Evangelical teachers have forgotten what inerrancy means

    That Scripture leads into all truth, that Scripture leads out of error, that Scripture achieves the purposes God foreordained for it – these are typical, essential assumptions that underlie all exegesis in the Jewish and Christian traditions up until the period of the Enlightenment. Since the Enlightenment, a few strands of Judaism and Christianity no longer hold to these assumptions. Still, for most believers, in public and private devotion miqra or reading Scripture is about “hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith.”  I wonder, though, if some evangelical teachers have forgotten that a high view of Scripture entails precisely that. In this post, I express my bewilderment at recent posts by Michael Heiser and C. Michael Patton, characterized in my view by a strange form of scholasticism. I will offer another approach to the dilemmas they address.

    The beating heart of Judaism and Christianity – with one version distinguished from another by the outer limits of the canon adopted and the amount of authority accorded to norms beyond Scripture which are nonetheless held to be normed by Scripture – is the acknowledgment that Scripture teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”  This last quotation and the earlier one about hearing the word of God with reverence are culled from The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, a Catholic document known in Latin as Dei verbum. The irony is this (I have argued this before). From a viewpoint firmly rooted in the Reformation but not without suspicions about the degree to which modern evangelicalism has been infected by the same misconceptions of truth it seeks to decry, statements like the ones just cited articulate a full-throated, unabashed, and intellectually honest devotion to Scripture better than the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement, it seems to me, ill-fits the very people whose views it is supposed to reflect.

    But what I do know? It must be true that some evangelicals spend their days sweating bullets over the ways Genesis 48:22 and Genesis 34 cohere and do not cohere (did Jacob buy Shechem or take it by sword or bow: Mike Heiser’s example). I suppose the blood pressure of a few evangelicals does rise every time they note an inconsistency of the kind comparative study of the four gospels brings to light (for example, did Jesus heal one or two blind men at Jericho; this is the sort of discrepancy Michael Patton has in view).

    Here’s the problem with Heiser’s approach. Given the definition of error he works with, he cannot but conclude that in Gen 48:22 “I don’t know whether there is an error or not.” Strictly speaking then, Michael Heiser, in his own words, does not believe in inerrancy. He takes an agnostic view.

    Michael Patton’s approach is no less unsatisfactory. The point of Patton’s post is the absurdity of a hyper-skeptical stance over against the discrepancies one runs across in the comparative study of the gospels. I agree the hyper-skeptical stance is absurd, but the question remains: Is a believer to be a minimalist when it comes to the import of divergences in detail? We are left wondering whether the believer needs to burn the midnight oil seeking a solution, any solution, to the discrepancies.

    Michael doesn’t offer help in this sense: maybe he will in a future post. For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that the two Michaels work with closely similar definitions of error, such that Patton, too, is not, strictly speaking, a believer in inerrancy. The most he can affirm, based on the style of argumentation he adopts, is that Scripture might be inerrant. It might be the case that none of the gospels, when they differ in detail, do not actually get any details wrong. For example, if one gospel says that Jesus healed one blind man at Jericho, another gospel two, it will be pointed out that he might have healed two, with the account saying he healed one to be understood as incomplete. Okay, but there is a limit to such an assertion: we cannot know if such a might corresponds to an actual was. It might, and then again, it might not. I don’t see how Patton can avoid coming to the same conclusion Heiser does: “I don’t know whether there is an error or not,” -  in Matthew 20:30, Mark 10:46, or both.

    What is wrong with this picture? What Heiser and Patton do is (1) disjoin the doctrine of inerrancy from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and (2) define “error” in a way that brings a false set of expectations to the biblical text.

    Classical Christian teaching on inerrancy – there are analogies to this in Judaism, but I leave them aside for the purposes of this post – conceives of inerrancy as a feature of Scripture that is activated through the work of the Holy Spirit. Error and the absence of error is qualified in terms of what the Holy Spirit teaches. Here is Zwingli, one of the Reformers, on inerrancy:

. . . so ist das unsere Meinung: Daß das Wort Gottes von uns in höchsten Ehren gehalten werden soll - unter Gottes Wort ist allein das zu verstehen, was vom Geiste Gottes kommt -, und keinem Wort soll solcher Glaube geschenkt werden wie diesem. Denn das ist gewiß, es kann nicht fehlen; es ist klar, läßt uns nicht in der Finsternis irre gehen; es lehrt sich selber, erklärt sich selber und erleuchtet die menschliche Seele mit allem Heil und aller Gnade …

... our understanding is this: that the Word of God is to be held by us in the highest honor  - by “Word of God” is alone meant, what comes from God’s Spirit -  and no word should be accorded the same faith as this one. For it is certain, it cannot err, it is clear, it does not let us go errant in the darkness, it is its own interpreter and enlightens the human soul with all salvation and all grace ...

    Now, if you believe that it is part of the Holy Spirit’s teaching office to reveal to us that Jesus (say) healed two blind men at Jericho, not one; that Jacob (say) bought Shechem and then conquered it at a later time, you are claiming that the Holy Spirit speaks, not through Scripture, but through harmonizing exegetes. I oppose such outlandish claims.

    The facts are other. Of course we don’t know whether Jesus healed one blind man or two at Jericho. Perhaps he healed one, and in the retelling of the event among some early Christians, the number was inadvertently raised to two. That sort of thing happens in the retelling of events. Why must we assume that the formation of biblical narrative was immune to these sorts of transformation?

    Of course we don’t know whether or in what sense Jacob bought Shechem for a price and took it by sword or bow. Both accounts reflect deep cultural memories in which Jacob the individual and Jacob the tribe are collapsed into one another. The Genesis narrative which results preserves highly refracted traditions of diverse origin which cannot be reconciled without doing violence to both.  

    As soon as the way in which ancient genres worked is kept firmly in view, and Scripture is assumed to instantiate the genres the ancient world knew, not the genres we wished the ancient world knew, it will be clear that the expectations Michael Heiser and Michael Patton bring to the texts are inappropriate.

    It is a mistake to bring to the biblical text modern anachronistic expectations, expectations which amount to assuming that the authors of scripture do not bring us treasure in earthen vessels, but treasure in vessels made of transparent plastic produced in a modern laboratory. It is time that evangelicals stop abusing Scripture by reading it against its own grain.

    I self-identify as an evangelical. I affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. My salvation depends on it. I am not agnostic about it - not in the least. I think Heiser and Patton’s mental gymnastics set a bad example for believers, though such gymnastics, if they are genre-savvy, have a place in the context of historical-critical investigation of the exact nature of the events to which Scripture refers. Still, affirming the inerrancy of Scripture is not about such investigations. It is not about the original autographs either (I criique Jeremy Pierce on this here). It is doxology. It is praise-language. Anyone who reads Scripture within the context of a community of faith in which the Holy Spirit is active will be confident that Scripture is God’s flawless Word, full of truth and grace.

Comments

[C Michael Patton]

Interesting stuff John. Thanks for the interaction.

You are right that I don't intend to do anything but critique a hyper-critical approach. That is normally where I reside on this issue. Even though I believe in inerrancy, I certainly don't think it is the hinge upon which Christianity (or Evangelicalism) hangs.

[C. Stirling Bartholomew]

You said: "I self-identify as an evangelical. I affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. My salvation depends on it. I am not agnostic about it - not in the least."

But on the other hand you think the Chicago Statement is bonkers, right?

On a different note,
some of my reformed "friends" read passages like Ezekiel 37-39 using a hermeneutic that completely undermines a number clear straightforward non-figurative propositions about the future of Israel. My response: if it doesn't mean what it says then it is a pack of lies and we should "tear it out of the bible and staple it to the Apocrypha." A quote from my late friend David Hastings in reference to the Apocalypse of John.

Within the prophetic and apocalyptic literature we find lots of metaphorical language, but the nation of Israel and "the land" are not metaphors. Treating them as such is completely irresponsible exegesis.
In this manner genera analysis is used to make an end run around propositions in the text which you find difficult to accept.

[JohnFH]

Hi C. Stirling,

I agree with you about Ezekiel 37-39 (though I am as baffled as the next person about the intended sense-in-context of much of 38-39).

I don't think the Chicago Statement is bonkers. I would sign it if I had to. But I'm glad I don't have to, because the statement is, on many fronts, a step sideways in the sense of slipping away from classical and Reformation emphases. If I signed it, I would have to hold my nose sideways so as not to be overcome by the odor of rationalism which permeates many of its paragraphs. On the other hand, I cannot subscribe to Dei verbum, because it does not allow Scripture enough room to stand over against the Church, as the norm which norms all other norms. Still, its high view of Scripture (excerpted from a context that undermines that high view) is a breath of fresh air.

[Brian LePort]

John,

I have often heard people describe the view proposed here as "infallibility" while the view that Patton and Heiser is "inerrancy". Infallibility would affirm what you said: "It is doxology. It is praise-language. Anyone who reads Scripture within the context of a community of faith in which the Holy Spirit is active will be confident that Scripture is God’s flawless Word, full of truth and grace." Inerrancy wouldn't allow for contradictions between gospels and so forth.

Would it be more pragmatic for those who hold a high view of Scripture, but who can't turn a blind eye to the issues you noted, to use the word "infallibility" while leaving inerrancy to those who continue to maintain that every detail must be accurate?

[JohnFH]

C. Michael,

Thanks for dropping by. I realize that you see yourself first and foremost as an apologist, so that you aim at removing impediments to faith, which you do by pointing out the fallacies of hyper-skepticism.

Perhaps this will surprise you: I disagree with you strongly about the hinge of Christianity. True faith hinges on a lot of things; in my view, it also hinges on a high view of Scripture of the kind one finds (for instance) in Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. My point is another: the definition of error you, Mike Heiser, and Jeremy Pierce work with, leads to uncertainty, agnosticism, and rabbit trails that lead nowhere. Time to connect Scripture with the Holy Spirit and the Church.

In the context of numerous friendships with Chicago Statement-style evangelicals over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the definition of error evangelicals in some traditions work with is a trap and a stumbling block that leads them away from healthy faith.

If so, it is no small matter, a question that apologists if they take their calling seriously would do well to be courageous about.

[CMWoodall+]

I hope this does not sound trivial in the light of all the issues here. But I have a question that digs deep at the heart of the mystical nature of the Word and Spirit connection.
"How often and how much Scripture is read in your worship gathering?" Do your people get a chance to hear the Word of God read to them? I find that those who claim to uphold inerrancy the most experience it the least. On the contrary, I find that those who experience it the most cannot fathom the descriptions put forward by evangelicals about Scripture. It is like saying, "I believe in moon dust...though I've never touched it."

...from a Word and Sacrament evangelical

[JohnFH]

Hi Brian,

The problem is not with the word "inerrancy." Christians have been using the word or something like it since forever. I am not going to cede it to a "third party" because they think they've patented it. In the same way, I feel free to use terms like being born again, justification by faith, predestination, and so on, according to biblical coordinates that do not always match the dogmatics of this or that tradition.

If Scripture is infallible (Isa 55), it must also be inerrant, that is, it cannot lead us astray in anything it is meant to teach us. Down to the last jot and tittle (Matthew 5:18).

The problem is that so many people bring false expectations to the text. They want to find in it a reply or alternative to this or that modern science. They want it to record history in the same way a tape-recorder and a cellphone camera might. That's not what we are given. If you think the text is truth in the above (pseudo-)senses, the message of the text may still come through, but it will be in spite of, rather than because of, the genre (mis)identification.

[JohnFH]

Hi CMWoodall,

Great blog you have there, and blessings on your ministry. The evangelicals who raised me in the faith, beginning with my godparents, had a lively experience of God and lived out their faith through acts of piety and acts of mercy.

But I don't deny that there are evangelicals whose faith is a form of intellectual assent alone, and a falsely constructed one at that.

[Mike Heiser]

I'm a bit nonplussed about your "response" John. Go back and read my post more carefully. *I didn't posit a definition of inerrancy*. Looks like you were looking for one. Not sure why you'd interject an item into the post and then criticize it for not covering what it didn't intend to cover. The whole point of my post is that people will disagree about what to do with such examples. Frankly, there's nothing unclear about that in the post. I don't disown inerrancy. I don't think it is a useless construct. I think it's important. I think the problem is how it gets discussed. I'm not satisfied with the "positions" that are presently available. I think we can do better. I wonder about the explanatory power of definitions (Can we come up with an approach that is workable in all cases - a paradigm). If asking the question (read: being honest that there is a question) means you brand me an agnostic when it comes to inerrancy, so be it. Agnostics have basically surrendered the notion that there *is* a solution; I haven't - I'm asking for thought to be put into the topic for that very purpose. If I was an agnostic, I'd dismiss the topic. Put another way, what should we call someone who doesn't want to ask the question? Dogmatic? Self-Assured? He-Who-Is-Above-the-Fray? The present paradigm (Chicago) does not adequately address all the things that need to be addressed. Appeals to the Spirit are pretty much useless in pursuing an answer for the simple (factual) reason that godly scholars have not reached a consensus. Sure, you can pick a position and assume those who haven't picked it are out if step with the Spirit, or resistant to the Spirit, but I'm not going to do that. I've lived in that world before, and it isn't very ... spiritual.

[JohnFH]

Hi Mike,

I am happy to be corrected if that is in order. Given a reading and now a re-reading of your argument, I was confident that you are working with a definition of error such that, if one and the same individual did not both buy a plot of land in Shechem and take it by sword and bow, the Bible is not inerrant.

If that is not the definition of error you are working with, I would be obliged if you explain what definition underlies your discussion.

It's an important point because, as you well know, there are some or even many Chicago inerrantists who work with precisely the definition of error I assumed was yours.

The genres that Gen 34 and 48 instantiate lead me not to expect to be able to reconstruct history of the kind you talk about in your post.

There is far *more* history packed into these texts than would be the case if they were narrating one-off events as would have been observed by eyewitnesses.

Gen 34 and 48 recount aspects of the ethnogenesis of the tribes of Israel in terms of conflicts between the storied ancestors of the selfsame tribes and the ancestors of their neighbors.

It is natural to read both accounts as true to processes of ethnogenesis but at a high level of abstraction such that the kind of problem you pose - how could one and the same person have followed a script inclusive of both episodes - does not fit the genres in the first place.

I might be wrong about what definition of error you were working with in your post, but that is where I thought we had a disagreement.

I think we are using the term "agnostic" in different ways. I meant it in a non-technical sense: simply, that you said you did not know if there was an error or not in Genesis 48:22.

I did not mean to imply that you were an agnostic in any other sense. I'm aware too that you affirm inerrancy, though I find that hard to square with your "I don't know" statement in the post.

Put another way, I want to ask questions of biblical texts that are commensurate to them. I am claiming that in your post you are doing what you rightly criticize in others with respect to Hebrew cosmology. There are those who are convinced that if the biblical writers conceived of the world in a non-realistic way, then the Bible is not inerrant. But of course they did conceive of the world in terms that are realistic in part but in part depend on speculation that we cannot affirm.

In the same way, Gen 34 and 48 reflect highly refracted cultural memories to which elements of social history from various times and places may have adhered. That such texts resist facile reconciliation is to be expected; to talk of error in the sense you do in your post is out of place.

You raise a good point about the Holy Spirit, but I wasn't assuming any identification between what godly scholars teach and what the Holy Spirit teaches. Sorry to be so grim, but I sometimes wonder if the two overlap very much.

It is my conviction that the prophecy of Jeremiah 31:31-34 continues to be fulfilled in every generation, so the lack of a strong overlap of the kind we would all hope for, but rarely see, is not the same thing as saying that the Holy Spirit is not active in making the inerrancy of scripture a reality in the life of believers and the church.

I am not interested in appealing to the Spirit in order to rule my interpretation of scripture in and yours out. On the contrary, 1 Cor 14:32 applies, if only in a transferred sense; hence this post and my attempt at re-opening debate.

Like you and perhaps more than you, I believe the Chicago Statement could be improved.

[Koert van Bekkum]

Dear John,

Although I doubt whether I share your view on the Book of Genesis, your point comes close to the Dutch neocalvinist approach: confessing that the Bible is 'onfeilbaar' does not mean it is 'foutloos'. The first word refers to the classical meaning of 'infallible', namely that the Bible always reaches its goal; the second phrase describes a wrong interpretation of this as it occurred after the Enlightment.

In addition, you could also have quoted the Chicago Inerrancy Statement in favour of your position, for in fact it leaves much room for a discussion about genre and the tradition of memories by stating that 'In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of the penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise. (…) So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth.’

[JohnFH]

You are right that the Chicago Statement can be read to accommodate the understanding of genres I find convincing for the book of Genesis.

It's a stretch but it is within reason.

I do wish to be allowed to call the Bible flawless and impeccable. I say that about my wife - we just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary - even though I might have some apparent counter-evidence on hand. I don't want to even touch the question from her point of view.

But praise and love language is like that. It needs to be understood on its own terms.

I realize we are on the same page: the Bible is not flawless in the Enlightenment sense of the term - a point in its favor, of course.

[Gary Simmons]

Thank you for this, John. Amidst the tides of the Euphrates, it's good to hear the gentle bubbling of the Shiloah.

[wm tanksley]

JohnFH, you posted a sentence that I suspect might clarify my ignorance in a way to allow me to comprehend your original post. May I ask what you mean when you say "the Bible is not flawless in the Enlightenment sense of the term - a point in its favor, of course." An explanation of "flawless" would be pleasant, especially if it would then make the rest of the sentence make sense to me.

[Gary Simmons]

Addendum: John, on this topic I have a habit of explaining the invention of impressionism in painting.

When photography was developed, painting was no longer needed as an art form to capture the exact features of life. So, what were painters to do? Make paintings that exaggerate certain details in order to illuminate truths that are more readily apparent than a straightforward painting/photograph would be.

In essence, an impressionist painting and the ancient historical genres are alike in that they are larger than life. God said that He would make David's house great, isn't that right? Every occurrence in another book of mizmor lidavid proves that God is faithful to His promises, regardless of how one understands the lamed preposition there.

[JohnFH]

Hi Wm Tanksley,

Plenty of examples come to mind. The Enlightenment has no use for concept after concept that permeate the pages of the Bible. The Bible is fundamentally in error on this view.

As Carl Becker noted in his classic lectures:

The essential articles of the religion of the Enlightenment may be stated thus: (1) man is not natively depraved; (2) the end of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; (3) man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth; and (4) the first and essential conditions of the good life on earth is the freeing of men’s minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and of their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of the constituted social authorities.

[Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) 102. The place of Becker in the history of ideas has been illuminated by Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) 151-186; the above passage is quoted and discussed on pp. 161-162.]

To be sure, it is possible, within the bounds of Judaism or Christianity to accommodate Enlightenment values to a certain degree. However, except in "progressive" contexts, it is typical of faith communities to reel in individuals who go too far in that direction. The example of Maimonides comes to mind. For all the world it appeared as if he wanted to deny the substance of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. But the consensus was that that was going too far. To the extent that modern Judaism has no use for the teaching of the resurrection of the dead, it could be argued that it has turned its back on a core component of historical Judaism. Jon Levenson is an example of a Jewish scholar who seeks to reclaim the doctrine of the resurrection for our time and place. Perhaps I am over-reading Levenson, but that would seem to put him in the anti-Enlightenment camp.

Among Christians, a fine example of an anti-Enlightenment theologian is Ernst Käsemann. I quote an RBL review of a volume of essays by Wayne Coppins:

Developing Luther’s statement that “A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need” (175), he argues that we always live in the threatening or actual subjection to idols or to demons (58) and associates the demonic with what is beyond our control and inhuman (203). The category of the “demonic” or of “possession” is, in fact, central to Käsemann’s vision (esp. chs. 6, 16, 17). ... he stresses the need to demythologize the optimistic Enlightenment faith in human goodness, progress, and self-determination (63, 163), which has “to a large extent become a tool of the white race for subjecting the rest of the world” (185). Theologically, he describes “possession” as “the condition in which the first commandment is no longer heard or taken seriously, thus in which the earth is inevitably handed over to idols” (187), and he critically (re)appropriates the doctrine of “original sin” from this standpoint (63, 204).

The Enlightenment is a project of liberation at serious odds with the project of liberation the Bible proposes. The only way to assimilate the latter to the former is to reduce biblical faith to a shadow of its former self.

[JohnFH]

An example I use is Picasso's Guernica.

Compared to a photo of Guernica's destruction, Picasso's painting contains an information overload. An evocation of the destruction is made to intersect with symbols of an array of metanarratives such that it is always possible to look at the painting and find more in it.

Traditional exegesis thinks of scripture along the same lines. One might say that scripture is Scripture whenever the following obtains:

Ben Bag Bag said: "Turn it [the Torah] and turn it over again and again [Pirkei Avot 4:1].

[wm tanksley]

John, thank you. That comment was very easy to read and assimilate; so your sentence means that the Bible and the Enlightenment contradict one another; and thus, you said that the Bible is "not flawless" according to the Enlightenment. That makes perfect sense. An Enlightenment reader would read the Bible and say "these things couldn't happen", and turn away.

The problem is that a reader of any worldview would read the Bible and turn away, apart from the work of God; so I don't see why you'd single out the Enlightenment as being especially vicious in that respect. (Mind you, I agree with your specific critiques of Enlightenment and modernity.)

I guess I was wrong to think that understanding that would help me understand the rest. I'll just keep reading your blog and wait for (heh heh) enlightenment.

-Wm

[JohnFH]

Good to have you as a commenter, Wm. Feel free to ask questions or propose topics as needed.

[Brian Mitchell]

"But praise and love language is like that. It needs to be understood on its own terms."

This is exactly how I feel about the Biblical literature. We, know the Massoretes as well as the Talmud acknowledge that there were scribal errors and more deliberate changes to the text of the Tanakh, yet we hold to the assumption that there is a God who ignited the spark in men to write these texts, who mystically guided the writing of these texts, who continues to breath life into these texts, and who is more than able to work through the things that in our finite eyes seem like mistakes, weak things, and foolishness things.

Yes, we need textual criticism, yes people can chose to accept the documentary theory, but rather than disproving the inspiration of God, these things reveal awesomeness and profoundness of the work of God.

[G. Kyle Essary]

"I realize we are on the same page: the Bible is not flawless in the Enlightenment sense of the term - a point in its favor, of course."

John,
That line brought a smile to my Southern Baptist, inerrantist face. Loved it.

[Gary Simmons]

This post is made relevant once again due to the words of yet another Michael.

[JohnFH]

Hi Gary,

Can you be more specific?