Scripture as the Human Word of God: Why Faith Contradicts Inerrancy  Christopher R. Hutson Abilene Christian University Abilene, Texas Pop Quiz: If you believe that the Bible is inerrant, then you may be (a) a Defender of the Faith. (b) stuck in a Modernist rut. (c) the Antichrist. What do we mean when we refer to Scripture as the “word of God”? What does the title of this essay mean, “Scripture as the Human Word of God”? This sounds like an oxymoron or perhaps an attempt to poke holes in the idea of belief in the Bible. But I come to this topic not as a skeptic trying to point out how silly it is to take the Bible seriously. Rather, I come as committed Christian, a life-long member of the Church of Christ. I teach an adult Bible study class every Wednesday night in my home congregation, and I preach and teach in churches of all sorts when called upon. I come also as an academic, having spent the past twenty-nine years either studying the Bible in various academic institutions or teaching it or both. For the past eleven years I have taught in a seminary where the majority of my students are preparing for ordination as parish ministers. My chief aim in teaching ministers to read the Bible, therefore, is not to destroy their faith (although some have accused me of that over the years) but to get them to put aside the theological assumptions they were taught in Sunday School and focus on what the biblical texts actually say. The object of this essay is to focus on what the Bible might say about how God has spoken, including what we might learn from the Bible about a biblical way to think about Scripture. What do we mean when we refer to Scripture as the “word of God?” The question is not whether God speaks but how God speaks. 1 In this essay, I shall not rehash old Fundamentalist-Modernist debates about whether scientific or historical analysis “proves” or “disproves” the Bible. The Fundamentalists made a basic error in the 20 th century by thinking they could use Modern scientific tools to “prove” the truth of the Bible. Modern science is the best set of tools