During the debate over “biblical inerrancy” that raged among evangelicalism for several years in the late 1970s, I remember someone observing that Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, which pretty much got that debate going, was more a theory of institutional change than it was about theology as such. That observation made sense to me. While there were some important theological issues at stake, there was also much reliance on the “slippery slope” image, as well as on the story of the camel who, once allowed to put his nose in the tent, eventually moved in to stay. When a key doctrine is abandoned or modified, the argument went, there is no turning back. For evangelicalism, this meant that departing from theology of strict biblical inerrancy could only mean an inevitable move in the direction of consistent liberalism.
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