With biblical inerrancy emerging as the theological issue at the center, one voice came to represent the
inerrantist cause: Harold Lindsell, whose books Battle for the Bible and The Bible in the Balance would provide fuel for the conservative cause.
Bube's view of biblical inerrancy was in conflict with many fundamentalists and evangelicals, and it incurred the wrath of
inerrantist Harold Lindsell in his 1976 The Battle for the Bible.
Roy Honeycutt, an Old Testament scholar who was president of Southern during most of the SBC struggle, commented one time that the problem with the word is that if you are not an "
inerrantist," you must be an "errantist." The word creates binary categories.
(Talisse gives a brave example of what dialogical democracy might look like in the case of a biblical
inerrantist opposing a school board's world religions curriculum.)
Unlike Nathan, Fowles is not an
inerrantist vis-a-vis interpreting the scriptures.
The elementary level science textbooks, God's World, are based in an
inerrantist approach to the Bible and a literalist reading of Genesis and creation, one in which evolution is dismissed.
If we hope to show biblical fundamentalists the error of their
inerrantist ways, we have to debate with them as they do with each other.
Her ideas, for example, that American religion perforce relies on "absolute truth" while "democracy, by contrast, depends on the Enlightenment values of freedom and equality," and that democracy has thrived here because it has "preserved relatively clear boundaries between public and private," and thereby kept "conflict between secularism and religion...to a minimum," mean she's never read Tocqueville or Perry Miller or Gordon Wood or Sydney Ahlstrom or Kevin Phillips's recent Cousins' Wars on religion's centrality in creating and sustaining our democracy, nor even vaguely begins to understand why and what divides American Christianity over literalist,
inerrantist and historical/critical readings of the Bible itself--or why it's important to American politics.
Warfield, a biblical
inerrantist at the Princeton Theological Seminary, who shared Wright's openness to biological evolution.
(1) had always assumed he was the first acknowledged conservative
inerrantist to head an SBC agency, but I learned later that Dr.
Whidden, "Sola Scriptura,
Inerrantist Fundamentalism, and the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Is 'No Creed but the Bible' a Workable Solution?" Andrews University Seminary Studies 35 (Autumn, 1997): 211-226.
