One of the most striking vantage points 17 years in ordained ministry I've seen over the years is just how fragile, foolhardy and even frighteningly beautiful the ordinary faith of ordinary people can be.
On more than a one occasion, I've sat through a pointless church meeting or an inane clergy gathering and been struck by this realization: The very testimony to which we respond every Sunday "The Word of God for the People of God/Thanks be to God" was written by believers who, in all likelihood, were every bit as sinful, ignorant, and only partially faithful as the people gathered around me right now. Call the author "Saint Luke" and you give him beautific hues. Realize he's the same as the guy sitting next to you in your pew, singing off-key on Sunday, and he's a completely different guy.
Ministry offers me a glimpse into the mysterious side of the "simple" faith.
And alongside that bitter dose of reality, there's the miraculous: The living God can be known through, and the unknowable God can be glimpsed in, people like me who aren't pretending.
There are people who believe that even in the muck and circumstances of our everyday human lives -- ordinary lives -- there's God. God loving us. Working with us. God with the world.
There's also folks who are pretty sure everything I've just written is heresy.
Because, for them, the book that tells us about God is totally unlike the ordinary in which God works. So many Christians would describe the miracle of scripture as inerrancy; that is, God has miraculously kept the Bible free from any error. The Bible's power and authority then derive from its being devoid of any historical mistakes (think the worldwide census in Luke 2), theological inconsistencies (Mark's Gospel vs John's) or scientific problems (think Genesis). Indeed, many Christians treat the "Word" as though it fell from heaven, printed and bound and translated in to the King James; therefore, it must be without error.
Such a "high view" comes with a high risk. If the Bible's power and authority derive from inerrancy, just one historical or scientific or theological "blunder", and the whole thing crashes down.
Based on anything other than confidence in God in Jesus, and it's just a matter of time before confidence in the Bible can be genuinely shaken.
Take the fiasco that was the recent debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy and the creationist guru. That wasn't a debate about human origins or atheism. It was about a particular way of believing the Bible. The debate was over the doctrine of Scripture.
So let me make a bold theological claim (thanks to Karl Barth)*: The "miracle" of the Bible isn't that it has no errors. The "miracle" of the Bible is that God makes himself known through what is human -- all-too-human -- always limited, partial and frequently mistaken.
I'm always struck by how little Christians connect the Bible -- as a human book -- to Jesus -- as a human man. At Christmas, we make a lot of noise about God in Jesus, working in real, ordinary flesh -- not pristine, idealized flesh. Because, as the early Christians believed: "What he has not assumed, he has not healed". In other words, for our entire fleshly selves to be saved, those entire fleshly selves had to be present in the Incarnate One. That's the mystery of Jesus.
Seldom, however, do we make the same hay out of scripture's incarnational nature, yet the miracle is the same. God can use the most human of mediums for revelation and grace. In a certain sense, for both Barth and me, to wish the Bible were something other than what it is (a fallible, human witness) is akin to wishing the Incarnation were less human and more spiritually sanitized than it was.
All this grounding the Bible's authority in inerrancy is worshipping a god other than the God we have in Jesus. God reveals himself in and with ordinary, corruptible things.
Ultimately, I think, believing in an inerrant Bible is rejecting grace.
Biblical inerrancy is a rejection of God's grace in Jesus. It rejects the gift God has given us (an unmerited, incarnational text) in favor of something we deem, through our doctrine, to be better.
"Better" isn't a Christian category. Because, what's "better" than grace?
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*See Barth's Church Dogmatics for this argument.