This is a preliminary summary of the ongoing discussion on Mike Macon’s blog regarding the scriptural inerrancy, as well as some personal commentary.
Those Christians who believe that the Bible IS inerrant also believe that if it WASN’T inerrant their faith would not longer have a firm foundation. If the Bible had errors it couldn’t be trusted; it becomes just another work of man, a compilation of men’s opinions. Without a reliable and objective scriptural testimony faith is reduced to subjective opinion and feeling. There would be no way to decide between Biblical Christianity and any other religion that purports to be true.
Those Christians who believe that the Bible IS NOT inerrant say that it doesn’t really matter when it comes to validating their faith. The Scriptures are one source of assurance and revelation, along with the internal witness of God in one’s heart and the community of believers. Together these sources of testimony converge on an ultimate truth. This truth cannot be known with 100% certainty, but that’s not really a problem. All these sources together present a reliable human witness to God’s nature and grace which transcends human witness.
It’s not clear how people arrive at these contrasting beliefs. Do some believers assert inerrancy BECAUSE it’s necessary to have a completely reliable revelation on which to base their faith? Or do they achieve complete personal assurance BECAUSE of their belief in inerrancy? Conversely, do some believers reject inerrany BECAUSE they’ve discovered errors in the text and found that it didn’t matter to their faith? Or do they accept the possibility of Biblical error BECAUSE the combined testimony of Bible, subjective experience and community means that no one source is crucial on its own?
No one on the thread of discussion has said something like this: I believe the Bible is inerrant, but it wouldn’t really matter even if it does contain errors. Nor this: I believe the Bible contains errors, but I am completely certain about the truths it contains. These are hypothetical cells in a grid of belief that so far remain unoccupied.
No one on the thread has really engaged what it means to read the Bible like a nonbeliever would read it. All the expressed beliefs and arguments concerning inerrancy and its importance expressed so far are internal disagreements among Christians. Same God, same faith, in broad-brush terms the same belief in the divine inspiration and reliability of Scripture. The non-Christian falls outside this grid. If you don’t believe in the God to whom the Bible gives testimony, you have no a priori reason to believe that the Bible contains ANY truth about God, let alone inerrant truth. If you have neither an internal witness of the regenerating Holy Spirit nor an interpersonal witness of the community of believers to rely on, these other sources are unavailable to you as testimonies to the truths of Scripture. One might say that, when it comes to reading the Bible, the non-Christian occupies a whole different REALITY from the Christian.
Andrew suggested that believers try reading the Bible "as if" it weren’t perfect testimony to a God they already have faith in, to read it the way unbelievers read it, with the intention of gaining a different perspective on the text. So let’s say that unbelievers read the Bible as a human text, without recourse to divine testimony of its truthfulness provided either by the text, by the community, or by internal regeneration of the spirit. Do Christians derive any benefit from reading the Bible like a non-Christian? By visiting that alternate reality for awhile, are Christians likely to come away from the experience with any new insights about the text or their faith? Are they likely to learn anything valuable about the unbeliever by seeing through his eyes for awhile, by talking together about the text on the unbeliever’s terms?
As an unbeliever I can see advantages to this approach. On the other hand, I can also imagine arguments to the contrary. Maybe it’s better to present as clear a picture as possible of the Christian reality, then rely on the Holy Spirit to draw in those with ears who are being prepared to hear. Why take a walk on the dark side when you have to step into the light in order to see the truth? But this is just me speculating about what believers might think. On the other side, it must be acknowledged that the unbeliever does believe something: that the Bible isn’t true, that there is no such God, etc. The unbeliever also entertains hopes that maybe if the believers could step into this alternate unbeliever reality for awhile they’d start seeing things more clearly. So perhaps there is a danger.
Re: inerrancy debates
This is an interesting debate. I plan to make a post about biblical inerrancy soon. It is all for good dicussion. By the way, currently I do not believe the bible is inerrant, but I do believe it is in some sense inspired by God.
Re: inerrancy debates
Why bother? This is an inane debate. The battle has raged for centuries. No minds are likely to be changed by anything you write. It is a colossal waste of time. See, e.g., Karl Barth on the world of the Bible.
Re: inerrancy debates
Why not not bother? I think these things are important to discuss.
By the way, is not the doctrine of biblical inerrancy relatively modern? I recall Bart Ehrman making a comment similar to that.
Re: inerrancy debates
The words “inerrant” and “inerrancy” are both modern words. They are extra-Biblical. But that fact hasn’t stopped people from claiming the Bible is “inerrant.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word “inerrant” had to do with astronomy and it was written in 1652.
The next uses popped up 1837. They referred to texts that are “free from error; unerring.”
In 1868 it was used in relation to the church: “Whether absolutely inerrant or not in matters of faith.”
The word “inerrancy” was first used sometime between 1818-34 in reference to books: “Absolute inerrancy is impracticable in any printed book.”
In 1865 it was used to refer to the “Ultramontane doctrine of the inerrancy of the Pope, i.e. that of his preservation from error.”
More recently, the “inerrancy” movement was championed by the Southern Baptist Association. In particular, in the 1970s, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler began pushing the SBC toward a conservative agenda that framed the Holy Bible as an “inerrant” text.
Re: Inerrancy debates on Mike Macon's blog
i must admit i too find this debate a sterile one. it seems to me the idea that ‘god made it, therefore it is inerrant’ is entirely without support, either in the text itself (which clearly contains typographical errors at least) or even philosophically/theologically.
the revelation may well be divine, but it is made to humans and therein lies the snag. while god is perfect in his understanding, we are not. thus we are always caught in the hermeneutic cycle. it was exactly the same with the law, as paul eloquently explains in romans 7 to answer exactly the same argument from jewish christians who were asserting that as god had given the law, it was necessary and adequate for salvation. as he explains, god’s part was NOT the bit that was broken!!!
i’ve written so much about this over the years it seems and it’s still tired, stale and unfruitful. see here http://fakerepublic.typepad.com/fake/2007/03/and_god_said_it.html if you’re still for some reason hungry for more. :o)
shane magee
director: fake
w: www.fakerepublic.com
Re: Inerrancy debates on Mike Macon's blog
I agree that there is something inherently pointless about the debate over inerrancy - and to be honest, I don’t feel entirely proud of my contribution to the conversation on Mike’s blog. There are too many traps to fall into. But I think any sort of polite dialogue, with a moderate amount of serious listening involved, between those searching for a new theological paradigm and those not is probably a good thing. And it’s always helpful to be made to rethink one’s position.
The following statement from your very interesting blog post seems to get at the heart of the problem:
But now I would ask whether there is some way that this can be turned around. At the moment I still feel that a critical-realist hermeneutic that exposes the narrative engagement of scripture with the historical existence of a community offers the best way to underpin (and only ‘underpin’ - I do not regard this as an exhaustive or fully adequate hermeneutic) the public relevance of the Bible.
But one of the ways that the biblical significance of the community is expressed is symbolically and prophetically, which makes me wonder whether we cannot make some sort of provisional symbolic or prophetic commitment to the ideal of biblical inerrancy. This is partly what that Principle 2 was getting at. It is simply a transparent way of holding in tension the ideal and the reality, the eschatological hope and the historical fallibility - as in Romans 7. The fundamentalist position is not actually true - but it is a sign of the truthfulness of God. I don’t expect fundamentalists to agree with that, but it gives me some comfort!
Re: Inerrancy debates on Mike Macon's blog
Don’t many statements of faith qualify an assertion of ‘the inerrancy of the scriptures’ by adding ‘as originally given’? Since nobody possesses the ‘originally given scriptures’ (assuming there ever was such a thing), the qualification and belief seem less than useful - though a strong case is to be made for the trustworthiness through transmission of biblical texts.
In some cases, apparent error can indirectly reinforce reliability. For instance, the apparent discrepancies in the resurrection accounts can suggest the kind of margin of error in eyewitness accounts which reflects their inherent truthfulness (that’s apart from their different theological emphases).
Inerrancy has therefore been joined, in some cases replaced, by the other slippery term ‘infallibility’ - which at its most flexible can simply mean ‘reliable for the purposes for which it was intended’.
It’s nice to be able to agree with Andrew about something (probably about many things), that the bible uses ‘word of God’ in the restricted sense of God addressing particular situations. However, I think it is also valid to accept that the bible as a whole addresses a broader human situation, and could therefore validly be described as ‘the word of God’ (which Andrew might not agree with). The problem this creates is when we assume we can know what ‘the word of God’ means in every detail of the situations which it addresses. In the end, there is always a great deal of interpretation going on, and we find ourselves not really talking about the text at all - or only in an indirect sense.
The problem with adopting the perspective of an ‘unbeliever’ towards the biblical texts is that the strategy simply substitutes one set of prior beliefs for another. One could argue that during the period of critical interpretation of the bible, scholars have been doing just that - reading the bible as if there needed to be no presupposition of belief, and instead bringing strongly held principles of unbelief to the text, and influencing others to do the same.
The ‘unbeliever’, whether a scholar or ordinary reader, does not approach the bible from this mythical place of neutrality with regard to belief, and always brings beliefs and mindsets to texts, whether consciously held or not.
The inerrancy debate may be sterile in itself, but it does point towards more important and significant issues of bible interpretation. But will we ever be able to get away from the bible as a text which examines and searches us rather than we it? All good literary texts do this of course, but behind the bible is the authority of the God which it somewhat uniquely describes. N.T.Wright argues a good case for the authority of the bible as residing not within the text itself (ie inerrant, inspired, infallible or whatever), but in the God whom it describes in history, and in the people whom he chose to be his own which it describes, as opposed to any other God or people.
So that adds ‘authority’ to the other words such as inerrancy, infallibility, and of course inspiration, which tend to fly around during these debates.
inerrancy and abstinence
One of the commenters on Mike’s blog said that something like 80% of American evangelical kids going off to university lose their faith and abandon the church. "The science profs “prove” that evolution is true, the history profs “prove” that the Bible’s history is wrong or it’s an unreliable text, these things contradict the Bible, the Bible is therefore untrustworthy, therefore what’s the point in believing?"
This commenter, and I suspect a lot of the vehement inerrantists, want to innoculate the youngsters against the noxious influence of secular science by teaching them an alternative scientiific outlook — I’d call it "Christian science" if the term wasn’t already taken. So you get all this stuff about how carbon 14 dating falsely assumes that the isotope has always degraded at the same rate, making the world seem a lot older than it really is; or the anthropological finding that cultures around the world have legends of a worldwide flood; etc. It’s a defensive posture, creating a barrier against the presumably anti-religious bias of modern science. Kids who gets immersed in theistic science can presumably withstand the assaults thrown at them by a-theistic science.
Today I read a news article summarizing the results of a metastudy evaluating the effectiveness of programs intented to reduce the prevalence of unsafe sexual practices among American teenagers.
In contrast, more comprehensive sex eduation programs are more effective at generating "positive outcomes," including teenagers’ delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.
Might there not be a parallel between abstinence-only sex education and inerrancy-only Bible education?
Re: Inerrancy debates on Mike Macon's blog
You make a good point. This is something Bart Ehrman mentions in Misquoting Jesus: if God inspired the original manuscripts of the New Testament, what good does that do us 2000 years later, because we don’t have those manuscripts? Additionally, if God didn’t go to the trouble to preserve those original, inspired manuscripts, why not assume he didn’t go to the trouble of inspiring them in the first place? On the other hand, I think we perhaps need to reevaluate what exactly “inspired” should mean.
Perhaps infallibility is a nice alternative. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the doctrine of infallibility states that the Bible is inerrant on teachings of faith and so on, but I’m willing to go a step further and say that the New Testament sometimes contradicts on doctrine, though not always significantly.
As for the reliability of Scripture, thousands of students study Plato never taking the time to think, “Did he really say this? Does this contradict what he said before?” and thousands trust the surviving works identified to be authored by Plato as reliable. Why can’t it be the same with the New Testament?
I think that is a better route to travel down. I think of the Bible as the history of God’s interaction with mankind. Some people make the Bible into an idol and forget about the God it describes.