Martin Luther is to have said, "The Word of God is Jesus Christ, and the Bible was the manger in which the Word was laid." He also said there was a lot of straw in the manger, and for him the Epistle of James was an Epistle of Straw. So the leader of the Reformation did not give equal weight to each part of Scripture.
The movement to make the entire content of the Bible inerrant or without error is a relatively new phenomenon. It happened in this country and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a reaction to the rise of science, biblical literary criticism, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and archeological findings to name a few things. The rise of this approach to the Bible was a vast departure from Early Church Fathers such as St. Augustine of Hippo and Origen. Augustine said that the mystery of the the story of creation as told in the first chapter of Genesis has to be taken somewhat allegorically because we do not know the mind of God as God created. We needed to be open to learn more about what that all meant over time as inspired by God. Origen interpreted much of Scripture in an allegorical fashion, which surprise many folks today.
Biblical Inerrancy was a reaction to a world that seemed to be changing so rapidly, and that rapidness has only accelerated over time. But there has to be some logical gymnastics to take all parts of the Bible as literal and factual. There are contradicting statements in the Bible, such as in the first and second Creation Stories. In the first story in the first chapter of Genesis God creates everything and then creates humanity in God's image. In the story of the Garden of Eden, in the second chapter of Genesis, the human (Adam) is created first and then all the other creatures. Then God creates woman as a companion to man. So which story is factually correct - humanity created at the end or beginning of creation by God?
This question misses the point. These Biblical stories were not meant to be scientific accounts, and their truth is much deeper than just on the surface. The first story of creation is meant to show that God created everything and that is it good, including humankind made in God's Image. The second story of Adam and Eve shows that humanity is to be stewards of what God has given, but we humans put ourselves in the center of things and not God.
To me giving literal truth to every word of the Bible trivializes much of it, and misses the more significant truth that is sometimes in poetry, story, or commentary. Biblical Inerrancy almost makes the Bible an item of worship, and if one part is proven not to be literally true then one's faith could come tumbling down.
Those ordained bishops, priests, and deacons in the Episcopal Church have to sign a document stating that they believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation. So we take the Bible very seriously. On Sundays we read most of the Bible in a three year lectionary cycle consisting of four parts each Sunday - Old Testament, Psalm, New Testament, and Gospel reading. But we believe that the Scriptures have to be interpreted with guidance of the Holy Spirit and in light of history, scientific learnings, archeological findings, and the tradition of the faith. After that we can say, "What is God saying to us (not just me) today?"
A significant teacher of Bible Study in my tradition, the late Dr.Verna Dozier, said that there was a Golden Thread running through the Bible, and that thread was that "God is for us". Every passage has to be played off that thread, and to take it out of context or that thread was to miss the point. She also said that we don't necessarily go to the Bible to find God. We go to the Bible because God has already found us, and we want to know how others have known God and how that can inform our relationship as God's people today. To me that speaks of the profound wonderful truth of the Bible, and not just as a laundry lists of "do's" and "dont's", or a scientific manual. The Bible is the story of salvation with God's people, and we are continuation of that today.
