Practical Inerrancy & Bible Difficulties

Of all Bible difficulties, one tops the rest: Why is God so severe in Old Testament times, especially in Joshua's conquest of the land of Canaan? For some Bible readers, this episode challenges confidence in the reliability of the accounts of Old Testament evils and the severe divine judgments they provoked. So how should we approach the goodness and severity of God, and does this difficulty call the Bible's infallibility and inerrancy into question? In this concise and scholarly treatment of the Bible's inspiration and authority, the author answers these questions in light of the evangelical debate over the Bible and its difficulties during the last fifty years. By using the conquest of Canaan and fifteen other Bible difficulties as test cases, the author shows why the Bible should be read as practically inerrant. What does practical inerrancy mean? Put simply, it means that the Bible's ambiguities and imperfections should not be labelled as errors but as imprecise and ancient expressions conveying God's perfect word in imperfect human words. The inerrancy of the Bible is more than a defining belief of conservative evangelical Christians. It is the practice of interpreting the Bible from a faithful conviction of its coherence and integrity.