Category: Religion

Examining religious belief from around the world.

The Myth of Inerrancy

When I was part of a charismatic, Bible-believing church, I was taught — and I believed — that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God.

God the Holy Spirit, I was told, had inspired men to write down exactly what He wanted them to say. As proof, our teachers would point to 2 Timothy 3:16:

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Only recently did I realise that “Scripture” here refers to the Old Testament — as it does in the other fifty places the New Testament writers use the term. We were taught, largely on the shaky basis of 2 Peter 3:16, that the New Testament was also “Scripture,” and therefore equally God-breathed and inerrant. Hence, everything in our Bibles was presented as authoritative beyond question.

Life Inside the Sect

When you live inside a sect, you accept such propositions because:

  • you love and respect your leaders,

  • you fear rejection by friends,

  • and above all, you dread God’s wrath lest you “distort the truth to your own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).

But once you leave that environment and begin to research the topics never addressed by preachers, the cracks appear quickly.

The Chaotic Canon

First: the New Testament canon itself.

The books and letters included were chosen during the three centuries after Jesus’ death through arguments, compromises, and confusion. To call that process “inerrant” is impossible.

If you believe instead that God guided the church flawlessly through this chaos, then the church itself becomes higher in authority than Scripture. That is precisely the Roman Catholic position — long condemned as heresy by Protestants since Luther separated the apocryphal writings.

A Flawed Text

Second: Erasmus (1466–1536) showed clearly that the church lived for over a thousand years with a New Testament full of errors and omissions.

So how can the Bible be the inerrant Word of God if millions of Christians were following the wrong Bible for centuries?

Arrogant Certainty

Third: in the sect where I spent twenty years, there prevailed an arrogant certainty that “our” interpretation was the only correct one.

Historical and cultural context was dismissed as irrelevant. The Holy Spirit, we were told, would simply provide our preachers with flawless understanding.

So, if Acts 10 describes baptism in the Spirit with tongues, miracles, and prophecy, then this must be the norm for every Christian, forever. Anyone who preached otherwise was a heretic — including the entire Baptist Church. I actually believed this.

And yet I never questioned why women in our services didn’t wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), or why they were allowed to speak and prophesy when Paul wrote that women should remain silent and it was “disgraceful” for them to speak in church (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).

Selective Literalism

The same inconsistencies plague the Old Testament.

  • Why do fathers no longer present disobedient sons to be stoned to death?

  • Why are women not excluded from worship during their periods?

  • Why are practising homosexuals not “annihilated” as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — a story which, in fact, has nothing to do with homosexuality?

This selective literalism always comes down to the same thing: an abuse of authority cloaked in divine certainty.

The Bible and Its Abusers

The Bible is an extraordinary piece of inspired literature. For many, it is genuinely a revelation of God.

But those who wield claims of inerrancy as a weapon — to bolster their arrogance, to demand obedience, to silence dissent — should be ashamed. For centuries, such misuse has caused division, pain, and even death in the name of Christ.

“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
— Desmond Tutu

The Architecture of Reality

What seems eternal is often only the echo of human agreement

Most of us move through life believing that reality is simply “out there”—something fixed and solid, waiting for us to discover it. But over time, I’ve come to see that what we call “reality” is not just given to us; it is made, sustained, and passed on through people.

Think about it: the rules of marriage, the value of money, the rituals of religion or education—none of these fell from the sky. They were created by people, agreed upon, repeated, and eventually treated as if they had always been there. A piece of paper becomes “wealth.” A ceremony becomes “holy.” A set of expectations becomes “the way things are.”

The most fascinating part is that once these human creations are in place, they begin to feel objective, untouchable, almost like laws of nature. We grow up inside them, and they become the air we breathe. By the time we are adults, much of what we take as “normal” or “true” is simply what has been handed down to us.

And yet, these worlds are not neutral. Some people and institutions get to decide which knowledge counts, which voices are heard, which rules are legitimate. That is why two cultures—or even two families—can live in entirely different realities without ever noticing how constructed those realities are.

For the individual, this becomes especially challenging when the world we grew up in collides with the wider world outside. The lessons we learn at home—about trust, love, authority, or shame—are sometimes at odds with what we encounter later in school, work, or society at large. When these two realities clash, it can leave us confused, even broken inside, as if we’re expected to live two lives at once.

I’ve come to believe that the way forward begins with awareness. If we can see that these worlds are made by people, then we gain the freedom to question them. We can decide what to carry with us and what to lay down. We can stop being passive products of two conflicting realities and instead become active authors of our own lives.

At its heart, this is not just about society. It’s about self-knowledge, grace, and the courage to treat ourselves kindly as we sort through the contradictions. The more we learn to accept ourselves, the less power those clashes have to tear us apart.

In the end, we both build the world and are built by it. The challenge is to remain awake to that truth—and to choose, with as much wisdom as we can, the world we want to live in.