Tag: Biblical Inerrancy

I’d like to condense the major arguments with regard to the Bible and slavery, as it appears that at least a couple of people have missed the point at which I’m hooking into this debate. (Please resist the idea that because I use lists when summarizing that I’m actually trying to reduce this to formal logic.)

First, the starting point argument could be summarized as follows:

1. Slavery is immoral
2. The Bible condones slavery
3. God or God’s word cannot condone something immoral
4. The Bible therefore cannot be God’s word.

I originally entered this debate after reading posts and comments on Ed Brayton’s site. His Slavery and the Bible – Take 2, was particularly clear. I want to reference Mark Olson as well, whose Slavery and the Word of God illustrates some of the approaches I’m discussing here.

Now one can attack the position expressed in my little list at several points. For example, one might believe that slavery is not immoral. One might believe that God’s word does not condone slavery. We have seen the following:

1. A response using both points #1 and #2, i.e. that the Bible does condone some sorts of slavery, but what it condones is not the sort of thing we condemn.
2. A response based simply on God’s authority–God gets to do whatever he wants, which really deals with point three. In this response God indeed cannot condone something immoral, because apparently what he commands is transformed into something moral. (Theologically this is possible, but in practice there is the simple question of how one tells when God is commanding something if God can command anything. Why not child sacrifice, for example?)
3. My own response which deals with the relationship of the Bible to the concept of God’s word. There’s an unstated assumption almost everywhere in this discussion that the Bible and God’s word are either equal or unrelated. My argument comes in here and is simply this: The Bible is a human-divine cooperation, and therefore shares imperfections of the human element. There will be things in the Bible that we do not want to implement today.

My approach allows me to take several options with some of the nasty points in the Bible. I used the example of the commanded genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31, and I’m going to continue to use that.

1. It’s quite possible that the incident never happened. We’re still left with the fact that the slaughter is forcefully commanded. I would note that at a minimum, I would say that the numbers killed and enslaved are almost certainly exaggerated. Again, I don’t view this as a real solution to the moral dilemna for a Bible student. “Slaughtered” is bad. “Slaughtered a few less people” remains bad.
2. The people wanted revenge, and conveniently became convinced that God had commanded it. This would be an all too human situation. I could use the story as a moral story with precisely that moral. In fact, I see this very human side throughout the stories of the conquest.
3. God gave a command adapted to circumstances. This one disturbs me to some extent. I do believe that God gives commands adapted to circumstances, and this is in fact the type of approach that Alden Thompson uses in chapter 6 (The worst story in the Old Testament — Judges 19-21) of his book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?. I’m uncomfortable with that option here simply because I cannot see the moral justification for the additional slaughter. I do think that was common to the culture, and it seems more likely to me that people simply exercised their desires and justified it by appeal to God’s command.

Since I said “condensed” let me just say one thing in response to Mark Olson (post linked above). I do believe that one can find good in the Bible, and that one can even find the ideal to pursue. I believe, however, that in order to find that ideal one does have to recognize the human-divine combination in scripture which means that not everything can be fitted into the divine ideal. Paul certainly embraces the equality of slave and free (Galatians 3:28) but he doesn’t do anything public about it. Rather, he gives instructions for slaves to be subject to their masters. I think he’s walking a very difficult line here with the Roman Empire, and Romans 13 is part of that. I cannot, however, see where Romans 13 is simply a softening of the rest of the letter, but then I often find that N. T. Wright presents arguments that are thoroughly researched and brilliantly argued, but that I think are wrong. In this case, I will certainly make the effort to acquire Wright’s comments on this text and see if he can change my mind.

[Note: In the interests of full disclosure, let me note that I am the publisher of Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.]

My previous post, Does the Bible Condone Slavery?, has produced some interesting responses, and one very valid question is just how I think the Bible should be used in making decisions. I’m going to try to keep this brief, but I’m not very good at that, so bear with me!

The most common analogy I’ve encountered for the Bible is that it is like a boy scout manual. The problem is that as far as I can see the Bible is almost totally unlike a boy scout manual. The Bible is a book containing a large number of stories, and materials from a variety of documents, often ones written from a different perspective. By assuming the kind of unity that would be expected of a scout manual, we often miss what the Bible is actually saying. For example, which attitude toward foreigners is more appropriate, that of Jonah, in which God saves them even though that makes his prophet angry, or that of Nehemiah who runs all foreigners out?

I often use the analogy of a toolkit, though this is only one of many. My basis for this starts with Proverbs 26:4-5: “⁴Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself. ⁵Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes” (NRSV). OK, so which is it? Should one continue to forgive over and over again (Matthew 18:22), or should one take the matter to one’s congregation (Matthew 18:15-17)? It would depend on the specific circumstances. I know that I have often encountered cases in which a fool required answering (and what do I do about the command of Jesus not to call anyone a fool?), and many other cases in which the best choice was silence. I take the tool from my toolkit that seems to work best, and I hope I have wisdom to use the right one.

Further, nobody actually keeps all the Biblical commands, especially those who are the loudest in claiming that they do. Consider the ten commandments case in neighboring Alabama. We had the odd image of Christians bowing down in front of the monument to the ten commandments (I know, they weren’t worshipping it, they were praying about it), and protesting its removal. Removing the monument was supposed to be a major blow to moral values. But the vast majority of the people who were protesting do not keep the command written on that monument to keep the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath. I’m sure they have good reason to ignore or alter that command–I don’t keep Saturday as the Sabbath either–but nonetheless isn’t it interesting to place a monument to a command that most seem to agree was altered? Or how many of those people do you suppose have pictures of Jesus on their walls at home or at church? Does the word “image” come to mind? Now I really have no problem with pictures of Jesus, other than that I’ve rarely seen one that has even a prayer of looking anything like the real thing, but certainly at least the Jewish interpretation of one of those commands forbids all images.

In the area of selective commands, what about Leviticus 18:22, “You will not lie with a man as with a woman.” Now I’ve heard this one proclaimed many times with firm tones or pulpit pounding as appropriate. But I frequently then point these individuals to Leviticus 19:33-34, which says, “³³When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. ³⁴The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (NRSV). When I quote the second verse, I am always presented with plenty of reasons why this is not applicable in modern America, because the foreigners will overrun us and bankrupt the treasury when they all go on welfare. But why is one applicable and not the other?

I present these illustrations to show that generally those who claim to follow the Bible do, in fact, pick and choose according to circumstances. The difference is that I openly acknowledge that I do it, and I think it is the right way to do things. In fact I’m frightened by people who thing they can and should keep all the commands, because they might actually try to do it! In Deuteronomy 21:18-21, we have the instructions for arranging for one’s rebellious son to be stoned. Is that applicable or not? Both the Jewish and the Christian traditions have dealt with such commands in such a way as to make them more humane, if they apply them at all. Those Christians who are about to complain about my use of references from the Hebrew scriptures should consider Acts 5 and the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

My approach is to look at all the tools available, and make the best choice for my particular circumstances. This means that in many cases my tools may come from something other than scripture. The Bible provides me with input, but it is not the only source of input that I have. In each case, I have to consider the source of my material, and its cultural background. But the key to my approach in the Bible is simply that I use the scriptures more to teach me about listening to God than I do to discover specific principles. I think that if you can discover where God is headed in a passage, that will be a good principle to work from, but it is often very hard to discover that principle. I have a number of approaches that I use in applying scripture, but the key one is what I call the hanging principle (Hanging Your Interpretation). This simply suggests that since Jesus said that all the law and prophets could hang on two laws–love God and love your neighbor–if your application of a scripture won’t hang there, perhaps you should look elsewhere. Those two laws are widely attested in scripture and in tradition. Because the Bible contains both the ideal and the real, that approach keeps one looking to the ideal.

But the bottom line is that I simply don’t expect the Bible to make my decisions for me. In other words, I don’t expect to find a specific command for my time and circumstances. I have to make decisions and live with the consequences. One thing that I can see happening in the Bible, in the scriptures of many other faiths, and in a broad range of human literature is that people wind up living with the consequences of their actions. One of the things we accomplish in literature is to examine potential situations, the principles by which one might live in those circumstances, and the consequences of those decisions. Note that I do not limit my study to the Bible, although it is important to me. I also don’t limit my study to literary works. The products of natural science are as likely to produce valuable information to me in my decision making process.

In this process, I am responsible for what I choose. I reject the excuse that I’m just doing what God commanded. Even if I am doing so, I’m basing the claim on what I believe God commanded. Unless God caught you with a burning bush and told you that I’m right, I have no reason to expect you to believe my claim. When I’m making a decision in the public sphere I should be able to support it with reasoning. I think it’s important to be able to defend claims about public policy to people who disagree completely. I know a number of atheists and agnostics who are unafraid to tell me to my face that they find my belief in God somewhere between silly and incomprehensible. At the same time, I can work together with these people because we often agree on public policy goals–separation of church and state, sound science education including evolution, equal protection of the law, environmental issues, public education, and so forth. We may have come to those views from different directions, but we have learned to dialogue about them.

So let’s make it simple. I am responsible for my decisions. I look for every form of input I can find, which in my case includes the Bible, I listen to God, I make a decision. Once I make a decision, I take responsibility for the decision.

In this process the Bible functions in two ways: 1) It provides me with extended illustrations of how others interacted with God, and 2) Because I believe that these people interacted with God, I commonly find that if I remove cultural and time factors from the experience, I may find the ideal principle to which God is leading and thus pursue that.

Ed Brayton, on his blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, started a bit of an exchange over slavery and the Bible with his post Slavery and the Bible, which was answered over on In The Agora by Eric Seymour in his post Does the Bible condone slavery?. Just so you have the whole story, Ed then responded in Slavery and the Bible, Take 2.

It seems in this exchange that Ed, who states that he “can no longer accept the Bible as the word of God,” seems to be able to read it with refreshing clarity, while its defenders seem to need to work around what the Bible actually says in order to get it to mean what they would prefer it to. The comments from those giving an “Amen” to Eric Seymour’s response are even more revealing than the original article. I hope you will read the comments as well as the article itself. One poster, John R., states: “I don’t expect, however, this Ed’s unbelief will be alleviated by the truth. When one has put his own moral authority above God’s, there’s not much room left convincing.” But assuming that what John R. has found in the Bible is God’s moral authority, John R. should realize that one can as easily put one’s own authority over that of the written message by weasel-worded interpretations as by simply rejecting a particular concept outright.

Though my intention is not to deal with the specific interpretation in detail, I’m concerned that this particular defense of the Bible could lead to immoral behavior in itself. It distinguishes between the 19th century American variety of slavery and the Biblical variety as a reason why the Bible might not condemn slavery. That, of course, ignores the difference between slavery as practiced between Israelites (the rules they cite, as Ed correctly notes), and the practice of slavery in the Roman empire which is what Paul failed to condemn. But would Israelite style slavery, i.e. indenture for indebtedness, be a moral option today? Is this really what Christians should feel comfortable arguing? Should we be able to have a debtor sold into slavery, and provide rules to allow how much he or she can be beaten? Is this a moral position we really want to take?

But back to the subject. If we take the basic approach to scripture that both of these arguments are taking, and accept that if something is condoned in the Bible, then the Bible condones it, then the answer is clear and obvious–the Bible condones slavery. There really is no way around this. People who are convinced that it must not be so will continue to believe that they have somehow chopped up the evidence, but it is still there. Ed can see it. Apparently some of my fellow Christians cannot.

But let’s take another step down this path. Does the Bible condone or command things that we would consider immoral? I could go through a list of laws from the Torah that would make most modern people shudder. (There are those who think they should apply, which makes me shudder!) But there’s a pretty clear case in Numbers 31. Here the Israelites have attacked an enemy, one that they consider grossly immoral and deserving of extreme treatment. Let’s leave aside any debate about the level of guilt of the opposing party, and simply accept that the Israelites had a right to be angry at their opponents. Assuming this, let’s look at the treatment commanded, and then accorded to the enemy:

Let’s look at the characteristics of this war (all verses from Numbers 31):

1. They did battle to execute YHWH’s vengeance (v. 3)
2. They killed every male (v. 7)
3. They took the women captive (v. 9)
4. Well, not quite all the males; they took the little ones captive (v. 9)
5. They burned everything left (v. 10)
6. They took the spoil and the captives to their camp (v. 12)

If any of you are acquainted with ancient near eastern records, this is not an atypical battle. This sort of thing happened all the time. The Israelites are behaving much like their neighbors, with the exception that they seem to have killed a few more people and taken less captive, but even that difference is marginal. There is even an attribution of the authority behind the attack to their god, just as would be fairly common in other ancient near eastern inscriptions.

Before we go on, let me ask you: Is there any enemy of the United States that you believe should morally be accorded this treatment? To be precise, an enemy whose country we could destroy completely, killing every adult male, irrespective of their specific, personal guilt or innocence and taking all the women and children captive? In modern terms, is this a moral act?

Well, let’s see what the reaction is to the return of the warriors. Moses is indeed angry at them (v. 14), but his anger is not at how many they killed, but rather at who they left alive. They left alive all the adult women. Here comes the command of Moses:

¹⁷Now kill every boy among the children, and every woman who has known a man by having sexual relations {sleeping with} him. ¹⁸But every girl who has not known a man by having sexual relations with him, keep alive for yourselves.

In the end, it turned out that there was quite a number of female slaves left for the people to have “for themselves.” Continue to read to the end of the chapter to get the story.

May I ask again, would there be an enemy group or nation against whom you would consider this a moral action, even assuming that nation to be thoroughly despicable?

So if we ask the question, “Does the Bible condone slaughtering your enemies?” the answer must be “Yes.” Again, this is based on the same type of interpretation that has been used in defending the Bible from the charge of condoning slavery.

At this point, many of those who are still reading will be thinking I’m about to declare that the Bible is not God’s word, and that I’m going to have nothing to do with it. But in fact I’m a Christian and a Bible teacher, and I love the Bible. What I think is going on here is that we have entirely the wrong set of expectations of the Bible and of divine revelation.

How do we determine what it is that the Bible is supposed to be? I find that people have quite an assortment of expectations for the Bible, or for any book claiming to contain “God’s word.” Then, based often on those very expectations, they produce interpretations that cause the Bible to say what it is that they want it to say. Clearer thinkers see what the Bible is actually saying and start questioning the foundation, and then either reject the Bible because it does not fulfill expectations, or change the expectations. It’s pretty easy for the latter two groups to condemn one another. Those who reject the Bible claim that those who change the expectations are moving the goalposts, or something similar, while those who change the expectations accuse those who reject the Bible of accepting the fundamentalists’ standard.

It’s not my intent to condemn anyone here. I think it’s easy to rationally disagree on the point. The problem is that we really don’t have any external standard by which to decide just what God’s word should contain and what it should accomplish. We make assumptions, or create lists, but these are either derived from our own hopes and dreams, or are extracted from something we already regard as scripture. An earnest, well-educated Muslim friend of mine tried to convince me that the Qur’an is God’s word. It was clear that it made him joyful. “It provides an answer for every detail of my life,” he said. I answered that I didn’t find that an attractive feature in a book of scripture. It was really very difficult to discuss from that point, because the question became just what I should want in my holy book. Without a holy book telling you that, just how do you determine what you want?

(I’ve discussed inspiration in general quite extensively elsewhere. I’d suggest my primary essay Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, and my inspiration series, which is listed in my Post Series page. This also lists series of posts on Biblical Criticism and on origins. I have found that most people who wander by to condemn me for my views don’t bother to read them in any detail, but I at least have not provided an excuse!)

So how do I see the word of God? First, I don’t regard the Bible as the equivalent of the word of God. While it conveys the God’s messages, and is an expression of the word of God, the actual word of God is much more than that. The Biblical view is that everything is the product of God’s word.

⁶By the word of YHWH the heavens were made,
And all their host by the breath of his mouth.

Thus the scientist doing field work is also studying God’s word, specifically a product of it. That is why I am extremely distressed to see Christians doing shoddy science and making poorly thought out claims in the name of science in order to defend some theological preconception. A Christian doing science should do the work with the awareness that he is playing with the product of God’s word. This doesn’t mean that he will discover God by the scientific method. Rather, it means that he will examine an expression of God by that means. (Intelligent design fails theologically, in my view, on precisely this point. All nature is equally the product of God. The idea of detecting God more in one place than another using the scientific method certainly is certainly not a search for the God I know.)

In the scripture, I believe we have a record, not of God’s pronouncements on all things, though there are some pronouncements, but rather, of God’s interaction with people. There is a human/divine combination in scripture. The people are not perfect. They are not even close. Some are despicable. But God works with them, and we have the record of the interaction. We should not expect to go back to the beginning of our relationship with God and find the same moral standards that we have at a later point. More importantly, we should expect every expression in scripture to occur in a cultural matrix, and to apply to a particular situation. When Romans 13 says that the authorities are given their authority by God so we should be subject to them, we can rightly ask just what were the circumstances that brought for that declaration. In fact, this was Paul’s practical, pastoral advice to the church in Rome at a time when Christians saw Rome more as a defender than as a persecutor. Their fear, at that time, was of persecution by Jews. Later, the fear became changed.

I use an illustration in my essay (Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy that I think helps to understand what I’m trying to say.

The point here is that the primary method of extracting data from the Bible in modern, conservative Christianity is the picture on the right. The Bible stands between the person and God, mediating what God has said. I’m advocating the approach on the left in which one listens to God directly, as well as through all available avenues, while the experience of scripture enlightens one’s own process of doing God’s will. Dr. Alden Thompson discusses some similar ideas (though he’s somewhat more conservative than I am) in his essay God’s Word: Casebook or Codebook. He also discusses some of these same issues in his book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.

Now some are still going to ask how I handle the really nasty material I pointed out from Numbers 31, which is certainly not the only nasty occasion in the Bible. I have no problem there. The actions described are morally wrong. I think our expectations can change over time, and that we need to avoid judging something from the 2nd millenium BCE from our 21st century CE standards. But if you’re looking to the Bible to contain a codebook of good things to do and bad things to avoid, then Numbers 31 is a problem for you, because it involves a command to do a bad thing. For me this says that the Israelites acted in accordance with their culture and time, and that God led them in some ways, while in others they were not ready to be led.

And to be blunt, I see Paul’s advice on slaves as a practical matter. I certainly don’t expect Paul to advocate a slave revolt. For revolution, you need the possibility of success. A slave revolt in the 1st century would have been a bad idea. The underground railroad in the 19th century was a good idea. Unfortunately when we nitpick through the Biblical commands in order to make them fit a pattern, things don’t work so well. What the folks who started and maintained the underground railroad had to do was discover a moral imperative in their own time and place, using their own minds, and carry it out.

Again, does the Bible condone slavery? By my view and method of interpretation, “The Bible” doesn’t do anything of the sort. It provides examples of someone condoning slavery. But the Bible is not a substitute for the human mind reading it, or the Spirit of Truth guiding that mind. The Bible can provide light. It doesn’t make moral decisions. Pretending it does will only bring trouble.

I’ve been talking about inspiration and canonization in several posts, and I’m finally ready to get down to talking about inspiration. First, I’d like to remind you of my existing essays on inspiration, Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, which goes into some detail on the topic of Biblical inspiration.

But now I want to look at what’s at the heart of divine inspiration. Then I’m going to follow with entries about various proposed tests for the validity of inspired writers and their value.

What do people generally mean when they say that something written is inspired by God? There are many different answers to this question. Some options are:

• God gave the very words and letters of the work in question
  This would apply to the Ten Commandments written on tablets of stone by God’s finger, to the Torah according to many Orthodox Jews, or to the entire Bible according to some conservative or fundamentalist Christians who believe in verbal dictation. Only those things God dictated would be regarded as inspired.
• God impresses messages on the minds of certain people, who write those messages in their own words.
  Many conservative and moderate Christians hold a view like this. There is room for the personality of the prophet, and there is room for individual idiosyncrasies, but there must be a specific message sent by God.
• People who experience God try to describe what they have experienced.
  This is a common liberal view of the inspiration of scripture. It is quite possible for there to be errors in scripture, but those who write do have a genuine experience of God. The validity of their descriptions may vary.

(I discuss more options in my essay noted above.)

There are different ways one can use to decide what inspiration means. All of these will be circular to some extent. For example, many people build their view of inspiration almost entirely from their understanding of the nature of God. God is all-knowing and truthful, so the Bible must be factually accurate and entirely truthful. This is the approach taken by those who believe in inerrancy. It has also been used in my experience by Muslims who have tried to persuade me that the Qur’an is the word of God. Others look heavily at human needs, and make the assumption that divine revelation would necessarily fill in what we don’t know and can’t know. There is a consistent assumption that God is intending to communicate knowledge to us, and specifically accurate knowledge.

In either case, these people will take either the first or second view that I present about inspiration. The process is primarily about conveying information and the primary question to be asked is whether the information conveyed is accurate and comprehensible. I think that their view works fairly well for books that at least appear to claim to come from God. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel claimed to be receiving messages from God and to write these messages. But what about other books? Luke claims to be writing the results of research. Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles appear to be history, and find their source in previously existing royal chronicles. Psalms contains prayers that are individual, and seem to express the heart cry of the individual psalmist.

I would argue instead for the third view. My problem is not that the other views are circular, and that my alternative is not. It is inevitable that when we talk about revelation, something revealed by God that we could not otherwise know, we’re going to get a bit circular. After all, how do we know it is God talking? If the information is readily available to us, we might as well look at a more natural source. If the information is not available to us, it’s impossible to check.

If you accept the third view, then the other books I have cited fall into place. There are many ways in which God speaks, many ways in which we can hear, and many ways in which we can express what we hear. The core, then, of an inspired writing is that the person doing the writing, or producing the information, has genuinely experienced God in some way. That experience may come through direct impression of messages from God in the mind, visions, dreams, guided study, or even guided experiencing of the world. The Biblical writer experiences God’s presence and writes it down.

Of course, this view continues to be circular. I don’t know, except through my community and others that I study, what divine presence is. I can read about what others claim it is. I can describe what I have experienced, but I cannot ultimate get outside it and test it. The only protection I have is that I operate in a community. But that, in itself, is a subject for a future essay.