“The Bible is perfect.”

I would ask, what definition of perfect are we using?

“The Bible saves. The Bible sanctifies.”

Remember, what started all of this recent nonsense was my statement that the Bible doesn’t have “intrinsic” properties. Intrinsic means “Of or relating to the essential nature of a thing.” What saves? What sanctifies? Is it the paper? The binding? The leather cover? The words on the page? The page numbers? The cross references? The running commentary by Saint Scofield? Further, is it the whole BIble that saves me, or just particular verses? Are some verses more salvific than others? Are people who memorize more scripture than me more sanctified? Is there a minimal subset of the Bible needed to save people? Is that why we print and hand out the Gospel of John? Can you be saved by the RSV? The NIV? The Jerusalem Bible? The KJV? Do we have to be able to read the original languages?

Someone will come back with, “we’re talking about the content of the Bible, not the physical book.” But then, I ask, where is the content? what is the content? What are we talking about? The ideas that the bible conveyed in the Bible certainly are ideas about how salvation and sanctification are accomplished, but are we saved by the ideas? It seems to me that runs up against the problem of mental competence; we’re back to being saved by subscribing to a set of principles, rather than being saved by

Making such propositional statements about something that’s understood by faith is problematic. It seems more than a little silly to me, and I suspect it might be the source of grave errors. Only God knows who’s saved and who isn’t, but anyone who comes to the conclusions you’ve described has, in my view, made those kinds of errors. These are, specifically, semantic errors and those who make them are usually unwilling to even consider that they are in error, let alone acknowledge them. The reason for this unwillingness is that they were led into the error on the basis of a set of epistemological assumptions, and they are committed to those assumptions as a matter of … faith.

Which is why, when I respond to such people, I question what their faith really is in.

And it’s why, as Donald Miller tries to argue in Searching for God Knows What, we need to change what I refer to as the central metaphorical paradigm that we use to understand what becoming a Christian is. I submit that we could avoid a lot of this sort of thing if – individually and corporately – we who are Christians made an effort to stop thinking and teaching that becoming a Christian is like joining an organization, and started thinking and teaching that becoming a Christian is like falling in love.