How to balance open-ended vs closed-ended nature of questions?

Question

There is value in open-ended questions.

I recently asked this question, and was a little surprised to learn it had acquired as many as four votes to close (see the comments). I had intentionally left the question a bit open-ended, in the spirit of the christianity.stackexchange (see Brothers, we are not Christians‼).

Here is a related meta question: Should I close questions that are open ended? As pointed out in its answer, there are open-ended questions which can be answered. For my OP, I think user @Nathaniel accomplished this well with his answer which came with some key qualifications. Other SE sites (esp. meta) have wrestled with a flavor of this while using terms such as "pedant" (pedantic) or how to handle "beginner" questions. There are a lot of SE sites. The flavor of question asking on one site can be different/nuanced on another.

I'm all for asking better questions, which includes revising the question itself. However, what of intentional open-endedness? How to balance it? This is also a common theme some SE sites have to deal with, usually making the assumption that the question has been asked in an honest, perhaps curious, way and it's the responsibility, then, of the knowledge base in the community to help shape and provide an accurate answer. So where does the line get drawn on christianity.stackexchange?

Possibly related meta: Are close-vote scope standards significantly different now than they used to be?

Answer 1

The question you asked is essentially a list question with all the typical problems: (yes I know you asked if anyone else had a list, but that's just pushing the problems somewhere else)

• Hard to compile
• Constantly out of date
• Massive scope (ETS for example has over 4000 members, and that's only one academic society)

The criteria for being on the list are also not sufficiently defined:

• You didn't define what kind of inerrancy you are asking about
• You haven't defined what constitutes a "Bible scholar"
• You would have to either limit it to self identified inerrantists, in which case the multiple definitions are a problem, or else someone would have to judge whether others are "true" inerrantists or not

Some list questions are okay. How many countries drive on the left side of the road is fine. Questions which ask for thousands of scholars to be labelled are not.

This doesn't mean though that we can't approach the topic from another direction. You wrote in a comment above that "it doesn't take much going around to realize there is a highly negative (secularly-held) view these days concerning Biblical Inerrancy, Literalism, and Historicity". We encourage questions that are intended to support beliefs! Questions about the history of the modern inerrancy movement, questions about modern groups trying to come to a consensus statement (like the older Chicago statement), questions about the arguments supporting inerrancy are all constructive and would be well received here.