Many Christians today speak of inerrancy as
though it referred to a uniform understanding of Scripture as without
error in every proposition or assumption it makes.
In
fact, as there are two main schools of errancy (classical and
contemporary or neo-errancy), there are also two main schools of
thought concerning inerrancy (classical and fundamentalist). There are actually other views of inerrancy, but these are the views held by the bulk of evangelicals.
There are, of course, multiple variations within those schools, but
they share enough similarities to be classified together. What is
interesting to note about this is that the two extremes of
fundamentalist inerrancy and neo-errancy are the two options that seem
to be gaining more ground in our day, and yet, are later concepts that
have less attestation within Church History. They also both appear to
argue against one another as though they were the only representations
of errancy or inerrancy that exist. In other words, for both groups,
there exists only errancy and inerrancy of the extreme varieties. There
is nothing in between (or rather, there are no other positions with
integrity that claim those titles). Although I think the classical view
of errancy in terms of its definitions for error is faulty from a
linguistic and literary standpoint, it is irresponsible for
neo-errantists to use their arguments in favor of neo-errancy without
noting that one can hold to those arguments without adopting the
neo-errantist position (we’ll discuss this more later). But my main
concern in this book is to flesh out the classical form of inerrancy, as
it is the least considered option by those who want to make an
“all-or-nothing” definition of inerrancy for whatever reason one might
have to do so. I will seek to do this by laying down the following
corrections to misunderstandings one encounters when others often
articulate the doctrine.
The
first false idea one must put to rest when considering the idea of
inerrancy is that inspiration and inerrancy has to do both with the
human authors and the text those authors have written. This brings us to
our first affirmation of the doctrine: The classical formation of inerrancy believes the human authors to be neither inspired nor inerrant. The Scripture states that “all Scripture is God-breathed [i.e., inspired],” not all authors of
Scripture. Inspiration is God forming the text through the author to
where the text speaks the message God wishes to convey accurately,
rather than divine knowledge placed within the author himself (as though
the author were given omniscience in order to produce a text that
evidenced omniscience in everything that it said). Instead, we have a
text that gives us sufficient truth (which is the only kind of divine
truth we can handle) in terms of what it asserts, i.e., what it is
attempting to actually teach us.
This
is an important point, since much of what is considered to be corrosive
to the doctrine of inerrancy has to do with the possible or probable
assumptions of the author rather than the point the text itself is
teaching. I am defending the idea here explained well in Michael
Horton’s summary of the Princeton formulation of inerrancy, as it was
put forth by Hodge and Warfield, that the text is inerrant, not the
authors of those texts.
Because
it is the communication that is inspired rather than the persons
themselves, we should not imagine that the authors were omniscient or
infallible. In fact, the authors themselves seem conscious enough of
their limitations. “The record itself furnishes evidence that the
writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources
and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge
and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even
wrong.” Yet Scripture is seen to be inerrant “when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs[1] and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.[2]
Hence, the mistaken views of the authors, whether they are historical, cosmological, mythological,[3]
etc. cannot be attributed to the text itself, unless it is the purpose
of that text to teach those assumptions to its audience. It is my
contention that nowhere do we find these assumptions as being taught as
opposed to simply existing as a part of the author’s language, i.e.,
merely supporting what is taught.
This
is an important distinction to be made, as the personal beliefs of the
author may, in fact, be flawed in all sorts of things—he is, after all,
likely to err—but the message that is communicated, a message that
evangelicals see as both divine and human, itself is without error.
This brings us to the second consideration to be considered: The
inerrancy of the message purifies the concepts that may otherwise be in
error by virtue of its being used as language to communicate that
message. In other words, if the intent is to communicate Message Y
using Assumption X, then the truth or falsity of Assumption X is
irrelevant as the means to communicate Message Y, and does not reflect
the truth or falsity of Message Y itself. Hence, Assumption X’s
existence within the text serves as language to convey truth, not to
communicate the truth or falsity of Assumption X. In other words the
words and concepts that are employed to present the message are not
making separate truth claims by themselves. They, as the package in
which the message comes, are serving as language to present the message
to the audience that is familiar with those words and concepts. To
separate them out and evaluate them as individual truth claims in and of
themselves is to be overly analytical of language to the point of
missing the very purpose of that language to begin with. One might call
this an example of an adventure in missing the point par excellence,
as it confuses the point being made with the elements of communication
used to make it. To put it another way, I would like to illustrate with a
story with which we are all familiar.
Imagine
that a mother sits down beside the bed of her children at night to read
them the story of “The Three Little Pigs.” She begins to read the story
and suddenly her children begin to object. “Wait a minute,” they say,
“Pigs don’t talk, and they certainly do not build houses in the manner
this story describes. This story is completely erroneous.” The mother
responds by saying, “Just listen.” She continues to describe the wolf,
and again, the children object, “Why are you reading this to us? This
story is false. Wolves do not blow down houses, and again, they do not
talk. There is no reason to pay attention to this story anymore.” “Oh,
but there is,” the mother replies. “You see, Children, the story isn’t
about talking animals and their construction projects. It’s trying to
teach us about life, and that the things we do in our lives ought to be
things that last eternally, enduring things that are worth building. The
wolf only represents tragedy and death. The pigs represent people who
spend their time building things that have no value in the day of death
and judgment and those who spend their time building things that do. So
you see, My Little Ones, this is a story about life, and a true story at
that.” The children, too caught up in the technical factuality of the
language used to convey the message, however, cannot get past it. They
ask their mother to not read it to them anymore, as they feel that she
is deceiving them. The story is rejected, and the message along with it
is lost.
This
story illustrates the importance of distinguishing between language and
the content that language seeks to communicate/assert as a truth. This
is not merely an arbitrary distinction. If the Scripture is truly both
divine and human, then the intent of the divine and human author meets
at the message of the text, not necessarily at the language utilized to
convey that message, since it could be argued that God Himself has no
language to begin with (and even if He did, it would not be same as the
human author’s language). That does not mean that God did not inspire
the language used, in terms of moving the author to use language that
would accurately convey the message, but that both the divine and human
goal are clearly seen in the purposed message that the language
communicates. Hence, it is possible to convey the same message in a
variety of ways within Scripture and throughout its textual and
translational witness that transmit the message. Inspiration and
inerrancy governs the language only in so far as it accurately
communicates the message, not in terms of perfecting the language
itself. Hence, grammatical, syntactical, conceptual errors can be made
by the human author, but since the message is conveyed accurately, it would be false to say that the text
is in error. To put it more bluntly, the Bible is filled with inerrant
messages that are conveyed through errant language and the conceptual
world that language assumes, but this has nothing to do with whether the
message, and hence the text itself, is errant or inerrant. It is simply
another question to ask altogether when one inquires as to whether the
Scripture is errant because the author uses human language to
communicate divinely directed truths. This isn’t a matter of splitting
hairs. It is a matter of understanding context. To fault a message for
the language used to communicate that message is a fallacy that ignores
context and assigns intent to every constituent part of the presentation
of that idea. Like the child that gets hung up on whether pigs can
really talk, the individual is simply pursuing an adventure in missing
the point.
This brings us to a third qualification: The
idea that the message must be evaluated distinctly from the language
used to convey it does not mean that what might be considered as an
erroneous concept, if taken as an individual assertion apart from the
text, is also an error within the text when it is not meant as the point
of said text.. In other words, as we have seen in the story of the
“Three Little Pigs,” if a text intended to teach an erroneous idea, then
the text would be in error; but if a text merely uses an idea as a part
of its language, whether the author mistakenly believes this idea to be
true or not, the idea cannot be said to be in error. It is simply a
category error itself to read literature this way. A picture does not
contain truth or error in its presentation, but may in its intended
message. The two must, therefore, be separated.
One
might argue that to teach one’s child that the sun moves around the
earth is to teach an error, but it would be absurd to argue that to use
language that assumes the idea that the sun goes around the earth, as in
the phrase, “What a beautiful sunrise,” is to communicate an erroneous
idea. It, in fact, does no such thing, even if I were to believe that
the sun does move around the earth. This is because the idea has now
become a part of the larger linguistic picture I am presenting – a
picture that communicates something other than the movement of the sun.
Here,
again, context rules our understanding of what is to be considered an
error. The language cannot be in error as long as it communicates the
idea it is employed to communicate. Confusion between the language and
the idea it intends to communicate leads one to claim that the language
itself is in error, and as such, claims an absurdity akin to saying that
apples talk funny. Talking does not apply to apples, and as such, one
cannot comment upon how they talk. In the same way, language cannot be
errant or inerrant. It’s simply language. What it communicates can be
errant or inerrant, but language itself is neutral in this regard.
Language used is only in error when it fails to use concepts that would
present its point accurately, but this would be a communication error,
not a factual one. As long as it presents the idea correctly, it cannot
be said to be in error, even if the individual concepts used to express
the message are not factually correct in and of themselves (i.e., if
they were somehow dissected and evaluated separately from the context in
which they are used).
The problem is that within Enlightenment realism, every statement is evaluated for its truthfulness separately.[4]
Hence, biblical statements are divided up as though they were each
separate propositions unto themselves. This is much like separating each
detail of a painting and asking whether the detail corresponds to the
object the painting portrays. This might be valid if the literary
painting of Scripture were always attempting to portray every detail as a
fact, as thought it were the painted version of a photograph, but that
is far from the intent of a painting that seeks to mold details of the
object depicted in an effort to communicate a message through it. The
details simply contribute to a larger picture, and it is the intention
of the message that picture creates which seeks to make a truth claim,
the details simply serve as contributions to the larger picture, and are
not separate truth claims unto themselves. Hence, it is the erroneous
methodology that would dissect each statement, or even assumption, made
by an author in order to evaluate its individual truthfulness that
causes the interpreter of our age to falter in his or her attempt to
understand the doctrine of inerrancy. Let me give an illustration to
serve this point.
My two year old son
watches a show called Dino Dan. The show is essentially concerned with
teaching kids certain theories about dinosaurs. However, in the show,
Dan, the main character, who is a young kid, goes around correcting
everyone of the minutia of their statements about dinosaurs, even when
it was not the intended message the individual was trying to convey. For
instance, in one episode, the child’s mother refers to Pterodactyls as
dinosaurs when pointing out that one is flying around in the house.
Instead of receiving his mother’s point, a point that had nothing to do
with classifying the animals correctly, the boy, while ignoring her
point, proceeded to correct her that Pterodactyls were actually
Pterosaurs, not dinosaurs. Of course, in the show, everyone concedes to
Dan that they’re all idiots and humbly submits to the rebuke of his
superior knowledge. In the real world, however, people would be highly
annoyed, not simply because their ego was hurt by being wrong in a
particular assumption they made or detail they got wrong, but because
their point was ignored by the person to whom he or she was speaking in
favor of his or her correcting a detail, a detail that did not need to
be corrected in order to understand the point being made.
The
very reason we are often annoyed at such correction is that it serves
to frustrate rather than clarify the point that is being made. In
essence, it is a correction that is beside the point rather than
pertaining to it. In other words, instead of clarifying the point, it
sidetracks, muddies the waters, and creates a red herring that rudely
ignores what the speaker is really trying to say. A correction that
pertains to inaccurate language (i.e., language that fails to
communicate its point to its intended audience, primarily the original
audience) would be welcome, but this is not the type of correction that
is often employed by errantists in the evaluation of the biblical texts.
Instead, a worthless dissection of every constituent part of the
linguistic picture that Scripture presents, where each statement or
assumption is evaluated separately for its own truthfulness, can only
yield a doctrine of errancy, precisely, because all communication
(including our own) uses imagery, cultural assumptions, and idioms that
may not be factually correct if evaluated separately, but serve to
communicate our ideas in a way that is understandable to our audience.
As such, these elements exist only to contribute to the picture being
painted by an author, and are not meant to stand as individual truth
claims on their own.
This brings us to our fourth consideration: In
order for God to communicate a message to humans, who are prone to be
in error due to sin and finite knowledge, He must use language that
accommodates faulty human understanding, but must also convey the
message accurately through that understanding, lest He fail to
accomplish His goal in communicating the wisdom that leads to salvation
and equip the man of God for every good work. In other words, for
those of us who believe that God has spoken through the Scripture, it
logically follows that God must have done two things: (1) Used human
language that assumes concepts that we, in the modern world, would see
as factually incorrect if dissected from the context and made a
proposition all its own; and (2) communicated His message accurately
through that language. If these two premises are accepted, then it would
be absurd to claim that the Bible is errant, since the language used by
God has, in fact, accurately communicated His message(s) to us.
This, then, brings us to our final consideration: Even
the manuscripts, translations, creeds, confessions, the sermon on
Sunday, the music and lectionaries, etc. that communicate biblical truth
accurately, whether the language used contains error or not, can be
considered inerrant, not simply the original autographs of Scripture. What
I mean by this is that if inerrancy is in the message conveyed, not
separately within each individual concept or part of that language used
to convey it, then as long as the biblical truth is conveyed accurately,
it is without error, and should be received as such. All evaluation of
errancy of a manuscript, sermon, or song ought to occupy its time with
whether biblical truth has been communicated accurately, not whether the
constituent parts of the language used to convey it is true or false in
and of itself—again, apart from the context that serves to support the
truth of another idea, rather than the truth of itself.
In
other words, if the message is inerrant, and that message is
communicated accurately, regardless of the linguistic clothing used to
communicate it, then the doctrine of inerrancy extends to all instances
where it is communicated accurately. The distinction, however, between
the Scripture and a creed, confession, lectionary, sermon, song, etc. is
that the former cannot err while the latter can. In other words, I am
not saying that translations, creeds, sermons, etc. are inerrant, but only that, in so far as they accurately convey Scriptural truth, they are inerrant. Hence, the former is inerrant, but the latter can be inerrant
only when it speaks the message the Scripture conveys accurately. We
must, therefore, seek to understand and convey biblical truth, rather
than truth from other means, since all other means are capable of error.
The Scripture, then, must remain norma Normans, i.e., the norm that norms all other norms.
[1]
Of course, I would delete this concept from Hodge and Warfield, since
the point stands well without it. However, the point could be made that
the idea of inerrancy in the manuscripts would prove itself vindicated
if the very words of the original texts were known. Still, I would
prefer to not muddy the waters by introducing this concept.
[2] Horton, The Christian Faith, 177.
[3]
Let the reader understand the distinction between “mythological” and
“supernatural.” The text does teach many supernatural things, but is
void of asserting that the mythology it may use to support a point is
literally true.
[4]
Part of the problem is that the Bible has often been used as a
foundational text to discover all truth about the cosmos, science,
history, etc. Thus, when each statement was dissected for its truth
value apart from its context, it now became a separate object of
scrutiny. Such a quest was misguided, therefore, from the beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.