Undeception

One citation of choice for those insisting that Jesus affirmed the typically Fundamentalist and Evangelical view of Scripture as our “infallible rule of faith and practice” is John 10.34-36, in which Jesus’ part of an argument with the Jewish leaders is recorded thus:

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?’

Many read this as Jesus confirming the full authority of the Old Testament as supporting their contention that the Bible is the “Word of God”. But the unquestioned assumptions behind the use of this verse as a prooftext are a mile deep.

First, as I explained before, logically it is only post-canon that we can even conceivably view the Bible in its entirety as ”the word of God”. And as it happens, we have good evidence that such an interpretation would be particularly invalid here.

For one thing, referring to the Tanakh (the Jewish canon such as it was at the time) using the Greek word graphē (lit. ‘writing, text’) was done in the plural, hence “the Scriptures”.  But here graphē is used in the singular: this means that “the Scripture” that “cannot be broken,” here refers only to the specific passage or “word of God” in question, i.e. “you are gods” from Psalm 82.6. It does not refer to the entire Jewish or Christian canon. Once again, you can’t just read “word of God” and think “the Christian canon”: here as usual the passage being referred to is not just any old passage of the Old Testament, but what purports to be a direct quote from God (“I have said…”). Plus, “the word of God” is qualified by “to whom the word of God came”: in other words, the entire Bible did not come to the audience of Psalm 82, so we know that only that particular text is being referred to as the “word/message of God” on this occasion. The apologist will want to extend this to the whole Bible, but they are responsible for proving why that is legitimate.

The more important point, however, is that in this passage Jesus is shown giving an undoubtedly rhetorical argument, arguing from within his opponents’ viewpoint but not necessarily adopting it himself. Perhaps most obviously, apart from Mormons I doubt many people really think Jesus was calling everyone “gods” in the sense we think of it: elohim meant either “mighty ones” or “God”, and we certainly have no other evidence to suggest Jesus thought of everyone as deities. John is picturing Jesus dishing out a bit of witty repartee dripping with irony, not a solemn theological exegesis of Scripture.

It’s not really in dispute whether the Jews, and hence presumably Jesus himself, upheld their Scriptures as having a divine source and authority, but there’s reason to suppose that Jesus is laying it on a little thick here: in verse 34, John paints Jesus referring to the Jewish Scriptures as “your Law”–not “our Law”, “God’s Law”, or even just ”the Law”. Just like all throughout the rest of the Fourth Gospel, that places Jesus as an outsider to the Jewish religious system. In effect, he’s saying, “In your own Scripture it says ‘you are gods’, and that message of God can’t be broken (right?). So why are so inconsistent?”

From verse 1 of the Gospel, Jesus is pictured as the personification of God’s message to humanity that trumped everything the Jews previously thought was God’s message.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

John 5.39-40

Now, as unique and distinctive as the Gospel of John is, this understanding of Jesus as the superseding Word of God is quite consonant with the other books of the New Testament. And when truly grasped, this understanding is fairly devastating to the typical inerrantist approach to Christianity. Here’s what I mean.

One of the most consistent presentations of Jesus’ teaching, serving as the lifeblood of so much of the New Testament, is the idea that rote obedience to God is insufficient and that cultivating and living up to God’s ideals is paramount. This is behind the standard Reformation doctrine of sola fide, in which we are set free from the Law of Moses with all its rituals and reconciled to God through Jesus alone. In all four Gospels Jesus is shown making a point to unshackle valid religious observance from hollow, blind ritualism. This is commonly understood by inerrantists.

What’s not always recognized is that Jesus was not afraid to take Scriptures and declare them or their appropriation by the literalists of the day to be inadequate to please God; this happens most obviously in Matthew 5′s recurring “You have heard it said, but I say…” He is commonly shown taking up the mantle of the OT prophet and prying up the planks of literalistic adherence to Torah:

• When challenged about associating with yet-impenitent sinners: “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (cf. Isaiah 1.13-23, Amos 5.21-25);
• After picking grain on the Sabbath: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
• Simply refraining from acting out in anger is not enough: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment…”
• Undermining the rationale behind Torah’s purity laws: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (see this discussion)

For Jesus, as F.F. Bruce put it, “The law is fulfilled ethically rather than ceremonially.”That ethic can be summed up as acting in love, as is borne out in his exaltation of two commandments as the “greatest”; anything the Law and the Prophets say that has value is a manifestation of loving the Lord with all your being and proving it by loving your neighbor as yourself. This is the law of love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13.34-35

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.

Romans 13.8

Ritual is a legitimate and even valuable way to express devotion to God and love for one’s neighbor: slavish obedience to rituals resulting in breaking those two great commandments, whether because the laws and rituals don’t go far enough in helping us avoid breaking those commandments or because they entice us to act against them, is defective and counterproductive. This is, in fact, the meaning of Jesus’ statements that he came to “fulfill” rather than “abolish” the Law: Jesus wasn’t campaigning against the Law as a set of rituals meant to evince one’s disciplined love of God and neighbor, but was intent on getting his countrymen to do the more important job of fulfilling the purpose behind the Law, which frequently includes going above the letter of the Law rather than ignoring it.

My point: even if Jesus agreed with inerrantists that the Old Testament Scriptures are word-for-word from God above (and it is difficult to find evidence that he did), he certainly did make it a point to warn that using Scripture as an “infallible rule of faith and practice” is a hopelessly backwards way of trying to serve God faithfully.

This dissatisfaction with treating Scripture as an ideal standard continues throughout the New Testament. As Paul memorably put it, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” In Galatians the Law is described as a schoolmaster that’s been replaced by Jesus. Peter in Acts is shown that following laws of ritual purity grieves God’s heart because it marginalizes people He has declared clean. For the author of Hebrews, the New Covenant Jesus established is “better” than the old one in that the law of God is written on our hearts instead of stone. Everywhere we look, we see early Christian testimony that says, “The Law was great, but it was insufficient to create righteousness.” I could go on and on. It’s the core of Christianity. The central insight energizing the Christian faith is that now, as then, the Scriptures are only useful inasmuch as they help us live out the first and second greatest commandments faithfully.

So when I read Jesus criticizing the practice of korban in Mark 7, I perceive that he was far more interested in the ethical truth behind the commandment to honor one’s parents, as given full weight by the prescribed penalty of execution for those who insulted their parents, than he was in affirming the Old Testament – still less the Christian canon – as the “standard of faith and practice” . Jesus taught us to observe the letter of the Law only insofar as it helps us fulfill the heart of God that we find represented in the two greatest commandments–the law of love.

Please note that this is a far, far cry from the prooftext-laced condemnations of behavior that we see coming out of many inerrantists. Where we see Jesus condemning behavior, it’s not for issues of personal holiness: it’s because he saw a system, built as it was around avoiding breaking Torah, that ran roughshod over those whom God demanded to be cared for as a primary act of devotion to Himself. For modern-day inerrantists, it’s different: instead of adding impossible regulations to fail-proof our adherence to the Bible’s demands for righteousness, we add the notion of non-negotiable doctrines that go far beyond Jesus’ New Command and end up violating the law of love just the same.

In summary, those who believe in a supremely authoritative Bible cite Jesus to support their view of inerrancy by assuming that Jesus somehow referred to the Bible as the Word of God, uniformly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Over the last few posts I think I have shown that a claim for Jesus’ acceptance of the modern Protestant’s God’s-Word-ism goes far outside of the scope of evidence. And regardless, I think it’s clear that at very least he would not draw the same sorts of conclusions from God’s-Word-ism that modern inerrantists so commonly do, especially regarding their bedrock, non-negotiable belief that the Bible is our sole “standard of faith and practice”. It is the law of love, internalized and painstakingly woven throughout our interactions, that should be our standard of faith and practice, and at times when our doctrines derived from the Bible lead us to violate that law that should be imprinted upon our hearts, we must respectfully release those doctrines and cling for dear life to the law of love.

So if you choose , against all the evidence, to maintain cognitive assent to the idea that the Bible is inerrant, that still shouldn’t be the foundation of your life in Christ. Even if true, it amounts to trivia. What matters is what you do when that inerrant Bible seems to be encouraging you to strain at doctrinal gnats while swallowing ethically rancid camels, treating the perceived shortcomings of others as grounds to violate Jesus’ highest commandment.

We’ve got to be careful when selecting the verses we’re going to allow as prooftexts that Jesus thought of the Bible (or the part of it that was available at the time) as “the Word of God” in the popular Protestant understanding of that term.

One passage frequently brought up to demonstrate Jesus’ biblicism is Mark 7.9-13:

Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

There you have it! Jesus castigated the Jewish religious leadership for not taking a couple of verses from the Old Testament, which he called “the word of God”, as seriously as their own traditions. By simple synecdoche, the whole Bible is thus the Word of God.

Not so fast. We can’t just blithely assume that every time we see the phrase “word of God”, “word of the Lord”, or another permutation of those words, it’s referring to the Bible as we think of it. (At least in one notable case, Jn 1.1, it refers to Jesus!)

To my knowledge, there is no evidence that the Christian canon was seen as the primary meaning of “word of God” until the Reformation–give or take a few centuries. The Jews (not to mention most non-Protestant Christians) took a different view of what “word of God” means than inerrantists have co-opted it to mean: for people in Jesus’ time, “the word of God” was “everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” which could of course in theory be either more or less than what’s written in what would eventually become the Jewish canon.

When Jesus pointed out a scripture like “Honor your father and your mother” (as above in Mk 7) and upheld it as the “word of God”, he did indeed seem to be affirming the authority and divine source of that teaching. But take a look at what part of the Old Testament he is referring to here: the Law, which clearly purports to have been handed down by Moses from God’s direct revelation. This isn’t a passage from Judges, 2 Samuel, or Job: it’s from a section of Scripture assumed by Jews to be the most authoritative, “thus saith the Lord” passage possible–straight from Mount Sinai. We simply have no evidence that the Jews or earliest Christians believed in some sort of divine dictation (which is what “word of God” implies) of the Old Testament generally, with the exception of the “thus saith the Lord” passages in Torah and the Prophets, and even then the Jews and Christians took quite a while in deciding which of the prophetic books carried divine authority. The “history” books of the Old Testament? Certainly not.

In short, what is referred to as the “word of God” is never talk about God: it’s talk assumed to be directly from God. And do you really believe that the whole Bible was directly, mechanically dictated by God? Not even the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy takes things that far.

The passages in question here in Mark 7 are part of decidedly prescriptive material intended to define acceptable behavior in religious practice, and it’s this context under which Jesus is addressing the Jewish leadership. If what God (ostensibly) told Moses can’t be said to be the “Word of God”, what can? So it’s not surprising that Jesus would cite chapter and verse to illustrate the Pharisees’ hypocrisy when their customs violated the spirit of the Law they claimed to be upholding.

But even granting that, can we then take the next step that some inerrantists do and say that by referring to a teaching from the cultic texts defining the Jewish religion (Torah) as a “word” from God, Jesus was affirming that every Jewish text that eventually got incorporated as the Old Testament was likewise “the Word of God”? Are we justified, or even given any reason at all, to extend that to everything in the Old Testament just because we know that eventually people would string all those scriptures together into a canon (which hadn’t been accomplished in Jesus’ time)? And may we then stretch this out to make it apply to everything that would eventually be called the canon?

The same tendency for conservative Bible readers to make too much hay of a biblical reference to a single part of Scripture frequently rears its head with Psalm 119. Almost every verse of this longest chapter in the Bible praises the Lord’s “word”, ”Law”, ”commands”, etc. Modern Christians are tempted to read each and every verse as referring to our Bible (especially when it says “Your word”), but this would be foolish: the subject of this Psalm is manifestly Torah, the set of prescriptive laws of behavior and ritual purity governing the Jews and regarded as defunct under Christianity. It’s exceedingly ironic that this huge Psalm is exulting in the one section of our Bible that Christians find to be inapplicable, despite v. 152: “Long ago I learned from your statutes that you established them to last forever.” Whoops!

So was Jesus at least saying that Torah was the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God?

Even an unqualified “yes” only buys us the Pentateuch and not much else within the Bible except by a stack of other assumptions not related to Jesus’ own recorded words. At most, we can try to recover the view of his contemporaries and accept as the “Word of God” only those passages explicitly stated to be presenting God’s…well, words.

But my answer is either “yes and no” or “no”.

As for “yes and no”, let me quickly say that passages like the above may indeed be implying that Jesus shared his peers’ apparent assumption of Torah’s divine origin and ultimate authority, with all necessary perfection implied, but again, we have no reason to apply the appellation “Word of God” to any specific body of scripture as a technical term as Protestants tend to do. And as I indicated in the prior post on this topic, I’d not be scandalized if Jesus did think of Torah this way.

Next time, however, I’d like to pursue the “no” answer by suggesting that Jesus may be using more rhetoric in his usage of Scripture than appears obvious on a first blush reading. That, or at least that he is occasionally presented as doing this by other Gospel writers.

Next up: Jesus the Tanakh-thumper?

If I were to ask you why you believe in inerrancy, would you answer with any of the following?

1) The Bible affirms that it is inerrant.

2) It’s a logical inference from other things I believe (e.g. about God’s perfection).

3) Without a perfect record of divine revelation, anything goes. What’d be the point?

I left off one likely response, as it doesn’t get to the root cause: “Because it’s never been proved wrong.” The problem here is that this response shifts the burden of proof off of the inerrantist, despite the fact that an expectation of complete perfection is not a natural position; no one expects that anything is perfect until it is proved to be flawed unless they have a prior reason for that expectation. So assuming the Bible is perfect until proved otherwise assumes something not in evidence. What I’m asking is, “Why do you expect it to be perfect?”

Let me look at the remaining answers one at a time.

1) For the Bible tells me so.

Ok. Forget the circularity of “I trust X because X told me to”; after all, presuppositionalism has nifty ways of embracing such circularity as a “feature, not a bug”. There are other problems.

Where does the Bible tell you so? Before answering that, realize what that question really means: does any passage ever refer to this specific collection of books as they were canonized centuries after the individual books were written? If so, does it additionally refer to them as entirely free from error? In other words, can you find even a single passage that refers to the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible (“the word of the Lord” doesn’t count)? Do those passages also refer to this canon as inerrant, or with an unarguably synonymous term? If not, does it even say something like that in a way that doesn’t require philosophical/theological (i.e. extrabiblical) extrapolation?

Pretty sure I know what the answer is. But I won’t spoil it for you: go look for yourself.

2) Ok, maybe it’s not spelled out precisely in the Bible, but it’s a logical inference based on other Scriptures and on what one should expect from a perfect God.

A common pitfall is to suppose that because Passage X:YZ makes a claim about a passage or portion of “Scripture” (e.g. Psalm 119 speaking of the Law), we can extrapolate that everything the Church eventually determined to be “Scripture” somehow gets grandfathered in. So when one verse proclaims, “The Word of God shall stand forever,” it must be referring to what inerrantists now think of as the totality of the Word, the Bible. That’s clever: but it’s not biblical. In fact, it’s unapologetically extrabiblical; that is, it requires you to add other assumptions to the text, assumptions about the Church’s role that Protestants by definition reject when applied outside this one issue. What I mean is this: you’re rallying around Source A for authority while rejecting Source B, yet citing Source B as the authoritative body that proves Source A’s authority.

Many hold on to inerrancy because they believe that God does not lie, and so by extension we must assume that this must be applied to everything we call Scripture. By now you should be able to anticipate my response: what makes you think that everything we call Scripture is comprised of God’s words? This is yet another mask of a presupposition that needs to be peeled away so that we can ask the underlying question. There has to be a reason you believe that Scripture = God’s very words, and preferably it’s more defensible and less based on personal ignorance/incredulity than, “I can’t imagine it being any other way.”

A typical response to this is rhetorically asking why God would leave us without an unimpeachable source about Him and His ways. I return, do you mean to ask why He wouldn’t ensure that we had a source of knowledge that was capable of proving His truth to us and that was free from human obfuscation, manipulation, misunderstanding, and exploitation? Why indeed! Instead, what we actually have is a book whose truth claims are very easily disputed and that has been obfuscated, manipulated, misunderstood, and exploited for all kinds of nefarious purposes–and all the more because of its supposed authority! If God intended to invest it with an authority used properly so rarely and misused so commonly, it would not go toward lessening the problem of God’s transcendence from our plane of existence: if anything, it would compound the problem of why He has chosen to (ineffectually) intervene in our affairs only to deliver us a much misinterpreted and too often dangerous collection of ancient writings while leaving everything else in our world in such a state of glaring imperfection. On the other hand, if our very human Bible is instead yet another example of humanity’s grasping after the ethereal, always just out of reach, and frequently misunderstood regions of the Transcendent, there’s no hollow exception. All told, everything makes much more sense: the Bible’s not perfect because its authors weren’t, either. Nothing’s perfect.

At this point, most will have asked or at least thought the third possible response to my initial question.

3) Without an inerrant Bible, why should I believe in Christianity – or God Himself – at all? How are we supposed to know what to believe? Christianity is just not intelligible unless God left us a clear, miraculously accurate demonstration of His activity in the world, which is what the Bible is.

What it comes down to for those of you asking that is that you were sold a bill of goods. You believe the Bible, and therefore Christianity, because the Bible is inerrant; the moment you stop believing the latter, despite having had no good reason for starting to believe it, your foundation is gone. You become fallible; your beliefs become less than 100% sure; you stand the chance of being wrong about it all. And it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it? I felt more secure when I was confident I knew everything–or if not everything, I at least knew enough to consult the complete Source of All Knowledge, which conferred absolute truth to me on demand (magically, my interpretations were spot on as well). How much simpler things were then!

Let’s just say that, given only a Bible that’s human rather than divine, you decide that it’s all a sham and a scam. Let’s say you throw in the towel on faith. Are you so worshipful of Almighty Certitude and the Right to Be Right that, in place of your shattered inerrancy, you’d be willing to embrace a version of certainty that affirms, “There is no God, no transcendent meaning, and nothing but the material world”? (This is a very popular choice, unfortunately.) If so, I weep for you and for all the people you take with you into that rigid, harsh realm of fundamentalism. Good thing you don’t base everything in your life off of complete certainty, or you’d never leave your bed in the morning!

The difficulty is in managing expectations and dealing with disappointment: if you were never accustomed to forming your beliefs and outlook on life from the belief that the Bible is a codified list of unquestionable direct messages from God, I don’t think you’d miss it. It does, however, hurt a bit to have what you’ve planted your feet on suddenly jerked from underneath you.

Thankfully, the situation for the non-inerrantist isn’t nearly so bleak as the former inerrantist might be tempted to believe. Most of us are used to living in expectation of things not seen (that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). Human beings can’t escape living by induction; the assumption that the sun is going to come up tomorrow is based only on inferences from our prior experiences and our unverifiable trust that past events are indicative of the future. We assume a lot in our daily lives, and have literally nothing we can say with certainty. We use Wikipedia. We Google to find answers from fallible people all over the Internet, having to pick through what is and isn’t credible on our own (well, Snopes helps). And by and large, we’re ok with that. That’s just the way it is. And for non-inerrantist Christians, the same goes with our faith; we don’t go around pretending we’re exempt from uncertainty because of some special knowledge we have about the world through our divinely authored handbook. We don’t set our gaze on the window with all its smudges and imperfections, but on what’s on the other side, which we can still see remarkably well.

For those brought up without such unrealistic expectations of the Bible as inerrancy, the faith is still communicated as it always was: the sacred but not necessarily infallible word of the saints’ testimony, leading to personal encounters with God. The earliest church spread by passing on their beliefs about their encounters with Jesus by word of mouth long before it was written down and spread around: even then, there were soon quite spurious testimonies as well, and so, like us, they couldn’t just trust that everything they read was…well, the gospel truth. The testimony of those changed by God in Christ was passed down and continues to be replicated. My father was brought to faith in his adulthood not because anyone had demonstrated the Bible inerrant, but because someone demonstrated the risen Christ in his life.

A faith without a perfect, unquestionable source for knowledge and truth is a light that shines in darkness without completely eliminating the darkness; in fact, when pointed in the wrong directions it can cast some pretty ominous shadows. Dim places are navigable as long as we tread lightly, but the inerrantist plows through boldly while pretending to see it all clearly, often with results that harm others more than themselves (which is the only reason I bother critiquing inerrancy). For instance, without permission to critique the Bible, we cannot convincingly condemn slavery, which is prescribed (by God, apparently) in the first part and never truly repudiated in the second.

“The faith once delivered to the saints” is bigger than will fit between the covers of a book. It’s unwieldy at times, and full of mysteries that can frighten some of us (and thrill others). But it’s entirely adequate for giving us insight into the backend of our universe and teaching us to recognize our place within it.

So what’s your answer? Why are you an inerrantist?

Recently I heard a Sunday School teacher of young children bubbling about how many catechism questions her children had learned that year; I should note that she was not bragging, since she doesn’t teach the catechism herself, but was commending the parents and children for their hard work because of how important it is for children to “know what they believe.” Laying aside her dubiously assumed answer to the question of “do they even know what the catechism is saying so that they could be said to ‘believe’ it?”, I think her remarks convey a popular misunderstanding among many people, and not just Christians.

On one hand, I agree that knowing what we believe is extremely important: we should always be aware of what beliefs are guiding us day-to-day. It’s part of a critical self-awareness that many are missing when they function from all sorts of unexamined assumptions and then act as though “believing” is the same thing as “knowing”. And this is the problem: although knowing what we believe isn’t the same thing as knowing the right things, most people who are most confident that they know what they believe seem to be the likeliest to “know” things they have no proper epistemological basis for knowing. So when people like this Sunday School teacher speak of the importance of children knowing what they believe, what they mean is believing exactly what we’ve taught them to believe before they have a chance to be critical about any of it.

I want my children to start off being aware of how little they know, not how much they know–or think they know. I also want them to be aware of how little everyone else knows, how much mystery there still is in this world, defying all of our confidence.

But it’s a difficult balancing act: I want my children to trust what my wife and I tell them and not gainsay everything we try to teach them. I want them to learn to live off their best guesses, while recognizing that that’s all they are. By this I hope they will avoid fundamentalism of both the religious and positivist varieties. I want them to live in wonder and in expectation, starting off not as skeptical blank slates who must learn everything for themselves but as notebooks written in pencil who can rest on the suggestions of those older and wiser than they, correcting as necessary.

As long as children are aware that their catechisms are written in pencil, some of the danger is mitigated. But children are so black and white that it’s often hard to get them to unlearn “facts” without damaging the trust tissue their learning is couched in. So I’m stuck thinking that by and large, catechism as practiced by most is a bad idea. If I had a chance to revise the way catechism is taught, this is how I would preface things–not just once, but often.

We’re learning the things believed by our mothers and fathers in the faith. They didn’t know everything, of course, and they made mistakes like we do, but they followed God and did their best to understand Him, and this is what they came up with. We’re entrusting it to you for safekeeping.

If we were able to communicate that…that’s really about all it would take, isn’t it? If not those very words, the regular reinforcement of this disposition toward knowledge, which falls under the virtue called humility, would seem to help many avoid crises of faith later in life.

None of the toilsome expositions about uncertainty, faith, doubt, hope (i.e. the stuff I talk about on this blog all the time) would be necessary for most Christians to perilously work our way through if we could have just learned to gratefully hold everything we were taught with an open hand and not been trained to “know what we believe” to the point where we held such unrealistic expectations about the capacity of anyone–to include the biblical authors–to have absolute, unquestionable knowledge.

Children want brute facts; their young minds are usually not amenable to nuanced views of epistemology. They often ask hard questions like “Is that true?” that we’re unprepared to answer without the necessary nuances. But answering that sort of question by both affirming that 1) “Many good people think it is” and 2) “But many other good people disagree” is extending them an invitation for discovery that will benefit them far more than unwavering confidence in “what they believe”.

Fellow non-/post-Evangelical believers, how have you seen this approach play out? Have you seen something that’s worked better?

I was recently warned about the danger and “arrogance” of judging certain portions of Scripture to be erroneous, particularly in regard to a theological claim made in the Old Testament (the death of Uzzah in 2 Sam 6.7 and 1 Chron 13.10): “In so doing,” said my conversant, “we set ourselves above the Bible and make ourselves the judge.” I agree that we should treat Scripture respectfully. This doesn’t mean that we can’t argue with it, but we should treat it with all due reverence.

The truly frustrating thing that I’ve been trying to point out (for it seems like forever) is that people don’t stop to properly analyze why it deserves this respect.

Those of us who come from Protestant traditions somehow acquire the assumption that we must respect the Bible, and that it is arrogant and dangerous to disagree with it, for the reason that it is perfect, untouchable, the very words of God, etc. But again, why?

I have heard it said, “Christ did not give us a book; he gave us a Church.” That is, the primary reason we give the Bible such high respect is because the Church, the community of believers that composed and compiled the Bible, has passed it down to us as something worthy of respect and honor. Here again, Protestant traditions have undermined that rationale by teaching us to distrust the fallible Church (which Catholics seem to view as more infallible than it actually is) and trust only in the infallible Bible (which most Catholics do not affirm as altogether infallible) — the same Bible that was written and canonized by that fallible Church! Protestants will typically respond that God especially sanctified the efforts of the Church, making sure everything was ship-shape, error-free, and all/only the right books were included because…again, why exactly are they convinced of that?

Is it just because we think the Bible says that we need to uphold it as inerrant? That’s entirely circular. Does something outside the Bible tell us to? That’s self-defeating, because holding that criterion as inviolable is by nature upholding something extra-biblical as your guiding principle. Is it because we find it really, really handy, indispensable even, to have an authoritative constitution to evaluate everything by? As I have quoted Lewis before:

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this.

If we non-inerrantists believed that God Himself wrote the Bible, guaranteed its full accuracy, and made it exactly how we wanted Him to make it and for the same reasons, it might indeed be arrogant and dangerous to place ourselves above God by saying “I reject that.” But we don’t believe that: actually, many of us are dismayed by the ill-founded presumption of attributing everything in Scripture (or worse, everything we read into Scripture as interpreters) to God indiscriminately.

I have been accused of trying to dismantle the bedrock of people’s faith and denigrating the Bible just for the thrill of proving that I’m right. If that were the case, I’d spend a lot more time pointing out biblical errors and disproving the attempted reconciliations of apologists. But ferreting out and proclaiming the Bible’s shortcomings is not really how I want to spend my time, mostly because I actually care very much about the faith of others. And I don’t wish to see their house come down on a poor foundation: I know far too many people who have made an inerrant Bible the bedrock of their faith, and when the winds and storms of evidence beat against this assumption they’ve been told is non-negotiable, they lost their faith altogether. Building your faith on a Bible with unimpeachable “authority” is building your faith on the sand. I don’t want to see that happening. Another danger for inerrantists that motivates me to speak out is crazy Francis-Chan-esque affirmations of hollow, unconvincing, or outright loathsome understandings of God’s character and ways.

I certainly am not arguing that there is no warrant for caution in indicting Scripture as containing error. As a rule, we should always give our brothers and sisters in Christ, including the authors of Scripture, the benefit of the doubt and not cast aspersion on their hard-won opinions without fear and trembling. But when we are told that in reckoning some Scripture as erroneous there is the danger that we exalt ourselves as the final authority, I must respond that the danger of refusing to acknowledge that we must judge Scripture is that we will not be able to recognize it when we are doing it. Instead, we exalt our interpretations as the authority and claim that we are just following what God says through the Bible. Because the Bible does not come with a divine commentary,  we all interpret the Bible, and we are all responsible for determining what makes the most sense using whatever means we have at our disposal. We do not have the option of just “going with what Scripture says” — we can only go with what we think Scripture says.

What this means is that if God truly gave us the Bible, in so doing He gave us a medium that requires human judgment, faulty as that usually is. Since He didn’t provide us direct access to the Truth without need for an interface, He could not have expected that we could just trust whatever it is we think we read in the Bible. He had to have known we’d be judging Scripture. Bearing this out, the Gospels show Jesus himself judging Scripture, and occasionally finding it wanting.

My problem is not that people want to give Scripture a unique and extremely important place in our walk with God: my problem is with the accusation that refusing to treat the Bible as an authority of a completely different and superior nature than our other authorities, which include Church tradition and personal conviction, requires a “dangerous” degree of personal judgment from which inerrantists are blissfully exempt.

Please consider how much you might be putting in God’s mouth by maintaining the “authority of Scripture” before accusing people of being arrogant/dangerous for not trusting that this or that biblical author author got it right all the time every time.

Allan R. Bevere’s blog today posted a quote from C.S. Lewis from Miracles on the general topic of the primacy of the apostolic witness. One part of the quote caught my eye.

The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christian brought: what we call the “gospels”, the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

via The Quotable C.S. Lewis #31: The Apostolic Witness

Although I would caution against reducing the “good news” to “the Resurrection” as he appears to do (Jesus proclaimed it long before he was even crucified: the “good news” is the coming of the Kingdom of God), I think this is a cracking good observation by Lewis. The historicity of the Gospels is never more important than their subject. No matter how much we know about how well they mirror historical reality, the fact remains that there would be no Gospels at all if there were not a gospel that had already been believed. The New Testament itself should be viewed as secondary to the primary apostolic witnesses and should never be viewed as the unquestionable, authoritative witness itself.

I found this to be a stark reminder of the secondary nature of the written word: the Scriptures should never be elevated to the level of the reality to which they seek to testify. Unfortunately, the bibliolatry of the modern Protestant church does just that.

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.