Undeception

Confession: I find less and less about science that thrills me the way it used to.

While I used to – and many people I associate with still do – greet the news of a scientific discovery or advancement with the geeky equivalent of a fist pump, a whoop, and a holler, for me nowadays it’s more like how I feel when a close friend’s child poops in the potty for the first time. Sure, I’m duly glad for the child and happy for her parents, and hopeful about the financial boon attending the chance for my friend to start spending less on diaper purchases. But apart from the notable lack of personal investment in their situation, we parents of older kids know that it’s actually rare indeed that a single deposit in the potty makes the child potty-trained–it may be months before she does it again. There’s satisfaction to be enjoyed at the milestone and what it might mean for the future, but it’s usually premature to declare victory.

This reaction of mine is probably just a phase, as I’m just increasingly unnerved by the triumphalistic fanfares of scientism. A pronounced pro-science movement has sadly been necessitated by resistance to science among Fundamentalist and conservative Evangelical Christians, but overcompensation has yielded an overweening, cultish reverence for science, with its most ardent devotees treating every scientific discovery as a nail in God’s coffin. It’s this that’s driving the growth of the New Atheism movement.

I’m always looking for ways to mitigate this overreaction and to integrate a healthy appreciation for science into a similarly cautious confidence in Christian theology. So when I read this recent (now two-month old) article by James K. A. (aka Jamie) Smith in Christianity Today, “What Galileo’s Telescope Can’t See,” I was happy it added some things to the discussion worth thinking about.

Our sensibility (following the late Robert Webber) should be an “ancient-future” one: The church will find gifts to help it think through postmodern challenges by retrieving the wisdom of ancient Christians. The goal is not to simply repeat ancient formulations while sticking our heads in the sand; rather, the contemporary church—and contemporary Christian scholars—can learn much from the habits of mind that characterized church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine.

The main thrust is that when believers encounter challenging scientific evidence, they shouldn’t close their eyes, cover their ears, and shout their existing theological constructs at the top of the lungs. Rather, we should look to the example of the historical church and learn to “foster the Christian imagination to underwrite more creative approaches.” Smith cites councils such as Chalcedon as having delivered cleverly and creatively derived theological resolutions to science/religion conflicts. The danger Smith is trying to put his finger on more or less amounts to what happens when you pit science and religion opposite one another in a fact fight, in a fashion typical of Western Christianity. He’s arguing that “creative” ways of retooling and upholding earlier agreed-upon beliefs to account for scientific revelations are needed to help heal the science/religion divide.

But I want to shift this a bit: the contentious science/religion divide is only superficially attributable to science offering answers that our theologies have yet to account for. Coming up with clever and henceforth authoritative rationalizations to make sure new data is consistent with what we already believe doesn’t seem all that different from “sticking our heads in the sand” while refusing to admit that this is what we’re doing. This is not a sufficient answer; we must dig a bit further down.

The deeper cause for the rift is trying to use either science or religion as a skeleton key to unlock the answers to both practical and more existential questions. Gould’s NOMA principle is rejected no less by Evangelical Christians than it is by atheists like Jerry Coyne with his fierce denunciation of “accomodationism”. Now, I’m not talking about the dubious apologetic claim about “different kinds of knowing”; I’m referring to “different kinds of questions” which we answer in the most practical ways we can considering the intractability of epistemological indeterminacy. Too many people talk about a “war between science and religion” and in so doing confuse the essentially incidental conflicts between specific scientific data and particular religious beliefs with the more fundamental question of whether science and religion can in theory coexist without falling all over each other trying to better answer the same questions. It’s not, “How do my truth claims need to make way for competing truth claims?” but, “Which kinds of observations are the most useful for which aspects of our lives?”

Science and Religion are portrayed to be in harmony in the Tiffany window “Education” (1890). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I view discovery of more accurate understandings of our physical universe as a (literal) godsend that should if anything highlight that our dependence cannot be on fallible, ever-changing intellectual assumptions, but can only rest on the basis of our faith, which is God Himself. I see the Church, the Bible, and other forms of tradition as candles that serve as guides that focus our life-efforts by teaching us to reject rationalist/positivist pat answers to encounter the meaning of our God-filled universe in the ways of our ancient forebears. Philosophically, scientific inquiry and religious belief stand much more often back-to-back than face-to-face; the latter stance is usually the result either of religion trying to answer (or dismiss) “how” or science trying to answer (or dismiss) “why”.

I’m not trying to draw too sharp a distinction between “how” and “why” questions: we’re not looking at two different objects, but merely describing the object differently. As Christians we cannot help believe that God is – somehow – a fundamental part of the “how”, and atheists must be forgiven for believing that a material-only universe must generate its own answers to “why”. What needs to be avoided are the turf wars that result from either side caustically belittling the answer the other side gives from within its own area of expertise. We need more theistic and atheistic representatives to agree to avoid flaunting the boundary line.

Unfortunately, the necessary commitment to letting science’s tentative answers to “how the universe works” questions override our forbears’ answers to those questions is dependent on a much less rigid system of doctrines and a much less hegemonic role of influence over our doctrines coming from the historical theological community than much of Western Christianity will tolerate. But Christianity has never been about giving definitive answers to “how the universe works”, nor even all that much about the “how God works in our universe” question. Christianity supplies us with meaning by instructing us “how to live in God.”

When we find scientific data that steps on our theology’s toes, we have to realize that our theology may well have been camped out on the wrong side of the boundary and withdraw gracefully. But we should also be on the lookout and be willing to hold the line when proponents of scientism make invalid claims to our inheritance. There is much work that can be done from within the demilitarized zone.

I recently read two articles that, while they’re directed at very different audiences, have a common thread between them that regular readers will recognize as a concern of mine lately.

English writer Francis Spufford is on the press-junket for his book, Unapologetic. This article he wrote for the Guardian (with a tip of the hat to Arni) seems to be setting up an approach toward speaking of religion that consciously and…well, unapologetically avoids putting up faith as “Reason 2.0″ as is done by most Christian apologists. To give you an idea of his approach, which is sure to be controversial among believers and unbelievers alike, here’s a bit from the post:

The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

I have recently been considering that the goal of “breaking down the barrier between faith and reason” may be misguided, at least to the extent to which it tries to blur the line between them. “Faith isn’t against reason: it is reason!” The enterprise of making sure that people don’t conclude that our religious convictions contradict the world of reason too often slides into the quagmire of “proving” our unprovable convictions.

This pitfall comes from the ubiquitous misconstrual of “faith” as “believing”. Faith is not belief, but a commitment to a belief (at least in its dullest form: for the Christian it should be a commitment to the Truth himself). Reason is for believing; faith is for living. I think Spufford was trying to say that we will only live out what we want to, what is emotionally real to us.

To be sure, we don’t want to base our beliefs on things that we know aren’t true (which isn’t the same thing as resting in beliefs we aren’t sure are true). But living without reasonable beliefs is the danger of Scylla to the Charybdis of reasonable beliefs without faithfulness.

It’s the latter danger that I see gobbling up most Evangelicals. Everything important to them about their faith has to do with beliefs about this or that fact or “truth”. If Jesus were to come back today, they’d rather be found committing an act of sin (since we’re all hopeless, dirty sinners) than believing something incorrectly (something about finding “faith” on the earth, wasn’t it?). Completely, utterly, hopelessly backwards.

This observation is behind the other post I wanted to share, a post by Zac Bailes called “Jesus, Truth, and Coffee“. It’s his reflections on a conversation with one of those Evangelicals I was just talking about. Here’s a salient quote:

Christians across the globe have become so concerned with making sure people know the truth about Jesus that they forget what that truth provokes. Love for the neighbor becomes sublimated to a concern about recognizing truth. They remained entombed in the truth of power, rather than the liberation of love.

No wonder our faith seems so trivial to the world! We tell them it’s about believing “facts” without any evidence, often enough in contradiction of evidence, and then we refuse to live as though those “facts” had any value for our lives at all. When the positivists tell us that our beliefs must be proved to be worth anything, we take them at their word and get waylaid as we single-mindedly turn our entire religion into an exercise of maintaining the right beliefs and proving them to others.

Instead, we have despised the only thing that could demonstrate the value of faith, the one unmistakably clear charge given to us by the one in whose name we claim to be acting: devotion to God as expressed by devotion to one another. The most emotional investment we have is put into holding everyone else accountable for behaving in ways that indicate that they believe correctly. This is why, as Spufford notes, the world looks at believers as people doing our level best to shut our eyes, clench our fists, and just believe something. We do not attempt to feel our faith; we are content to believe it. We do not love that in which we believe; we are not committed to it enough to energize it with the affection of commitment.

And in so doing, we demonstrate ourselves faithless.

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?

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”

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?

Now, the one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, repulsion, recoil between the component particles of the Lord’s body. I will not, I do not care to inquire who is more to blame than another in the evil fact. I only care to insist that it is the duty of every individual man to be innocent of the same. One main cause, perhaps I should say the one cause of this deathly condition, is that whereto we had, we did not, whereto we have attained, we do not walk by that.

Ah, friends! do not now think of thy neighbor. Do not applaud my opinion as just from what thou hast seen around thee, but answer it from thy own being, thy own behavior. Dost thou ever feel thus toward thy neighbor, “Yes, of course, every man is my brother; but how can I be a brother to him so long as he thinks me wrong in what I believe, and so long as I think he wrongs in his opinions the dignity of the truth?” What, I return, has the man no hand to grasp, no eyes into which yours may gaze far deeper than your vaunted intellect can follow? Is there not, I ask, anything in him to love? Who asks you to be of one opinion? It is the Lord who asks you to be of one heart. Does the Lord love the man? Can the Lord love, where there is nothing to love? Are you wiser than he, inasmuch as you perceive impossibility where he has failed to discover it?

Or will you say, “Let the Lord love where he pleases: I will love where I please”? or say, and imagine you yield, “Well, I suppose I must, and therefore I will,– but with certain reservations, politely quiet in my own heart”? Or wilt thou say none of all these things, but do them all, one after the other, in the secret chambers of thy proud spirit?

If you delight to condemn you are a wounder, a divider of the oneness of Christ. If you pride yourself on your loftier vision, and are haughty to your neighbor, you are yourself a division and have reason to ask: “Am I a particle of the body at all?” The Master will deal with thee upon the score. Let it humble thee to know that thy dearest opinion, the one thou dost worship as if it, and not God, were thy Saviour, this very opinion thou art doomed to change, for it cannot possibly be right, if it work in thee for death and not for life.

George MacDonald (from his guest sermon to a Unitarian congregation in London, 1879)

—————————————————

Ouch.

Or, if I were to yield up my pride to express the true extent to which these words convicted me, “YEEOUCH!”

I believe I have been granted – and I do not think it’s prideful to admit it – a rather large share of empathy with those who believe differently than I do; I credit my father’s example for that gift, and credit the gift for my having ever been able to entertain the theological changes in opinion that have so changed me in recent years. I have sought on this blog to bring all involved in Christianity’s conservative and liberal wars to understand the opposing view, and if not that, at least to love and treat with respect those who hold it. But even that larger than average share is not enough: MacDonald nails me dead to rights (which is why I keep coming back to him).

It’s not enough to try to convince ourselves that we love our much mistaken brothers and sisters despite their flaws: we must be passionately devoted to them, even at the dreaded risk of being mistaken for one of them. We must stand up and be associated with them whenever they speak and do what is right without fearing of being branded as “one of those people,” and inasmuch as they are the victims of the sicknesses of awful theology or attitudes, they are that much more in need of our compassion and attendance at their bedsides, holding their hands in prayer for their recovery.

I can’t begin to prescribe – any more than I can foresee – the various practical ways this radical ecumenicism can be realized in our interactions. It cannot always mean shutting our mouths, and it can never mean pretending not to be concerned for bad behavior or harmful beliefs on the part of these, whom we imagine as our theological adversaries. But, I warrant, we’ll know it when we see it, provided we have continuously ensure in each of our own hearts that we are always pursuing the “more excellent way” of Christian love for those opponents. A passion for their well-being, which will be manifested by their well-behaving, should be our very central driving motivation. And above all, we should not be satisfied with anything about our own ethics or theology until we have disciplined our haughty, learned souls into their true place: that of loving siblings to all of the children of our Father.

Any belief of mine – however true- that I allow to get in between me and my brother will leave me subject to the purgative fires of God’s hell until it is put in its proper place. I apologize to all of my “theological adversaries,” from creationists, to penal substitution advocates, to apologists for “disturbing divine behavior” in the Old Testament, right down to Calvinists – yes, even them! – for loving my “better” beliefs more than I have loved you. God forgive me for that.

Thanks, brother George, for the reminder.