From a Facebook friend:

If you believe in verbal plenary inspiration, which means each bit is as inspired as the other, then you end up taking positions that very few civilised people would hold these days. Take as example the theological gymnastics that William Lane Craig and Paul Coppan from the Evangelical Theological Society take to try and argue the slaughter of all the men women and children of the Canaanites was a good thing. Who would want to try and debate that on TV? No one. it only works when talking to very conservative Christians (and fundamentalist Muslims).

Basically, the verbal plenary people have to maintain that a holy and godly person in Levitical times would be doing the will of God to execute adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children, as well as those who disobeyed the Sabbath. So if we’re back in those days, we’d be gladly casting the first stone, assured in our place in carrying the will of God. As for me, I would do anything to save them from such a fate . . . even if it meant going against the verbal inspirationists of the day.

Can anyone really read Numbers 5 and explain to me how a holy and just God inspired that? Conservative Evangelicals just say, “Well that was the Law”, as if that can explain the ethics of such rules.

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To which another replied:

The problem is when we interpret those passages from the perspective of today. From the perspective of the time, Numbers 5 (I presume you mean v.11ff.) was very progressive. It looks like hocus pocus, but it afforded the rights of women who otherwise could have been divorced and her reputation shattered on the whim of a jealous husband. Sounds like something a loving and holy God would do, to me.

As is keeping infectious diseases in isolation and implementing restorative justice. Ceremonial cleanliness may seem harsh, but that only lasted a day.

Rather than judging Scripture and imposing our own standard of so-called holiness, it’s instructive to learn what holiness means by meditating on it.