The Errors of Errancy, Part IX: Didactic Errantism as Religious Faith Pretending to Be Objective Scholarship

Many Didactic Errantists argue that they are just analyzing what the Bible is and what it is doing, and so conclude that the Bible is errant in its teaching of some of its theology and moral practices.

Errantists often assume that their moral compass is superior to those belonging to those in history. Whatever morality is in fashion today gets to judge whatever morality from yesteryear is no longer in fashion. We might call this the arrogance of modernity. It should be no surprise then that Errantists use both themselves as individuals and their cultural consensus to judge the morality of the Bible. The problem is that they must assume that the Bible is false before they even come to these passages due to the fact that they must assume that the Bible is in error when it comes to its anthropology, i.e., doctrine of man.

For instance, let’s say I read the Bible for the first time and run across the account where God commands the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites, including their children, for their sins. My reaction is that I immediately hate it. 

Most people stop there and assume rather than ask the very important next question, “Why do I hate it?”

Do I hate it because I have all knowledge and understanding, together with a pure mind and will so as to assess that my moral compass is greater than the God presented in the text?

Do I hate it because I am a depraved sinner, a criminal who also justly deserves destruction along with my children and hate anyone who would bring me to a reckoning with the evil/chaos I have injected into the world?

Most would assume the former and go on to judge the God revealed in this text as a man-made fabrication of their true God who would have showered murderers with lollipops of love. These savage peoples in their ignorance did not have the moral fortitude to see past their culture into the morally advanced utopia of our enlightened age (please ignore the past 300 years of racist kidnapping and enslaving, mass killings in political revolts, and numerous genocides all in the name of progress) in order to see that they were merely projecting their own bloodthirsty views on God and then blasphemously lied about it by saying that God revealed Himself this way. 

The problem is that this assumes at least Pelagianism and at worst omniscience and moral perfection. In other words, it assumes a completely unbiblical/antibiblical anthropology. 

According to the Bible (and common sense) man is not god, and therefore, is not omniscient. The fact that man grows in moral behavior means he is not morally perfect. And the fact that there is evil in the world means that man is not morally neutral or good (environment cannot cause one who is morally good to be morally evil since one who is good would always react to negative environmental conditions with good). Furthermore, the Bible confirms that man is not morally neutral but under the sin of Adam, born corrupt in mind and will, desiring to kill rather than be killed and to eat rather than to be eaten. His mind is sick above all things and horribly corrupt from the time he young, conceived in sin, and even the best of fallen mankind, believers, are called “evil” by Christ Himself. 

This means that man has no way of knowing whether a moral action commanded by God is good or evil apart from God revealing it to him. He has no access to that information directly because he is not a god himself, and he has no access to that information indirectly because his sin causes him to interpret information to accommodate his sin rather than to uproot it (i.e., he suppresses the truth in unrighteousness). 

Therefore, he is left simply “feeling” that what God commands here is awful, but if a biblical and logical anthropology is adopted, he would have to conclude that his feelings are based on the fact that he himself is a criminal and deserving of the same punishment. Therefore, he hates this God, not because God is morally inferior to him, but because God is morally superior to him and will not let evil men and their posterity go unpunished.

Hence, he feels the way he does because he is like a mass murderer who snarls at his executioners as they prepare to administer his lethal injection. 

Those who maintain that their spidey senses are morally superior to the God presented in the Bible , e.g., the Deuteronomic texts, assume an anthropology that they have no basis for believing in. They have no inerrant standard or knowledge by which to judge their claim that the modern man knows better than the text. They are simply guessing and then dogmatically asserting that they know better, but there is no way for them to do so. 

Thus, those claiming to reject these texts actually reject a lot more. They reject biblical anthropology and the anthropology that Jesus Himself confirms, even in the red letters, which every liberal knows are most authoritative parts of the Bible (sarcasm implied).

Maybe Errantists need to read John 10:35 “and the Scripture cannot be broken up.” Jesus made that statement because He quoted a Psalm that was placed in the section of the Hebrew Bible called Ketubim, i.e., Writings, and was often thought to be of a lesser authoritative nature than the Prophets and certainly the Torah. There are no texts that can be broken off as less authoritative or less inspired because they are, as Jesus argues, “the Word of God.”

What this means is that the Errantist’s view that the Bible is errant assumes that it is errant before he can evaluate it one way or the other. In other words, his conclusion that the Bible is errant is based on his assumption that the Bible is errant, and thus, he is making a circular argument that merely asserts a belief without any evidence. His evidence must assume the very anthropology rejected by the Bible, and hence, he must reject the Bible before he ever evaluates its claims to draw that conclusion.

To put it plainly, he actually needs to assume an errant Bible in order to establish an errant Bible.

This is not to suggest that Inerrantists do not start from a faith position, but that both Errantists and Inerrantists must assume an a priori faith position, which means that Errantism is not an academic conclusion but a position based upon faith that the Bible is errant, and therefore, concludes such in its analysis of individual texts. In short, it is not simply looking at what the Bible is and what it is doing. It is a priori deciding what the Bible is and what it is doing and then arguing in accordance with one's presuppositional beliefs. This is religion, not some objective analysis.