inerrant truth
I think the fundamental question concerning inerrancy is, what sort of book is the Bible? If the Bible is a history book, it's truth rests on it's historical accuracy. If the Bible is a science book, it's truth rests on it's empirical methods. If the Bible is a book of theology and philosophy, it's truth rests in well reasoned arguments and systems of spiritual enlightenment.
Standingout made the assertion in the previous thread that the Bible is a book of theology. I am probably reading more into that than he intended, but I must certainly disagree.
The Bible is not a book of theology, nor history nor science. It's a mishmash of narrative and parable, history and myth, theology and epiphany, streaming into the modern world from and ancient past of rich oral tradition through centuries of interpretation and transcription. It's a book filled with sermons and letters and dogmas and stories that span all genres and categories. As such, it often presents us with some peculiar problems. What are we to do with the stories about God trying to kill Moses, David committing genocide, and Isaiah summoning bears from a forrest to maul 42 children?
Facing such stories, I feel like the early God-fearing gentiles must have when, just before and during the time of Christ, they realized what sort of faith they were following. Converted abroad and introduced to the faith mainly by theology and practice of the law, these would-be converts went to the temple in Jerusalem and witnessed first hand barbaric traditions carried down from ancient years wandering in the desert that bore little or no resemblance to their conception of the faith. The sluices of blood, the moaning of cattle dead or nearing it, the smell of death and excrement - these things did not resemble at all the rational and comfortable, if compelling, sort of Hellenized Judaism they practiced in Rome or Galatia. Yet this unique amalgam of religious sensibility and tribal coarseness are both fundamental aspects of the Christian faith, and imbibe it with such complicated, if sometimes frustrating, beauty.
This is the same quality we find in our dealings with the Bible. It's simultaneously ridiculous and rational, straight and crooked, clean and dirty. It cannot and should not be read as any other book - it is not easily outlined, easily defined, easily constrained. It was not made to be parsed by chapters and verses into 35-minute-3-point sermons. It is a text as ancient, strange, marvelous and complicated as the God it describes, and like him, it must be taken seriously to be truly understood.
C.S. Lewis found the contradictions and complications in Christianity to be among it's most compelling facets. The rough edges contain the peculiar blend of truth and circumstance that a human mind could never create, and rather than detracting, this only adds to the beauty and depth of the Christian message.
On a scale of 1 to Kierkegaard, I give this post a rating of "pretty darn freaking sweet." Just kidding, but seriously, it took me like an hour.
posted by RJ @ 6:29 PM
25 comments
25 Comments:
I didn't mean to imply that we can't meaningfully interpret scripture, or that study isn't important. I'm not sure what I said that implied that to you, and I'm fairly certain I've never said that. I did imply that truths outside of those central two are "peripheral", so let's address that.
My point was simply that many of the "errors" we perceive in the bible are only "errors" because we've required the Bible to hold truth it never intended to. For example, the Bible is not lying, wrong, or false if the world was not created in a literal seven days, because Genesis 1 and 2 are not about science or history. Similarly, the mis-placement of the incense alter in Hebrews does not mean the book is "un-true" because it has nothing to do with the point of the passage. Only by studying these passages and the circumstances that gave rise to them can we understand why they don't make the Bible untrue.
Another good example of this is Paul's exhortation that Women submit to their husbands. At first glance, it might seem to some that Paul is saying Women are secondary citizens. Quite to the contrary, study shows that Paul is really telling women that they are not the property of their community or tribe, and responsible for submitting to only their husbands and no one else. He then goes on to much more exhaustively exhort Husbands to submit to their wives, showing that women are to be treated with equal respect as Men. This passage always bothered me before hearing Dr. Schaeffer lecture on it.
well, sort of. You've pinned me down now and I'm going to have to make a point you disagree with.
Even if the author of Genesis did intend to say the world was created in 7 days, or if the incense alter was simply a mistake, I don't believe this makes the entire Bible wrong or something we need to throw out.
I don't view "inspiration" as some mystical power that imbued the authors of scripture some super-natural ability to never make mistakes. To genesis, I would say it was written before science on the cosmos was available, and thus has no truth to offer on that topic. To the incense alter, I'd mark it down as an irrelevant error that does not in any way effect the meaning of the passage.
I do not believe the Bible is inerrant in the way conservatives claim it is. I believe it contains errors and alterations, but that these do not in any way depricate it's authority or the truth it was intended to convey.
I really wish j. morgan would weigh in on this. He said something once about the sacredness of tradition and it's importance in understanding scripture and I think he'd have something insightful to say on it.
I think the place that you and I disagree, Redhurt, is only in what I meant by a book of theology. I meant that when we read the Bible what we should get out of it is theology. We learn about God and how we should live in respect to Him and eachother through the mishmash. We don't read it and get History or Science. I didn't mean to imply that it was written as a systematic theology that we could read through and dissect quickly and methodically.
This is neither here nor there, but it relates to the seven day creation theory. When taking a class from the lone intelligent professor at Methodist (Llyod Bailey, written a TON of books), he explained the seven day creation theory in this context. According to him, the creation story was not made until the Jews were under captivity in Babylon or Assyria (not sure which one). The religious leaders were looking for a way to avoid assimilation so they came up with a creation story that A) showed God's power of specific pagan gods in seperate acts and B) had God rest on the seventh day, providing a rationale for the Sabbath where the Hebrews could gather together and maintain national identity.
He was a whole lot more eloquent than that, but you get the main idea. One of the main points of the class was that large portions of the Bible were never meant to be taken as literal history, which is fairly obvious when comparing the Bible to cultural context and other pieces of literature from that era.
“The Bible is not a book of theology, nor history nor science. It's a mishmash of narrative and parable, history and myth, theology and epiphany, streaming into the modern world from and ancient past of rich oral tradition through centuries of interpretation and transcription. It's a book filled with sermons and letters and dogmas and stories that span all genres and categories.”
That is the best thing I have read all day. I am so tired of people – predominantly Evangelical Christians – talking about the Bible like it were a book. No one seems to talk about The Harvard Classics as a book. In our understanding of what Scriptures are, we need to make a point of avoiding reductionisms at all costs. Good work redhurt.
Incidently, my word verification was “kllbbf,” which is the Hebrew word that roughly translates, “You damn Fundamentalists, of course the Bible isn’t inerrant. Nobody ever said it was supposed to be!”
j. morgan: Thanks!
Barnaby: I think our fundamental difference might be in our assessment of authorship, which is to say "inspiration." My question to you is: why should the books be consistent? Job was written thousands of years before Jude, by different people living in drastically different circumstances. Why would an error in Jude cause you to throw out Job or Jonah? What holds the books of the bible together and gives them this unique claim to absolute consistency and truth?
The standard conservative answer, which may or may not be yours, would be, "inspiration." God breathed these scriptures - the same God, over thousands of years - so they have to be as consistent as He is.
My answer is tradition. These were the inspired and holy books that bound centuries of jews and early christians together and comprised the core of their doctrine. Their could be other books and teachings just as sacred, now lost to the ages, and those included need not be entirely consistent, because they were written by different people for different reasons in different times to explain different truths.
The cannonization process marks one of the most interesting periods of Christian history to put notions of inspiration to the test. If the Bible today is the exhaustive absolute conservatives claim, why was it necessary to invent the lie that Paul wrote Hebrews in order to secure it's cannonization? And why were so many of the early church fathers, instrumental in constructing the Bible we use today, heretics in their old age?
The Bible and it's authoring is not a simple, concise or perfect system - that is my opinion.
Well, could this all knowing God direct human events such that factual errors don't impede the truth?
It's not a matter of discerning truth from error - it's not as simple as "the bible is right" or "the bible is wrong." I never claimed the Bible was a book of lies that we're supposed to figure the truth from - simply that there are some inconsistencies and transcriptual changes that have been made to it but do not change the truth it conveys. Right?
Barnabas:
Have you ever seen Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew?
Where do we get the idea that Scripture is revelation?
Where in the Scriptures does anyone ever write that the Scriptures are God’s primary or authoritative vehicle for revelation?
I'm not arguing that scripture isn't revelation here - I'm waiting to see if J. Morgan's gonig to say any more about it - but I feel like 2nd Timothy 3:6 is often misused, because "scripture" did not mean "the bible" when it was written. I especially wonder if the author thought of that document as "scripture" while he was writing it.
To me this agruement about Bible having errors and what not seems alittle crazy to me, this is why. Feel free to disagree with me. But as a Christian I believe in a God that created the entire universe, created science and gave us human the abilities to discover science. I feel like God is probably laughing at us because He is like "wow you believe I created the entire universe and give gave you a mind sharp enough even be talking about my existence but I couldn't create my Word without having humans put errors into it? It just baffles me that on one hand we can believe that God created this infinitly complex world and humans and animals in it but somehow could not give us what he wanted to say without errors. Thats my two cents, I'm kinda on my way out and I'll probably say this more elqunotly (sp) later.
yeah, you probably should.
I believe the Bible contains exactly the truths God wants us to read, but also that this is possible within the matrix of human history, and not immune to it. It's not a question of what God CAN do - that's quite a complicated problem in itself. It's just a question of the history of the book, and how that history effects the way we read it.
I don't know if this post is still alive, I just found it today and it has 21 comments! So if it is still alive, great. If not, my comments will be left for future generations.
Redness - I argee with the post in everything I think, well done. I give it, hmmm... Liebniz. Good enough?
Just a comment on the incense altar in Heb. 9. I do not think that was an error in the same way I do not think Jesus dying on Thursday in John's Gospel was an error. In both cases the writer is making a theological point which goes past some literal fact. John clearly knows when Jesus died, Luke(?) clearly understands Jewish temple thought pretty well, he didn't screw up on the Holy of Holies. So just rehashing what you said, those passages have no intention of being 20th century history lessons. Everyone hated those in school anyways, I bet God does too.
J. Morg - you know where I stand on the inspiration issue. I love the painting of St. Matthew, I use that a good deal over here against "fundies" but it is quite clear through Scripture (thanks Barns) and in the history of the Church that the Bible is a qualitatively different book than any other in history. To deny that it is divinely inspired (read authored compatabalistically with God and man), no matter which form you take is absolute heresy and puts you outside the Church. It really does. I know this is strong language and I imagine that you do believe it is inspired text, but sometimes I wonder in what sense you mean it as inspired. Again, I think if one does not believe in either inerrancy or infallibility (or totall trustworthy or whatever phrase is being used) he or she stands outside the Church Catholic, and that is a bad place to be.
Now, we are not a people of the book, like Islam, but we are a people of a revealing God, who has most revealed himself through the Holy Scriptures. I think it is a fine distinction, but it is important. That's it for me, just thought I would throw in my two cents, for what it is worth.
Barnabas:
“Almost every book of the Old Testament quotes God Himself, and all over the NT they talk about how God spoke first through the prophets, and then through Christ.”
Let’s try to keep my questions in mind. This has nothing to do with my second question, and only vaguely pertains to my first. Even still, it is meaningless. I can “quote” George Bush, but unless I can demonstrate that I have the authority to do so, the mere fact that I am “quoting” him does not in any way testify to my authority to do so or authenticity or my “quotations.”
“Then, Peter in 2 Peter puts Paul's letters on the same level.”
No he doesn’t. All he says about Paul’s writings is that:
a) he “wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him,”
b) he is consistent in his message, and
c) he is difficult to understand.
None of that has to with my two questions. None of that necessitates revelation and certainly none of it makes claims about the legitimate vehicle for revelation.
“Oh yeah, and 2 Timothy 3:6
’All scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching...’”
I could write a book about this, but:
a) as redhurt has pointed out, the author knows “Scripture” to be the Hebrew Scriptures only,
b) nobody knows what “God-breathed” means, but it certainly doesn’t necessitate revelation, and
c) “useful” is a pretty low standard by which to make the claims that you want to about Scripture.
With that said, nothing in that verse says anything about my questions. So, let me answer those questions myself:
“Where do we get the idea that Scripture is revelation?”
The Church.
“Where in the Scriptures does anyone ever write that the Scriptures are God’s primary or authoritative vehicle for revelation?”
Nowhere. Several times in the Scriptures, however, it is made clear that the Church is God’s primary and authoritative vehicle for revelation (Mat. 16:15-19; Mat. 28:18-20; John 17; Acts 2; 2 Cor. 6:16). Jesus does not vest His authority in the Scriptures, but in His apostles, who are inheritors of the entirety of His authority on Earth and are the foundations of what is literally Christ on Earth. The Scriptures, then, are products of the Church as authoritative testaments to the Church’s teachings. As such, they are revealed documents - authoritative and infallible - but not in some extra-ecclesial sense.
As Hans has said, we are not people of a Book, but people who are members of the Living God, full participants in the second person of the Trinity. Christ leaves His authority with His apostles, not with books. As such, we can only attest to the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures in relational connection with those who authorized their production and affirmed and legitimated them. Now, I am not going all Rome on y’all here, but it seems to me that in as much as we want to talk about the Scriptures as anything more than just writings by some weird guys in a meaningless province of the Roman Empire, we need to understand the process of Scriptural legitimation. It isn’t as straight forward as you (Barnabas) are making it out to be.
Hans:
“in the history of the Church that the Bible is a qualitatively different book than any other in history. To deny that it is divinely inspired (read authored compatabalistically with God and man), no matter which form you take is absolute heresy and puts you outside the Church.”
I don’t deny any of that (see above). All I am arguing is that the nature of the Scriptures as authoritative and the process of legitimation are far more complicated than we usually recognize. It is fundamental, as far as I am concerned, that we understand the Scriptures as a necessary product of the Church to codify orthodoxy. That is not to say that, as such, the Scriptures don’t have authority in themselves, it is just to note that legitimacy is a serious issue that has not been adequately addressed in Protestant and Evangelical Christianity (and, to a lesser degree, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, albeit for different reasons and in different ways). This requires a very sophisticated examination and articulation to be meaningful. I think I am going to spend my life doing just that.
hmm. jmorg and hans, you've given me a lot to think about. J. morgan - I'd like to donate to your foundation and read your book. This "church as revelation" idea is new and interesting to me, and brings a lot to the table (community, structure, accountability.) Interesting.
Hans: I'm worried about saying anything less than an absolute view of inspiration puts one outside the church. Again, I think about cannonization, and how subjective and flawed the process seems. Certainly a "perfect God" could use imperfect means, but that seems a little too contrived to fit history. I'm not sure if I how to articulate exactly what I really mean here, so I'll just leave it at that.
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I don't really have anything to add, this is a little outside of my realm, but I wanted to let you all know that my face hurts from being rocked off continually.
J.morg - I think you are going a bit Roman on us, which is fine. I think there is much to say for the Apostolic Authority and I agree with most of your statements. I agree that Evangelicalism has not addressed these problems, at all ("you mean the Bible didn't just fall out of the sky?"), but then that is why I am an Anglican. Yet I do want to tread carefully about this issue. I am looking forward to your life work on this, but I do want to stress compatablism, it helps with a lot of these areas. Also via media does quite nicely.
Redness - I know inspiration is a tricky issue, and I am aware that some of the letters got cannonized in a strange fashion (Augustine: "I know Hebrews wasn;t written by Paul, but since the East thinks it was, we can get it pushed through without any problems"). Certainly there is a human element, and yet once the Scripture is cannonized the Church universal only preaches from that list and sees it as uniquely authoritative. I think it is a bit like the Lord's Supper. It is not exactly his body and blood, simple as that may seem (the Carravagio inspiration model) nor do I think it is only symbol (power legitamization deconstruction view), rather it is a mysetrious union of the two. We feast on Jesus in the bread and wine, he is physically present there, but it is also bread and wine, the elements don't change. It is a both and, not an either or and our rational minds don't like it, but that is how God works. Compatablism, really.
That may or may not help. I do think the inspiration bit is more organic and tradition related than Evangelicals but at the same time I think it is inerrant and divinly selected as a cannon. Not sure how to totally reconcile the two beliefs, but then again maybe a bit of mystery is fine too. But I do think it has reasonable support, just not a water tight finish.
Great discussion here. I'd like to go into specifics of one area of the debate.
If you say "The Bible is only authoritative if it's perfect," or something to that effect, all someone needs to knock down your tower is a contradiction. Scholars have excogitated tomes attacking and reconciling such problems--timelines; numbers in the Old Testamenet; the incense altar; Christ's actual place of birth; etc. I see that as pointless because I agree with j. morgan that the Bible's authority is tied to the church as a testament to God. Once we "ground" the authority of the Bible in the body of Christ, or at least make them coterminous, we completely avoid many of the problems of interpretation that plague evangelical scholarship. If you build your trust in the Bible on the Pentateuch having been written by Moses, and research and scholarship show this not to be the case, you better have an elastic worldview in order to rebound without your faith being damaged. But if JEPD or Mosaic authorship are BOTH testimony to something else, you're all set.
The problem this introduces is the need for another defense of Scripture as authoritative in/against culture. This testimony to its authority is, I would argue, explicitly the role of the church, and our opportunity. Culture is supposed to see the authority of the Bible not only as something inherent in it, as self-referential or "clear and distinct," to quote Descartes, but in the actions of the church. This is something that I think redhurt would appreciate because it assigns a more active role to the body of Christ. We don't just hold up Bibles and point; we bring them to life through our actions.
nice work guys. I like the way you both worded things at the end. Hans, the communion analogy works nicely. As long as we're allowed to question, investigate, and take into account the "human" aspects of scripture, and aren't forced to ignore them in favor of some idealistically *perfect* testament from God, I'm down. Chuck: "Bring them to life through our actions" is a great phrase.
my validation word is a full 8 letters of random gibberish. These things are starting to feel like a typing test.
"The Great Need is not to do things but to believe things."
-Oswald Chambers
Doesn't matter how much you do if you don't believe then matters not. Action without sincere belief is worthless. God could do anything and everything he wanted. He does not need us at all, let me say that again not at all. God the "pefect idealistic" God wants you heart and for to believe and trust in his "perfect" Word because he sent his Son to die for you. The church is filled with people who pretend to believe and they act all the time, but in the end these people are so empty inside because without true belief then doesn't matter how often you go to sunday school or help out with youth group. All of your arguements are so circular, you can agrue if the Bible is inerrant or not for rest of your life but you'll never be able to come to a concrete answer. God created you? Can't he create a book? You also imply something about what God can and can't do. There is one thing God Can't do thats make one believe and repent, thats up to the individual everything else is fair game for God, just ask the Egyptians. By the way Redhurt you said way back that Husbands are to submit to their wives, no where I've found does it say that. It says Husbands love your wives, not submit. Though they are equal but in a different but equal role.
Talk to Shaffaer about it...it doesn't literally say "submit to your wives", and "submit" isn't the most exact word for what I was trying to say, but the passage has much stronger exhortations towards husbands than wives, and the point is that it's not advocating the oppression of women like it might easily seem. Flame on.
Anonymous, you are conflating “sincere” and “true.” In fact, you are using them interchangeably. Sincere belief is vacuous, meaningless, and banal; it is a bit like “spirituality.” True belief, on the other hand, is full, rich, and engrossing. In that context, then, I would argue that Chambers’s distinction entirely breaks down. True belief encompasses - even requires – action to a definitional extent.
Aside from that, though, I don’t see anywhere arguments about what God can and cannot do, only what He has and has not done. Things happen in real context; “life-worlds” as they are sometimes called. We aren’t talking in hypotheticals here; we are dealing with real events in space and time.
So, Anonymous, here is what I would suggest:
a) make an outline before you write your thoughts,
b) use punctuation, and
c) clarify what you are arguing and against whom you are arguing.
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