A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy

Since I have staked out a pretty firm position as an opponent of Biblical inerrancy, I was interested in the series A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy on The A-Team Blog. The series comes in five parts:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5

Some might expect me to go into a blow-by-blow refutation of such a post, but having recently written on it extensively in my book When People Speak for God (though that wasn’t my central topic), I really only want to call attention to it and highlight a few points.

This series is well written and very clear, though some may be concerned that the author has covered a great deal of ground in large leaps. That is, however, the nature of essays and blog posts as opposed to multi-volume works on systematic theology. He defines inerrancy as he sees it very clearly. I suspect he would not include someone like me who denies inerrancy completely in the group he was addressing. As he notes:

Even though the paper states so, I would like to make it clear that my argument is directed to those Christians who hold that the Bible is inerrant only in some areas (such as faith and practice), but not all areas in which it makes affirmations.

Since I don’t view the Bible, as such, as inerrant in any area, perhaps I’m simply too far away from his point of view to connect at all. The standard difficulties occur. First, as I argue in my book (p. 16ff), it’s a bit odd to use either a proof-texting approach or the approach of systematic theology to determine what the Bible must be, when we have the Bible itself which we can examine, asking questions like just how it came together, how the prophets or other authors got the words that they wrote, how much those words are impacted by the surrounding culture, and so forth. The text of scripture itself tends to deny the results of systematic theologians; the Bible simply doesn’t operate the way they seem to think it should. How, for example, should one believe that all the words in the Bible are the words of God when the Bible clearly identifies many of them as the words of other people, often people who should not be believed? I know that sounds like an unsophisticated response. The inerrantists are sure to point out that they are not so stupid as to assume that when the inspired writer says that Satan, for example, says something, that must be true. It must, of course, be true that Satan said it. But even so that points to the Bible being something quite different than “the words of God” and suggests a more sophisticated approach.

Second, the procedure of taking any Biblical text and applying it to all of the Bible, such as the usage of the favorite 1 Timothy 3:16-17, is questionable at best. Roger, our A-Team blogger, avoids this, but only partially, claiming that 1 Timothy 3:16-17 would apply to the Old Testament. I assume then that he would extend that application to the New Testament in forming his doctrine.

But the process of canonization was not complete, even for the Old Testament at the time 1 Timothy 3:16-17 was written, so the assumption that the statement can be applied to the entire corpus of scripture is just that–an assumption. It happens to be an assumption that I would tend to agree with, though I understand God-breathed differently, but it is an assumption nonetheless. And would I agree with it in reference to the same canon? That is hard to tell.

I would point out also that it is not primarily textual criticism that has brought inerrancy into question, but in one major way I think it should. In general, other higher critical methodologies are more of a challenge to inerrancy, as is historical study of the ancient near east. Because inerrancy as commonly defined applies to the autographs, textual criticism doesn’t really impact that definition.

Or does it? I find it very odd that inerrantists claim that in order to have authority the Bible must be 100% without error. Even a slight error as the original author writes that autograph is fatal. Yet “essential accuracy” is what is required of those versions of the Bible that we have today. So apparently if manuscripts of the book of Acts differ by 10%, as the western text does from the Byzantine and Alexandrian texts, that’s OK. It’s textual variation. Through textual criticism we know what the text was to a very high degree.

Now that is an assumption as well, because we have applied generally good principles of textual criticism and come up with the text that we have, but what about the poor early Christians who had the wrong text. Was it important that various Christians had differing texts for the book of Acts? Generally, inerrantists tell me know, pointing out that the variants are not doctrinally important. That’s a questionable point in itself, but is not critical here. The argument is that as long as it wasn’t done by the author, that 10% variation is not important. Even though it’s important that there was an inerrant autograph somewhere, nobody actually needs that inerrant autograph in order to have the truth–according to the inerrantists own arguments. I admit I just don’t get that argument.

So let’s take a specific variant. According to 2 Kings 24:8 Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he began to reign. According to 2 Chronicles 36:9 he was 8. Now I like this variant because it is so obviously trivial. But it’s an interesting one from the point of view of inerrancy. In both Chronicles and Kings we are probably dealing with a compiler/editor who created the autograph. According to the doctrine of inerrancy, this variant is unimportant if it is the result of a copyists error. But supposing that the compiler of Chronicles, the one more likely to be wrong in this case, actually slipped up and wrote eight rather than eighteen in the autograph. Would that invalidate the truth of all of scripture? I find it astonishing that one can suggest that it’s critical if the error was made by the author, but unimportant if made by a copyist. The result in terms of the Bible I read, is the same.

Obviously, I’m brushing past huge amounts of the argument in the series. I did want to call attention to it, however, because I think it’s a good summary of the other side on this issue.