As someone who (as far as I can tell) is a fairly orthodox and conservative – I would say evangelical – Christian, what should I make of the frequent reference among my peers to the “verbal” inspiration of Scripture?
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Back in June 2009 I explained that I am not an inerrantist. In response to some initial (but, I think, quite mistaken) criticisms of my comments there, I said in November, “You heard me right the first time, I am not an inerrantist.” I then added some historical perspective to what I was saying with a blog post called “Errantly Assuming Inerrancy in History,” where I discussed the way in which a number of important theologians in history spoke about Scripture, which would be more than enough to make modern inerrantists uncomfortable. In a nutshell, in these blog entries I explained that I think that while inerrancy is false and that I do actually think the biblical writers expressed some false scientific assumptions and may have made minor mistakes on the finer details of history, geography and minor errors like citation errors, the message expressed in the Bible is the very word of God who is infallible, and every part of that message is correct.

Assuming it’s true that great minds think alike, it’s encouraging to see great minds agreeing with what I say, so I welcomed the chance to read Matt Flannagan’s thoughts here, where he summed up and affirmed my view that “one can affirm the authority of the bible, even the claim that it is infallible in what it teaches, without affirming that it is inerrant, in the sense of containing no errors.” Have a look, I think it’s definitely worth reading (naturally, the fact that we agree has nothing to do with it ).

To be fair, Matt himself did not, in that piece, deny or affirm inerrancy. My position, as I have always made clear, is that inerrancy is false at face value, and if it is qualified to the point where it starts to look plausible, then the one who holds it has to allow for so much error that it’s pointless to use the label “inerrancy” at all because it is misleading.

In spite of the positive response I have seen from very committed and very conservative Christians like me, the negative reaction has not stopped. In a sense I don’t mind this. Those who are firmly committed to a strict doctrine of inerrancy will, initially at least, disagree and react strongly to what I have said. This opens up the possibility of discussing the issue with them, and exposes the issue to a wider audience. That’s a good thing. But I do think that those responses often warrant a response, and at times some sort of corrective as well when they go too far in their critique and step into unfairness or misrepresentation, an inevitable feature of human disagreement it seems.

Recently Jeremy Pierce at the Evangel blog (hosted by First Things) blogged on a blog on a blog (and now I’m blogging on his blog). In a blog entry called “Basic Inerrancy,” he blogged on Matt’s article, who had in turn blogged on what I said earlier. Interestingly, although I took Matt to basically share my view, Jeremy says “I actually agree with much of what Matt says,” while saying of my piece, “There are so many things I disagree with in [Glenn's] post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn’t have the time.” Ah well. But I want to draw attention to the way that Jeremy criticises the position I outlined.
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I’m just about finished reading through Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs. I know it has been a while since I started, but the only time when I’ve been reading it is over a cup of coffee on my lunch breaks at work. I’ll have some comments to offer on that when I’m done. Expect to see that beginning some time in the next few weeks.

Today a new book arrived in the mail: Donald G. Bloesh: Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration & Interpretation. I was prompted to get it after some of my recent musings on inerrancy. Read a blurb on the book and some brief Q and A with the author here. Bloesch says that he intends to “defend the orthodox evangelical faith from its friends as well as its enemies.” Its enemies are the sceptical opponents of Christianity, and the friends that Bloesch has in mind are (or at least include, based on my skim read) Christian modernists who defend inerrancy.
This is the next book I’ll be sinking my teeth into. Here’s what’s in store for me:

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction
The Witness of Sacred Tradition
Modern Errors
Toward a Theology of Word and Spirit

2. The Crisis in Biblical Authority
Inerrancy and Infallibility in Historical Perspective
Need for Reinterpretation
Models of Scriptural Authority

3. The Meaning of Revelation
Revelation as Truth and Event
Revelation and the Bible
Truth and Error in Protestant Orthodoxy
Revelation in Nature and History
Revelation and Reason
Appendix A: Conflict in Theological Method

4. The Inspiration of Scripture
The Reformation
Orthodoxy and Pietism
Fundamentalism
Neo-Orthodoxy
Liberalism
The Question of Inerrancy
The Nature of Inspiration
Inspiration and Revelation
Appendix B: The Rogers-McKim Proposal

5. Scripture and the Church
The Problem of the Canon
The Bible over the Church
The Bible Within the Church
The Supreme Authority for Faith
Appendix C: The Apocrypha

6. The Hermeneutical Problem
The Dynamics of Interpretation
Breakthrough into Understanding
The Natural and the Spiritual Sense
Guidelines of the Reformers
Hermeneutical Options Today
Faith and Criticism
Appendix D: Narrative Theology
Appendix E: Hermeneutical Pluralism and Transcendence

7. Rudolf Bultmann: An Enduring Presence
Cultural and Theological Background
Distinctive Emphases
Demythologizing
A New Venture in Hermeneutics
God Hidden and Revealed
Freedom for Obedience
A Neoliberal Theology

8. The Bible and Myth
The Conversion of Myth
Narrative Forms in the Bible
The Bible as Myth and History

9. Truth in Biblical & Philosophical Perspective
Biblical Understandings
Faith’s Encounter with Philosophy
Truth in the Technological Society
Models of Truth
The Current Controversy

Prompted by some recent (but, I think, quite wrong) criticisms of my stance as a conservative Christian who doesn’t accept the belief that the Bible must be seen as inerrant, I’ve been reflecting over the last couple of days on the fact that – as with other doctrines – plenty of evangelicals today assume that since they believe something and so does everyone they associate with, this must be the “orthodox” view, and it must belong to all orthodox Christians in history. Some evangelicals, understandably keen to trace key elements of their own theology back throughout church history, have claimed that their doctrine of inerrancy has uniformly been taught by conservative Christians of all ages.

While there has always been a clear expression of the view that what Scripture teaches is correct, this has certainly not always been seen in terms of the notion of “inerrancy.” After all, the very disagreement that exists between evangelicals who affirm inerrancy and those who do not is a disageement about whether or not the idea that the Bible is authoritative and truthful in what it teaches us should (or need not) give rise to the further claim that the Bible is also inerrant.

Discussions of inerrancy specifically formulated didn’t take place until the modern period, so nobody is going to be able to produce a statement from, say someone in the fifth century saying “I affirm the doctrine of inerrancy.” Certainly, there is plenty of material to quote claiming that the Bible is authoritative and that it contains no false teaching. But here and there over the centuries we do get a window on how some theologians taught about the existence of small errors or inconsistencies in the biblical record, and what to make of them.

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A while back I wrote a blog post pointing out that I don’t hold to an inerrantist view of the Bible. I do not accept that beloved doctrine held by many other evangelicals, biblical inerrancy. It isn’t biblical, it isn’t required, and it is, at times, just implausible.

Bnonn over at Thinking Matters doesn’t think much of the position I expressed. Apparently my comments are “theologically inept” and “culturally prejudiced.” I think Bnonn is simply wrong about this, but do head over to check his post out, where you’ll see my comments on it as well.

Unfortunately he actually oversteps the mark and misrepresents me, saying that I personally believe that the Bible may contain “fraud” or “deceit,” but I realise that it’s hard for those with a strong committment to inerrancy to imagine a Bible that is neither inerrant nor fraudulent and worthless. The fact is, I do not countenance a fraudulent or deceitful Bible. All I postulate is that the message of God was delivered by imperfect people (not fraudsters or liars). It’s nothing shocking, really.

Glenn Peoples

A friend of mine pointed me to this entry over at Michael Spencer’s blog, The Internet Monk. It’s a decent post actually, and I recommend giving it a read. The point that my friend was intrigued by was the exhortation that as we read and interpret the Gospels, “Don’t harmonize the Gospels.”

Don’t harmonize them? Why not? Michael’s reason is fine. He says:

Don’t harmonize the Gospels. That’s like taking four paintings and combining them into one. You come up with something no one painted and no one intended to paint. Let each Gospel author be an artist in his own right. However, a Gospel synopsis, such as those available from UBS, are very useful and important in comparing Gospel texts to one another WITHOUT harmonizing them.

It has long been thought, and rightly so, that each of the four Gospel writers portrayed Jesus differently, and intentionally so. They emphasised a different side of his character, or a different focus of his mission, or a specific angle on his status (e.g. Luke has a clear emphasis on concern for the poor and eschatological reversal of fortunes, and John went out of his way to emphasis the divinity of Christ).

Simply as a matter of respecting what the writers were trying to convey, you should refrain from trying to map one Gospel onto another, blending them to get one picture rather than multiple pictures. But there’s another reason too. This is a subject I’ve been considering broaching for some time, and this question has given me a good platform to do so. Here goes:

The other reason that you shouldn’t harmonize the Gospels is that to do so presupposes a very strong doctrine of inerrancy, and that doctrine is false.

There. I said it. I’m not an inerrantist.
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Bart Ehrman is a slippery type.

Existing near one end of the spectrum on biblical scholarship (where extraordinarily conservative fundamentalism is at one end and unreasonable scepticism for the sake of novelty, notoriety and ratings is at the other – you figure out which end Ehrman is at), Ehrman insists that he’s not out to destroy Christianity. Now, he’s definitely out to deny the resurrection of Jesus, he doesn’t think miracles have ever occurred, he doesn’t even affirm belief in God,  and he thinks that the basic New Testament story about Jesus is false. But he’s not out to destroy Christianity.

How can this be? Like this: He starts out with a view of Scripture that most Christians don’t hold: Inerrancy. Then in the space of a couple of sentence he shifts (without telling the reader) to belief that what the Bible says is true. And then he moves (again without telling the reader) to the view that we should trust the Bible and not God. And since this last view is not a historical Christian view anyway, by attacking all the things I listed earlier, he’s not really attacking Christianity at all.

Here’s what he says. Oh, and because it won’t be obvious to those who are familiar with Ehrman’s work, where he uses the phrase “biblical scholarship,” he’s talking about his own work. Speaking of Christians who think that Christians should believe the teaching of the Bible, he says:

Throughout most of history most Christian thinkers would have been seen this view as theological nonsense. Or blasphemy. The Bible was never to be an object of faith. God through Christ was. Being a Christian meant believing in Christ, not believing in the Bible.

Here are the historical realities. Christianity existed before the Bible came into being: no one decided that our twenty-seven books of the New Testament should be “the” Christian Scripture until three hundred years after the death of the apostles. Since that time Christianity has existed in places where there were no Bibles to be found, where no one could read the Bible, where no one correctly understood the Bible. Yet it has existed. Christianity does not stand or fall with the Bible.

And so, biblical scholarship will not destroy Christianity. It might de-convert people away from a modern form of fundamentalist belief. But that might be a very good thing indeed.

Wow. So teaching people that what the Bible says is false and the Bible is unreliable is fine from a Christian perspective, because we’re supposed to trust God and not the Bible, and the early Christians didn’t have the compiled Bible that we now have?

That really takes the cake. Who, exactly, is saying that we should trust in the Bible instead of God? And while it’s true that the Bible wasn’t compiled for some time, it’s not true that the individual books weren’t written in the first century (even the most zealous of liberal wouldn’t push for later than the mid second century). Even the most liberal of New Testament critics must grant this much in order is to remain within the pale of respectability. It may be sexy and hip to throw out the canard that the Bible represents a much later faith, a faith of the power brokers in church history, that was imposed itself on Christian world, but please Dr Ehrman. To play innocent on grounds like this is frankly making me embarrassed for you.

Glenn Peoples