Undeception

People commonly appeal to Jesus’ words in the Gospels as authoritative evidence shoring up their beliefs about the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. If Jesus believed that the Bible was the Word of God, then he believed it was inerrant, and if he believed it was inerrant, it’s inerrant. Q.E.D.

You think I’m special? Get a load of this!

Right?

I’m going to explore this over the next few posts. But before getting to the main questions, in this post I want to make a couple of quick points.

I’m not sure that it matters all that much whether Jesus was an inerrantist. Jesus did not claim exhaustive knowledge. Apparently he thought that the mustard seed was the smallest of all seeds on earth–that, or he presented a truthful statement in a decidedly reckless and misleading way, which indicates an error in his judgment.

And aside from understandable ignorance about such mundane facts, Luke says he had to grow into wisdom; this is significant because it means that at one stage, he had incomplete wisdom, which for the Jews was anything but trivial. In fact, late into his ministry he’s even recorded to have admitted ignorance about an important aspect of his own mission (“the day or the hour” when he would return and bring the Kingdom). This shouldn’t be troubling to us, but inspiring: Jesus is our model of a man being instructed by God and putting all of his dependence on Him. He wasn’t just a puppet to God’s ventriloquism. We should, then, actually count it a felicity when he didn’t share the mindset and presuppositions of his peers.

The other point I wanted to raise was the obvious point that appealing to the Bible to say, “Jesus affirmed inerrancy,” is begging the question. The best you can hope to demonstrate is that there are passages in the Bible that claim that Jesus affirmed inerrancy–which would not prove inerrancy, since it depends on those passages’ inerrancy!

I don’t have have a problem with saying that anything that is truly a word from God within Scripture is sacred and inviolable. God would not lie. So if, as the bumper sticker says, “God said it,” then “He meant it,” and indeed, “that settles it.” But the point in question is whether God did say everything the biblical authors may have thought He said–or whether they even thought that everything they said was from God. It’s only from a premature and unwarranted assumption of inerrancy and a simplistic understanding of inspiration that we would just proceed as though everything attributed to God in Scripture is actually from God–isn’t that what the discussion is about?

But starting with the next post, we’ll lay those things aside for a little while. Let’s assume that it does matter whether Jesus signed off on the Chicago Statement, and that the circularity of using internal evidence to prove the Bible inerrant isn’t a problem.

Next up: The Bible’s “Word of God” isn’t the Protestant’s “Word of God”

Will twenty-first century evangelicals be able to make their peace with a culture of Christianity characterized as “without inerrancy, with women, without young earth, with social justice”? Daniel Kirk hopes so.

I hope so, too! This would be a great development. But I have some misgivings about the prospect when I consider certain defining characteristics of mainstream evangelicals.

• Most who self-identify as “conservative” evangelicals, in the U.S. anyway, view the most essential aspect of our faith to be belief in God through Jesus — and not just any belief: right belief. Right belief is then defined as holding fast to the truths revealed in the Bible.
• Evangelicals are self-consciously “people of the Book”. Every passage of Scripture is affirmed a priori to be accurate and, if possible (and sometimes even when not), taken at face value. Every question, small or large, should be answered by reference to the Bible if at all possible. Faithful Christians are those who believe and do not allow themselves to doubt the truths of the Bible. The leading lights of the movement are those who are most successful and credible at carefully guarding the Bible from critical inquiry that potentially undermines its accuracy.
• Probably chief among the Church’s responsibilities is to be good stewards of true theology, where “how to interpret the Bible” and “what the Bible says” are defined more or less precisely by how their own tradition interprets it. It is possible to move from one tradition to another and be considered “still a Christian”, but only as long as both traditions affirm all these fundamental assumptions I’m describing, principal of which is “the gospel” defined in their particular way.
• Specifically, “the gospel” is defined as penal substitution, which is based upon the specific formulation that’s triumphed among Protestant systematic theologians since Calvin. “Being saved” means accepting this understanding of the gospel without question.

My point? These assumptions are all — all based in inerrancy. And that’s the first plank we want to take out!

Every inerrantist knows the stakes: take away inerrancy, and the whole beautiful structure comes crashing down. Structures like exaggerated patriarchal subordinationism, an historiographic reading of Genesis, and a view of justice that emphasizes wrathful punishment rather than extravagant mercy typically cannot stand serious scrutiny once one begins to question that the Bible is a pure chunk of divine revelation. Why, without inerrancy, we might end up with…all kinds of horrible things. Things like women in leadership, a rejection of creationism, and a de-emphasis on doctrine in favor of “social justice”. Bible believers would then have no protection from the compromise of all their carefully constructed beliefs. Rejecting inerrancy changes everything!

And you know what? There’s no sense trying to redefine key terms like “inerrancy”, “infallibility”, or “evangelicalism” just to avoid that assessment. Because inerrantists are right: in every practical sense, rejecting inerrancy changes everything.

Those who embrace inerrancy find non-inerrantist modifications of doctrine to be the primary problem. On the other hand, those who approach the Bible as sacred and thoroughly human literature (rather than as a perfectly accurate and harmonizable set of divine revelations) consider the inevitability of reevaluated doctrines to be a marked but essentially superficial difference between themselves and inerrantists: for them, the fundamental contrast lies in these groups’ views about acquiring and parsing truth. For mainstream evangelicals, most of whom at the very least take a “soft” view of inerrancy that affirms the passages of Scripture teaching doctrine as inerrant, the Bible is The Standard, and challenging the assertions made by any author of Scripture is tantamount to standing in for the serpent in the garden, hissing, “Yea, hath God said…?” For those who, like Dr. Kirk, accept even the more modest deviations from this form of inerrancy, acknowledging theological tensions, contradictions, limited authorial understanding, and outright erroneous assertions, no given passage of Scripture can ever be the absolute standard by which “good” or “bad” teachings are easily accepted or rejected. In certain areas, we must view the Church’s understanding of God’s ways to be a trajectory shaped by but not ending within Scripture.

See, for all practical purposes, rejecting inerrancy seems to yield an entirely different religion qua religion from that practiced by inerrantists. I know, that sounds outrageous on the face of it, but consider that they are separate systems with often dramatically divergent doctrinal focuses, widely variant understandings of their own mission, and, as the linchpin, highly contrastive epistemologies:

• At bottom, inerrantists believe because the Bible says so; some have an appreciation for church tradition, but usually only as long as it bolsters their own beliefs about what the Bible says. If the Bible’s shown to be wrong, they’d sooner evacuate the premises than pick through the rubble. As goes the Bible, so goes Christianity. Truth is defined as that which is Christian.
• Non-inerrantists believe because our understanding of God, as shaped (but not bound) by the historical community of faith whose testimonies of God comprise the Scriptures and have affirmed those testimonies in the centuries since, is consistent with and complementary to our broader understanding of history and the world we experience today. Christianity is defined as that which is true.

An analogy that comes to mind is that of older and newer versions of software. There’s a level of “backwards compatibility” for non-inerrantists such that we typically understand and can embrace conservative evangelicals as (misguided) brothers and sisters, but continuing the software analogy, I have to ask, will older versions of the software be able to process us? Sadly, I expect a negative response. Windows XP systems will simply not recognize programs written for Windows 7 as valid software!

I don’t like this schism at all. I want so badly to find a way to bring mainstream evangelicals along and find unity, but given differences this fundamental it’s so very difficult. I can’t wait for a more significant portion of the Church to adopt the culture of Christianity as conceived in Dr. Kirk’s “Evangelical Manifesto”. And I’m sure it will. But when it does, I daresay modern inerrantists won’t want to be considered a part.

I realize that his intent is speak up and say, “Hey wait, this is our religion, too — you can’t just paint us out of the picture!” But by trying to reclaim “evangelical”, we’d end up with two fundamentally different groups trying to lay claim to the same label. The hallmark of “evangelical” is a focus on the euangelion, the “gospel” — but an integral reason for the clash is that most of us can’t agree on the definition of that primary distinctive (nay, shibboleth), much less what living it out would look like. It would take a bloody, contentious coup for non-inerrantists to be able to co-opt the term “evangelical”, and I’m just not at all sure it’s worth the strife.

Unfortunately, knowing human nature, no viewpoint is able to gain any traction among the masses unless it has a catchy umbrella term or label. “We are ‘not-evangelicals’, who don’t believe this…do believe that…” will simply not fly. But our non-inerrantist culture does need a “handle” of some sort , other than the non-descriptive and baggaged “liberal” and the negative “post-evangelical” label that I am fond of using. I’m just not convinced that any attempts like Dr. Kirk’s laudable Manifesto will be enough to wrest this particular term from those currently defined by it!

Am I wrong? If not, what can be done?

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to him. And why are we told that these treasures are hid in him who is the Revelation of God? Is it that we should despair of finding them and cease to seek them? Are they not hid in him that they may be revealed to us in due time—that is, when we are in need of them? Is not their hiding in him the mediatorial step towards their unfolding in us? Is he not the Truth?—the Truth to men? Is he not the High Priest of his brethren, to answer all the troubled questionings that arise in their dim humanity?
…
The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and towards which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness.

from Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 1, “The Higher Faith“

Although I was once critical of “Christocentric” readings of Scripture in general, I have recently considered that there is really only one brand of it that I have major problems with.

Specifically, I dislike a Christocentric bibliology that views the entirety of the Bible as sub-consciously or self-consciously about Jesus. Jesus’ foot was the one who would crush the serpent’s head; Jesus was (typologically at least) the ram in the thicket; Jesus stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; Jesus was the one in view when David was promised that his line would endure forever; etc.

I disagree strongly. The authors of Scripture were entirely children of their own times alone, and while it certainly appears that they began to be hopeful for some of the right things (and missed others dramatically), viewing the NT’s deliberate attempts to reinterpret current events in the terms of OT themes as the decisive “actual meaning” of those OT passages is anachronistic. Inasmuch as they violently commandeer the ancient writings that comprise Scripture ex post facto and thereby prohibit us from seeing certain insights (such as a development of early believers’ understandings of God), these Christocentric interpolations really amount to the truly revisionist readings of the Bible.

Yet there is a way of viewing Scripture that I have an affinity for which I have lately decided qualifies as a “Christocentric” reading. It views the whole of Scripture not so much as “pointing to” Christ (which, again, implies a consciousness on the part of the authors, or at least a more direct divine editorial hand than the evidence suggests) but culminating in Christ. It is much more of an evolutionary approach that mirrors, or perhaps rather, is part of the warp and woof of the development of the universe. It results in an encouragement to judge the Scriptures by Christ instead of revising his theology to make it compatible with some of even the OT’s most disgusting portrayals of God. If Jesus was the definitive Word of God, putting him as he truly was into those wineskins should, occasionally at least, result in a bit of a mess.

Anyway, there have been a few posts on other blogs during this last week that have been complementary to the better aspects of Christocentric bibliology. First was a post by Jeff Dunn on Internet Monk that, while occasionally straying into some classic Christocentrism-of-the-wrong-sort language, did contain this gem:

A woman asked me if I knew of any DVD series that used New Testament characters to teach positive character traits. Another woman, a teacher in a Christian school, needed it for her middle school classes. I said, “No, I don’t know of any.” Then I continued, “And that would be the wrong use of Scripture.”

“What do you mean?”

“Scripture is given to us for one reason only,” I said. “And that is to reveal Jesus to us. If you want to teach positive character traits, try a book like Mickey Mantle’s The Quality Of Courage. That’s much better to use to teach that kind of thing.”

While I wince a little at the idea of the Bible being “given” to us in the direct manner implied here, I do think his main point is a good one. We can look at the saints in the Bible and see some good character traits — heck, Hebrews 11 is full of them — but if we insist that we want to take what they had to tell us seriously, we’ll not lose sight of the fact that the NT authors were firmly, thoroughly Christocentric. The Gospel writers (especially Mark) and certainly Paul were intent on showing even the Apostles to be fallible, while never once intimating the same for Jesus. We even have people go so far as to discern and prescribe “character traits” supposedly exhibited by any and every animal mentioned in the Bible (but only those in the Bible), because of course, “God mentioned the bat in His Word for as many good reasons as we can think of, and more.” There are good character traits in Scripture, and I wouldn’t go as far as Dunn does to say that highlighting those traits in order to teach them was “wrong”, at very least it bolsters Protestantism’s characteristic and problematic bibliocentrism. It also tends towards very silly, misguided, and often sidetracking emphases such as the Prayer of Jabez craze of yesteryear: Jabez prayed that prayer, so we should at least give it a go!

A post that describes bibliology in terms I quite like is Diglot’s ”My Take on the Bible“. It’s short, sweet, and to the well-stated point. His points coincide so closely with my own views that I will not even try to start quoting the post here. What I will do is quote a verse mentioned in the post that I think stands as a good summary of the NT writers’ own Christocentric bibliology.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5.39-40)

As both Jeff Dunn and Diglot pointed out, as self-professed Christians we’ve got to be careful that we don’t major on the minors. Anything in Scripture worth fighting for will be found in Christ. Maybe we should spend less time systematizing or arguing the “fundamental” importance of certain teachings within the Bible (“recovered” by some sect or another), and spend more time listening to the actual Word of God, if that’s who we believe he is.

Daniel Kirk today expressed well my feelings about and disillusionment with theology (which I have written about here).

Reflecting over the course on The Cross in the New Testament that he just completed teaching, he writes:

Three big take-aways from both the lecture and the readings are these: (1) when the NT talks about the cross it is infinitely more concerned with how we live lives of faithful discipleship than it is with how the death of Jesus “works” to save us; (2) there are numerous models of “atonement” in the NT that address different facets of the problem of the human condition; and (3) penal substitution might be less pervasive than you think, and probably needs to be rethought in more biblical categories.

With one of my favorite lines in biblioblog history, Kirk notes, ”The problem with ‘knowing’ how the death of Jesus works is that it keeps us from being able to see how the NT writers talk about it.“ That hit me in the pit of the stomach: despite my railing against it, I recognize the lingering tendency on my own part to view various biblical texts from some unifying principle that may not apply to all the texts equally.

One needn’t even completely reject inerrancy in order to recognize different authors’ perspectives on theology as not entirely overlapping, so long as we maintain the difference between truth, the facts as they are, and theology, our attempts to interpret facts.

And this is why I’m more broadly skeptical of erecting any theological statement, howsoever so broad it may be, as the “grid” through which we read the scripture. The spiral of reading scripture and theological articulation must always allow for scripture to come back and correct the faith of both the individual and the church.

It occurs to me that the prevailing assumption of concordism underlying the way we systematize theology is the actual problem, not the theologizing itself. Our goal as people who value the testimony of the authors of Scripture is to discover the unique theologies of Mark, of Romans, of Colossians, of Hebrews, etc., and we must never expect them all to coincide in every detail. We must use different utensils to pour out the different soups on the table, or else we’re likely to attribute to one soup or other a flavor that is actually alien to it.

Systematization of theology cannot proceed without our recognizing that the various theologies within Scripture do not always neatly coincide. Nor should it be taken for granted that the picture they provide, even when painstakingly pieced together properly, will be complete and exempt from critical analysis.

Kirk ends with a statement of quote-of-the-day caliber:

Theology: no better friend, no worse master.

Why do I even blog at all, when people like Daniel Kirk are writing such gems?

As a fairly new owner of a smart phone running the Android OS, I was happy to find a Greek NT resource for only $0.99. This app, called simply “Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament” (don’t groan – see below), is based off that outdated but public domain edition, but is enhanced with morphological tagging, lexical data (from Strong’s, but please don’t hold that against it), and notes on significant variant readings from NA27 to mitigate deficiencies in the outdated Westcott-Hort text uncovered since 1881. The text of the AV is available by clicking on the verse numbers.

Use Barcode Scanner or click the image from your phone to download this app.

There are a couple interface issues, such as (currently) not giving the option to go to a particular verse; one must simply navigate to it from within its chapter. But hey, it beats paying more for other apps to give you access to the Greek NT, usually with fewer features than this app offers. If you’d like to try it out, remember that Android Market lets you refund your purchase within 24 hours with only the click of  a button. Highly recommended.

Daniel Kirk at Storied Theology has a great post up in which he’s critical of an article in the current Christianity Today theme this month by J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett in praise of catechism.

Now I must say, since we’re attending a Presbyterian church now (I’m actually serious), my kids have recently been learning the children’s version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Sunday School. While I’ll certainly need to start shaking loose some of the stuff I have problems with in the WCF before it hardens permanently in their minds, it’s both a good exercise for their brains and a way of learning historical Protestant theology. What I’m just saying is that although I certainly have a problem with overly and artificially systematized theology, I’m not really necessarily anti-catechism.

But I also must say, the following remarks from Daniel Kirk are spot on:

I could not disagree more with the claims being asserted [in the article by Packer and Parrett]: that the real thing we need is theology, and all those stories in the Bible (you know, the actual Bible God, in God’s wisdom, decided to give to the church) are second-rate tools the learning of which makes us less competent Christians.

This is the classic inversion of sola scriptura: no longer do we really want you to do what the Reformers did (read your Bible), we want you instead to read and memorize what they said after they had read their Bibles.

Wow. That last sentence was a home run, with bases loaded. What do you think the Hebrews did before they had a Calvin or a Beza?  Do we really want to take the ancient Jewish commentaries as seriously as we’re to take, e.g., the Westminster Confession of Faith? Why the heck would the Bible come loaded with stories of people encountering God, often coming away with differing ideas about what they learned about Him, and very little that even resembles systematic theology? Couldn’t God have provided an inspired, inerrant commentary or hermeneutic key if He really wanted to?

Certainly we should teach our kids our beliefs about what the authors of the Bible believed; it can even take the form of a catechism. But whatever we do, we don’t want to give them the impression that we are teaching them unquestionable Approved and Authorized Theology^®. We should be instructing and encouraging them that good theology isn’t learned by rote, but painstakingly cultivated.