Bad Ideas: Biblical Inerrancy

You Know the Drill

An atmosphere of palpable tension envelops the Sunday School room as the teacher relays the signal: “Draw swords!”

You and the other children, poised at the front your seats, hoist your Bibles into the air with a single hand, index fingers caressing the bonded leather spines. You know the rules: no part of the gripping hand can make contact with the pages, seeking an unfair advantage or a head start that would bring this contest into disrepute. 

The teacher, a true master of his craft operating at the height of his powers, pauses to eek every last ounce of suspense from the moment. Well played, Mr. Johnson, well played. At last, he calls the reference. “Psalm 18:30. Charge!”

Bibles rapidly descend and the sound of swishing pages can be heard. You feel your thundering pulse as you pierce your Bible in its centre with your thumbs and rifle through its thin leaves in a mad dash toward the Book of Psalms…the 18th chapter…the 30th verse! You shoot your hand into the air in a fever of angst and sweat and feel the sweet relief wash over you as Mr. Johnson calls your name. 

You read aloud, “As for God, his way is perfect: The LORD’s word is flawless.” You take the points.

Behold, the ‘Sword Drill’ — a Thunderdome of biblical grit and tenacity, from which only one can emerge victorious. It’s a race designed to train young Christians to know their Bible (all 66 books, in order of appearance) inside and out. No quarter is given, none is asked.

The theory behind the game, I suppose, was a simple one. Call it ‘gamification’ of Bible readiness. The better we could locate verses in the Holy Book, the better we could wield them to great effect to persuade others and score victories for the Kingdom of God. This theory, however, probably wouldn’t exist without the more heady ‘doctrine’ of inerrancy.

Leaps of Faith?

For those unfamiliar with the notion of biblical inerrancy, it’s exactly what it sounds like: the idea that the text of the Bible is completely free of error, and is therefore reliable on all matters contained in its pages – not least, on the origins of the earth, the human race, and its subsequent history. And in short, it’s a notion that’s rife with problems.

The most obvious (and oft cited) issue with inerrancy is this: the Bible itself never claims to be inerrant. Sure, verses like the following are usually offered:

All Scripture is God-breathed (*some versions translate θεόπνευστος here far less literally as "inspired by God") and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...

2 Timothy 3:16, NIV

Every word of God is flawless;
    he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.

Proverbs 30:5, NIV

All your words are true;
    all your righteous laws are eternal.

Psalm 119:160, NIV

Yet with verses like these, believers in biblical inerrancy have to make a few significant leaps:

• a leap that equates the word ‘God-breathed’ or ‘inspired’ with ‘perfect’ and ‘without error’, despite no real indication that word should carry such meanings
• a leap that equates the ‘word/words of God’ or ‘laws of God’ with the whole Bible, despite no indication of this within the text itself
• a leap that treats lines of poetry as statements of doctrine
• a leap of circular logic, whereby, for example, “The Bible is inerrant because Proverbs 30:5 says ‘Every word of God is flawless’, and Proverbs 30:5 is absolute fact because the Bible is inerrant.”

A Substitute Deity

The worst leap, though, might be (ironically) straight into one of the Bible’s cardinal sins, the leap into a kind of idolatry. Inerrantists (yeah, that’s a word!) often turn the Bible itself into an idol by elevating it to God’s level, a perfect and immovable document. It’s easy to see how it happens. So often, the inerrantist view of ‘inspiration’ involves something akin to a trance-like state falling upon the Bible’s human writers, whereby the Holy Spirit controls their thoughts and the movements of their hands like a master puppeteer, so that every word is written exactly as God wills. But consider: when every biblical phrase is deemed perfect, the very words of God, doesn’t the scripture then stand in for God? Doesn’t the Bible become a kind of surrogate God, whose every word must be obeyed and venerated?

Some seem to believe that if the scriptures were composed under the guidance of a perfect being, they must themselves be perfect.¹ Yet is that really the case? God has created all things; they are not therefore perfect simply because God created them. Nothing penned by human hands and in human language can ever be perfect. But it doesn’t need to be perfect to be good or trustworthy. Treating the Bible in this fashion not only ascribes perfection where it doesn’t belong, it robs the scriptures of their humanity – humanity that makes them more beautiful and relatable.

Genres – Who Needs ‘Em?

This leads us to another of inerrancy’s major (though slightly less unforgivable) sins. Inerrancy thinking steamrolls the text, levelling the biblical ground so that every verse can essentially bear the same weight. Verses from almost anywhere in this flat Bible can be plucked out and strung together to support any idea the group wants – ideas like inerrancy, for instance. In this way, Christians can even countermand the teachings of Jesus (!), such as his instructions on nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount, by citing Old Testament passages in which God commands Israel to slaughter its enemies.

This can be done because the theory of inerrancy, by its very nature, ignores crucial aspects of scripture like genre, historical setting, culture and language, audience, and authorial intent. Instead, it treats every verse as though it was written specifically to us, for us, and according to our needs. Every verse becomes a tool. And with tools like these, we can proof-text the shit out of just about any church teaching we like.

Who’s it Hurting?

Now, all this might seem relatively harmless. Who’s it hurting if people cling onto this notion of inerrancy? Unfortunately, I think it’s hurting plenty of people, including the ones who champion it. After much time spent reflecting on this so-called ‘doctrine’ – one I was raised to whole-heartedly believe, one I did wholeheartedly believe – I’m convinced it lies at the heart of so much bad teaching: the antagonistic outlook on science, the escalation of Christian nationalism, the veritable subjugation of women by churches, a skewed understanding of ‘The End Times’, ideas about healing and prophecy gone awry… just to name a few. Armed with these ideas, we wade blindly and arrogantly into pointless debates over the age of the earth, or when and how life emerged, or the veracity of biblical history, usually ridiculously ignorant of the discoveries of science, or archaeology, or pointedly, the scriptural texts themselves.² Verse upon verse, chapter upon chapter are weaponised against ‘liberals’, the LGBTQ+ community, abortion rights advocates, the divorced, those suffering with anxiety or depression, even against our own men, women and children. So it’s hard to say it’s not hurting anyone.

Learning to Love Scripture for the Right Reasons

After reading all that, you might be surprised when I say I love the scriptures. They’re abundantly rich, astoundingly deep, and emotionally engaging. I love reading the scriptures with all their cultural and linguistic grit in tact, with their very human authors and very human audiences in view, with whatever inconsistencies there might be allowed to linger. When that happens, when all those verses I once extracted to attack or defend some theological hill are returned to their place, when they’re allowed to speak from their context, they don’t usually mean quite what I used to think.

But they take on new power. They allow me to engage honestly and in good faith with scientists, with historians, with theologians, with (shock horror) feminists, with environmentalists, with peace activists, environmental activists, reproductive rights activists. They allow me to listen and think, rather than just argue and quote a knock-down verse or two. They allow me the joy of wrestling with the texts, of wondering, of exploring them in their language and their cultures and discovering unknown things, rather than the intellectually lazy, know-it-all approach of ‘The Bible says ______’.

In the end, I think what I’ve learnt through such exploration is that the ‘doctrine’ of biblical inerrancy is inherently disrespectful to the Bible, because it obsesses over the wrong thing – ‘fact’ or ‘error’ – and asks scripture to be something it isn’t: a sterile information text, with all its ‘t’s crossed and all its ‘i’s dotted, like an encyclopaedia volume or a manual that accompanies a new appliance.

Isn’t it better if we take 2 Timothy 3:16 seriously when it says that all God-breathed scripture is ‘useful’? Not perfect, but useful. Not flawless, but useful. Not God-like, but useful. That’s, after all, what the scriptures are for. They’re life-giving documents to be devoured and studied and consulted and enjoyed – but not worshipped.

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Notes:

1. Some proponents of inerrancy (most notably, those who developed the incredibly verbose Chicago Statement) split hairs by stating that the scriptures are ‘inerrant in their original autographs’, the first-hand documents actually written down by the biblical authors. In other words, they allow that ‘errors’ might have been transmitted due to copying and translation. It’s a cleverly evasive assertion – because we don’t have any original autographs to compare to the copies and translations we do have.
2. An example of this is seen in the work of Australian proponent for ‘Young Earth creationism’ (YEC), Ken Ham. Ham is, I think, a well meaning individual, who believes he’s taking the Bible seriously and wants others to do so. But he’s neither a scientist nor a biblical scholar, with any deep understanding of the evidentiary claims of evolutionary science or of the cultural and historical nuances of the Genesis creation accounts. He’s rather more of a salesman for the YEC perspective.