Test suites are awesome
Just because you can get around a feature doesn't invalidate that feature.
I'm not sure how I feel about static typing in Java, but it does do what OP talks about, because by default you're not playing devils advocate with reflection.
With Java + Spring + XML you can get one language for the price of two!
How useful is Java's type checking when one typo in an XML file breaks your program?
At least in Python I can follow the logic of the language and find where the mistake is. Spring's XML files don't have such logic and usually all you have is a confusing traceback to work with.
Static typing can guarantee the functionality of quite a lot of code, but it cannot do this for any arbitrary piece of code. As an example, no compiler in any language can know what whether a user will numbers or garbage, when you're expecting numbers. You need to check for an exception in Java even in this simple case.
Instead, you need to figure out what level of reliability you require and then work out a strategy to get there. Static-checking can be one element of this strategy, since you can use it to eliminate whole classes of bugs. But I've usually found that architectural solutions like canaries, automatic restarts, feature disablement, fallback codepaths, etc. are more effective at reducing errors per programmer-hour spent on them, and when you have those the reliability thresholds for the actual code you write can be much looser. (You probably still want to verify the hell out of the framework code that implements these architectural mechanisms, though.)