Jim Packer has written this article in response to the debate begun in EN between Paul Gardner and Alister McGrath.
Inerrancy, like fundamentalism, is a word I would rather not use when confessing my faith. Why? Because, like fundamentalism, it carries a huge load of prejudice and misconception.
Words that cannot safely be used without first explaining what you do not mean by them are best avoided, however noble their true sense may be. Fundamentalism, for instance, means standing for the fundamentals of the faith, and inerrancy means the total truthfulness of the Bible, and ideally all Christians would be for both the one and the other. But because of what has happened to both words in the 20th-century Christian world, I, like others, try to get on without them, expressing my commitment in different terms. When accused of being a fundamentalist and an inerrantist, I need to define the words before pleading guilty, and that takes time I would rather spend in other ways.
