infallible

I have been thinking a lot today some continued thoughts. More confessions of an amateur Christian. One is the idea of the Bible being infallible. I don’t know if technically it is or is not, but practically it’s not.

But there’s this idea that the Bible is this book with no errors and is infallible, which means it cannot fail, I think. But it can fail. It can fail easily and often. For example, it fails to justify Hitler’s murdering millions of people, many of them Jews. It fails to keep an elder-in-training I know from devouring the life of a young woman I know and love. It fails to keep people from bludgeoning weaker Christians with its supposed rules. It fails to keep a former friend from blaming me for everything that didn’t go their way. It fails to keep people from having sex before they’re married, or sex with lots of people afterwards, or sex with people of the same sex before or after. It fails to prove that people are right when they put sinners down. It fails to make people regularly meditate and have consistent communion with God. It fails in many ways.

Of course I’m being master of the obvious here. And I’m sure I could be straightened out so that I have to admit some doctrinal tenet of infallibility. I’m sure it goes something like this, that human beings are fallible but the Word of God in the written form of the Bible is not. People fail the Bible, and not vice versa. And I would say that’s just about right. The problem is that the Bible is not written for anyone but people. So the claim is that it is perfect and incapable of failing when read and applied perfectly. Which it never is. Because we haven’t yet found the perfect person to read it and apply it. And if we did he/she would probably be disqualified because they’d be either lying or delusional about being perfect.

So the thing is, it doesn’t really mean all that much to have a perfect book that is incapable of failing when a person perfectly reads and applies it. What would really make a difference in the world is if someone treasured the ancient words and traditions so much that THEY decided to be infallible. Now that is something I could get really excited about. And I would love to be an apologist for a group of People who, no matter what they did wrong, never failed to love, and leave Book defending to people going the way of the dinosaur.