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The "Spirit of the Law" and Bible Inerrancy
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John Erickson
"The word is not the concept".
This is especially true of the Word of God. The bible is written in such a way that the believer is required to reach out beyond his comfortable "natural-world" comprehension and force his spirit into a state of faith. This then energizes the believer to see beyond his natural limitations and thus comprehend God (and his message) more completely.
The bible isn't written in textbook form. We need to grasp the "spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law." But what does this actually mean?
Just as we regard the bible to be inspired by God, the reader must likewise be inspired by the Holy Spirit in order to understand it. Often this is just a word of revelation whose relevance is known only to the reader.
The bible is tasked with changing the reader's spiritual and mental state over into the "intangible" realm of "faith". It is not simply a text which passes on knowledge to us in the manner of a history book, but it is a catalytic agent which interacts with our mental comprehension in such a way as to make it aware of our spirit. From here we can move forward in a condition of faith, in which the "spirit" of the words is made clear to our spirit.
For this festival of epiphanous comprehension to take place, the reader must be motivated enough to seek out an answer rather than simply dismiss a passage as being somehow "erroneous" or a violation of the rules of grammar.
"Inerrancy" pertains to the concept behind the words. The literacy of the various books is influenced by too many disparate factors for it to be consistently "inerrant" in its conveyance of natural detail. Evolutions in linguistic form over the time periods involved, differing languages and the peculiarities of communicative style and comprehension of the individual writers have produced a text that is mysterious on the outside yet intimate and empowering on the "inside".
These "eccentricities" of style drive the earnest seeker closer to a spiritual state within which the concept becomes clear. A purely intellectual study of the bible could never lead us beyond the limits of this finite physical existence.
Each "oddity" allows the message to address the varied psychological and spiritual states of individual believers. The entire bible isn't meant to be understood by the entire body of believers - just the word that pertains to one believer's situation at any given time. "Scholarly" studies of the bible can only catalogue details. They can never reveal the inerrant perfection which lay underneath.
Only one's spirit can comprehend that.
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