OBJECTION 1
Inerrancy is not important
It is quibbling about insignificant details. What really matters is a person's relationship to Jesus Christ.
ANSWER
A person's relationship to Jesus Christ is of the highest importance. No Christian would ever want to dispute that. But how do you know Jesus except as he is presented to you in the Bible? If the Bible is not God's Word and does not present a picture of Jesus Christ that can be trusted, how do you know it is the true Christ you are following? You may be worshiping a Christ of your own imagination. Moreover, you have this problem. A relationship to Jesus is not merely a question of believing on him as one's Savior. He is also your Lord, and this means he is the one who is to instruct you as to how you should live and what you should believe. How can he do that apart from an inerrant Scripture? If you sit in judgment on Scripture, Jesus is not really exercising his Lordship in your life. He is merely giving advice which you consider yourself free to disobey, believe or judge in error. You are actually the lord of your own life.
OBJECTION 2
Inerrancy is not Biblical
The Bible does not say it is inerrant. It only says it is inspired.
ANSWER
This is like saying that the Bible does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity. True, the Bible does not contain the word "trinity," and nowhere does it say in so many words, "There are three persons in the one God God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit." But the Trinity is still clearly and emphatically taught. The Bible teaches that there is one God. It also teaches that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are distinct from the Father and from each other and yet that each is divine. Our doctrine of the Trinity is merely a logical and consistent way of stating these two truths. It is the same with the doctrine of inerrancy. The word "inerrancy" does not occur in Scripture, nor does Scripture say, "The Bible is without error in all it affirms." Yet the doctrine of inerrancy is there. It is a necessary and obvious conclusion based on two other truths that Scripture does declare clearly. First, the Bible is God's Word. That is, the very words of Scripture are the words of God. Second, God is a God of truth and therefore speaks truthfully. If those statements are true, the only possible conclusion is that the Bible is inerrant in everything it teaches.
OBJECTION 4
Inerrancy is refuted by modern scholarship.
It may have been possible to believe in inerrancy in a less knowledgeable or sophisticated age, but we know today that this view is impossible.
ANSWER
What argument has persuaded you that the Bible has errors in it and is therefore not totally true? Are there real, provable errors? Or are you just adopting the skeptical mind set of our contemporary unbelieving world? One class of supposed errors is miracles. "The Bible must be making a mistake when it says that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, because dead men don't rise," some say.. "The iron could not float, the sun could not stand still." The issue here is not error but faith in God or lack of it. Just because you have not seen a resurrection does not mean that resurrections never occur. In fact, if God repeated miracles too often, they would cease to be miracles and would lose their evidential value. The real issue is whether or not there is a God such as the Bible depicts. If there is, then no miracle is beyond possibility. Besides, if you accept the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which you should, the other miracles are easy.
A second class of supposed errors has to do with moral issues. In Joshua the Jewish people are commanded by God to kill the Canaanites. Some regard this as an error, because on the basis of their own outlook "the killing of innocent people is morally wrong." This forgets two important points. First, the Canaanites were far from innocent. Second, God is the Lord of life. He gave life and has the right to take it away. The only error here is the error of assuming you or other fallen human beings have the right to pronounce on the rightness or wrongness of God's decrees or actions.
The most significant class of supposed errors are apparent contradictions within the Bible. Examples would be the length of time Israel is said to have been in bondage in Egypt (Genesis 15:13 says it was 400 years, while Exodus 12:41 says it was 430 years) or the number of angels reported as being at Christ's tomb following the Resurrection (John 20:12 mentions two, Matthew 28:2 only one). These are divergent ways of reporting the events, of course. But they are not contradictory. The difference in the number of years the Jews are said to have been in Egypt may be the result of one writer starting from a different point than the other or of one giving an exact figure while the other is rounding the number off. So far as the angels are concerned, if there were the two John reports, there was certainly one, as Matthew says. People who deny inerrancy try to give the impression that the discovery of problems like these has led them to abandon the inerrancy position. But these problems are not new. They have been known down through the centuries, and reasonable answers have been given to them. So far as evidence goes, we have more evidence for a high view of the Bible today than in earlier times. Discoveries from the Dead Sea, Summeria, Nag Hammadi, and now more recently from Ebla in Syria, provide more support than ever for the position that evangelicals have long held.
As an analogy: If my mother says, "Don't touch that stove! It's hot and you'll get burned!" And I proceed to touch the stove anyway, AND get a bad burn, then what did the stove teach me? The stove taught me that mom was right!
