Question about Christianity...?

Question

Is it possible to be a Christian yet not believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God?

I believe that it may be possible that God "spoke" to people and that they wrote it down, but I dont' believe that it hasn't been changed at all since then

Answer 1

A christian is one that believe Jesus is the messiah.
IMO we cant pick and choose what we want to believe to suit our needs. When we follow the Bible's teachings, it can do no harm.
There are a lot of parables used in the bible, so I wouldn't take every word as literal.

When studying the bible its very important to be careful. There are a lot of people that do interpret it the wrong way and can and will hurt others. Even the Devil knows how to quote scripture.

Answer 2

It depends on what you mean by inerrant. If you mean completely factually true, then no. I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, but I'm not a complete literalist. Just because it's inspired by God doesn't mean it's completely factual. In addition, we have to face the fact that although the gist may be accurate, it's inevitable that during the thousand years or so before the printing press was invented, some scribes may have made a few errors. Even typing this I noticed a couple of typos that I had to correct. As a teacher, I see students who write b instead of d, etc. It makes sense to assume some of that may have happened. Add that to the difficulties of translating certain words accurately, and you're bound to have some ambiguity in certain parts. That said, I do believe that the bulk of it it mostly true. Looking at the Gospels is an interesting exercise for this: four books about Jesus's life, but some of the stuff is very different. Does it mean some parts are untrue, or just that the authors chose to focus on different things for different reasons?

You may want to check out a book titled "And God said What?" (sorry, can't remember who wrote it). It's based on the idea that the Bible isn't meant to be a factual history. It likens the Bible to a newspaper: lots of different people writing for different purposes: some factual stories, but also editorials, letters to the editor, etc. If you tried to read all of it as if it was fact, your opinions would be skewed. I didn't agree with everything in the book, but I liked it--some parts made a lot of sense.

By the way, nowhere in the Bible does it say that you must believe every thing written there. It says you must believe that Christ was the Son of God who died for our sins. A lot of the other stuff is context and directions on how to live.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Well let's see...for 300 years Christianity and Christians existed but the Bible did not, so yes.

(The documents IN the Bible existed, but if you really think that some guy in Thessalonia ran around the street waving a letter from Paul saying "Look! Look! A letter from Paul that is inerrant and God-breathed because 300 years from now church leaders will pick this one, so let's take it as The Word of God and treat it as if God was guiding Paul unlike last year's letter, which was just a respected admired man of God giving spiritual advice.")

And then for another 1200 years all Christians were Catholic and Orthodox (except for some small sects who were more unorthodox than they were) and those churches believe that authority for faith comes from the Bible AND Church teachings AND current ordained Church leaders through the unbroken line from Peter, so...yes.

If you believe that a Christian must believe the bible is the inerrant word of God, the (1) you have a truly mind-boggling view of early Christians running around paying homage to certain letters, and (2) you think Christianity started with the Protestant Reformation.

Totally uninformed opinion.

~ Lib

Answer 4

Do you believe the history of China, or the history of Rome. Do you believe that the writings of Socrates and Plato have been corrupted over all these years?

We tend to accept the ancient writings of those not dealing with Christianity without question, and yet have a hard time believing the Bible has not changed?

When you do the research, it is actually quite clear that the Bible writings have been maintained with exceptional accuracy, and most of it was written by eye-witnesses.

A great book (easy reading) to give you a good feel for the accuracy of "what we have today is what was written back then" is More than a carpenter by Josh McDowell. He lays out a pretty convincing argument that the Bible has been exceptionally maintained in content.

Answer 5

Sadly, there are many Christians nowadays who believe this. I'm sorry to see you may be one of them. So many folks claim the Bible has been changed througout the ages, but when asked for proof, they cannot produce it.

Consider this: when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, scholars were astonished (and pleased) to see that there have been no major changes to the OT for thousands of years. The differences were due to extremely minor copyist errors; most errors were averted by the Hebrew Masoretic system. Look it up on Wikipedia -- it's amazingly ingenious.

The NT is the same; the oldest copies we have prove no major changes have occurred.

Bottom line: you CAN trust the Bible. After all, our God is a BIG God, capable of ensuring His Word is preserved throughout the ages. If He was a little god, THEN we'd be in trouble.

Peace.

Answer 6

I have met several people who truly believe that Jesus Christ is their savior that don't believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. The problem is that it is hard sometime to reconcile the two ideas.

My ancedotal experience has been that this belief is held by people who have not explored the Bible a great deal and have not researched it's amazing accurace.

Answer 7

Jesus Christ said " the Scripture can not be broken"(John 10:35)
He said "It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the smallest pen stroke from the Law to pass away" (Luke 16:17)
The Bible warns against believing in a Jesus of your own making (II Corinthians 11:4)
You need to consider - what is the real basis of your faith - the Word of God or your own opinion? I speak from many years of experience, unless you make the Word of God, the Scriptures your highest authority in life, you will hardly, if ever come into God's peace.

Answer 8

I don't mean to be offensive, but use some common sense here. If that was gods word, why would he be wrong some of the time? You are just experiencing what any normal and rational human being should, doubt. You are starting to see the bible is a bunch of bs in many of its things, but instead of you dealing with this and stopping to be christian, you want to reconcile this by calling yourself a christian and picking and choosing what verses to believe in.

Answer 9

There are churches out there that don't believe that. And you can see that these churches are worldly, carnal places. They are like what Paul described people in church in the last days: "They will hold to an outward form of godliness but deny its power. Stay away from such people." (II Timothy 3:5)

After living as a Bible-believing Christian, I have discovered that the Bible is inerrant, and completely sufficient for man's needs. You only need to read, believe, and apply it to your life.

If God's Word is errant, how do you pick and choose? If you pick & choose, then you have become "god." And if it isn't correct, why bother at all? If God is God, isn't He able to preserve it and its message? And if God isn't able, why worship? What kind of "god" does He become?

UPDATE: You added that you don't believe it hasn't been changed. Let me show you why it hasn't.

Let me discuss the history and accuracy of the Old Testament manuscripts. When the translators of the King James Bible wrote the Old Testament, the oldest available manuscript for them to use, was known as the Masoretic Text. This had been written in the 9th century A.D. It was this text that the translators based their work on the Old Testament. In 1947, a shepherd boy discovered some pottery in caves in the area called Qumran, near the Dead Sea. In these jars, he discovered scrolls, which archaeologists and Bible scholars have researched ever since. Every book of the Old Testament (except Esther) was discovered. Most of these scrolls are dated to 150 B.C. After comparing these Dead Sea Scrolls to the Masoretic Text, the scholars discovered an amazing degree of unanimity between the two, although they were written a thousand years apart. Further, the Septuagint (the Greek language translation of the Hebrew Bible) was also compared. With all of these references, there is plenty of evidence that no biblical doctrine has been tampered with.

Naturally, the next object of ridicule is the New Testament. There is no larger ancient body of manuscript evidence in the history of mankind, than the papyri and parchment manuscripts of the New Testament. With over five thousand actual Greek manuscripts, and numerous other manuscripts in four other languages, there are about twenty-four thousand available manuscript texts for the New Testament.

Even if we didn't have these documents, we could almost have a complete New Testament from extra-biblical sources, such as ancient lectionaries, church fathers' records/sermons/writings, etc.

No other body of ancient work comes close. No one really disputes Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars (10 manuscripts remain, with the earliest one dating to 1,000 years after the original autograph). No one really disputes Pliny the Younger's Natural History (7 manuscripts; 750 years elapsed). Or Thucydides' History (8 manuscripts; 1,300 years elapsed). No one disputes Herodotus' History (8 manuscripts; 1,350 years elapsed). No one really disputes Plato (7 manuscripts; 1,300 years elapsed). No one really disputes Tacitus' Annals (20 manuscripts; 1,000 years elapsed.) Homer's Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is the second best-preserved literary work of all antiquity, with 643 copies of manuscript support discovered to date. In those copies, there are 764 disputed lines of text, as compared to 40 lines in all the New Testament manuscripts.

But we have ancient manuscripts of the New Testament that are written within a generation of Christ's resurrection, and people have the audacity to say it's been tampered with!

Answer 10

That's a tough question.
I would have to say, that Although many of the passages seem to contradict each other, they don't.
I believe that the bible was written under the instruction of the holy spirit. So in that light let the holy sprite be your guide and let Jesus Christ be your savior.
Find Jesus Christ and the Holy Sprite first and then pick up a bible and start to read.
I hope that helps.
Bye and god Bless.