A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture. We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.