I do have an extended essay on Biblical inspiration, available on my Energion.com site, and of course in my book When People Speak for God.

While I certainly agree that the Bible is not inerrant

If you open the door that the Bible has errors in it than you open the door to dismiss anything that does not fit your world view by saying that the Bible is wrong. Unfortunately for you the all knowing God that created the universe, through the divine inspiration of men, wrote the Bible. There are no errors in the Bible, only in our interpretation of it. I will freely admit that I may be interpreting the text incorrectly, but once I am in heaven worshiping at the feet of Jesus I will know the errors of my interpretation and I will see that the Bible was right all the time, as will you. I believe the age of the earth is an non-essential for salvation, as long as you do not take from God the power to create life with but a thought. Think about this: All God needed to do was think it and all of the matter in the universe (planets, stars, creatures, plants, light, atoms and every grain of sand in the world) would have been created, why did he then do it in such a long period of time as six days?

1) The critical methods I described, and by which I come to the conclusion that the text is liturgy are generally not those used in apologetics, and have not generally been accepted by the more conservative branches of Christianity. In using them on the text I would be accused by such folks of destroying the text in order to save it.

2) I do not consider the seven-literal-days interpretation to be hopelessly naive. In fact, in the post I said:

Were you to ask the Israelites just what they believed at the time when Genesis took on its current form, I would personally guess that they would believe something like a literal week “a long time ago.” . . .

I am kind of hoping that I did not then somehow imply that the same interpretation I expressed, at least for that stage of the composition, was hopelessly naive! I was referring in particular to the time of the final redaction of Genesis, at which time I would suspect that the writer and readers of the time would take the creation week fairly literally to the extent that they considered the question at all.

The question that I set out to determine first is how the text would have been heard first. As I will discuss in later posts, there are points at which I believe the Bible writers believed and expressed things that were not so.

My major defense against the “anything that works apologetically” charge is simply that in many cases I come to the conclusion that an apologetically unhelpful interpretation is, in fact, the true one. Again, I will provide examples as I continue.