Inerrancy is the Problem Behind the Problems – Part 4

• The idea that the world is only 6000-or-so years old, despite all geological, biological, and astronomical evidence to the contrary.
• The idea of a global flood destroying all life, despite no geological evidence to support it.
• The idea that the world’s languages originated at the Tower of Babel, despite all linguistic evidence to the contrary.
• The idea that God demanded the total annihilation of Israel’s enemies.
• The idea that the modern nation state of Israel equates to ancient Israel.
• The idea that, even today, God specially ‘chooses’ nations, or one nation – and we’re it.
• The idea that Jesus’ crucifixion was about an angry God who was compelled to pour out his wrath upon humanity, but who ‘mercifully’ executed his son instead.
• The idea that women in the church couldn’t possibly exercise any leadership of men, or teach them.
• The idea that a one-world government will arise, headed by an ‘Antichrist’ figure, before the world comes to an end.
• The idea that the vast majority of the world’s population will be consigned to the cosmic oven called Hell for eons of cruel torture.

All of these ideas are defensible (and defensible only) when reading the Bible through the lens of inerrancy: the belief that the Bible is ‘perfect’, free from error in any historical, scientific, theological, or lifestyle matter it addresses. This way of viewing scripture is rife with problems and inconsistencies (the topic of Part 2). That’s why we discussed (in Part 3) a set of questions to foster a more reasonable approach to the Bible and its content.

The final question – the vital question for all of us who call ourselves Christians or followers of the way of Jesus – demands this more extended discussion.

“Does this picture of God look like Jesus?”

Evangelicals like me have spent years proclaiming Jesus as ‘Lord and Saviour’ to anyone who will listen. Of course, when it came to taking either of those claims seriously, we’ve also spent years personalising the second and disregarding the first. You have to admire us: we knew what we wanted. We chose to shake hands with power, to exalt ourselves to positions of influence, to look down on the poor and the outsider, and to relish the thought of exacting retribution on our enemies. And we weren’t going to let a little thing like following the teachings of our Lord Jesus get in the way.

So when we wanted to excuse ourselves from advocating for the ‘least of these’ (or wanted to cleverly redefine what the ‘least of these’ was), or from showing mercy, or from adopting meekness, or from lowering our status, or from taking up our crosses, or from eschewing the kind of public religion that seeks adulation, we mined scripture for verses to qualify, diminish, or outright dismiss Jesus’ words. We found a very handy angry and vengeful God, who might even approve of us trampling on men, women and children on his behalf. And we exploited every loophole that carefully curated biblical passages could provide.

Inerrancy allowed us to do it, because all scripture is essentially created equal in its eyes.

But surely that’s a backward way for Christians to read these texts. Throughout the centuries, Christians (and evangelicals more than anyone) have affirmed the divinity of Jesus. It’s his teachings, his life, and his death that we look to in order to best understand God. Thus, beyond all others, our crucial question should be, “Does this picture of God look like the God Jesus showed us?” Take this well-trodden passage (1 Samuel 15:1-3):

Samuel said to Saul, ‘YHWH sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of YHWH. Thus says YHWH of hosts, “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”’

So does the ‘God’ who issues this divine directive to commit genocide look like Jesus? Like Jesus, who preached love for one’s enemies, who refused to strike back against his own enemies, who prayed “Father, forgive them” on behalf of those subjecting him to a torturous death?

Some will try to dance around this passage by saying things like, “We don’t understand God’s ways!” in a gymnastic effort to harmonise this image of God with Jesus. Yet the plain fact is this representation doesn’t look like Jesus at all. We can see this looks like a wrathful and unmerciful God who will happily allow us to exterminate anyone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic group. We can see it looks like a culturally bound, ancient human perception of God that allowed them to justify their worst actions as divinely sanctioned. And we can turn instead to the God Jesus reflected.

“Is there a verse to support this?”

Now, anyone committed to inerrancy who’s tracking the discussion will probably dismiss this argument without a passage or verse to back it up. How’s that for irony? Well, I’m happy to oblige with one of my favourites: the opening passage of John’s gospel. In line after line, the author describes Jesus – not the Bible, but Jesus – as ‘the Word’. He concludes his prologue with this statement (Jn. 1:18):

"No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known." 

In other words, it is only through Jesus that we see what God is really like.

“Seriously?”

Where does all this leave us with respect to the Bible?

You’ll hear many argue that unless you subscribe to biblical inerrancy, you don’t take scripture seriously. But consider: is diminishing the cultural settings of the texts taking the Bible seriously? Is virtually disregarding the Bible’s original audiences taking scripture seriously? Is ignoring genre and idiom taking the Bible seriously? Is it taking the Bible seriously to presume a simple surface reading can cross a vast historical and linguistic gulf? And treating the words of Jesus with no more import than other favoured passages of scripture? For followers of Jesus, that doesn’t seem very serious.

What’s more, abandoning inerrancy doesn’t mean abandoning the Bible’s sacredness. To quote one of inerrancy proponents’ go-to passages (2 Tim. 3:16-17):

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The scriptures can be perfectly useful¹without being ‘perfect’. ‘Useful’ doesn’t equate to “infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches”². Every dictum needn’t be eternally and irrevocably binding for scripture to be useful. Nor does it need to accord with (or rewrite) our contemporary understanding of science and history to be useful.

Instead, by:

• asking wise questions when approaching the text
• recognising our historical, cultural and linguistic ‘foreignness’
• adopting a learning posture toward our reading
• viewing scripture through the lens of Jesus

we can more sensibly discern how scripture can be most useful. We can read the Bible with different eyes.

---

1. The Greek word here is ὠφέλιμος, which means, ‘advantageous’ or ‘profitable’ and appears four times in the Bible (three of them in 2 Timothy). It’s derived from the word ὄφελος, meaning something’s ‘use’ or ‘profit’.
2. Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978