A hopefully thoughtful exposition on inerrancy
This is in response to comments made on Wade Burleson's blog. Since my response is so long, I thought it would be appropriate to post it here in case Wade prefers to delete my comment. It's kind of my summary of the concept of inerrancy...
I'm going to ramble for a bit. Hopefully you won't jump to any conclusions about where I'm going until you wander to the end:
I think our claims about inerrancy need to be modulated by a realistic view of the origin of the bound books we carry around that have the word "Holy Bible" on the spine.
I can easily point you to passages--such as Jesus's handling of the adulterous woman in John 7:53 through 8:11--that must be declared erroneous. Those passages do not exist in the earliest manuscripts (a fact proclaimed both in many translations and checkable by visiting biblegateway.com)
And since they do not consistently appear in ALL manuscripts, at least SOME of the manuscripts MUST be wrong...either by "omission" or "commission" of including the text. If you agree with this comment, you either need to rip out those passages or carefully consider what I'm about to say next.
What about a claim of inerrancy for the original manuscripts? How do you administer that claim through copying and translation? The typical Southern Baptist is uninterested in hearing anything with respect to inerrancy other than this: "The Holy Bible I am carrying is without error." Yet I offer that most of those Bibles carry the potentially erroneous passage I mentioned before.
This isn't the same kind of claims that our atheist friends press when trying to offer errors: they point to such things as the claim of the ratio between the circumference of certain columns and the diameter being presented as 3 instead of pi. And our gloss of explanations in dealing with their concerns typically are both patronizing and defensive. The result is that it looks like we are spinning the word "error" to mean what we're comfortable having it mean rather than the common English usage of the word.
Hence the word inerrant is in many ways misleading. We can't make that kind of quality claim either regarding any of our manuscripts in hand nor regarding any of our translations. We make it regarding the original manuscripts not because the Bible makes that claim (it doesn't), but because it provides us theological comfort to consider those manuscripts to be without error.
I'll offer that it is a LOT like Justice Potter Stewart's famed comments on obscenity: unable to define it rigorously, he noted that he would recognize it when he saw it. Inerrancy is not a word with clear, applicable meaning. It is a fuzzyheaded concept that lacks precision and lacks application.
The result for the thinking person is for them to be left with the sense that the term "inerrant" means to trust without thinking. To the thinking person, the spiritual claim of inerrancy can sometimes covers a multitude of uncareful thought that ranges from inappropriately treating biblical language as both too literal AND (thinking of the Song of Songs) as too symbolic. It can lead us to misread the book of Ecclesiastes (and perhaps most of the book of Proverbs) as being divine guidance when some of it is just insightful human analysis. And it CAN lead us to substitute rules for thinking and ritual for faith.
I can easily pardon nonbelievers for being disappointed by our poor reasoning in adopting the rubric "inerrant" and the Rube Goldberg contraption of explanation that supports it.
On the other hand, Rex's comment illustrates--as Dave has accurately pointed out--that the original conservative resurgence was about TWO things:
1. Whether all of God's written word is (and can be treated as) trustworthy.
2. Whether the employees of the Convention would be held accountable to teaching about the Bible and about faith as as if the Bible is fully trusthworthy
The purpose of the CR was to make the claim (ignore the language and semantics because they REALLY are confusing if not misleading) that you can read the entire Bible--including most attempts at faithful translations and perhaps even paraphrases--with the HOPE/FAITH that God intended it to be transmitted to us exactly as it was and with the additional HOPE that the Holy Spirit will somehow administer the reading of that Word in such a way that the essential truth will be apparent to us.
Are there errors in the Bibles we carry? Almost certainly. How does God overcome those errors? He created a story that has parts of the Bible interconnect with other parts in a deeply woven fabric of redemption. Parts that take on errors must be compared to parts that remain substantially error free to understand and interpret the words that we have. This--combined with the time period over which the materials of the Bible were written and collected--gives us a way to avoid both cultural myopia that has made its way into some of the prescriptive guidance and adoption of false doctrine.
So...while I disagree with Rex's comments about the truth being true and untruth being untrue, I see the point he is making as this: let's recognize the depth of the conundrum that must be fought through for a believer to come to the point that they can trust the Bible that way. We don't need to beat them over the head with the word inerrant. We need to guide them into all portions of the Bible so they can see how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole.
That means you have to read the history in places like Samuel, the Kings, the Chronicles, and even Ezra and Nehemiah in order to understand the prophecies in the major and minor prophets. And you have to glimpse the typology of the Old Testament rituals to fully understand Jesus's sacrifice.
The higher criticism of the 19th and 20th century brought the entirety of the text into such disrepute that no one knew which parts to trust and which parts to reject. And any system of hermeunetics that admits to any Scripture being essentially in error puts all readers, all worshippers, all preachers, all teachers, and all theologians into the role of deciding for ourselves which parts to keep and which parts to throw away.
When my dad--arguably a moderate--made that argument to me for the first time, I realized why it is important to treat the Bible as "inerrant" even if I find a tremendous amount of intellectual sloppiness in the word itself. I am putting my trust in an invisible God that he has provided a reliable revelation of himself that--if I will eat the scroll--will lead me to a complete understanding of Him.
But we need to remember the SECOND point of the Conservative Resurgence (thinking also of how Dave concluded his just previous post): while there is a certain amount of flexibility in concluding exactly how God administers the plan of salvation, at the heart of it the Bible must be treated as a reliable text in order for us to have any unity at all. Without the Bible being treated as reliable literally anything goes. And it did.
But treating the Bible literally can be done in a way that builds bridges and avoids violation of conscience. If my brother Rex has not reached the point in his life where God has convinced him as completely as he has me regarding the full truth of Scripture, I still can love him as a brother and I believe God can still save him. I believe God WILL save many whose theology is defective because at the end of the day and at the heart of the matter they put their ONLY trust in God...and specifically in Jesus Christ...for deliverance.
But the problem that Wade points to with the entirety of his blog and that Dave re-illustrates is that only a central, unified core of doctrine can be permitted to be taught by the Convention and her entities. The discussion is and should be on which parts are acceptable to be taught as singular truth and which parts can be taught as, essentially, doctrinal opinion. A very simple illustration of that can be seen in the varying Southern Baptist views on the doctrines of grace (especially the doctrine of eternal security of the believer) v. free will-based conversion.
I actually admire Rex for digging into the Bible to make his points. His post that ends "and so Acts Chapter 15 begins" is a classic example of this. I'm glad to have him around and I think we can tolerate his not yet perfected knowledge of the Bible and of Christ Jesus...as long as he can tolerate ours. ;)
Greg Harvey
P.S. I tremble in fear at the thought that this post is both too long and too off-topic to be hosted in Wade's comment section for this post. I intend to post it on my blog and leave Wade with the freedom to delete it here if he so chooses.
P.P.S. If you got to the postscript intending to take issue with something I wrote, I'll respectfully ask that you not try to divide and conquer my points. I'll also offer that if you follow the link to my blog you can either respond there or look at my profile and respond to my email address and engage me in a more substantive discussion than I will willingly have on Wade's site.
Go to full article...
I'm going to ramble for a bit. Hopefully you won't jump to any conclusions about where I'm going until you wander to the end:
I think our claims about inerrancy need to be modulated by a realistic view of the origin of the bound books we carry around that have the word "Holy Bible" on the spine.
I can easily point you to passages--such as Jesus's handling of the adulterous woman in John 7:53 through 8:11--that must be declared erroneous. Those passages do not exist in the earliest manuscripts (a fact proclaimed both in many translations and checkable by visiting biblegateway.com)
And since they do not consistently appear in ALL manuscripts, at least SOME of the manuscripts MUST be wrong...either by "omission" or "commission" of including the text. If you agree with this comment, you either need to rip out those passages or carefully consider what I'm about to say next.
What about a claim of inerrancy for the original manuscripts? How do you administer that claim through copying and translation? The typical Southern Baptist is uninterested in hearing anything with respect to inerrancy other than this: "The Holy Bible I am carrying is without error." Yet I offer that most of those Bibles carry the potentially erroneous passage I mentioned before.
This isn't the same kind of claims that our atheist friends press when trying to offer errors: they point to such things as the claim of the ratio between the circumference of certain columns and the diameter being presented as 3 instead of pi. And our gloss of explanations in dealing with their concerns typically are both patronizing and defensive. The result is that it looks like we are spinning the word "error" to mean what we're comfortable having it mean rather than the common English usage of the word.
Hence the word inerrant is in many ways misleading. We can't make that kind of quality claim either regarding any of our manuscripts in hand nor regarding any of our translations. We make it regarding the original manuscripts not because the Bible makes that claim (it doesn't), but because it provides us theological comfort to consider those manuscripts to be without error.
I'll offer that it is a LOT like Justice Potter Stewart's famed comments on obscenity: unable to define it rigorously, he noted that he would recognize it when he saw it. Inerrancy is not a word with clear, applicable meaning. It is a fuzzyheaded concept that lacks precision and lacks application.
The result for the thinking person is for them to be left with the sense that the term "inerrant" means to trust without thinking. To the thinking person, the spiritual claim of inerrancy can sometimes covers a multitude of uncareful thought that ranges from inappropriately treating biblical language as both too literal AND (thinking of the Song of Songs) as too symbolic. It can lead us to misread the book of Ecclesiastes (and perhaps most of the book of Proverbs) as being divine guidance when some of it is just insightful human analysis. And it CAN lead us to substitute rules for thinking and ritual for faith.
I can easily pardon nonbelievers for being disappointed by our poor reasoning in adopting the rubric "inerrant" and the Rube Goldberg contraption of explanation that supports it.
On the other hand, Rex's comment illustrates--as Dave has accurately pointed out--that the original conservative resurgence was about TWO things:
1. Whether all of God's written word is (and can be treated as) trustworthy.
2. Whether the employees of the Convention would be held accountable to teaching about the Bible and about faith as as if the Bible is fully trusthworthy
The purpose of the CR was to make the claim (ignore the language and semantics because they REALLY are confusing if not misleading) that you can read the entire Bible--including most attempts at faithful translations and perhaps even paraphrases--with the HOPE/FAITH that God intended it to be transmitted to us exactly as it was and with the additional HOPE that the Holy Spirit will somehow administer the reading of that Word in such a way that the essential truth will be apparent to us.
Are there errors in the Bibles we carry? Almost certainly. How does God overcome those errors? He created a story that has parts of the Bible interconnect with other parts in a deeply woven fabric of redemption. Parts that take on errors must be compared to parts that remain substantially error free to understand and interpret the words that we have. This--combined with the time period over which the materials of the Bible were written and collected--gives us a way to avoid both cultural myopia that has made its way into some of the prescriptive guidance and adoption of false doctrine.
So...while I disagree with Rex's comments about the truth being true and untruth being untrue, I see the point he is making as this: let's recognize the depth of the conundrum that must be fought through for a believer to come to the point that they can trust the Bible that way. We don't need to beat them over the head with the word inerrant. We need to guide them into all portions of the Bible so they can see how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole.
That means you have to read the history in places like Samuel, the Kings, the Chronicles, and even Ezra and Nehemiah in order to understand the prophecies in the major and minor prophets. And you have to glimpse the typology of the Old Testament rituals to fully understand Jesus's sacrifice.
The higher criticism of the 19th and 20th century brought the entirety of the text into such disrepute that no one knew which parts to trust and which parts to reject. And any system of hermeunetics that admits to any Scripture being essentially in error puts all readers, all worshippers, all preachers, all teachers, and all theologians into the role of deciding for ourselves which parts to keep and which parts to throw away.
When my dad--arguably a moderate--made that argument to me for the first time, I realized why it is important to treat the Bible as "inerrant" even if I find a tremendous amount of intellectual sloppiness in the word itself. I am putting my trust in an invisible God that he has provided a reliable revelation of himself that--if I will eat the scroll--will lead me to a complete understanding of Him.
But we need to remember the SECOND point of the Conservative Resurgence (thinking also of how Dave concluded his just previous post): while there is a certain amount of flexibility in concluding exactly how God administers the plan of salvation, at the heart of it the Bible must be treated as a reliable text in order for us to have any unity at all. Without the Bible being treated as reliable literally anything goes. And it did.
But treating the Bible literally can be done in a way that builds bridges and avoids violation of conscience. If my brother Rex has not reached the point in his life where God has convinced him as completely as he has me regarding the full truth of Scripture, I still can love him as a brother and I believe God can still save him. I believe God WILL save many whose theology is defective because at the end of the day and at the heart of the matter they put their ONLY trust in God...and specifically in Jesus Christ...for deliverance.
But the problem that Wade points to with the entirety of his blog and that Dave re-illustrates is that only a central, unified core of doctrine can be permitted to be taught by the Convention and her entities. The discussion is and should be on which parts are acceptable to be taught as singular truth and which parts can be taught as, essentially, doctrinal opinion. A very simple illustration of that can be seen in the varying Southern Baptist views on the doctrines of grace (especially the doctrine of eternal security of the believer) v. free will-based conversion.
I actually admire Rex for digging into the Bible to make his points. His post that ends "and so Acts Chapter 15 begins" is a classic example of this. I'm glad to have him around and I think we can tolerate his not yet perfected knowledge of the Bible and of Christ Jesus...as long as he can tolerate ours. ;)
Greg Harvey
P.S. I tremble in fear at the thought that this post is both too long and too off-topic to be hosted in Wade's comment section for this post. I intend to post it on my blog and leave Wade with the freedom to delete it here if he so chooses.
P.P.S. If you got to the postscript intending to take issue with something I wrote, I'll respectfully ask that you not try to divide and conquer my points. I'll also offer that if you follow the link to my blog you can either respond there or look at my profile and respond to my email address and engage me in a more substantive discussion than I will willingly have on Wade's site.
Go to full article...
posted by greg.w.h@1:31 PM link-to-post
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