Your lengthy comment gives us a lot to think about – too much, really! You bring us several specific trails to follow. So, I’d like to start with it by pulling one item out. We can always return to the rest.

I decided to put that one item into a new post so others could see it more easily.

Grudem left himself a LOT of wiggle room in insisting that the protective umbrella of inerrancy only covers the original manuscripts. Since we don’t have a single original manuscript of the Bible, everything can be disputed. Coincidentally, this is exactly what the Mormons teach about the Bible.

I think the greatest wiggle word found in all of the definitions above is ‘affirm’. I think there must be a secret definition of ‘affirm’ going around the systematic theology circles that I am not aware of. Anything stated positively is an affirmation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is an assertion, and therefore an affirmation. For that matter, so is “God created a firmament to separate the waters under the firmament from the waters above” and so is “Nature shows that long hair on a man is shameful”. Indeed, that last is an example of BOTH meanings of ‘affirm’, as it is both a positive statement “long hair on a man is shameful” and a statement of agreement or support of the assertion “Nature shows (affirms) that…”.

In this highly nuanced world, how are we to determine what the Bible affirms compared to what it merely asserts? Is all our faith to be put in exegesis? Or is it a charismatic phenomenon, with the Spirit dividing between bone and marrow? (Are the Mormons on the right track, placing their faith in a Prophet rather than a document?)

Take the required reading article on head coverings. So Paul was wrong about the physiology from which he makes his argument. Hair does not function as part of a woman’s sexual apparatus. Does this mean that women don’t need to cover their heads? Or is scripture affirming that women should have their heads covered, while merely asserting that women’s hair function as genitalia? Who gets to draw the line between assertion and affirmation? It seems that even reading this stellar article, we are left back at square one, with having to choose between obeying the instruction or dismissing it as culturally relative. If anyone feels contentious about it, the church has no other practice…

And if we decide that the cultural relativity of Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 11 means women don’t have to cover their heads, then what do we make of 1 Timothy 2 that says women shouldn’t teach or have authority over men? One of Paul’s arguments there is based on the order of creation, but your required reading article shows that the biblical view of creation is itself culturally relative. And it becomes difficult to hold to a literal interpretation of the Garden of Eden once the creation account itself has been re-mythologized. So both of Paul’s arguments (i.e. men were created first, and women were deceived first) become suspect as culturally relative remarks. Huzzah, women can now teach!

But wait a minute; doesn’t the author of Hebrews use the same stories of Creation and Fall to discuss the saving work of Christ? The first Adam brought sin into the world, and the second Adam (Christ) brings salvation? And hasn’t our lowest common denominator definition of inerrancy asserted that the Bible affirms everything that is to do with salvation? Oh, now we are in a pickle. We just made Original Sin (and perhaps even the Atonement) a culturally relative doctrine.

Indeed, if everything pertaining to salvation is ‘affirmed’ rather than merely ‘asserted’, doesn’t this bring into doubt our dismissal of 1 Timothy 2, since it concludes the section on women not teaching by saying ‘she shall be saved (soizdo) through childbearing’? Well, that certainly sounds like it has something to do with salvation. Ok, sorry women. No teaching for you. And maybe you need to cover your heads as well.

I have a hard time with the lowest-common-denominator inerrancy which defines ‘affirm’ narrowly to statements about salvation, with everything else up for grabs. It seems somehow too selfish. On some level, isn’t scripture about learning how to serve God (rather than just learning how He is going to save us)?

Another difficulty raised by the separation of fact and Truth is that the deutero-canonical books need to be reconsidered. External criteria (such as Judith claiming that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Assyria instead of Babylon) can’t be used to discredit the books. (Indeed, isn’t it possible that in the Seleucid period, when much of Israel’s troubles came from the direction of Syria that moving Nebuchadnezzar to Syria served a literary function that has nothing to do with relaying ‘facts’?) And internal criteria are trickier to use as well. For example, the Prayer of Manasseh was discredited by the Protestants for ‘asserting’ that the patriarchs were sinless. But if we realize that 1) not every verse is meant to be a logical proposition, and 2) that readers of the Hebrew Bible would actually be familiar with the ‘sins of the fathers’, and 3) the point of the beautiful prayer is to ‘affirm’ that God made the law as a blessing for the common man, not just the heroes of the faith, then it needs must follow that the Protestant rejection of the Prayer isn’t based on a definition of inerrancy that we ourselves hold anymore, but rather based on ideas of propositional logic that we ourselves reject. If neither internal nor external criteria are all that helpful in determining canonicity, then all we have is faith in the traditions of the church that somehow they ‘got it right’. Take THAT ‘Sola Scriptura’! I’d like to be the first to welcome Manasseh back into the canon. Excuse me while I go kill the fatted calf.