Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. So in this section of the season, I am providing you with addendums, you know, extra resources that complement some of the the things that we have talked about, hinted at, alluded to, whatever, at in the main part of the season. And so in this section, I want to do a lot of talking about inerrancy because it's something that has weighed on me for a number of years now and something that I've I've really tried to work through in an intellectually honest way. And so, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about it. So growing up, inerrancy was was something that was a central tenet of all of the the major Christians who've had an influence on my life, whether it was my my Christian school, church, the Christian college I attended, the church that churches that I have attended, and even the current church that I'm I'm at now.

Derek: 01:37

They are very big on inerrancy. And the way that it's always been depicted is that because God is perfect and because God speaks truth, and therefore, you know, when He chose to reveal Himself to us, He did so in a perfect and truthful way. And like, sure, intellectually that makes sense that it makes sense that God is perfect. It makes sense that God is truthful. And if I were perfect and truthful, I would sure make make certain that however I revealed myself to people, it would be in a true and perfect way.

Derek: 02:21

But of course, over time, as I've thought through things critically, rather than just merely receptively, there became some extremely glaring issues with the dogmatism centered around, inerrancy. And so I want to give just some of the philosophical intellectual issues and then get into some more of the, you know, application practical issues. First and foremost, it's very obvious that there are errors in the text or discrepancies problems. Some of the you know, one of the best examples, I can't think of the the specific verse right now, like, I think it's Matthew, he quotes Zephaniah or Zechariah or something when when it actually came from a a different passage. It came from a different author.

Derek: 03:21

There there are loads of those sorts of things like numerical discrepancies. If you look at the Septuagint between the Septuagint and the Masoretic, like the story of David, the story of David that we have comes from the Masoretic text. And there are lots of really odd things. When you look at it, you're like, wait, Saul already knows who David is. But then when David goes to fight Goliath, Saul's like, who is this guy?

Derek: 03:45

And like, of course, you know who he is. And Goliath's like ginormous. I mean, not like not absolutely unrealistically, like you could imagine that he'd be as tall as it said he was. But there's just some really mythical sorts of things that are in the story of David and Goliath and such. But you look in the Septuagint and it's way shorter and it doesn't have the problems, you know, that we have in our text from the Masoretic or Masoretic and Septuagint discrepancies where we take the Septuagint where it's convenient, where it has things that show prophecies of Jesus, but we take the Masoretic like everywhere else.

Derek: 04:26

I mean, all kinds of things, all kinds of things. Now, a lot of people would say, Well, because we have so many different copies of things, like we know where there are discrepancies and issues and we with a high degree of confidence can, you know, arrive at what is probably accurate. You can take Jesus, one of my favorite stories of Jesus. He is where he stoops down to write in the sand with the adulterous woman. Well, that almost certainly was not in the original text, but all of our Bibles have it in it because we we like that text.

Derek: 05:03

And maybe it was maybe it was part of the original, or maybe it just was a tack on later, like one of the disciples wrote it, but it wasn't part of the original manuscript, but they tacked it on later. But who knows? Like, that's the point. There are just so many things, either errors or or things that we don't know. Is this scripture or is it not?

Derek: 05:26

And so this idea of like absolute perfect inerrancy just falls to the wayside. Now, an another thing that people say to that is and and very few people would know this, like the the people who've been theologically trained would know it, but a lot of the lay people wouldn't know it and they just cling to inerrancy. But inerrancy really only applies to the autographs. They say that God inspired the original autographs, like the documents that the people actually wrote. But what we have today is not inerrant.

Derek: 06:05

I mean, it is it has been preserved to the extent that there is no major doctrine that's different, but not every single word is inerrant in our modern Bibles. It's the autographs that were inerrant. Well, at that point, you have to ask, what's the point of the doctrine of inerrancy if you have no access to it? And, so that actually that aspect of my issue with inerrancy is, is what's going to be central in the article that I wrote here. And yeah, I I won't spoil that.

Derek: 06:43

You'll kind of see that come out. And, I I really like it's sort of digging, but I think it makes an an important point, because it's it uses Protestant disdain for other denominations like, Catholicism and some of their doctrines that we find very odd or the Orthodox and some of the doctrines that we find very odd. And it says, Hey, this doctrine of inerrancy fits right in with the oddness of that and might even be worse than than the things you critique in their their denominations. So, I mean, are those are two things right there already. The Bible clearly has some errors or discrepancies.

Derek: 07:23

And number two, we don't have access to what is inerrant. And then you get to number three, which is on top of the inerrancy issues, like we also have translation. I mean, if we if we spoke Hebrew or Koine Greek as as the, you know, Old and New Testaments were written in, then we'd be closer to inerrancy. Like we might understand some of the of the words and things better. But when you go across translation, you lose things so as it is.

Derek: 08:00

A fantastic book to see this in would be the book Valiant or Virtuous. And the book, its name comes from the author says like, Hey, look, you look at David's valiant men, and that word for valiant is, you know, is a particular word in Hebrew. And she said, But then we get to Proverbs, I think it's like Proverbs 31, and it talks about women. It calls them virtuous women. And she's like, she has chapters she has a chapter on that and then a bunch of other things where it's like, hey, we have very selectively chosen how we are going to portray certain words specifically related to women in the text.

Derek: 08:44

You know, a woman is virtuous, but a man is valiant. Right? And that colors the way that we create some of the doctrines that we do and we we create some of the theology that we do. And that's why theologians like Beth Allison Barr have really lambasted the idea of inerrancy a lot of times. Not always necessarily inerrancy itself, but the way that inerrancy is wielded.

Derek: 09:13

It is used as a gatekeeping device to protect an ideology that people want to protect. And it's an excuse to not have to think critically about one's own position because one can just say that whatever they believe, they believe because God said it. Right? God said it, therefore I believe it. And to question that means that you're not really a Christian or you're not following God.

Derek: 09:40

And so doctrines can't be questioned. Randall Rauser in in his book, he has a quote very early on. I can't remember who it's from. But it says something to the extent of, I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. That's so true.

Derek: 10:01

And that's exactly what inerrancy does. For many, many times, for many of the people who invoke it, it is to shut up people asking questions. And even if that's not the intention of its invocation, that's how it ends up being used and functioning. And you know, when you're dealing with translation, that brings up a fourth issue, which is that we are culturally separated from the ancient Near East and from the Greco Roman Empire. And I know one of the ways I think it was Matthew Flanagan or something who is trying to portray why the Canaanite genocide wasn't the way that it it appeared to be.

Derek: 10:52

And he was using, ancient near other ancient Near East literature, like from Babylon or Syria or something, and showing how, like, historically, we know what happened. And then we look at the way that they described it happening and it's like way different. Know, there was a battle and it killed like 60 people. And they're like, we annihilated all of their men, women, and children, 200,000. It's just like grossly inflated.

Derek: 11:20

And he likened it to like, if we have if we have the World Series and the Braves beat the Yankees 10 to nothing, you'd say that they annihilated them. And it's like, well, doesn't it doesn't really mean what we think it means today. It's just gross, you know, gross inflation for the because they were a narrative society. They were they were storytellers. And they didn't do history the way that we do history.

Derek: 11:51

Like, they made points that everybody would have known that they're making. Everybody would have known it wasn't 200,000 people that were killed, but that's the way that they told the story. And so for us to try to dissect a text and to say that inerrancy means that, hey, whatever that that number shows, that really has to be what it is. Because, you know, if you're going to do real, true, perfect history, like God would do perfect history because His His, you know, how He defines perfection is the way that I do, and His methodology must be the way I would do my methodology, then therefore, that's what inerrancy means. And that of course is just ludicrous.

Derek: 12:32

And then finally, when you when you take a look at the idea of education, It is very presumptive to think that if God is communicating with people, it would always look the same as we might expect it to look. And the best example I can give, I've taught at a lot of different levels of, of school. I've taught fifth grade science, I've taught eighth grade science, and I've taught chemistry in high school. And at least in the state of Georgia, each of those grade levels touches on some physical science. And so one of the things that students had to learn at each of those levels is about the atom and and, you know, the structures and things.

Derek: 13:23

And so when I when I'm teaching fifth grade, I might talk about the Bohr model of the atom. And the way that you depict an atom there with the electrons, you know, orbiting around it, it's like a track because fifth graders can picture what a track is like. They can they can see this two d, dot with other smaller dots going around it, and they can picture a track. Like, that makes sense to them. When you get to eighth grade, the the atoms, the electrons are not going around the track.

Derek: 14:01

Now they are in orbitals. Right? They're in these set paths, but now you're you're getting more like three d conceptual. Okay, I can I can picture that? That's kind of like the solar system, right?

Derek: 14:15

All of the planets go around the sun in in a three d way, and they're not all right in line with each other. You know, some of them are some of them are at, you know, a little bit higher than others. So they don't they don't all just get in one single line and and go around like a track. Got it. Well, then when you get to eleventh grade, you discover that, they don't really go in these set tracks.

Derek: 14:41

The electrons don't travel in set tracks. They're actually in these clouds of probabilities. Okay. All right. So was I lying to my fifth graders when I told them that when we talked about electrons going in tracks?

Derek: 14:56

No, I was meeting them where they were at, and I was giving them a conceptual framework that they could latch on to, which then we built on in eighth grade and built even more on in eleventh grade. And they could understand it in eleventh grade because they had already taken a stab at it in fifth grade and eighth grade in ways that they could understand. We scaffolded that for them. So those were whatever it is, five or six different thoughts and realizations that I had about inerrancy over the past couple of years. Just recognizing that inerrancy, the way that I have been taught is it just doesn't make sense.

Derek: 15:43

It's unnecessary. It doesn't make sense. The evidence doesn't point to it. And so it just it seems absurd at this point. When you get to the practical application, which is really what came first for me when I was when I realized the practical applications.

Derek: 16:03

That's what caused me to really dig into the more logical, philosophical applications, because a lot of times you can tell how good or bad something is by the fruit that it produces. And the fruit of inerrancy just was not good the way that I saw it invoked so dogmatically. And I already I've talked a lot about Beth Allison Barr and the way that that it had been used against her. And she's not the only one. And egalitarianism is not the only issue where that comes up.

Derek: 16:35

You see inerrancy invoked a lot to shut people up and to keep them under the thumb of church leadership. Right? You see it used by abusers, whether I mean like domestic abusers to to, shut their wives up or to go to the church to talk about them being the head of household. You see inerrancy used very abusively, whether that's through physical and domestic abuse or whether that's through spiritual abuse in the church. It's very often a power play, and there are it's often wielded out of a a need for control, and it often presents itself as domineering.

Derek: 17:19

Second, it's also used to just prop up some some crazy things. We have people who are are going back to like becoming flat earthers. We have, you know, people who are very adamant about like young earth creation. And I know some people who I I highly respect, who are young earth creationists, and they leave room for others in the interpretation of Genesis. And I can respect that.

Derek: 17:49

But there are other groups that invoke inerrancy and because of inerrancy cling to beliefs that seem to go against other forms of revelation that God has given. I think it's I think it was Galileo who said something to the extent of, you know, I do not believe that God has given us reason and intellect and asked us to forego their use. Point being, yeah, you can can point to the Bible and you can tell me that it says something. But when my reason and intellect very clearly indicates that that's not true, I think that God also reveals Himself through reason and intellect. And that goes back to our conversation with Randall Rouser very much where what inerrancy does is it elevates the Biblical text to a point where even if something is so clear, like genocide is not good, we cannot use that strong moral intuition, that perhaps properly basic belief, to critique our interpretation of the text.

Derek: 19:01

And that's what that's what it is. The way that we view the text is an interpretation. It is not a straightforward reading. It is an interpretation of God's intent, what He's trying to say through that particular text. And inerrancy just elevates certain traditions and certain interpretations to the point where those things can't be questioned.

Derek: 19:27

And you can see that play out with the belief in some really crazy things that our intuition and intellect should tell us, should should correct us on and say, No, you know what? That interpretation of the Bible, not right. Geocentrism? No, I know that I know how you get that from the Biblical text. And probably if you're going to read the Biblical text in the way that a lot of inerrantists do today, they should be geocentrists.

Derek: 19:56

But we know know that that's not true. And so the the power play, the ludicrous things that clinging to inerrancy causes certain people to believe, and then the fact that there are clear errors or discrepancies and that dogmatically clinging to inerrancy would keep somebody from becoming a Christian. It just it wasn't worth it to me. Like, why why would I hold to inerrancy so tightly that, it would prevent somebody from becoming a Christian? Because they can look and say, well, there's an error there.

Derek: 20:40

Okay, well, that's what Christianity is, I guess I guess I can't believe it because clearly it isn't true. So I just didn't like the fruit that I saw of inerrancy. And so as I as I looked more through church history and how other people viewed the Bible, I think like the the early church, there was a fivefold or sevenfold reading of Scripture, levels. You had allegories and things like that. And some some of those things are crazy too.

Derek: 21:10

Some of those things have good aspects and and bad aspects. But there there was a lot that showed me that this modern position of inerrancy was very rationalistic. It was a human response. It was a human felt need for certainty and control that came out of the Enlightenment and rationalism. It's not something that has been a long standing felt need of the Church.

Derek: 21:38

Scripture has always been elevated, but our particular need for the type of inerrancy that we invoke is different. Now, I would say is Scripture is very important. You've got people like Greg Boyd who elevates Scripture and loves Scripture. Randall Rauser think that Scripture is vital and it needs to correct us on things too. But they're going to come at it with with more humility and also saying that that we need to allow tradition, we need to allow reason to correct things and to help us in our interpretation.

Derek: 22:16

And so the way that I would view things today in an elevated scripture would be to say that God God uses scripture infallibly, right? He the Bible is a living text. I have gone to church my whole life, and when I was a kid, like three days a week, a lot of times. And then there were missions conferences and things like that. I have heard so many different sermons, and it's amazing that I can still go to church today and hear a sermon on a text that I've heard preached on countless times, and I can still be moved and motivated, and I can still learn stuff that God teaches me through that.

Derek: 22:59

And so God uses His text infallibly. And the infallibility of His text is not based on Him getting, you know, the words just right, like the words perfect by my definition. It comes because His Spirit can illuminate the words that are there in my life for where I am at that point in time in my situation. And through God's Spirit, He He teaches me and He leads me. And so the inerrancy, the infallibility, it comes through God's work of the Spirit through the text.

Derek: 23:39

It doesn't come from some, like, definition of a text being perfectly dictated at a given point in history under certain cultural conditions. And that just shows another way that inerrancy is a modern belief, a a cultural response, a rationalistic response, because what it ends up really doing practically is it ends up cutting out the need for the Spirit. And I can just go to the text and exegete it and know exactly what God said. Right? I I there is no reliance on the Spirit.

Derek: 24:19

I shouldn't say there's no reliance on the spirit. There's lip service given to the spirit, but there's no practical need for the spirit. Alright. So anyway, that was a was a long introduction to this article, that I wrote a while back. And, actually, guess my introduction is not done because a little bit more background here.

Derek: 24:43

This is an article that I wrote when I was when I was really wrestling through do I am I really going to stay clinging to inerrancy? And so I wrote this article, while we were still in Romania, and I posted it on my blog, which I do not advertise my blog. I like put the links in my my podcast, but I don't even I don't advertise my podcast. Like, I just kind of do it for myself. I put it out there and I don't advertise it very much at all.

Derek: 25:17

Maybe a couple times I've I've posted a a link, but not really. So I don't expect anybody that I know to really be listening to my podcast or reading my blog. But one day, I got a call from, my boss, my team leader, and he said, hey, the regional director, guy, he want he wants to talk to you about something you wrote. I was like, oh, okay. And so I got a phone call, and he said, yeah, we had somebody, call into the president, like, call directly to the highest person in our organization and said, Hey, this is a problem.

Derek: 26:02

You've got a missionary who's who's writing this stuff. And so he's like, Let let's talk about this. And so I I talked him through it, And I mean, I told him, Hey, look, this is what the Chicago statement and biblical inerrancy says. I mean, I'm just saying we shouldn't make this a stumbling block for people who are coming to faith. It it shouldn't be a sticking point because we're talking about the autographs here.

Derek: 26:30

I explained my case. And he's like, Yeah, I I understand what you're coming where you're coming from. He's like, You know, I read it. And he's like, I I don't think there I don't think that there was a theological problem with anything that you said, but we don't need to be questioning things like that publicly, is what he said. So, that really bothered me.

Derek: 26:59

And I struggle with that because I know to a certain extent, there is a wisdom in talking about things at appropriate times and places and inappropriate venues. I mean, I just talked about teaching kids grade level appropriate things about the atom, And and it's true with with our kids, with things like you don't want to be a stumbling block to them by giving them more than they can bear at at any given time. And so you don't wanna put things out there. I don't need to put things out there publicly that are going to be stumbling blocks for people who would come across them. And yeah.

Derek: 27:50

But at the same time, the way that it felt was just, we don't want to bring up those questions. That's how it felt. Like, we don't want to bring up that question. We don't really want to deal with that thing. So I'm still torn about that.

Derek: 28:06

I felt kind of betrayed a little bit. Nevertheless, it was what it was, and I I took it down. But I'm happy that I can share it now. That is one of the things that I love about my new job is that I don't really have to care. I can think what I want to think, and I can pursue truth.

Derek: 28:33

I don't have to be confined by, the gatekeepers. And actually, I'll let let me correct that. I there are gatekeepers, but the gatekeepers are not my denomination. The gatekeepers are Christian tradition. So I I survey Christian tradition and I I stay within the bounds.

Derek: 28:59

But within the the broader Christian church, their, their boundaries are broader and there is room to ask questions. Okay. So now I think for real, the introduction is done. So let let me go ahead and, read the article, and I hope you enjoy. Inerrancy, the Immaculate Conception, and Icons.

Derek: 29:28

The idea of inerrancy has honestly been a struggle for me over the past few years. Ironically, that struggle started as I delved more into apologetics. There are two key points of struggle for me in regard to inerrancy: the autographs and the circumscription. First, let me address the autographs in light of the Chicago statement on Biblical inerrancy. It says, We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

Derek: 30:01

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographed 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. End quote.

Derek: 30:37

The reason I struggle with this is because I've seen the idea of inerrancy be a huge hang up for unbelievers and skeptics. And it's hard for me to see why this is a hill to die on. It's a difficult hill for me to die on because the idea of inerrancy doesn't at all claim that what we have now is inerrant, though it recognizes it's good enough to get us the vital truth. What we have is a solid representation. And through God's Spirit, the current text is used infallibly by God to accomplish His purposes.

Derek: 31:08

I'll die on that hill. But to argue that the autographs, which we don't have access to, are without any error whatsoever, seems like a Catholic version of the Immaculate Conception. It's arguing something which isn't necessitated by the text of Scripture, nor has any bearing on the Bible we have now, as we don't have access to the inerrant autographs. What's more, while the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is adhered to because Catholics think it's required to obtain a theological necessity, the sinlessness of Christ, inerrancy falls far short of this. Why?

Derek: 31:45

Because inerrancy gets you a perfect autograph, which God thought was important enough to convey inherently while getting you a varied copy God didn't see fit to preserve inherently. The doctrine of the immaculate conception tries to get you something that you need, a perfect incarnate God and savior. While the doctrine of inerrancy seems to get something we want, a perfect Bible which bolsters my confidence, and then it discards it in the rubbish bin of ancient history, never to be seen again. The second area I struggle with in regard to inerrancy as presented in the Chicago document is in regard to the limitation of human language. The document says, We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation.

Derek: 32:33

We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration. What strikes me about this is the seeming double standard we Protestants have in regard to the words and images. Prior to moving to Romania, I studied Eastern Orthodoxy a little. One of the areas I tried to wrap my head around was the topic of icons as they were a foreign concept to a Protestant like me. I read a number of works, including a work by Theodore the Studite, and I was intrigued by their grounding of iconography and the fact that God icon ed His image in Jesus Christ.

Derek: 33:12

The Westminster Confession opposes images of Jesus because though we recognize Jesus as the exact representation of God's being, and Jesus told us that when we see Him, we see the Father, we know that any imaging of Jesus or God would be to circumscribe God. We'd be limiting Him and binding Him in something finite as an approximation rather than a pure representation. But isn't this essentially what the Chicago document is doing? Just with words? The statement recognizes that there was a true representation of God's desired verbal communication, the inerrant perfect autographs.

Derek: 33:54

Yet the statement recognizes that we don't have those. We have a close approximation or maybe sufficient approximation would be better in order to convey that the vital content is the same. In light of this, it's hard for me not to view the Protestant concept of inerrancy as akin to the Eastern Orthodox veneration of icons. Protestants criticized the Orthodox for worshiping icons, which are mere representations of Jesus and the saints rather than the real deal. Yet it seems Protestants also worship mere representations as we hold up as perfect documents, which are approximations and representations of the true image and perfect words found in the autographs that God failed to preserve.

Derek: 34:41

If we want to call our worship of the Bible quote, veneration and a tool rather than a pure form, then it seems our lowering of the importance of inerrancy, the incarnate Word circumscribed in written words, as well as our acceptance of icons, the incarnate word circumscribed in images, ought to follow from this. It at least indicates a double standard in our Protestant willingness to differentiate between worship and veneration when it comes to our own pet issues while failing to show that distinction to the Orthodox. In the end, I can kind of understand why some feel the need to die on Inerrancy's Hill. If we believe that we have an inerrant autograph, if we believe that the original source for today's text is inerrant, perhaps that gives some people more confidence that today's variant scripture has a better chance of being used infallibly. However, it seems to me that this ought to be a confidence we derive not from the text, but as a result of the Spirit's work in us to discern the Bible.

Derek: 35:48

Nevertheless, as the immaculate conception and a traducian holding of the virgin birth gives some people a better hope for Jesus' sinlessness, I suppose some Protestants similarly feel the Bible's confidence needs to rest in its original inerrancy. While I might believe in inerrancy, I don't feel the need to die on that hill since I've never encountered an inerrant autograph nor plan on it in the future. So if you are a Protestant or if you've hung around Protestants a lot, you can probably see why I got a big hand slap for writing this. Protestants don't tend to take too kindly to being placed lower than Catholics. We like to think of ourselves as being the true Christians, you know, better than Catholics.

Derek: 36:36

You know, if Catholics are even Christians, some people in, you know, in Protestant circles would would think. And so to say that inerrancy is similar to the Immaculate Conception, which most Protestants just think is like utter stupidity, you know, then Protestants don't take too kindly to that. But legitimately, like, what is the difference? If Catholics have this, this theology that holds Mary to be perfect, sinless. And they do that because there's a real need like, hey, Jesus has to be perfect.

Derek: 37:15

How did that happen if he's got like a human mom who had sin? Right? Well, Mary must have been sinless. I mean, forget how was she sinless. And, you know, if she could be sinless, why couldn't Jesus be sinless?

Derek: 37:28

But like, there's a felt need or a real need, like Jesus needs to be sinless. And so they posit the Immaculate Conception. They feel the need for that. And they try to base that off of some biblical texts, I imagine. But I get it.

Derek: 37:47

Right? I think that's wrong, but I get it. The same thing with inerrancy. Okay. I understand, like, you want confidence.

Derek: 37:58

You want to believe that that when you read the Bible that God can speak to you. Like, I get that. So you posit inerrancy to get you that. Like, I understand why you're doing it. I don't think you need to.

Derek: 38:14

Like, God can use just like God can use other means to accomplish Jesus' sinlessness. I don't I have no idea how he did it, but I just trust that he did it. And it seems crazy to me that you're having to make Mary perfect. Well, same thing with the Bible. Like, but there's a better explanatory factor there.

Derek: 38:31

There's the Holy Spirit that Jesus sent to live in us. That's what we rely on. Not the fact that there's some autograph that disintegrated into the desert a millennia ago that I'm basing my hope in. No, I've got the living Spirit within me and He can use whatever text is in front of me, whatever situation is in front of me, and He is going to illuminate that for me. So whereas the Immaculate Conception actually gets you a perfect Jesus, right?

Derek: 39:00

We'd all believe that Jesus is perfect. The doctrine of inerrancy, it doesn't even get you the thing it thinks it needs. It thinks it needs a perfect autograph because God has to speak perfectly and we have to be able to understand it. But it but we don't have that. So inerrancy is way worse than the immaculate conception because it posits a need, a real need, but it doesn't actually give you the solution to that need.

Derek: 39:30

At least the immaculate conception gives you the solution to the need. So that's that's essentially the, you know, the the summation of of that. I did also bring in circumscription, which, is is similar to, the article that I will be sharing in the next episode, Circumscribing God. So I'll I'll elaborate on that more there. That's all for now.

Derek: 39:58

So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.