What Benefit is an Errant Bible to the Church?

Introduction

There is nothing better than a good conspiracy theory. At 4:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s voice crackled from the speakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston. He said simply, “the Eagle has landed.”[1] On Monday July 21, 1969, the Washington Post ran the front-page headline of ‘“The Eagle Has Landed’ – Two Men Walk on the Moon,”[2] but in the almost fifty years since that time, there have been various conspiracy theories that it was just an elaborate ruse to make the people of the world believe that American had won the great space race. In fact, “In 2001, an hour-long special aired on Fox that questioned whether the moon landings were fake. Fox News has hosted a moon-landing conspiracist at least twice since that year. Not to be outdone, CNN covered Bart Sibrel, the same conspiracy theorist who produced the Fox documentary, in an online story in 2009, as well as NASA’s response to the Fox documentary in 2001.”[3] There is definitely no shortage of conspiracy theories. People are always looking for Big Foot, Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, Area 51 in Roswell, how many people were involved in the shooting of JFK, 911, and every Easter and Christmas, one can expect a story in all the major magazines about how the Jesus of Christianity is a hoax. There almost always seems to be the accusation that those in power are covering something up.

Far too often, this same type of angle is taken by those who do not ascribe to the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. They tend to argue that those who hold to inerrancy, do so only to maintain control and power. There is common thread that runs through most of the errantist’s works, which is that they are being ostracized by those in power. In the mind of many, “the divisions within evangelicalism would be solved if the whole notion of inerrancy, regardless of how it is defined, was discarded.”[4] More pointedly, Bovell proclaims that, “the principle reason for this is that inerrancy works on an ideological level to effectively shield inerrantists from seeing the kind of Bible God has given.”[5] The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the “errantists” tend to engage in the wrong discussion about the truthfulness and exegesis of the text; they tend to operate from a perceived understanding of what the doctrine of inerrancy really is; and ultimately, offer little by way of solutions to the problems they see. Unfortunately, they offer far more heat than light to the conversation, although the “inerrantists” are certainly not without fault in the debate.

Engaged in the Wrong Discussion

Peter Enns and Westminster Theological Seminary parted ways in 2008 over Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. In 2013, Enns was a contributor to Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy where he was set against R. Albert Mohler Jr., who was defending the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The one glaring aspect that stood out in Enns’ article and his response to Mohler was that there must have still been some unresolved or resentment towards anyone who holds to an inerrant position. As one reads his article, it is easy to find oneself reading faster than one would normally and there is a sense of anger in the writing. A similar attitude can be picked up as one reads Bovell’s Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear, although the writing does not express anger, but hurt. It seems that the argument is against the “ill-advised inerrantist zealotry”[6] as Yarbough calls it, instead of the doctrine itself. There is not so much an aversion to inerrancy as a concept, as long as it is not defined in the way that the Chicago Statement or the way that Warfield and Hodge define it. It is interesting to observe that there seems to be a desire by the errantists to be accepted by the people that they so strongly attack.

There is a serious lack of biblical content in much of errantist argumentation, it tends to focus on critical scholarship and a hermeneutic that corresponds with their ideology. Houtz appeals to 1 Clement 25 and Clement’s insufficient understanding that the Phoenix was a mythical creature when he drew an analogy between the Phoenix and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but he states that he uses Clement rather than the Scripture so that he can avoid Bible bickering. If the online article is named “Inerrancy denies that the Bible contains scientific error”[7] then to be logically honest, the biblical text should be dealt with. It unfortunately ends up being a red herring, much like “when proponents of inerrancy defend their view with too much haste and bluster and not enough substance, it gives the credence to proposals that Scripture errs after all.”[8] Lastly, Enns accuses inerrantists of intellectual dishonesty in their approach to how they interpret the Scriptures. In his handling of the Jericho story, he states that the “line of argument is common rhetorical strategy among inerrantists” when they suggest that erosion could be a possible reason why the walls are undetected[9]

Misunderstanding the Doctrine of Inerrancy

Sexton makes an insightful observation regarding the two sides of the debate. He stresses that “before any forward progress can take place, some consensus on terms must be located. Along with this, a serious attempt at a comprehensive understanding of the history of this debate, replete with all the arguments set forth, needs to be made and is due to the evangelical community.”[10] He adds that “there seems to be little consensus that each understands the other’s positions.”[11] These insights are extremely important because there is a lot of talking past one another. Some inerrantists make inerrancy a litmus test for who is in and who is out, which upsets many errantists, since there is this apparent desire to be accepted by those who reject them. Contrary to how it is often presented, the Chicago Statement never claims to be a litmus nor does it seek to be given creedal weight and the framers explicitly state that they “invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself.”[12] D. A. Carson makes the point that “if you try to make inerrancy the scalpel by which you judge all matters, then it seems to me you’re asking too much of it. In my view, a rich and sophisticated doctrine of inerrancy is part of biblical fidelity. It’s bound up with the way Jesus saw Scripture.”[13]

Boone provides two common objections to the doctrine. The first one is “that the doctrine does us no good since we do not have that to which inerrancy is ascribed, namely the autographs… [the second] is that it makes too many distinctions and qualifications to be a meaningful doctrine.”[14] He states that both objections are misunderstandings of the doctrine. Poythress adds that,

Anti-inerrantists regularly accuse inerrantists of having a simplistic view of divine revelation. Supposedly, inerrantists leave out the illuminating work of the Spirit or the centrality of the Son in revelation. These accusations tend to be unfair. They do not notice the difference between an inerrantist who actually denies illumination or the centrality of the Son and an inerrantist who fails to mention these elements because he is focusing on the question at hand – namely, inerrancy itself.[15]

Correspondence or Accommodation?

            The question is how did God inspire Scripture? Did he just reveal the truth of how things really are, which would be that truth as revealed in the Scripture corresponds to how things really are in life? Or did he accommodate the Scriptures to line up with what people already believed? It is evident, based on their arguments, that errantists follow the latter and inerrantists the former. Bovell states, “the concern I have about the Chicago Statement’s emphasis on ‘God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only’ has to do with the way it emboldens students to uncritically presuppose a simplified, unified ‘how things are’ mentality while reading biblical narratives, dialectically reinforcing a metaphysical expectation for a ‘how things are’ correspondence.”[16] This begs the question, should one seek to presuppose how things are not? Blomberg’s assessment of Bovell’s concern is that he “leaves a door open for some new form of inerrancy but resists current formulations, especially the Chicago Statement. He sees it as too tied to a propositional view of revelation and to a correspondence theory of truth.”[17]

Kurka, on the other hand, believes that “capitulating on a high view of Scripture would be a denial of historical Christianity…however, it has become necessary to seriously examine whether this choice term of theological conservatives is adequate in explaining our scholarly endeavors to a twenty-first-century, multicultural world.”[18] One is left to wonder if this position is succumbing to current culture in order to be accepted in academia, since he adds that,

the term ‘inerrancy’ has become unusable because it creates a pseudo-conflict, giving the impression that historic evangelical notions of the inspiration, authority, and truthfulness of Scripture are in jeopardy…ironically, this comes at a time when conservative biblical and theological scholarship is beginning to take a front seat in the academy. It seems tragic, if not ludicrous for Protestant ‘comrades in arms’ to forfeit this opportune moment due to a term that communicates something both sides find simplistic and unscholarly.[19]

 

It certainly seems that the goal is to be accepted by the academic community rather than hold to a view that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. Is it possible that a high view of Scripture has already been capitulated? History has shown this to be true, Joseph Butler, not long after John Locke gives his classic statement regarding the elevation of reason over the Scripture, wrote, “let reason be kept to: and if any part of the Scripture account of the redemption of the world by Christ can be shown to be really contrary to it, let the Scripture, in the name of God, be given up.”[20] Moorhead adds that “Schleiermacher’s goal was to save Christianity by making it palatable to the rational man. he posits that Christianity is misunderstood – it is not about knowledge and doctrine of the Bible, but about human experience, feeling, and intuition.”[21] Unfortunately, these emphases are not far off from the current understanding of the errantists. Consequently, one is forced to question whether, man is still trying to set himself up as the arbiter of truth rather than God.

No Workable Solutions

            In the process of academic engagement, it is necessary to not only criticize the doctrines with which one disagrees, but it is also necessary to offer suggestions of what concept or doctrine could or should replace it. A key aspect of offering a replacement is to show how the replacement will work practically in place of the unfavorable doctrine. It is in this area where there is a vacuum of sorts. Bovell recommends a hermeneutical model, but just how this hermeneutical model would sufficiently replace inerrancy is fuzzy at best. What he ends up doing is supporting the Speech Act theory that Kevin Vanhoozer espouses. Blomberg observes that Bovell “suspects progress could be made if one followed Kevin Vanhoozer’s appropriation of speech-act theory, identifying the locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions of the various literary genres of Scripture. The locution is the meaning of an utterance within its context; its illocution is what it intends or accomplishes by its being spoken; and its perlocution is the way it is received and the results or effects that reception creates.”[22] All Vanhoozer is doing is applying the terminology from John Austin and integrating them into a process of interpreting the Scriptures. It is creative and attractive to students in today’s postmodern/post Christian environment, but it is not so different from the process laid out in the Chicago Statements on Biblical Inerrancy and Hermeneutics. Sexton offers a critical assessment of what he titles “Carlos Bovell’s Disgruntled Approach” where he observes that,

he clearly wishes to influence them [younger evangelicals] away from inerrancy. But while he does this, he provides no alternatives for them beyond a footless polemic against evangelical teachers, scholars, and inerrancy. Accordingly, he leaves readers in the same position he claims inerrancy left him. His interaction with nonevangelicals is good and substantial, but he never permits evangelical scholars to answer his concerns. Although his view of an evangelical is inseparably linked to CSBI, he shows no real knowledge of the document or its contemporary relevance within the evangelical community. He is therefore too sweepingly dismissive and not as sensitively constructive and thoughtfully creative as he purports to be. He paints evangelicals as unwilling to recognize problems with doctrines like inerrancy, but this simply does not represent reality.[23] (emphasis mine)

 

One final mention of Bovell’s attitude towards inerrants before moving on to other’s suggested alternatives is that he believes “that reconciliation appears to be the primary religious value of those who devote their lives to the establishment and maintenance of peace and social justice…[whereas] the quintessential theological habits of fundamentalist and evangelical inerrantistism are fundamentally at odds with a spirit of reconciliation.”[24] As an conservative evangelical, who holds to the doctrine of inerrancy, I am not sure how the two groups (fundamentalists and evangelical conservatives) can be lumped together since the two terms are not synonymous.

Peter Enns, on the other hand, simply believes that those who hold to the doctrine of inerrancy are just logically and intellectually dishonest in the understanding of the Scriptures and they do so not to lose their position of power. Enns, commenting on inerrancy and inerrantists states that,

Though intended to protect the Bible, inerrancy actually sells it short by placing on it expectations it is not designed to bear – as evidenced by the need for generations of continued publications and debates to defend it…inerrancy sells God short…The premise that such an inerrant Bible is the only kind of book God would be able to produce, or the only effective means of divine communication, strike me as assuming that God shares our modern interest in accuracy and scientific precision, rather than allowing the phenomena of Scripture to shape our theological expressions…the CSBI, when given prescriptive force, it obstructs the kind of critical dialogue clearly surfacing within evangelicalism, and therefore threatens to neutralize self-criticism, a necessary quality of any healthy intellectual pursuit. At such times, evangelicalism appears intellectually dishonest, thus forfeiting intellectual witness to our culture and creating spiritual stumbling blocks for its own members…To the minds of many, maintaining inerrancy requires that perennially nagging counterevidence from inside and outside of the Bible must be adjusted to support that premise rather than allowing that evidence to call the premise into question.[25]

 

That is a lengthy quote but it is Enns position in a nutshell. He offers no substitute, only that inerrancy must be done away with so that we can grapple with the God of the Bible. We need to realize that the God of the Bible is so powerful that he can overrule ancient human error and ignorance and that we need not fear modern historical criticism.[26]

Another option is the idea of divine spiration offered by A. T. B. McGowan, which spiration “already refers to the mode of the Spirit’s procession within the Trinity. Using it also with reference to the Spirit’s work in producing Scripture would be confusing.”[27]  McGowan likes to think that the concept of inerrancy started with Hodge and Warfield, but history demonstrates that to be an erroneous position. “Dr. McGowan proposes changes to the theological locus of Scripture, offers suggestions about the terminology used to characterize Scripture theologically, reconsiders the doctrine of Scripture, and also proposes changes in the use of Church’s confession, and in preaching. In McGowan’s view, a ‘high’ view of Scripture is consistent with an errant autographic text.”[28] It appears that in McGowan’s view, everything that has happened over the last two thousand years of church history has been wrong, needs to be scrapped, and we must start over using his methods. One is left to wonder if he has any relation to Joseph Smith or Charles Taze Russell. On a final note, Gunter writing on behalf the Wesleyans states, “it is soteriological sufficiency and not factual inerrancy that lies at the heart of Scripture’s authority for Wesleyans…[therefore], we should leave behind the fractious ‘Bible Wars’ that disrupt our evangelical churches.”[29]

Conclusion

            Trying to understand the position of the errantists is difficult because, while they are passionate for their cause, they lacking unity in what they are trying to accomplish. It is easy to recognize what they are trying to accomplish, namely, to be true to the Scriptures in a way that incorporates scientific and historical studies within the larger academic scope, not just Christian universities and seminaries. It is a search for credibility, but cost is the great. They lose positions within the evangelical community or even prestigious positions like Enns with WTS. Should the biblical community seek the acceptance of the secular? Is Tertullian correct? What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The Christian faith is an intellectual, reasonable faith. Many great scholars have been produced because of Christianity, but were they trained to just accept that God word is filled with errors? If so, the fields of apologetics and textual criticism, in particular, would be pointless. It is my position that three things need to happen to at least have God-honoring debates about the issues. First, the errantists need to worry more about defending their position than attacking their critics regardless of how they are treated, let their evidence for their belief be their defense. Likewise, inerrantists need to learn to be graceful in their conversations with those who hold opposite beliefs. Secondly, errantists need to attempt to understand the CSBI as it is written, not by what they believe it to be saying. And finally, they need to offer workable substitutions in place of inerrancy, if they want to do away with the term. Almost every article and book examined for this paper resulted in a lot of noise being made about inerrancy, but nothing substantial given as an alternative. Personally, I find it extremely difficult to see the benefit of an errant Bible, but I may just be a simple guy, who believes that God can do whatever he wants. Even if it means that a donkey can talk or a large fish can be raised up to swallow a man.

 

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-eagle-has-landed/ accessed on Feb. 28, 2018)

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/07/apollo.pdf?tid=a_mcntx (accessed on Feb. 28, 2018)

[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/in-a-tweet-fox-news-seems-to-question-the-moon-landing/546431/ (accessed on Feb. 28, 2018)

[4] Swanson, Dennis M. 2015. “Inerrancy and the local church what does the debate mean to the people in the pews?.” The Master’s Seminary Journal 26, no. 1: 47-58. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost(accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 48

[5] Bovell, Carlos R. Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2012. p. i. The “this” in this quote pertains to the idea that critical scholars understand what the Bible is in ways that inerrantists programmatically cannot, at least in the view of a small, growing segment of evangelical students that are socially rooted in in inerrantism but not necessarily academically committed to it.

[6]Yarbrough, Robert W. 2011. “Inerrancy’s complexities: grounds for grace in the debate.” Presbyterion 37, no. 2: 85-100. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 93

[7] https://postbarthian.com/2016/11/02/the-errors-of-inerrancy-4-inerrancy-denies-that-the-bible-contains-scientific-errors/ (accessed on Feb. 27, 2018)

[8] Yarbough, 2011. 94

[9] Merrick, J. and Stephen M. Garrett, Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013. p. 95

[10] Sexton, Jason S. 2009. “How Far Beyond Chicago?: Assessing Recent Attempts to Reframe the Inerrancy Debate.” Themelios 34, no. 1: 26-49. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 31

[11] Ibid. 31.

[12] Beale, G. K. The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority. Wheaton: Crossway Books. 2008. Ebook. Loc 5957 of 6410

[13]Carson, Donald A, John M Frame, and Ben III Witherington. 2014. “Plenary discussion on biblical inerrancy.” Journal Of The Evangelical Theological Society 57, no. 1: 41-62. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 48

[14]Boone, Mark J. 2016. “Ancient-Future Hermeneutics: Postmodernism, Biblical Inerrancy, and the Rule of Faith.” Criswell Theological Review 14, no. 1: 35-52. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost(accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 40

[15] Poythress, Vern S. 2017. “Inerrancy and the Trinity: New Testament perspectives–John 17:6-8 as a window into divine communication in language.” Presbyterion 43, no. 1: 16-29. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 21

[16] Bovell. 2012. 53

[17] Blomberg, Craig L. Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. 2014. p. 136.

[18]Kurka, Robert C. 2015. “Has ‘Inerrancy’ Outlived Its Usefulness?.” Stone-Campbell Journal 18, no. 2: 187-204. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 188

[19] Ibid.

[20] Moorhead, Jonathan. 2016. “Inerrancy and Church History: Is Inerrancy a Modern Invention?.” The Master’s Seminary Journal 27, no. 1: 75-90. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost(accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 86

[21] Ibid. 87

[22] Blomberg. 2014. 136

[23] Sexton, 2009. 35

[24] Bovell. 2012. 1

[25] Merrick, 2013. 84-85

[26] Ibid. 91

[27] Scott, James W. 2009. “Reconsidering inerrancy: a response to A.T.B. McGowan’s The divine authenticity of Scripture.” The Westminster Theological Journal 71, no. 1: 185-209. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 188

[28] Helm, Paul. 2010. “B. B. Warfield’s path to inerrancy: an attempt to correct some serious misunderstandings.” The Westminster Theological Journal 72, no. 1: 23-42. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost(accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 24

[29] Gunter, W Stephen. 2011. “Beyond the Bible wars: why inerrancy is not the issue for evangelical Wesleyans.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 46, no. 2: 56-69. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost(accessed Jan. 22, 2018). 69