Tag Archives: inerrancy

More On Inerrancy, Because Monday

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My original post on Rescuing the Bible From Inerrancy has been read about a thousand times, and while it generated only a single comment here on the blog, there were Facebook comments and shares with more comments, a few emails, and (best of all) several real-life conversations. The feedback was mixed; some Christian friends were uncomfortable with what felt like an attack on the bible, and some non-Christian friends wondered what the big deal was anyway.

The feedback from Christians was the most interesting, and it came in two distinct flavors. Retorts from conservatives/evangelicals basically said, “No, you don’t understand – the bible IS inerrant because it HAS to be!” which only illustrates my point, I think. Agree to disagree. But the most helpful pushback was actually from like-minded Christian friends who said, “We basically agree, but why stress errancy? Why undermine people’s faith in the bible based on a technicality?” While I think my post did touch on this, it’s a valid question and worth revisiting.

My point was never about the technical errancy of the bible. In rejecting the modernist category of “inerrancy,” I’m also implicitly rejecting its counterpart “errancy.” I’m suggesting that these are not the most helpful terms when it comes to describing what the bible actually is, a collection of ancient documents. If I wave my hand and declare them to be “inerrant,” I’m fooling myself and stacking the deck against intellectual honesty. If I quarantine them as “errant,” I’m still playing into the notion of factual veracity as the primary gauge of a document’s value. What does it mean for a poem to be “inerrant”? For the self-defining stories of a community to be labeled “errant”? How do those labels help us engage with the actual content of the bible?

And this is the crux of the issue for me: it’s all about our POSTURE as we engage with the text. Are we open to an encounter with the weird and the unexpected? The disturbing? The divine? Or have we made up our mind ahead of time that it’s all somehow magically perfect, a database of categorized truths ready to be observed, memorized and enforced? Inerrancy is like an immunization against the crags and surprises in the text. It puts the text on a shelf so high we can’t see the fingerprints all over it. It turns the volume of our own doctrines and interpretations up so high that neither the text’s authors nor God Himself can cut through the noise and say anything new.

Here’s an obvious and practical example of the problem as I see it:

  • The bible says (or rather, the authors of Exodus 21 write, citing the law) “If there is harm, you shall repay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
  • But Jesus of Nazareth (in Matthew Chapter 5) says, “You have heard it was said, ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn him the other also.”

Two “biblical” principles: violent retaliation and nonviolent confrontation. They are, on the surface, at odds with one another. So which of the two is “inerrant”? Which one is an “infallible doctrinal truth” and the “foundation of our faith”?

Now, you can point out that talion (“eye for eye”) was actually a progressive (read “less violent”) ethic in its ancient context, and that seems to be the case. So when Jesus proclaims the godly ideal of nonviolence, we might receive it as a more pure and evolved but consistent version of the old principle. Maybe. Maybe not. We’d need to wrestle with it for a while. Meanwhile, it took our subjective evaluation and historically-informed interpretation to get us even this far. And once we’ve acknowledged the possibility of an evolution of ideas among the various conversant perspectives in the bible, inerrancy as a presupposition becomes at best unhelpful and at worst a hindrance.

We may insist that the principles and ideas we extract from this subjective process are “trustworthy” and even “infallible,” but the only way to prove them out as such is the same way we encountered them in the first place: open and honest encounters with other humans. You can’t just declare it to be true and go back to bed, you have to live it out for the rest of your life. “Truth” apart from relational experience is just an abstraction. Many “bible believers” throughout history have lived “eye for eye” as “inerrant truth” and spilled a great deal of blood. Jesus himself lived “turn the other cheek” to its perilous extremity.

I believe that God can and does speak through scripture. I believe we can encounter Him in its pages in authentic and spectacular ways. I believe that the bible is precious and crazy and human and divine and ancient and alive. I trust in it, even as I often toil to make sense of it, and I think you should too. But it does no good to engage it with our brains tied behind our backs.

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Rescuing the Bible From Inerrancy

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A Plea For Honesty and Realism

Ask an evangelical Christian today what the center and heart of Christianity is, and they’re likely to say something like “Jesus is the Son of God,” or “Jesus saves sinners.” But they’re just as likely, in my experience, to say something like “the Bible is God’s inerrant and infallible Word.” A recent interview with Norman Geisler by the Billy Graham Institute underscores the intense manner in which many Christians are doubling down on “biblical inerrancy” as a sort of moral stand against non-believers and the greater culture.

So this is an awkward but opportune moment for me to chime in and explain why I do not subscribe to the doctrine of inerrancy and why I think it’s actually harmful to both faith and personal sanity.

Inerrancy Defined

Biblical Inerrancy is a Christian doctrine about the factuality, reliability and authority of the Bible. It comes in harder and softer flavors, the hardest claiming the text is infallible in all forms and softer versions asserting that the original texts were correct in every fact they affirmed. The major implication of the doctrine, according to its adherents, is that every teaching of the Bible is as true and reliable as every other, and that God’s own authority is carried by every word. This is meant to give the Christian believer a measure of confidence and certainty as they read and proclaim the Bible.

Inerrancy in History?

Proponents of inerrancy assert that it has always been a central part of historic orthodox Christianity. While it’s true that the inspiration and authority of Scripture have always been integral to the faith, “inerrancy” is a distinctly modern category. The early Church writers like Clement of Alexandria spoke often about the sacred and inspired nature of the Scriptures, but they had no concept of inerrancy (and many like Clement himself subscribed to mystical and allegorical readings of the Bible that most inerrantists would reject).  The question of factual veracity as a measure of reliability and value is a product of post-Enlightenment thought.

Historically, biblical inerrancy is a major tenet of the American Evangelical movement of the 20th Century. The concept developed throughout the 1950’s and 60’s but was expressed publicly and explicitly in the “Chicago Statement On Biblical Inerrancy” in 1978 (within my lifetime!). This is not an ancient doctrine fighting against modern sensibilities, it is a modernist attempt to describe the authority of the Bible in the most extreme terms available.

Inerrancy in Scripture?

What does the Bible say about its own inerrancy? Keeping in mind everything we just observed, and setting aside the question of whether any text could conceivably establish its own “inerrancy,” it is helpful at this point to clarify a few things about the Bible and the way it talks (or seems to talk) about itself. For instance:

  • Our term “the Bible” does not refer to a single work of literature, but to a collection of ancient texts that were celebrated and preserved by religious communities and collected together many centuries after they were written.
  • In biblical texts, the word “scripture” does not refer to the canonized collection of texts we call “the Bible,” it simply refers to writings that were known and cherished by the author and community which produced that text. Many writings that were considered sacred to ancient communities were never canonized into the Hebrew or Christian Bibles.
  • The phrase “word of God” in Scripture does not refer to the Bible. In the Hebrew Scriptures it refers to the wisdom, decrees, and will of God expressed through creation, providence, and messengers like the prophets. In the New Testament, Jesus is the “Word of God” embodied.

And so, a few quick examples of how this affects our reading of Bible passages frequently quoted in support of biblical inerrancy:

  • “The words of YHWH are flawless!” Psalm 12:6. The poet David compares YHWH’s promises to refined silver.
  • “Every word of God proves true!” Proverbs 30:5. The prophet Agur celebrates God’s reliable character.
  • “All scripture is breathed out by God, and is useful for teaching, for rebuke, for improvement, for training in righteousness.” 2 Timothy 3:16. Paul implores a younger minister not to forsake the sacred writings of the early church community when teaching and serving his congregation.

Bible texts have much to say about God’s own “words” and the value of the “scriptures” cherished by the ancient Jewish and Christian communities, but the onus of authority and infallibility is always on God and never on the writings themselves.

The Heart of the Problem

You might assume at this point that I’m mounting a technical or scientific argument against inerrancy. While I think I’ve already demonstrated how that might work, it’s actually not what I’m on about. I certainly have no desire to convince my fellow Christians that their Bible contains errors, general or specific. I don’t find inerrancy to be historical, biblical, or technically tenable, but my real objection is to the ideological assumptions behind the doctrine.

The most revealing rhetoric about inerrancy, in my opinion, comes in response to the question, “Why do we need it?” Or more to-the-point, “What do we lose without it?” Norman Geisler’s answers in the interview linked above are typical:

“If we can’t trust the Bible, then we’ve lost the very foundation of our faith.”

“Once you deny the inerrancy of the Bible, you don’t have any basis for your teaching. And you’ve lost the power of God because if it’s not the Word of God—if what the Bible says is not what God is saying—then how can we preach it with authority and life-transforming ability?”

Not only does Geisler reinforce the traditional oversimplification that “God’s Word” = “the Bible,” his answers betray the fear and faulty assumptions at the heart of the inerrancy claim. If we lose inerrancy, he says, we lose the “foundation of our faith” and the “power of God” which gives us “authority” when we preach the Bible.

Two questions:

  1. Why? Why would losing the claim of inerrancy cost us our faith? Is our faith a vulnerable and open-hearted trust in the good character of God, revealed in Jesus and testified in the Bible, or is it an anxious and tenuous faith in a system of facts, a house of cards that might come crashing down at any moment? Is our certainty just a mask to hide that fear?
  2. Where did we get the idea that we need this “power” and “authority”? Did Jesus teach his followers to seek power and authority? Is the aim of our faith to dominate and control others into thinking and believing like us? Is the Bible a living and breathing testimony to the traditions of God’s people, or a magic trump card with which we can “win” the culture? Are we being pious or just arrogant?

My point is not that everyone who holds to inerrancy is just afraid and arrogant. In my experience the doctrine’s adherents are devout and godly people with the absolute best of intentions. But those lofty intentions are part of the reason why the troubling implications of the doctrine have gone largely unexamined. I think that an honest and humble reassessment is in order.

Finding A Better Way Forward

I understand the appeal of inerrancy, I really do. I love the Bible, and my desire to “prove” and “defend” its integrity is what led me to study it and ultimately to attend seminary. But the Bible I encountered in my studies was not a catalog of theological propositions and cultural truth bombs, it was a diverse library of stories and songs and poems and histories and visions that cried out across the millennia with a startling and broken humanity, even as they testified to the divine. Inerrancy, in my estimation, is part of a modern approach to the Bible that often silences those voices and even puts words in their mouths. There has to be a better way.

For the sake of discussion, I offer two examples of “better ways” of thinking about the Bible and its value and authority for the Christian:

  • N.T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God is, in many ways, a very traditional and “orthodox” take on the question of Scripture. What I find so refreshing about it is the clarity and realism it has about the nature of the texts and how they work. Wright compares the Bible to a signpost, set up by helpful people, which points you on your way, but your business is ultimately at your destination. Wright’s full of stuffy little British analogies like that.
  • Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns is one of the more insightful and helpful books I’ve read on this subject. Enns suggests an “incarnational” approach to understanding what the Bible is and isn’t. If God’s infallible love had to be embodied as a mortal human being so that we could encounter it, surely we can appreciate the subjective, human origins of the Bible while still acknowledging its sacred payload. (Enns was fired from an evangelical seminary for his views.)

These are the first two examples I could think of, and they aren’t perfect. That is to say they are errant, but I’m afraid those are the only types of methods available to us. What they have going for them is a combination of intellectual honesty and intense devotion to the texts of the Bible.

My original title for this post was “Embracing Errancy.” I nixed it because it’s a bit misleading and over-the-top, but I still like the phrase. I’m not talking about embracing the factual errancy of the Bible, but embracing our own errancy, and the errancy of our traditions. Our beliefs and interpretations, like the Bible itself, can be powerful tools, signposts pointing us in the right direction. But we will always struggle with the temptation to trade vulnerability and trust for certainty and pride. That’s when our doctrines and even the Bible itself can become idols.

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