Quote:
From Againstheheresies
One of the major areas of disagreement between us is apparently the Doctrine of Inspiration. It is my contention that I hold to the orthodox position of the church and most of you apparently hold to a heterodox position. My position is best stated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/creeds/chicago.htm
The statement that immediately addresses our disagreement is Article 10
“We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.”
This is my position. You may not agree with it, but you should not mischaracterize it. I would highly recommend reading the Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
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I do highly recommend reading "The Ecclesiastical Text" by my great and good friend, the late Theodore P. Letis. He was a bona fide work-a-day scholar of the history of the text of the bible and was the protege of Edward F. Hills. In it, he traces all down the church age, the historic/orthodox doctrine of "Infallibility" and shows the recent doctrine that replaced it "Inerrancy". Your confession is a product of 1978 and is the first confession/statement IN HISTORY that invokes "Inerrancy" (I've already dealt with
The Chicago Statement in post #6 of "Why Do YOu Call It Baloney"). The church's doctrine has always been "Infallibility". Inerrancy says only the autographs were inspired and today we can only reconstruct the original text within a high degree of certainty. Infallibility says the original autographs (they don't use that language, I'm just doing so for clarity) were immediately inspired but their copies (apographs) were providentially preserved and therefore "authentic" (not just high degree of reliability). The church has always treated the translations as being commanded by God (inferred in the confessions since God commands us to search the scriptures and from the fact that the scriptures have been received in lands other than hebrew/greek speaking ones) and as such, are not the work of man, but of God (What God commands, God provides).
Do check it out.