The Errors of Errancy, Part III: The Epistemic Impossibility of Didactic Errancy

I will now turn to the claims of what I call "Didactic Errancy," that is, the form of errancy that argues that the ideas the human authors intend to communicate as true in Scripture, whether theological or ethical, are actually false or immoral in comparison to modern moral sensibilities or other scriptural texts thought to contradict them. Yet, these errantists maintain, the Bible is still, or can become, God's Word to us in that it can still communicate truth and good to us.

These two ideas, however, cannot exist together. Instead, I will argue that it is impossible for both of these ideas to be true, and that the Didactic Errantist, logically speaking, is forced to choose one or the other. Either the Bible is God's Word that can communicate truth and good to us, and can only do so as being fully inerrant in all that it intends to communicate as true, or that it may contain even a single theological or ethical error somewhere within it, and therefore, cannot communicate anything to us concerning the knowledge of what is true or good.

This may seem like quite a task I have set before myself in showing this, but actually it is only a matter of common sense put plainly and briefly.

Imagine that I have a bucket full of bird feathers. Each is a different size and color. My task is to identify which ones belong to a particular species of bird. The problem is that I have never seen a bird of any type before at all. I now must somehow discover which feathers go to which birds without having any knowledge of these birds other than the feathers I have before me. I then hand the bucket to a hundred other people who have no knowledge of birds either. They pick out the feathers they find to be the most beautiful. At the end of the day, each has a different pile of feathers from everyone else, and each claims that their feathers must belong to the bird. The problem is that there is no way to confirm if anyone or everyone is right. The mere choosing of feathers based upon each individual's preferences has not yielded any more information about the specific bird than anyone had before.

This is the situation created by saying that the Bible consists of human words that contain the Word of God, but some of it reflects merely the words of men that do not accurately reflect the truth and goodness of God and His will. Imagine now that the feathers are theology and morals, and it is the responsibility of each individual or community of individuals to figure out which theology and morals accurately describe the character and will of a Being that no one has any confirmed knowledge of apart from that revelation As personal preference/intuition failed to give any knowledge to the participants attempting to place the right feather with the right bird, one is left with the same amount of information about God, His character and will after he reads the Bible as he has before he reads it. It, therefore, has failed to communicate anything about God or His will at all, and therefore, cannot exist as any sort of Word of God to humanity at all.

What people really mean by the statement that the Bible becomes God's Word to us is merely that they are God's Word to us, and the Bible, in so far as it affirms their own beliefs and morals concerning God, is God's Word. But this is God communicating not through the Bible, but through them. The Bible has merely stumbled upon what they already "knew" through personal preference, and thus, can be confirmed by them to be the Word of God in those places. Where it disagrees with their own theology and morality, it is to be rejected as consisting of erroneous or immoral human ideas that are merely the social and communal husk that must now be removed by the modern human, who apparently is more intuitive than the ancient religious individual so as to be able to discern between the human errors and divine truths that the ancient authors were not able to accomplish.

However, if the Bible is left to the group or individual to decide what is true or good, then the Bible can confirm nothing, and is useless as to providing any sort of knowledge about God. It has failed to communicate any knowledge about Him or His will, and should be rejected as being the Word of God at all.

Furthermore, to speak of a document that is unreliable even in one idea it seeks to communicate, since one cannot know which idea that may be (and it could be any of them), as the Word of God would mean that any errant document that may contain truth or error in terms of its ideas is the Word of God, which means that everything that communicates, from Shakespeare to Harry Potter, from Pastors to Plumbers, from Handel's Messiah to Baby Shark, is the Word of God, which is to say that nothing is really the Word of God anymore than anything else is. It is the individual or community preferences, the zeitgeist, that is the Word of God that must then judge all other claims, whether made of the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita,  as to whether it accurately reflects God and His will.

Yet, none of this has provided any more knowledge of God than one had before. Everyone is just guessing, and this is evident in the fact that theology and morals do not just change from generation to generation but from community to community and indivudal to individual, and not just in small variation but in absolute contradiction to where the good and loving deity in one group is a horrible monster in another, and as some have often put it, "in one culture they love their neighbors and in others they eat them." All believe in human flourishing, but how that should be accomplished is where further knowledge is needed. To some people human flourishing means save the Jews and to others it means exterminate them. If one preaches that Christ is the only way of salvation and all are damned outside of Him, but inclusivism is true, then that person has oppressed others by causing them grief if they should not accept the exclusive claim. If, however, inclusivism and universalism are false, then one has damned men by preaching that Christ is not the only way and has become a murderer. If homosexuality can be good, then others saying it is the judgment of God is evil, and if it is evil, then others saying it is good are participating in that evil. There are a billion and one things that are not just inconsistent but absolutely cancel one another out, and are necessary to know if one is to do what is loving and right and worship the true God. And yet, none of this knowledge is available to humanity by any intuitive means, since all of these ideas gained from intuition and feeling contradict one another.

What is needed, therefore, if God is to communicate anything about Himself and His will for mankind is a reliable, external Word of God that can verify truth claims concerning theology and morality, and the Bible is only that if it is reliable in all that it says without one single error in what it intends to communicate as true. Hence, either it is the inerrant Word of God through the words of men, or it is the erroneous words of men about God that may or may not have stumbled upon something true about God but can never be confirmed by anyone or anything that it actually has.

Didactic Errantism, therefore, fails to provide a logical basis for its claims. It is forced to choose between the Bible as not fully reliable in everything it intends to communicate as true and therefore not the Word of God at all (which I would still argue is something impossible for it to claim since no knowledge of these things is possible apart from an external reliable revelation from God), or that it is the Word of God in its entirety, completely reliable in all that it intends to convey as true, and therefore, to be honored exclusively as the guide by which all ideas gained from the zeitgeist or other documents are to be judged as true or false.