Reddit reviews The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

Hello mrZNS. This is one of those great examples of Biblical diversity. One of the reasons this troubles you, probably, is that you've likely been taught to think of the Bible with a certain set of assumptions - those assumptions being that you can take little pieces of the Bible out of context (not only out of the context of the passage, but of the context of the entire Bible, as well as out of the "historical context" - the culture in which it was originally written) and then use them like a gavel - slamming them down in order to shut down conversation and win points. But the Bible is actually extremely diverse in its voices, as you might notice when you point passages like this (and Genesis 6:6, Jonah 3:10, and the scene where Abraham argues with God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah even) towards passages that disagree, like Malachi 3:6, Numbers 23:19, and James 1:17.

It is problems like this that are one of the reasons I refuse to use the word "inerrant" anymore, but instead I use the word "infallible". It is important to note that the word "inerrant" or anything like it is never used within the Bible to describe itself - but rather, the Bible tells us that it is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, and that it equips us for good works (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

If you'd like to read more about this other way of thinking about the Bible, I've written some things - here, here, and here. I'd also highly recommend the following books:

The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It - this is a very easy read from one of my favorite scholars, Peter Enns. A more scholarly version of this book (with perhaps more details) is another by the same author:

Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

Also a great book by the same author:

The Evolution of Adam, What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

Other similar books by different authors:

The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority - this one has more to do with how we came to have the collection of scriptures (namely, that our imagining of someone called an author of each book sitting down and writing the whole thing is not really how it would have happened).

This one is perhaps the most difficult to read, as it is the longest and has the most details:

God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship

Maybe you can start with Peter Enns, a Christian professor explaining why Biblical Inerrancy is, well, an errant idea in "The Bible Tells Me So - Why defending scripture has made us unable to read it."

https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Tells-Me-Defending-Scripture-ebook/dp/B00H7LXHJQ

Then, going and reading mainstream biblical scholarship is both enlightening and fascinating - such as Richard Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible".

https://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630353

One book I really love is The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns. It helped me reconcile the faith I felt with the the issues I had with how the Bible is used.

There are many of us that reject traditional views of what the Bible is and how it should be read. I've just finished reading a couple of books by Peter Enns (view here and here) that address the concerns you brought up as well as many others. It was a very therapeutic read for me.

I thought Enns did a great job in this book putting the issue into the context of ancient writers telling a certain story which would have made sense to them.