This is from an interview somewhere – you can probably find it fairly easily on google

Interviewer (the ‘pond is the Atlantic Ocean):

“One great controversy—I’m not sure it’s a controversy across the pond—is the role of the Scriptures. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “inerrancy of the Scriptures” or “infallibility of the Scriptures.”

Yes.

What is your position on that? To what extent is a doctrine that says something like infallibility or inerrancy necessary?

Right. I see words like that—inerrancy, infallibility—as attempts to put into a glass case, almost, something that Christians down the years have instinctively felt and known but not until recently have they actually formulated—a Scripture principle of some sort. You know that in the Middle Ages, in the early Church, it just came with the turf. If you were a Christian, the Bible was your book, and they didn’t develop great theories about what it was or how. They said odd things here and there, but it’s very recently that people have done that.

Particularly that a lot of that debate has happened within modernity, within post-Western-Enlightenment modernity, makes me worried because often, then, you get modernist categories about certainty and objectivity dumped on Scripture which really don’t do it justice and really don’t do what needs to be done. I was with a group of Anglican bishops last year, and one of them was asked the question about what he felt about Scripture, and his first answer was, “There isn’t any other book in the world I read every day of my life.” And in a sense that’s a very Anglican answer. It’s to say, “I’m not necessarily going to give a one-word theory, or even a five-word theory, but I am going to tell you that I am on my knees in front of this book day after day after day.”

In fact, I know the bishop in question, and I know there are some parts of Scripture that he would want to distance himself from. I wouldn’t take that view. I really think that if it’s in this book, I need to be doing serious business with it. If I say that I believe X but that the Bible says Y which is different, then chances are I’m making a mistake somewhere, but that doesn’t prejudge all issues of interpretation, you know. There are many, many issues where I say I am committed to believing this text whenever I figure out what on earth it’s supposed to mean, which at the moment I don’t think I know. So that, for me, is often an open question.

I know what the people who say inerrancy are trying to say, and broadly I want to affirm something like what they’re trying to affirm. I do have a sense that that word has got in the way. And as you say, in England this isn’t a big debate. We just don’t have the heat that it generates in the United States.”