I’ve suspected the “battle for the Bible” was lost ever sense my Microsoft Word spell-check started suggesting the word “ignorance” every time I type the word “inerrant.”
Texas pastor Bart Barber posts this morning one of the finest, and most charitable, explanations of inerrancy I’ve seen in a long, long time. I suspect he’s right that there’s a sense of “inerrancy fatigue” among some evangelicals, including perhaps some within my Southern Baptist denomination. His response to the theologian-in-residence at the Baptist General Convention of Texas is strong, comprehensive, and merciful.
The outside world won’t hear our inerrant Bibles until we start displaying how corrected we are, personally, by it (I’ll write more on that later).
Barber’s post is a good model of someone who is talking to regular people (those able to cross list arguments and counter-arguments by Barth, Henry, and Lindsell are not who will decide this matter), showing why it matters, and why it doesn’t make one ignorant.
October 26th, 2009 | 12:40 pm | #1
“The outside world won’t hear our inerrant Bibles until we start displaying how corrected we are, personally, by it.”
Great quote, Dr. Moore, thanks for writing.
October 26th, 2009 | 1:34 pm | #2
“The outside world won’t hear our inerrant Bibles until we start displaying how corrected we are, personally, by it.”
Ummm, do you really think so?
I’m thinking that the outside world won’t hear our inerrant Bibles until they are converted. Has anyone, ever (aside from Satan and his chosen 1/3) believed the Bible to be inerrant prior to regeneration?
October 26th, 2009 | 1:37 pm | #3
Actually in the South, I have known quite a few people who believe the Bible is without error and who will argue doctrine for hours who are proudly unsaved. They say that they don’t want to change their lifestyle, but that they know they are going to hell.
I knew some of these folk quite well and have no doubt that they:
1. believed the Bible was totally true.
2. rejected its message.
So there you go . . .
October 26th, 2009 | 1:38 pm | #4
John Mark,
Point taken, however that’s exactly the opposite argument of the original post, no?
October 26th, 2009 | 1:52 pm | #5
Well, I thought the point was that a Bible without errors:
1. matters
2. is not an ignorant position.
It seems that even in my counter-examples, that inerrant Scripture mattered as it still shaped his views. It just did not matter enough.
My friends were in fact not very sophisticated, but not because they believed in an inerrant Bible.
October 26th, 2009 | 2:06 pm | #6
I think my bigget problem with the debate about inerrancy is that it seems to be a red herring. While I believe the Bible is inerrant, I don’t se the point of arguing about it ad nauseum. As Christians we want people to be converted to Christ and His ways. While there is a lot be lost when Christians regard the Bible as full of myths and half-truths, not much is to be gained in the debates about inerrancy (and by that I mean the highly technical debates that most people cannot understand). Also, those who fight for inerrancy (in the extreme sense) are usually those who have a very low view of the Church. I think that says something. Since they do not believe what the Bible says about the Church (that it’s the pillar and foundation of the truth), then they have to put all of their eggs in the basket of inerrancy.
October 26th, 2009 | 2:32 pm | #7
I second the recomendation of Akin’s piece. I’ve read through point #5 and find it so far to be quite excellent.
I did find one factual mistake, though. He says that the Bible couldn’t comment on textual issues, because there wouldn’t have been any textual issues yet when it was written. This assumes it was all written at once. There were different manuscript traditions and translations into other languages (with the LXX Greek especially available) when the NT was written, although I suspect most Jews and Christians didn’t have access to anything but one text, which makes it unlikely to have been a problem enough for it to be discussed. But it’s simply not true that there weren’t manuscript differences at that time, so there were manuscript problems even if no one was talking about them.
Orthodoxdj, I don’t think very many of the inerrancy debates are attempts to prove to nonbelievers that the Bible is inerrant. They’re attempts to get other Christians to have a correct view of scripture. Your argument assumes the only reason to discuss inerrancy is to try to use it to evangelize.
October 26th, 2009 | 3:34 pm | #8
John Mark,
Upon further review…the play has been reversed. I see your point, grant your point, and acknowledge that I missed said point.
October 26th, 2009 | 4:14 pm | #9
Jeremy,
I understand that there are many reasons one might have for arguing for inerrancy. The problem, as I see it, is that many argue for inerrancy as if losing the debate means utter disaster. I really do believe it’s a red herring in that the debate often takes Christians away from uniting around the bigger reality that the Bible is authoritative and very important in the life of the believer and the life of the Church. Many of the debates about inerrancy ending up unnecessarily dividing Christians from each other.
Also, nonsensical debates get thrown in, such as the debate about the days of Genesis. Some argue that if one holds to an Old Earth position, then one does not believe in inerrancy. It gets to be ridiculous. Again, these debates seem to have no regard for the life and authority of the Church.
October 26th, 2009 | 4:41 pm | #10
“Some argue that if one holds to an Old Earth position, then one does not believe in inerrancy.”
And yet…and yet, when people make those claims, and others, the demonstrate one of two things. Either a disbelief in inerrancy, contra their claims, or a deficient view of Scriptural authority.
October 26th, 2009 | 4:43 pm | #11
Or they mistake how to interpret the Bible versus the nature of the Bible.
October 26th, 2009 | 6:42 pm | #12
“Thou shall not murder” (Conservative Evangelical) or Thou shall not kill (Roman Catholic) — who is reading from an erroneous Bible? And what of the original source material, written in ancient Hebrew?
“Should Judaism’s sixth declaration be rendered as “Thou shalt not kill” as in the popular KJV translation, or as “Thou shalt not murder,” which is a bit closer to the connotations of the original Hebrew though still not entirely accurate?”
Three traditions. Three different readings. Inerrancy you ask? Find me an Evangelical who studied the Old Testament in a synagogue and I’ll show you an Evangelical who *truly* respects inerrancy.
October 26th, 2009 | 6:49 pm | #13
Eh? Why would modern synagogues automatically be the best places to understand ancient Hebrew sources?
October 26th, 2009 | 8:33 pm | #14
Jugulum,
The Rabbinical tradition of teaching Judaism (Old Testament history) occurs in the Synagogue. Each Torah is an exact character for character copy of the original, handed down from Moses. It has not been translated and re-translated from Greek to Latin to English. Furthermore, the spoken wisdom of Moses – transmitted only by oral tradition – is only taught by Rabbis. The Christians of the Council of Nicaea, however, edited the Torah to suit their needs.
Consequently, to learn the true and unadulterated word of God (pre-Christ), a Christian dedicated to inerrancy must learn it as Moses received it.
October 26th, 2009 | 10:11 pm | #15
What?
1.) The strong reliability of the Masoretic copying process means we have good Hebrew manuscripts. That’s it. Synagogues don’t have better access to the manuscripts than the rest of us. I asked you about understanding them.
2.) Our English translations of the Bible are not made from Latin. They’re not re-translations. They’re made from Greek manuscripts, ultimately copied from the originals. (Just like how all current manuscripts of the Torah are ultimately copies of the originals.)
3.) Please, be very specific about how the Christians at the Council of Nicaea edited the Torah. Did they edit Hebrew manuscripts? Did they edit manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint?
Who told you?
Now, I asked you, “Why would modern synagogues automatically be the best places to understand ancient Hebrew sources?”
The only thing you said that would answer my question is this:
“Furthermore, the spoken wisdom of Moses – transmitted only by oral tradition – is only taught by Rabbis.”
Faced with a modern Rabbi who claims, “Oh yes, what I’m about to tell you has been secretly passed down for 2000 years,” I’m going to say, “That’s nice, but I have no confidence that you’re right, even if you very sincerely think that’s where your teachings come from.”
2,000 years of oral transmission is not particularly reliable. And that’s even assuming you manage to pick the right Hebrew tradition.
October 27th, 2009 | 9:04 am | #16
The Old Earth thing isn’t a result of making inerrancy an issue. It’s a result of some people taking inerrancy to be something other than what it is. Just because some people misunderstand inerrancy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about it.
Some people misunderstand love and think love requires never disciplining or punishing people (or, on the other extreme, that it means abusing those you love in the name of discipline or punishment). Does that mean we shouldn’t be concerned about love?
October 27th, 2009 | 3:03 pm | #17
If I say Job was not an historical person am I violating the concept of inerrancy?
October 28th, 2009 | 9:28 am | #18
Yes.
October 28th, 2009 | 9:57 am | #19
I happen to think Job was a historical person, and I happen to think the book of Job presents the information in a way that should make us think exactly that. But the question asked isn’t whether Job was a historical person but whether someone denies inerrancy by denying his historicity.
The answer to that depends on how you do it. If you do it by saying that the book assumes Job’s historical reality but that you disagree, then you are. If you do it by saying that the book doesn’t assume his historical reality because it’s a literary work telling a story with fictional characters to illustrate a theological point (as Jesus unmistakably does in his parables), then you aren’t denying inerrancy. I’d say you’ve gotten the book wrong, but it’s not inerrancy that you’ve denied. It’s the historical character of that particular book that you’ve denied.
There was a major discussion of this recently among a number of Christian blogs. My contribution to the discussion was Longman, Literalism, and Genesis (and an earlier treatment was The Broadness of Inerrancy). You can follow the links from the former to some of the other posts by those with different views.
By Daryl’s standard, there’s no easy way to rule out the view that you deny inerrancy by denying the historical personage of the Lazarus in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus and Abraham’s bosom.
October 28th, 2009 | 11:08 am | #20
Jeremy,
You may be right. But I would argue that Jesus use of Lazarus is more historically ambiguous than Job.
My point was that at some point we really do need to listen to what people say about specifics in the Bible in order to determine whether or not they believe in Biblical inerrancy.
Justs saying “Do you believe the Bible is inerrant” isn’t enough, especially if the person asked believes that you’ll take their views more seriously if they say “yes”.
This is why I believe that people who hold to theistic evolution, or day-age or some other billion year old view of creation, other than a 6 24 hour day creation, do not really hold to inerrancy.
Perhaps I should have answered that question, “No, but you’d have be inconsistent in your claims of inerrancy to say that Job wasn’t a real guy.”
October 28th, 2009 | 11:43 am | #21
Daryl,
But if Job had been written with a Hebrew equivalent of “once upon a time”, it wouldn’t be violating inerrancy, right?
If someone’s arguing that the text itself shows that it belongs in the fable genre, then they aren’t violating inerrancy.
Of course, the weaker their arguments are, the more likely it is that they’re paying lip-service to inerrancy while demonstrating a willingness to re-interpret at the drop of a hat. Which is different from explicitly denying inerrancy, but not very far.
October 28th, 2009 | 1:56 pm | #22
Jug,
Exactly. Which is why I backed of (just a little) in response to Jeremy.
It seems plain to me that Job is written in a factual, historical fashion. I’m not saying that another argument couldn’t legitimately be advanced towards it’s being myth. But to just say, as I think is more common “Well he can’t be a real guy” is a different sort of thing.
I suppose the proof is in the pudding. If someone says “Job’s a storybook character” and that’s their only deviation from accepting Scripture at face value, then fine.
But who does that? Who denies Job’s historicity (without advancing another explanation from the text itself) and nothing else. Further, who denies a literal global flood and nothing else, or who denies Paul’s authorship of books that start with “Paul, an apostle…” and nothing else.
Precious few, it seems to me, because errancy, in any form, has ramifications.
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