Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Biblical Inerrancy

  • Is Inerrancy an Essential Christian Doctrine

    Obviously I don’t think so, but I must now add C. Michael Patton to the list of those who do accept the doctrine of inerrancy themselves, yet don’t believe it is an essential of the Christian faith, which he does in his humorous “AND OTHER STUPID STATEMENTS” series, If the Bible is not Inerrant, then Christianity is False.

    Dr. Patton lists many of the reasons I have listed as to why the doctrine of inerrancy tends to breed other problems, such as a Christianity that is bibliocentric but not Christocentric.  Now let me be clear that one can actually be both, provided one always is more Christo- then biblio-centric.  One can also lose sight of Christ because one puts too low a value on scripture that points to Him.

    Other than the fact that I am a Christian who no longer accepts the doctrine of inerrancy, even in its more nuanced forms, I agree with Dr. Patton’s article.  I find his story of Gregg very interesting as well, and it reflects many, many stories I’ve heard as well.

    In fact, the first reaction I usually get when I tell folks I left the church pretty much at the same time I received my MA in Religion, is that I must have discovered errors in the Bible and thus lost my faith.  But that is not the case.  My problem was with what I saw as the all-encompassing claims of Christ which in turn led me to question the validity of such a leap–not merely a leap of faith, but one also of deep trust.

    I think that both those who think they must hold to the doctrine of inerrancy or lose their faith entirely, and those who abandon the faith because they discover errors make a common mistake.  They make the Christian faith primarily about the knowledge of facts.  Now doubtless there are facts involved with Christianity.  Jesus either died for my sins or he did not.  He was either raised from the did or he was not.

    But my belief doesn’t alter those facts.  More importantly, my simple acknowledgment of the evidence for certain facts doesn’t constitute Christian faith.  After all, even the devils believe and trouble.  For one to be in Christ, however, one needs to believe and trust, and that trust goes beyond the facts.

    For me, the experience of life trusting in Jesus has made it one or another fact from scripture proven either right or wrong is going to change that basic trust.  “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” has become the unshakable center and I can examine other things openly with no fear.

  • On Inerrancy

    I respond to some discussion of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy on my Participatory Bible Study blog.

  • Borrowing and Inspiration

    I want to discuss inspiration just a bit, partly because it is relevant to my next post on Biblical interpretation (I hope to post it later today), and partly because there is someone on Twitter who is spouting a great deal of nonsense with regard to parallels and borrowing.

    (For those interested, he is @BibleAlsoSays, he claims to be “Religion’s Nightmare,” and he has a rather routine web site by the same name. If you are a believer, don’t worry about going to the non-believers side. You’ve likely heard all these accusations before.)

    But my purpose here is to take a quick look at the way in which we debate inspiration, particularly, but not exclusively, when we’re using the term “inerrancy.” I would note that the problem I’m discussing remains the same in any discussion in which some form of inspiration beyond an ordinary text is claimed of scripture.

    I recall an e-mail discussion I had with a Muslim lady some years back. She seemed to believe I was a sincere Christian who might be willing to look at something better. We exchanged several e-mails, but her final attempt to persuade me can be summarized as: The Qur’an provides you with a clear and absolute answer for every question and aspect of life.

    Now I don’t know enough about Islam or the Qur’an to say just how many Muslims would agree with that, though I have heard it from more than one Muslim, so I know it is not a unique argument. What ended our discussion was my response. I told her that I didn’t find that to be an attractive quality in a holy book. She was quite stunned.

    You see, to her it was obvious that a book that answered all of her questions and gave her absolute ground on which to stand must be divine.

    I hear the inverse of that argument quite frequently. There is some aspect or another of the Bible that someone thinks is inconsistent with divine revelation. They bring this to me, sometimes repeatedly, because it is so obvious to them that it is the nail in the coffin of my faith, and they are quite stunned when my faith doesn’t merely rise from the supposed coffin–it never got in it in the first place.

    The problem, stated simply, is this: What are the proper characteristics of divine revelation, and how do you make that determination? In each of these cases, someone has determined what divine revelation must or must not be, and thus their argument is conclusive. Well, it’s conclusive if you accept their assumption.

    Now some of you might be questioning me on another point, which is just how parallel the parallels are, and just how “copied” the copied scriptures are. This is a good question. While one may find strong parallels to the stories of creation and the flood, one also finds significant differences.

    It is my contention, for example, that the Genesis account was not copied from the Babylonian or Sumerian accounts, but that the author was aware of other creation accounts and intentionally contradicted them. One need only compare the function of the wind in Enuma Elish to Genesis 1:2 to get my basic point.

    But in addition, while one may demonstrate a parallel in certain places, it is much harder in others. Where in the ancient world do we find poetry comparable in style and theme to that of Isaiah 40-66? Where do we find struggles with God that are truly like those of Jeremiah?

    But valid as those points are, I don’t think they get to the basic point, which is that we impose a set of assumptions of what a sacred text should be on various sacred texts, which would result in nothing more than selecting the sacred text that we find most helpful to the needs we feel. But is that a valid argument for truth?

    I would suggest that a major part of the problem here is the attempt to select a religious text as standard prior to a “selection” of faith or a faith community. In my own experience, an acceptance of scripture was not logically prior to an acceptance of Christ, even though I knew scripture.

    I might put it this way: The good news (gospel) is not that the Bible is true and you ought to obey it, but rather that Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead. I become part of the body of Christ first, and then accept the scriptures because they testify of Jesus.

    Now I don’t want to make this a purely fideistic approach. I do believe there is a place to discuss reliability, but that place is within the context of the body of Christ and not as a sterile issue that simply attempts to demonstrate a body of facts. But at the bottom of my belief system, unsurprisingly, is an act of faith. Without that act of faith, the rest does not seem nearly so logical.

    Apart from the conviction in my heart–you ask me how I know He lives / He lives within my heart–I would not be able to get past the impossibility of the resurrection. Let me add here that those who try to make the resurrection more “possible” do nothing for me. If the resurrection is “possible” in a natural sense, then it is also meaningless.

    Thus, for me, learning about inspiration has been much more of a journey in which I look at how God works. I learn more about how God speaks by looking at how scripture works–borrowing and all–than I do by reading specific texts that discuss inspiration. By looking at scripture I understand how God works.

    There is one other point regarding borrowing. People who make an issue of borrowing in the ancient world seem to me to be generally unaware of literature. What we call mythological themes are repeated in literature all over the place.

    To call this copying plagiarism, besides being anachronistic, is to ignore the passage of time and the contemporary standards of referencing. But saying that the Genesis story of the flood was copied from Gilgamesh, or that the first chapter of Genesis was copied from Enuma Elish ignores even modern standards. The standard movie disclaimer “inspired by a true story” might be closer to the truth.

    To be effective, communication must communicate, and that involves using relevant themes. Mythological themes come from the problems of real life, and it should not be surprising at all that they are repeated multiple times.

    I would add one final note, though this blog post is getting too long. In establishing parallels, one must look at both similarities and dissimilarities. One can make almost any two stories seem parallel if one is permitted to list only similarities. On the other hand, one can prove that two stories are not at all parallel if one is permitted to list only dissimilarities. You can only establish some form of true relationship when you consider both, and in addition account for universal themes.

    For me, the study of parallels is a completely relaxed process of looking at how scripture communicates–a wonderful blend of human and divine. Without the human, it could not be said to communicate; without the divine it would have nothing to communicate.

  • Interpreting the Bible I: Obvious Exegesis

    I’m starting a short (I hope) series on interpreting the Bible. This is in response to a series of posts I read recently. The first two were from EvolutionBlog, OEC vs. YEC and The “Terrible Texts” of the Bible. I then encountered A question for Christians on Positive Liberty, which discusses some poor (in the both mine and the post author’s opinion) exegesis used with regard to homosexuality. Though I do read Positive Liberty, I actually went to that post via Dispatches from the Culture War, who agreed with and commented further on the post here.

    I have two more kind points of meta-posting. First, what interests me in these posts in particular is that all of the authors involved are people I read regularly and respect, though obviously I disagree with them on some issues. I’m not talking here about stupid approaches to the Bible, but rather, misunderstanding of Biblical studies as an academic enterprise and also of the role of the Bible in Christianity. Second, I’m posting this here on my Threads blog, rather than on my Participatory Bible Study blog, because I’m most interested in commenting on the social aspects.

    Now for those who were not too bored by the introduction . . .

    What distresses me here is that while those involved in scientific endeavors quite rightly expect others to note technical nuances in their fields, or at least to admit those nuances are inaccessible to them, they often don’t grant similar respect to another field. I’m going to get to material on the Bible and homosexuality in later posts, but right now let me just illustrate from the creation vs. evolution debate.

    It’s quite common for a scientist, let’s say an evolutionary biologist, to comment on how some creationist fails to comprehend details of an issue because that person is a non-specialist. This is very important and quite appropriate, because people who don’t understand certain issues precisely can make wildly silly remarks about it. An engineer may not be well equipped to understand cell development. I’m not really all that well equipped to understand any of the above, which is why I stick my nose in a book when posting on science and/or get someone more expert to check what I write. (On a blog, I can count on correction in the comments, but those usually come from people who know even less than I do.)

    Similar courtesy is often not extended to experts in Biblical studies, however. Scientific experts are quite quick to comment on just how people in Biblical times understood the world, and what their statements on such topics actually mean. One example is the common statement that the Bible “clearly” supports young earth creationism, so that anyone who is a Christian but doesn’t support a young earth is “going against the Bible.” It’s one of the few things on which non-theistic evolutionists and young earth creationists can agree!

    But stating that the Bible “clearly” supports young earth creationism is an example of “obvious exegesis.” I use that particular collocation of words in my title because it makes my hair stand on end. I hope I can make some of my readers feel similarly about it as I write.

    In discussing this I’m going to look at two aspects of Biblical interpretation. First, exegesis. I’m going to simplify by restricting the word “exegesis” as I use it here to mean “getting to understand what the original author meant to the people to whom he originally spoke or wrote.” (We’ll find, however, that even such an apparently simple label as “original author” is somewhat complex.) Second, we have application, or the way in which people who use the Bible in their lives in some way take Biblical statements and apply them. This one isn’t so simple either, and not just because modern Christians try to accommodate the Bible to modern science.

    For this introductory post, let me simply take a look at one statement from Jason Rosenhouse:

    But for all of that, I do still have quite a bit of sympathy for their interpretation of Genesis. It sure looks to me like twenty-four hour days and a young-Earth were what the Biblical authors intended. The text itself describes the days as being bracketed by an evening and a morning, which is a very odd way of speaking if something other than twenty-four hour days were intended. . . .

    Now oddly enough, Rosenhouse gets around in the paragraphs following this one to a couple of the key points of exegesis that do not fit into a young earth model, but he misses significant details, and also some of the key ways in which an expert in appropriate areas in Biblical studies would look at the text. Note here, of course, that I am not an “expert” in the “doctoral degree and academic involvement” sense. I’m a popularizer. That’s important, because an expert in any one of the areas I’ll touch on would make this more complex than I do, not less.

    So is it so obvious that Genesis describes creation in seven literal 24 hour days? That all depends. In what context are we studying what part of Genesis? Rosenhouse does not that Genesis 2 is different from Genesis 1, but he only notes the length of time involved, not the key point, which is that Genesis 2 is itself a creation story that differs from Genesis 1, that it does not have any days of creation at all, and that it is chronologically incompatible with Genesis 1. If I step beyond Genesis I should point out that Psalm 104 is also a creation story that skips that part.

    So when we do exegesis, we have several levels at which we can look:

    1. The textual pre-history, in this case Genesis 1:1-2:4a vs Genesis 2:4b-24. We will get a different answer to our questions in looking at the original intent of each author. (Note that I have a breakdown of these stories according to the sources here.)
    2. We can look at the redactor who somehow combined the two stories. The interesting thing here is that he is unlikely to have been unaware that the two stories do not share a time framework, and are not actually chronologically compatible. In interpreting the combined text, we have to take that into consideration. Did he mean Genesis 1 to be taken as the chronological framework, which should then be imposed on Genesis 2, or did he see them as compatible in another sense? (If, as I argue below, Genesis 1 is liturgy, while Genesis 2 is a narrative sharing many, but not all, characteristics with myth, then it is quite possible that he intended the reverse–that Genesis 2 is closer to the history, while Genesis 1 is the way in which it is celebrated liturgically, and the time framework is entirely liturgical.)
    3. We can look at their canonical position as part of the Torah. This involves adding the Sinai experience and the 10 commandments, which pushes us back in the direction of a literal creation week.
    4. We can look at them in the broader canon of scripture, in which case we must not only add those points at which a literal creation week is described, but those texts, such as Psalm 104 or Proverbs 8 that describe creation differently.
    5. Finally, we get to the point of application, as in what is the community that uses the Bible as scripture expected to believe about this material. This is where those who are not part of the community, and especially those who once were but no longer are tend to be very dogmatic. The “true” Christian way is to figure out what the original author said and then to believe that. I’m going to deal with this in a later post, but I will simply note for now that this has never been the actual approach, even when people most vigorously claimed it was.

    So what would the “obvious” exegesis of Genesis 1-2 be, actually? I hope I’m giving you the sense that this is not quite so simple. Rosenhouse is certainly right on one point, in my view. Genesis 1-2 was not intended to describe the process of evolution. As he says:

    Ultimately, it is very hard to believe (to put it kindly) that a writer setting out to communicate a lengthy creation process over billions of years would have written anything like what Genesis records. . . .

    Just so. It’s hard to believe, and you shouldn’t believe it.

    But then he says:

    Or you can take the most sensible approach. That’s where you recognize that the Bible (more specifically the Torah) is not inerrant, and it is not the word of God. . . .

    While I certainly agree that the Bible is not inerrant, the rest simply does not follow. A simplistic idea of how one gets from scriptural text to doctrinal belief is posited and then discarded. An idea of the word of God that may or may not be correct (or more importantly held or not held by a community) is assumed and then dismissed.

    If I believe that errancy is incompatible with the phrase “word of God” then obviously I must discard it if I discover error–or, perhaps, alter my view. But having discovered that Genesis does not describe evolution does not remove the option of allegory, or any number of other points. (I’m going to discuss the meaning of “word of God” in a later post in this series.)

    So let’s go back to the initial point of “obvious exegesis.” Just what did the Biblical writers think they were writing in this case. Was it chronology? Was it narrative history? Allegory? Myth? Here is where I find myself most annoyed with superficial looks at what the Bible might mean, whichever end of the spectrum they come from. Allegory is a particular type of literature. Myth is a particular type of literature, as is narrative history, theology, liturgy, and so forth. All of these occur in the Bible, and all of these are written to answer different questions or to serve different roles.

    Those liberal Christians who call Genesis “myth” are doing as much or more disservice to the Bible as those Christian fundamentalists who treat it as science or history. It is none of the above. In fact “it” cannot be so classified, because “it” combines different types of literature into one text.

    The redactor of Genesis had before him (or in his head) genealogies, stories from various sources, poetic elements, liturgy and theology, which he wove into a new text we call Genesis. I would argue that Genesis 1 is liturgy, and that is a fairly common view amongst experts. Now liturgy is not myth and it’s not allegory, though it may partake of aspects of both. For example, when the minister on Easter Sunday morning announces “He is risen!” as part of the liturgy, nobody supposes that he is claiming that Jesus just rose from the dead, nor does one suppose that the liturgy means that this rising occurs annually. Nobody who understands the liturgical calendar supposes that this statement is made precisely (even to the day or week) of the anniversary of what it celebrates.

    Neither does Genesis 1 necessarily mean that the writer or those who used it in their liturgy actually believed that the earth was created in six literal days followed by a literal day of rest. In fact, allegorical interpretations of the seventh day come much before modern times, as, for example, in the book of Hebrews. But even earlier you get sabbatical years and cycles of seven years, all based on this same concept.

    Were you to ask the Israelites just what they believed at the time when Genesis took on its current form, I would personally guess that they would believe something like a literal week “a long time ago.” (I would note that Daniel seems confused on some chronology that occurs over only a few centuries. We’re talking millenia. That probably means “ancient times.”) I also think they would be surprised at the question, simply because it didn’t occur that much in their world. My guess as to their answer is not obvious, however, it’s just my guess. They might have just looked at the questioner oddly and had him locked up as nuts!

    Genesis does not answer the kind of questions we seem to want answered regarding origins, because those were not the questions that the authors wanted answered, and they wouldn’t have had a clue as to the answers even if they had asked them.

    Note that I have not excluded Jason Rosenhouse’s view. Much of what he says the Biblical text doesn’t mean is quite likely correct. But looking at what it does mean is substantially more complex. Understood in its historical context I would say that the Bible provides very little comfort for any of the groups. The Biblical authors would, I think, be equally surprised by efforts of young earth creationists to lock their days and their chronology into stone, by the day-age efforts of old earth creationists, and by efforts of some Christian evolutionists to suggest that the Bible really teaches their view. It simply doesn’t tell any of these stories, or answer the questions these stories intend to answer.

    I intend to continue with posts on the meaning of the phrase “word of God,” on how scriptural application is determined, and how this relates to the issue of the Bible and homosexuality as I continue.

  • Question Everything, Including the Bible

    James McGrath (whose comments are well worth reading) pointed me to this post, and I responded here.

  • Some Dialogue on Inerrancy

    . . . via if i were a bell, i’d ring. Check it out and the links.

  • My Previous Looks at 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

    Since the texts for Proper 24C / Ordinary 29C / Pentecost +21 (October 21, 2007) include 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, which in turn includes 2 Timothy 3:16-17 on which I have written a considerable amount before I thought I’d simply provide links to some earlier material.

    First, there are two key articles on my Threads blog, T4G Article I: The Bible, which is a response to the Together for the Gospel statement articles on Biblical inspiration, and also The Impossibility of Verbal Plenary Translation which applies some ideas about Biblical inspiration to translation. Neither of these articles are direct exposition of 2 Timothy 3:16-17, but they respond to such exposition.

    Second, I have two articles here on this blog, Information or Conversation, which examines the major reason(s) we have to approach the Bible in the first place, and how that will impact what we get from our study, and Hebrews 4:12-13: God’s Word is Alive and Active which combines 2 Timothy with a look at Hebrews 4:12-13, another key passage.

    Briefly, I think there are two issues in reading this passage on the scripture. First, do we read 2 Timothy 3:16 alone, or in the context of the broader passage, especially verse 17? I would suggest that verse 17 is essential in understanding “God-breathed,” by pointing us to what the resulting text should accomplish for the believer. Second, just what does “God-breathed” mean? People quote this text to me all the time, and indeed I quote it quite frequently myself, but it’s easy to assume that “God-breathed” means whatever I want it to.

    If I believe in [tag]verbal plenary inspiration[/tag], I’m likely to believe that when God breathes scripture the result is a fully verbally inspired text. If I believe that inspiration occurs in the conversation between a person and God, then I will imagine that this constitutes “God-breathing.” If I believe that God’s breathing must produce [tag]inerrancy[/tag], then I am likely to assume that meaning in “God-breathed.”

    Yet the text actually says none of those things. In it, “God-breathed” points forward to the specific uses and usefulness of the text. Now I’m not saying that the text actually contradicts any of those views either.

  • The Human Face of Scripture

    Psalm 137 came up in the lectionary for this week. Now there was a time when we would get this Psalm at least with the final verse left out. That verse reads “Blessed is the one who seizes your little ones and dashes them against a rock.” One should understand, of course, that this was a Psalm about/by Jewish exiles in Babylon, and that the Babylonians had done precisely that sort of thing to them. One strong element of the Psalm is revenge.

    I was teaching a class on the Old Testament, drawn from the book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? once, and I asked people in the class whether they would feel the way the Psalm describes if someone had come into their community and killed their children. Would they want their attackers to suffer the same fate?

    Person after person in the audience expressed their desire to be forgiving, and their disapproval of the attitude expressed in the Psalm. Then one lady, a grandmother, interrupted the flow. “I think many of us are lying to ourselves,” she said. “I would feel bad that I wanted it, because I know what Jesus said, but I would want them to suffer the same fate.”

    Several people changed their minds. That one lady had given them some cover to be honest with themselves. The fact is that Psalm 137 is a very human Psalm, and a very real Psalm. It makes us uncomfortable, but I believe part of that discomfort is that we know that those feelings are not far from many of us.

    Does this justify a search for vengeance? That’s another matter. It is an expression of the true desires. Perhaps what we need to do when we have such feelings is express them and then seek the grace to forgive. That’s another subject. My point right now is that the Psalm expresses who we are.

    This Psalm makes me think about what the Bible actually is. I’m amazed at how frequently we decide what the Bible ought to be, and then try to force it to be whatever it is we think it ought to be. But we have the Bible itself and we can observe that it doesn’t fit these prescriptions we make for what it must be. People decide it must contain hard information sent from God by means of verbal dictation. Humanity should not have any real involvement. A little personality here and there, but no impact on the actual message.

    But in fact the Bible displays a range of human attitudes, emotions, cultural baggage, and even mental capacity. God’s commands are not merely God’s commands; they are what people heard God commanding them to do. And communication is limited to the capacities of the least capable end of the line. Scripture displays both a human and a divine face. (See The One-Ended Cord.)

    I also recently read a post titled Minimising mistakes in the Bible (or not). This is a good discussion of a minor Biblical error. The “error” a problem for inerrantists, who have to find a way to work around it. I would suggest, however, that it’s a natural part of the human face of scripture. The message comes through clearly, while there is a minor glossing over of fact.

    People often assume that I don’t believe in inerrancy because I have a long list of errors in the Bible. But that is not my problem with the doctrine at all. For those who want to ask me for my list, I don’t have one. I’ve encountered many things that I put down to “the human face of scripture,” but I don’t keep lists of them, because to me they are not very important. I suppose that if I did not reject inerrancy on other grounds, such a list might become important to me. But as it is, I think inerrancy simply misses the point of a communication between a perfect God and imperfect (or at least limited) human beings. Such a communication is simply much more dynamic than can be described in the phrase “error-free.”

    Scripture is divine, because it involves communication with God. It’s human because it is communicated through and to humans. Because it is what it is it requires careful and prayerful–Holy Spirit guided–interpretation and application, accomplished, of course, by humans, who are hopefully aware of their own limitations.

  • Bible Translation and Fundamentalism from a Wesleyan Perspective

    Dennis Bratcher, of the Christian Resource Institute, has an exceptionally good article on neo-fundamentalism, with a focus on the TNIV and Bible translation, looking particularly from the Wesleyan tradition. (He is Nazarene). There has been a frequent tendency amongst Wesleyans to borrow theology from the Calvinists, but not to go as far on certain points. I would note also that sometimes Wesleyans who are not part of the charismatic or pentecostal groups borrow some theology back from those sources, often without careful consideration of how it all fits together.

    I have encountered people with cobbled together theologies made up of mismatched elements from the Calvinist, charismatic, and Wesleyan traditions. Now often United Methodists are loose enough about their theology to make it sort of work. But Bratcher calls on Wesleyans to at least ask how this might be view from a Wesleyan perspective.

    I’ll leave the rest to him. Go and read.

  • Reading Part 6 (On Inerrancy)

    I somehow got the idea that the inerrancy series to which I linked yesterday was in five parts. A comment from the author let me know that I was wrong on that point, and how I got the idea I do not know, consider that the statement “*Part 6 will conclude with reflections on why the doctrine of inerrancy is important.” occurs at the end of the notes to part 5. But such is life in the blogosphere.

    You can now read part 6, and it does tie the package together. I would like first to quote portions of the author’s comment to my previous post here to set the stage. After gently reminding me of the sixth part, he said:

    I don’t want to give the impression that some people, such as yourself, are “too far away” to connect with. This was a paper I wrote for seminary last year, and given the space limitation I had to narrow down my argument rather strictly. To engage every possible position on inerrancy was not possible within the scope of the paper, but I believe I had something original to say to those who claim some sort of “limited inerrancy.”

    This is a good point which I did note. Now I don’t find that the premises he lists at the beginning of part 6 catch me. When he says “The Bible’s claims about its own integrity are a matter of faith and practice” as the second premise, I’m not sure I’d agree, but then I’m truly not one of the limited inerrantists whom he is addressing, and thus I might not evaluate that statement properly. I reject inerrancy in all its forms and I have problems with the term “infallibility” in many contexts. I’ll write more about that below.

    I have been frequently shocked by positions held by people who do claim to accept inerrancy. There seem to be people out there who profess some form of belief in inerrancy who are more liberal in their handling of the scriptures than I would be able to accept. One of these points is the late dating of the book of Daniel, which I have grave difficulties reconciling with inerrancy. I commented on this point in Earnest Lucas’s fine volume in the Apollos Old Testament Commentary series, in which he doesn’t specifically affirm a 2nd century date for Daniel, but does argue that one can affirm inerrancy and yet hold to a late date. I’m supposed to be the liberal on this issue, and I accept a mixed dating, with a historical Daniel and some fairly old stories supplemented by later Hebrew additions.

    You said “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.” I’d like to clarify that the argument I presented makes no claims to what the Bible must be (or must not be). My argument is more modest in that I’ve only argued what the Bible claims to be. Whether or not the Bible is what it claims is an entirely different point, and I’ve yet to present any argument regarding that.

    On this point, I understand the objection to my comments, but in the broader picture, the doctrine of inerrancy seems to me to result from systematic theology more than it does from observation of the Bible. In fact, the claim of inerrancy produces a considerable effort in explaining those elements of the Bible that don’t appear to fit the picture. I’m not only talking about explaining errors or reconciling contradictions, but also looking at the process. The synoptic gospels, for example, display signs of copying from one to another. The simplest explanation for stories with slight variations is that they are the same story remembered or passed on with slightly different details. The doctrine of inerrancy forces one to explain how the details really worked. An extreme version of this is Lindsell’s explanation of the cock crowings and denials that reconciled the stories in the gospels. Now one can’t be absolutely certain that Lindsell was wrong, but it seems very improbable that he was right. (I see a reference to this here. I don’t have a copy of The Battle for the Bible on hand to check the accuracy of that reference, however.)

    My preferred approach is to sit down with the Bible and ask, “Just what does this book appear to be, and what does it appear to do?” Having gotten a start at answering that question, I will move on to what precisely it is, and then I have some basis on which to interpret and apply statements such as 1 Timothy 3:16-17 (which winds up being very important in my view of inspiration as well) or 2 Peter 1:20-21.

    Welll, I started this post with “Biblical inspiration” fatigue, as in I’ve written way too much on the subject recently. But I should still say something about what I do believe. (Note that this is not in response directly to Roger’s series. I simply feel that I should make a positive statement to connect with any criticisms, thus giving people equal opportunity to criticize my views.)

    First, I do not think a doctrine of scripture, apart from a more general doctrine of how one discovers God’s will is likely to be valid. That is sort of like a view of how a house will be laid out sole by expressing the accuracy of the measuring tape. In such a case the measuring tape can be 100% accurate, but it’s practical accuracy is limited by the people who receive the information.

    This leads to my second point, which is that as human beings, we are always speaking of God’s word as we receive it. God’s word in God’s mind is always true and absolutely accurate. If we believe that God is infinite, his word in his mind is also without perspective, or perhaps more accurately with absolute perspective. We, on the other hand, never comprehend something without perspective, and those moments in God’s presence that simply hint at God’s absolute perspective are overpowering.

    Third, I hold that this perspective issue applies to the prophet who initially receives the revelation as much as to any other human. He will not absolutely comprehend the message, and based on recorded statements in scripture as well as observations of the written product, I see no validity in the idea that God’s inspiration involves dictation. (Now please don’t assume that I think inerrancy necessarily involves verbal dictation. The vast majority of inerrantists I know do not.) My particular point here is that the prophet understands and expresses the message as a human, and thus the received communication is itself limited. I would argue further that the received message is imperfect, but I have little time to follow that trail.

    Fourth, this results in the possibility of error at any stage of the transmission other than the thought in God’s own mind. The possibility of error applies to everything that is communicated because everything communicated goes through a human mind, is then copied by a human mind, and is later interpreted and applied by a human mind–all imperfectly.

    Inerrantists of my acquaintance accept that interpreters are all fallible, and certainly fallible in faith and practice as well as history and science. They accept that copyists may have made errors, though they would maintain those are few and of small import. I simply extend that one more step. Any human mind that transmits the word of God will do so in a limited way, i.e. imperfectly.

    So why read and depend on the Bible? Well, first, I don’t “depend on” the Bible as such. But generally this question tends to make me crazy. I depend on potentially fallible materials in my daily life. I am a fallible person who makes imperfect decisions, many of which I now know, from the eminence of 50 years (!) to have been really, really bad. I deal with imperfection. It is important to me that God is perfect, but I see no need for any human to be perfect.

    Now the Bible is a core element in my reception of God’s word, but by itself it is words on paper. I must bring all elements of God’s revelation together in order to have the faintest prayer of a chance of getting anything right. And that “prayer” of a chance is precisely what I do have. For me the Bible comes in a Spirit-filled community and is guaranteed to me not by the factual content of the text, on which I may change my mind in the next several seconds, but rather on the Spirit and the community with all the gifts and wisdom that God can give us. Even so I know that we will be in error from time to time.

    But even more importantly, I think we spend most of our times in the questionable areas, things on which we can quite reasonably disagree, while most of our actual problems come in areas on which we know what is right, and yet aren’t doing it. But again, that’s another point.