Inerrancy accepted, discarded, established and eroded

Last week on this side of the pond, specifically at John MacArthur's Shepherds' Conference in California, the hot topic has been the inerrancy of Scripture. Inerrancy means that the Bible, in its original manuscripts, is 'without error in all that it affirms'. For the first 16 centuries of church history inerrancy was accepted. People believed that the Bible was written by men, but men who "spoke from God" and were "moved by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). With the Age of Reason in the 17^th and 18^th centuries came Enlightenment thinking which had the effect of raising the thoughts of man above the mind of God.