Inerrancy is the Problem Behind the Problems – Part 2

Growing Pains ran for 7 seasons and aired 166 (!) episodes. Kirk Cameron (a.k.a. Mike Seaver) was on top of the world. He was rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty and sharing the cover of Tiger Beat magazine with the likes of Michael J. Fox and Johnny Depp.

Then he had to go and get old and question the notion of an eternal Hell . Well, the pro-damnation set wasn’t going to let him get away with that one. They don’t care how many ABC After School Specials you’ve starred in.

Of course, many of his listeners would probably tell Cameron we’re living in a virtual Hell right now:

The globalist Left is trying their damndest to destroy Christian America with open borders and Communist laws. The LGBTQ+ agenda is shredding the moral fabric of the nation. Women are rising above their station and ambitiously seeking power and influence. Scientists are lying to us about evolution and the climate and vaccines. Many false Christians are drifting away from the rugged and masculine faith of their elders and embracing an effeminate, woke religion focused too much on the words of Jesus. Truly, these must be the signs of the ‘End Times’.

And if you’re the type of embittered evangelical who’s enraged about these things, then an inerrant Bible is the engine that carries you along. That was the topic of ‘Part 1‘. There, we talked about the history of the idea that scripture contains no contradictions or errors, whether theological, historical, or scientific. What we didn’t talk about were these glaring issues with this so-called ‘doctrine’:

1. It confuses ‘inspiration’ with ‘manipulation’ and ‘dictation’.

Those who adhere to the idea of biblical inerrancy are quick to dial up 2 Timothy 3:16-17 in its defence.

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." 

So how do you get from ‘inspiration’ to a text that is the “infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches”?¹ Because in the minds of so many evangelicals, God may as well have swung a pocket watch in front of the biblical writers, telling them they were feeling “very sleepy”, then dictated word for word the text they were to compose. Or better yet, simply shoved those writers aside, saying He’d “take it from here”, dipped His stylus in ink and started scribbling.

Strange, since the word so often translated ‘inspiration’ in this verse is θεόπνευστος. It literally means ‘God-breathed’ and was very possibly invented by Paul in writing this letter. ² Why would we presume that ‘God-breathed’ must equal something like ‘dictated word for word by God’?

2. It discounts the scriptures’ humanity.

You can’t think much of the texts’ human authors if you believe God essentially possessed and controlled them to produce a ‘perfect’ Bible. Why bother with humans at all? Why not just drop the book, fully formed, into the hands of readers and booksellers?

It’s not to say the biblical texts have nothing of the Spirit’s inspiration. Personally, I think they do. Yet nothing humans put their hands to can ever be ‘perfect’… but that’s what makes the writing beautiful and meaningful. It’s people, across centuries, wrestling with – and disagreeing on – the ideas of who God is and what God does, sometimes getting it right and sometimes getting it wrong. And which of us can’t relate to that?

3. It ignores the language issues.

The scriptures were composed in three different languages, frequently by authors writing outside their mother tongues, then copied over and over again by scribes across the centuries, before being translated by scholars into modern dialects, using a developing knowledge of the ancient languages and negotiating a range of textual variations, to try to capture the meaning of words written well over a millennium before.

What could go wrong?

Well, absolutely nothing, if you believe hard-core proponents of inerrancy.³

In reality, though, all those textual variations we know about show that, when it comes to words, mistakes (if that’s what you want to call them) are often made. Beyond that, a gap will always exist between the original languages and our best understanding of those languages. Furthermore, any human language, no matter how poetic, no matter how precise, can only go so far to describe the divine.

Powerful, they can be. Beautiful, they often are. But words will always fall short.

4. It Ignores the cultural gulf.

If language is the tip of the iceberg, then culture is the 90% lying submerged and unseen, waiting for you to crash into it. The biblical texts emerge from ancient, nonwestern cultures, with perspectives on the physical and non-physical world, and on society, which diverge sharply from our own.

So many evangelicals, though, seem to think that cultural gulf can be crossed with ease, or simply ignored. They read the books of scripture as though they were the intended audience, as though the Bible was churned out by John Grisham for their personal consumption.

But ancient readers didn’t share the same expectations of texts that we have. For example, they didn’t expect histories to be laid out chronologically or contain only verifiable facts. In fact, they expected those histories to behave more like religious propaganda than we’d be comfortable with. Nor did they care about ‘scientific accuracy’; they wanted a moving and poignant story.

5. It ignores the literary nature of the Bible.

All this is because ancient audiences knew they were reading and hearing literature. They understood that each book of scripture fit into a certain genre, or set of genres, and those genres held predictable features.

They knew, for instance, that the early Genesis stories belonged to the realm of (brace yourselves) Near-Eastern mythic literature, not to the realm of modern science. They recognised that the text in Genesis 1 has a structure of ‘form’ and ‘filling’, with a rhythmic cadence and a repeated chorus that was perhaps meant to be chanted. The text of Genesis 2, they also understood, was an alternate creation story, with a different chain of events and theological thrust.

At the other end of the Bible, 1st-century readers knew that Revelation belonged to a common genre of the time called ‘apocalypse’. The purpose of an apocalypse was to reveal the spiritual realities behind events present to the readers. In any apocalypse, the speaker is always taken into the heavenly sphere and shown symbolic visions. The original audience could interpret those symbols far better than we can. Because they weren’t meant to prophesy events in our own day.

When ancient hearers heard and sang the Psalms, they understood how Hebrew poetry worked. They recognised its chiastic and parallel structures. And they knew that figurative language and hyperbole was very much on the cards when describing God’s nature and God’s actions.

More could be said about proverbs that are ancient wisdom, not, say, rules for 21st-century parenting or marriage, or about letters that are just that – letters – not systematic theologies. But you get the idea.

6. It flattens the text.

In denying or ignoring authorship, audience, language, culture, and literary features, inerrancy acts like a bulldozer. It creates for itself a flat Bible, reducing the texts to a set of easy-to-read facts and propositional statements to which we must assent. We can therefore pull verses from across the text and cleverly arrange them to formulate ‘statements of faith’, or evangelistic methods, or to furnish ‘proof texts’ for our positions.

And here’s where the dicey part of that comes in. With a flat text, every passage is ‘levelled’. Every verse now holds the same authoritative weight. So now, we can even find a verse from the Psalms, or from Leviticus, or from Ezra to disregard, or ‘balance’ or downright contradict the words of Jesus when they become inconvenient or unsuitable.

Listen to today’s angriest evangelical voices. They’re doing exactly that.

7. It’s blindly arrogant.

Here are some hard truths:

• We now have a more scientific understanding of our universe than the ancients (not a better understanding; just a more scientific one).
• We know our sky is not a solid dome containing the sun, moon and stars, as the biblical texts suggest.
• We understand that rain doesn’t fall from heavenly ‘floodgates’ as described in certain scriptures.
• No geological evidence exists for a global flood.
• Meanwhile, plenty of viable geological and biological evidence for the evolution of plant and animal species does exist.
• No historical or archaeological evidence has been found for the enslavement of Hebrews in Egypt.
• We have texts older than the Bible from elsewhere in the ancient Near East which suggests outside cultural and narrative influence on early biblical stories.
• Scientists are pretty smart and study these things rigorously.
• Historians are pretty smart and study these things rigorously.
• Textual scholars are pretty smart and study these things rigorously.

To double down, to cover our eyes and ears and pretend otherwise – that’s not faith. That’s either wilful ignorance, or plain arrogance.

8. It’s a house of cards.

I can’t help but think, though, that this is an arrogance born from fear.

For generations now, inerrantists have defended the edifice of scripture they’ve constructed. They’ve insisted that to question the historicity of any of its stories, or the legitimacy of any of its commands or claims, is to destabilise the entire structure. Unless it’s all founded on “indisputable historical facts”, the whole thing will collapse.

Which means inerrancy has erected a flimsy house of cards. It looks pretty on the table and it’s great to show off to our friends, but nobody breathe or make any sudden movements, because anything could topple of it. And if it falls, all that work – all that ‘faith’ – be for nothing. And then where would we be?

There is, however, a great number of Christians who don’t espouse the idea of an inerrant Bible. Either we no longer do, or they never did in the first place. So we can tell you that, as it turns out, we’ll all be just fine.

Because far better ways to read scripture are out there. That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 3.

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1. The words of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy of 1978
2. Or by whoever wrote this letter. There’s contention as to whether this letter is pseudepigraphic.
3. Actually, many suggest that the Bible is only inerrant in its original autographs (the original manuscripts), as Article 10 of the Chicago Statement asserts. But is that really any better?