Quote from Turok:
Shoe:
>But you're missing my point a lot of Christians do not
>even hold to the idea that the Bible is inerrant nor is
>that critical to their faith
My goodness Shoe,
A: I have no idea where you find the christians you hang out with, but they are nothing like the christians I'm familiar with - not that that's a bad thing 
B: Sometimes I believe you have a very small world view -- that is you have a tendency to think that the rest of this 'christian nation' views theology the same as you -- and that couldn't be further from the truth.
There are gigantic overwhelming swaths of this country (take Southern Baptists for example) where their basic theology DEMANDS that they believe the bible is inerrant and critical to their faith.
>That's just one reason why I find it hard to
>believe that you really studied much Bible
>at a Christian university
OMG -- try walking onto any of the largest, most prominent christian universities (say Bob Jones, Heritage Christian or Oral Roberts, on and on) and espousing that the bible is not critical to the christian faith.
Holy Cow Shoe -- you would be branded a heretic.
JB
Okay, I should have said more, but I didn't think anyone on this thread really knew about Christians! Yes, to clarify, most layman Christians that I know believe in inerrancy, so I really misstated that. However, seminary-educated individuals is a completely different matter. As far as I know, you can't go to seminary w/o getting teaching on inerrancy, infallibility and the difference. Infallibility is generally the idea that the Bible has a few errors in it, but none of them are pertinent to issues of faith and practice.
In other words, you may find that the number of men in an army in the chronicles and in kings don't match, but it really doesn't matter because God saw to it that the Bible was accurate in areas where it needed to be accurate.
A half-way position on this is that the original text was inerrant but our translations and a few minor modifications by scribes have made it not completely inerrant.
So leadership of Christianity in American is certainly not all fundamental and inerrant even among some evangelicals. Maybe I should have gone into more detail, but I didn't think it was worth it on a board that, from what I can tell, is composed entirely of anti-Christians and fundamental Christians.
Btw, it's highly arguable that Bob Jones and Oral Roberts are the most prominent Christian institutions of learning in the US!
Fuller actually was one of the early leaders in opening up the inerrancy debate. Below is a link and a quote if you're interested.
http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/fuller_seminary.htm
The next defection of neutralism at Fuller concerned the biblical doctrine of inerrancy. Dr. Ockenga, in his "re" statement, had said that there needed to be "the restatement of Christian theology in accordance with the need of the time..." I doubt if he ever dreamed that the first doctrine to be restated would be the most essential of all, the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture.
The original statement of faith of Fuller Theological Seminary which was worked out by the faculty and adopted by the faculty and the Board of Trustees, read as follows:
The books which form the canon of the Old and New Testaments as originally given are plenarily inspired and free from all error in the whole and in the part.
A fundamentalist could subscribe to that. The words "free from all error in the whole and in the part," state the truth of inerrancy This was 1949.
In 1972, alter 23 years of internal combat, the words "...free from all error in the whole and in the part" were removed from the doctrinal statement. Between these years there were faculty members who signed the statement tongue-in-cheek and faculty members who openly warred against inerrancy. Daniel Fuller, son of the founder, led the battle against inerrancy. Because of the scholar-worship of new evangelicalism, he had been trained in Princeton Seminary and later in Switzerland under Karl Barth. Barth's neo-orthodox view of scripture triumphed over the historic view. Again, new evangelicalism was demonstrated to be much closer to apostasy than to fundamentalism.
A Clause of Calamity
What does it mean in practical results when a theological seminary eliminates a clause in its doctrinal statement? Let me quote from page 246 of Marsden's Reforming Fundamentalism, as he summarizes the results of a Fuller alumni survey:
Three fourths of the students coming to Fuller in its earliest days, graduating classes of 1950 to 1952, came with a solid belief in inerrancy. At the time they left Fuller about 60 percent of them still remained firm in this view, while almost all of the rest held something like a limited inerrancy view. By the 1960s, on the other hand, limited inerrancy was the overwhelmingly dominant, though not undisputed, view. Less than half the students entering Fuller held to strict inerrancy and only about one-fourth left with the view intact.
Later on page 268 he says:
Predictably, commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture continued to drop, so that by 1982 only about 15 percent of students held that view.
Neutralism produced very real and very tragic results. Dr. Harold Lindsell, who resigned from the Fuller faculty speaks prophetically in his book, Battle for the Bible on pages 120, 121:
Down the road, whether it takes five or fifty years, any institution that departs from belief in an inerrant Scripture will likewise depart from other fundamentals of the faith and at last cease to be evangelical in the historic meaning of that term.
