I agree that there is something inherently pointless about the debate over inerrancy - and to be honest, I don’t feel entirely proud of my contribution to the conversation on Mike’s blog. There are too many traps to fall into. But I think any sort of polite dialogue, with a moderate amount of serious listening involved, between those searching for a new theological paradigm and those not is probably a good thing. And it’s always helpful to be made to rethink one’s position.

The following statement from your very interesting blog post seems to get at the heart of the problem:

it seems to me that holding the bible as inerrant in this way pushes christians into an unnecessarily restrictive and increasingly redundant position in society

But now I would ask whether there is some way that this can be turned around. At the moment I still feel that a critical-realist hermeneutic that exposes the narrative engagement of scripture with the historical existence of a community offers the best way to underpin (and only ‘underpin’ - I do not regard this as an exhaustive or fully adequate hermeneutic) the public relevance of the Bible.

But one of the ways that the biblical significance of the community is expressed is symbolically and prophetically, which makes me wonder whether we cannot make some sort of provisional symbolic or prophetic commitment to the ideal of biblical inerrancy. This is partly what that Principle 2 was getting at. It is simply a transparent way of holding in tension the ideal and the reality, the eschatological hope and the historical fallibility - as in Romans 7. The fundamentalist position is not actually true - but it is a sign of the truthfulness of God. I don’t expect fundamentalists to agree with that, but it gives me some comfort!