Undeception

The Southern Baptists have done it again.

Despite taking a surprisingly progressive stand in favor of “a just and compassionate path to legal status…for those undocumented immigrants already living in our country” at their convention in Arizona this week, Southern Baptists have also “unanimously or near-unanimously” passed other resolutions that affirm or re-affirm some of their trademark old-time-religion stances.

• They lodged a complaint to the Obama Administration to revive flagging support for the Defense of Marriage Act.
• Calling out Rob Bell’s book by name, they affirmed their belief in “the biblical teaching on eternal conscience punishment of the unregenerate in Hell.” Note, not just hell, but eternal conscious “punishment” (known less euphemistically as “torment”).
• The gender-neutral and therefore “inaccurate” NIV 2011 was rejected, and pastors were encouraged to teach their congregations about the dangers of translating “men” as “people”, “sons” as “sons and daughters,” etc. Because that’s what the world needs now, apparently.

Regardless of your stance on each of those issues, I’m wondering how much influence large Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention have on Christian culture. I’ve no doubt that there are plenty who try to follow what they have to say, but it becomes increasingly apparent that these bodies primarily serve the function of attempting top-down reform — or, as with the immigration and DOMA issues, attempting to use some high-profile influence to catalyze that quintessentially top-down reform known as “public policy”.

Don’t roll your eyes about that last remark, political progressives. You do it, too. The question these days doesn’t seem to be whether we should use the government to legislate our religious values: it’s which religious values you’re going to try to legislate.

I’m not just pointing all this out as an excuse to bag on “those loony Southern Baptists.” I wanted to suggest that resolutions and legislation from authoritative bodies, both ecclesiastical and governmental, may be as fine and dandy as they are inevitable, but the best reform comes from the ground up. And it seems to me that the Southern Baptists are losing that battle.

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 10: “Into the Looking Glass”

By this point in the book, and undoubtedly long before, what everyone’s asking is, “So what’s his solution?” How can we read this very human book with all its human flaws and still think of it in some way as scripture?

Much of this chapter retreads familiar territory in light of Stark’s answer. One might be surprised that they’ve already encountered his answer to that question several times throughout the book. The answer: by confronting the text head on. The earliest texts set the precedent when they argue with one another. Many of the chapters describe a changing understanding of God and His ways, and despite the claims of the canonicists, we cannot assume that we are the beneficiaries of an interpretive victory won long ago by those who had the most recent word on the subject, whether author, canon, or council: that would be similar to what Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery”, the assumption that the later a belief, the better. Instead, we have to engage the text in a way analogous to the old classical model of the dialectic, i.e. not as an infallible rule or unaccountable master, but as one of our teachers who is occasionally presenting something incorrect. Stark has referred to this type of engagement with the text as a confrontational reading more than once before this chapter. Perhaps another way of thinking about it would be peer review, in which even those accounted as experts (the biblical authors in this case) occasionally have their consensus overturned by new data presented by new researchers.

The key insight from this chapter is laid out in the first section, which at last elucidates the somewhat ambiguous title of the book. Stark’s point is this: the Bible is a mirror. When we read the Bible, we are looking at humanity’s attempt to understand the divine. We cannot even hope to accurately see God’s face in the text until we stare those ancient human faces in the eye and make the intentional and painstaking effort of wiping the egg from our moustaches, washing the toothpaste off of our chins, and taking the beam out of our eyes. When we read the Bible, Stark argues, we are not looking at God, but at ourselves, in all our human shortcomings and failures, subject as we are to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. It is not only Scripture for us insofar as it accurately speaks to us and convicts us of our shortcomings through its true teachings; no, we cannot fully claim it as our Scripture until we acknowledge our weaknesses, temptations, and unfavorable tendencies writ large within the text, indicting those human flaws in the justification for actions prescribed and described in the text and even in the very motivations for the writing/editing/compiling of the text. We can’t just learn from good examples and ignore the mistakes of our community, both historical and current, by covering up for them or cleverly explaining them away. For Stark, we can only ever hope to use the Bible effectively as Scripture if we consciously read it as a record of history that, when found wanting, we can then do our best to avoid repeating. Stark argues that God may indeed speak to us through the text, but often He does so in pointing out the pitfalls of human nature that produced the text.

The rest of this first section reexamines a few of the material from previous chapters under a confrontational reading to show what sorts of insight might be gleaned. I will only focus on a couple of them.

Stark argues that the development of monotheism from polytheism evident in the Old Testament doesn’t mean we just uncritically declare monotheism as the winner. He points out certain harmful tendencies of monotheism that are often noted by anthropologists and sociologists, paraphrased as “if you cannot kill or enslave them, convert them” (p. 221). Indeed, in chapters 4 and 5 he already showed that monotheism in Israel developed amidst such mindsets. But we only notice that when we entertain the possibility that the Bible is not inerrant and is never unchallengeable.

Many conservative American Christians will find the specific “condemned texts” he selects and draws lessons from to be at odds with their politics. But it is such close identification of Christianity with that particular conservative stance that he thinks the text warns us about in cases like the sacrifice of innocents: “…we continue to offer our own children on the altar of homeland security, sending them off to die in ambiguous wars…” (p. 222). Still, no particular party or political ideology is immune from the charge of hero worship and propaganda that he takes to be the most valuable moral of the David and Goliath story.

Reading biblical propaganda such as the legend of David and Goliath at face value may have its rewards; it is certainly an inspirational story. But such a reading can also foster delusion. Moreover, such a reading is not as interesting or as relevant as a critical reading. It is the critical reading that prepares us to face the real world where the true giants are the centralized powers that mask themselves with the ruddy faces of shepherd boys and good ol’ boys. (p. 225)

This doesn’t undermine his main point here, but I daresay that if he thinks a critical reading is more interesting and more relevant, he hasn’t tried to teach the story to young children!

This is the chapter that picks up where he left off in chapter 8, “Jesus Was Wrong”. He spends several pages talking about the problems with the apocalyptic mindset that, as he argued in chapter 8, Jesus was functioning from within. Stark makes a lot of hay pointing out the shortcomings of a dualistic, “black and white” way of viewing the world (“You’re either for me or against me”). The dualism of God vs. the world is somewhat impotent to effect the changes it most wants to accomplish, because waiting for God to come sweeping down on a wire to fix everything stymies progress in the interim:

Time and again, the Christian commitment to justice has been undermined by the expectation of an imminent end. Generation after generation, those who suffer are told to wait it out; authentic justice is impossible this side of the eschaton, but there is hope to be had in the conviction that the end is nigh. Yet the end has never been nigh, and there is no reason to believe that it is nigh today. (p. 227)

Here he acknowledges something I anticipated in my review of chapter 8, that to say that someone thought in apocalyptic terms is not to say that the entire set of his ideas could be boiled down to and dismissed as “apocalyptic”. Stark suggests that if we could recover those aspects of his thinking that Richard Horsley identifies as going back to Mosaic covenantal sources (such as “mutuality and debt forgiveness”), we will find positives in Jesus’ teaching that have the most potential for those “searching for strategies of resistance to domination and for those communities who have voices in democratic societies” (p.229). Supporters of capitalism and personal economic liberty are likely to find it more difficult to let Jesus get that right than the apocalyptic worldview.

As an aside, this highlights a limitation in Stark’s presentation at points throughout this book, and especially here: if he is trying to convince inerrantists they’re wrong, either he needs to underplay the politics (I get the feeling he’s doing his best to do this and falling short) or allow room for fuller argumentation, which certainly seems impractical in this type of book. He seems to work from the impression that getting someone to abandon inerrancy will make the shackles of conservative politics fall off their wrists, which may indeed happen for many, but in the case mentioned above there is a (probably unavoidable) limitation in his argumentation that requires a prior sympathy for social justice in order to have much persuasive value.

But now those wanting to know how what value Jesus being wrong could possibly have had are presented with Stark’s answer:

The revolutionary impulse was right. The curse upon the existing world order was valid. The expression of hope in a new beginning was vital. The creation of counter-cultural communities which function as signs of this new beginning was not only noble but necessary in order for the revolution to be successful. But the waiting for a miracle to make it all happen–that was wrong…Their apocalyptic framework was most likely the best they could do given the limitations of their time, place, and political climate. But we live in a different world. We do not have to wait for the miracle. (p. 230)

This is the recurring type of lesson learned by the negative example recovered in a confrontational reading, and it’s the primary contribution of this book. Admitting there are errors is only the beginning. Stark counsels us in Shakespeare’s words to “gather honey from the weed”, appropriating what works and, vitally, leaving in what doesn’t to serve as an ever-living reminder. This is why the Marcionite charge won’t hold up against Stark and his reading. He rejects it as among the worst possible solutions because it is antithetical to the approach he advocates. There is no more powerful a reminder of the dangers of mowing grass barefooted than when I see my cousin’s feet with its missing toes; when he wears shoes, it’s all too easy to forget. Abandoning inerrancy is only half the battle: we can neither merely cut out the offending texts or acknowledge errors while focusing exclusively on the positive, inspirational messages in what’s left. We must confront the writers of Scripture and their respective communities, and by confronting them, confront ourselves and our own communities of belief.

The final part of this chapter is devoted to diagnosing and addressing objections to a rejection of inerrancy. Stark indicts the mindset that wants all or nothing and a final, infallible, unquestionable authority as “the mark of profound immaturity” (p. 233). This plays into his earlier remarks about the importance of developing as moral agents and inerrancy’s thwarting of this endeavor. “Our Scriptures are like our parents. As much as we disagree with them, we cannot escape the ways they have irrevocably shaped us; nor, in many cases, should we want to” (p. 234); but as we mature, we learn that we can build off of their foundation and learn from their mistakes, and so must we do with Scripture and Christian tradition based off of the readings handed down by our forebears. In this I am reminded of the reminiscence of Rachel Held Evans in Evolving in Monkeytown how the moment she realized her adulthood was when she was able to confront her father’s inadequate theological response to a searing question about suffering. In failing to have a good answer to his daughter’s question, her father did not fail as a father, but had at last succeeded: he had finally produced a woman. As Paul spoke of Torah, the Bible as a whole is a pedagogue that is only as successful as its ability to train us to acquire and apply our understanding beyond its tutelage.

As a parent of small children, I found that this leaves me wondering exactly how I should present the Bible to my children who are nowhere near the maturity level from which Stark wants us to read the Bible: as they get older I can educate them in the dangerous human tendencies on display in the Flood narrative, but I cannot simply wait until they are old enough to understand the nuances before they learn the story. Perhaps a crisis is necessary: perhaps they can take stories like that at face value and I can draw out the good values in them until they’re old enough to 1) face the truth that the story never happened, 2) realize there are some immoral ideas behind that conception of God, and 3) appreciate the lessons we can learn from those bad examples. But hey, Stark never said it would be easy.

The most likely objection to all of this I (and Stark) have been saying is that we with this approach, and a rejection of inerrancy in general, we are left “picking and choosing” what is to be accepted and what is to be discarded. But as Stark argues in this chapter, the simple fact is that everybody chooses. Arminians, Calvinists, universalists–all Christian traditions presuming inerrancy choose which passages to read the others through, proposing new interpretations for (or burying) those passages which contradict their anchor doctrines. The other problem is that, even if the Bible were inerrant, no one has access to its infallibility. It is all filtered through our differing mindsets developed in our wildly different communities and cultural histories.

For Stark, being a Christian means using Jesus as our starting point, allowing his valuable teachings to guide us and to serve as both a launchpad and as a home base for our moral development. Living the Christian life is much more about developing workable ethics than defining rigid doctrines. It’s about accepting God’s call to implement his vision for humanity, a vision a church bound up in inerrancy has lost.

Who will get the most value from this book? From my perspective, it’s highly useful for readers like me, who are already convinced that the Bible is not inerrant but want something to do with the passages that cause problems for us. I have approached most of these posts with an inerrantist reader in mind, and when standing back and aggregating the concerns my posts anticipate on their behalf, I still find that it would be a good resource for the type of questioning believer most likely to want to read this book. For the dyed-in-the-wool inerrantists who most want to believe Stark is full of baloney…well, I’m sure he was never under any illusions about overcoming their doubts anyway. I advise commending this book to those in your circle of influence most likely to engage you on these topics, since a book like this is best read in community. In fact, the ideal scenario is for a small group study with plenty of interaction. The possibility of a future edition with study questions at the end of each chapter has been mentioned; I dearly hope that comes to fruition.

I’d like to warmly thank Thom Stark for this book. No, I am not convinced of every one of his particular critiques of the biblical authors nor of the universal applicability of all the principles by which he finds the various texts wanting, but neither does he expect me to be; that would be a replacement of one unappealable magisterium with another. Thom makes the important point that each individual and community must make the judgments as best they can in their circumstances. Regardless, I can confidently assert that for his main arguments, he has made his case.

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For more discussion of this material and to hear Thom’s answers to some of my lingering questions, please note our interview with him on the [ad hoc] Christianity Podcast.

Tweets from prominent Christians tend to make for some great blog posts.

In this case it was @RickWarren who prompted SkepticalHeretic to ask, “If not evangelical, then what?”

And here I though Evangelical had to do solely with believing and sharing the gospel or good news—the Greek euaggelion.

I have to admit, I’m clueless about what the target of Rick Warren’s comment is. If they referred to Bart Ehrman as an evangelical, then yeah…what were you thinking, NYT? But who else is defined out of the label by Pastor Rick’s tweet? In the world of Twitter when tweets are instantaneously retweeted all around without any contexualization, most of us are forced to conclude that such definitive sounding statements as this one are meant to be taken at face value.

Which is…what exactly? How much of the Bible – and in what way – must we believe in order to be A Genuine Saddleback Evangelical^®? Everyone who even bothers identifying as a Christian “believes the Bible” on some level: even many progressive Christians who scoff at “Evangelical” as a label for themselves believe the Bible and the importance of the gospel in important ways. How useless a tweet was this? And yet, in all its vague and potentially misleading glory, it’s being retweeted all over the interwebs.

What supposed evangelical gate-keepers insist upon is that self-identifying evangelicals accept their definition of the good news, which is something like, “Believe (our intepretation of) the Bible, and you will be saved; then spread it around!” SkepticHeretic remarks,

I didn’t realize until I started researching this that Evangelical has to do more with belonging to Evangelicalism and its tenets/creeds and less with the gospel and it’s place in the story of humanity.

He continues,

…I think those Evangelicals who stress Biblical inerrancy and “belief in the Bible” over the “good news” (literally: the euaggelion) should cease calling themselves Evangelicals and come up with a new word because clearly they have lost sight of what the root of evangelical should be!

What exactly is the distinction between “Evangelical” and “Fundamentalist” anymore?

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: devout evangelicals will never be able to come to terms with evolution as long as they believe that it denies the existence of an historical Adam with an historical Fall. As goes creationism, so goes Christianity. Some will cling to their Christianity so tightly that they will never entertain any beliefs that contradict it; others cannot live with the cognitive dissonance and will eventually call it quits on Christianity once they recognize that universal common descent is, for all intents and purposes, indisputable.

The issue is why Jesus had to die if there were no original sin. Why do we need the second Adam if there was no first Adam? What did Jesus do if he didn’t undo the sin that came in because of Adam? At various times and places on this blog I have offered my answers to those thoughts, which include understanding the nature of the Bible and alternative views of the atonement, most especially. But I have often felt and occasionally expressed exasperation that there were no high profile Christians grappling with this problem, which is surely on the short of list of the most problematic issues in Christian theology.

The BioLogos Foundation has done a good job of turning that around, especially since bringing on Dr. Peter Enns as senior fellow. But he has really outdone himself this time. The next time I have someone ask me about the Adam problem for evolution, I will ask that person to carve out 50 minutes to watch the following presentation. In it, Pete Enns manages to lay out the finest explication of the narrative motivations behind Genesis and Paul’s use of the Adam story that I’ve heard in quite some time. Enjoy, and spread it around.

Hard link

H/T I Think I Believe

Tim Bulkeley writing in December’s Bible and Interpretation seeks to explain what he sees as a widening disconnect between those who understand the Bible in light of academic research and most other lay Christians who live faith-led lives, e.g. the televangelist and young earth creationist crowds carefully quarantined from intellectual scrutiny.

Bulkeley believes that this divide has been exacerbated by the insularity of the academic approach to biblical studies. Even seminaries, he writes, “have increasingly bought into [the] modern and post-modern styles of Bible reading,” many of which, despite being “exciting, challenging, and intellectually satisfying,” he deems too beholden to “materialistic practical atheism.” So even many Christians initially interested in deepening their academic understanding of the faith by going to seminary find themselves more attracted to less intellectual and indeed anti-intellectual forms of Christianity. His solution is

…not to offer more, and more entertainingly presented, instruction in neuro-reflexological readings of biblical texts. Nor is it a good dose of minimalist historiography. The effective response is simpler than that, and more radical. Offer religious readings of the sacred texts to religious students. Recognize and celebrate their (our?) faith, and explore the texts within that framework, with spiritual goals in view. Such a study would not focus almost exclusively on the last century or two of scholarship. Rather it would give students a sense of how our spiritual ancestors wrestled with the texts. Thus revealing that our predecessors read the Bible using a range of non-literal hermeneutics, and how they read parts in the light of the whole. Particularly it would show that Christian readers in the past understood everything in Scripture in the light of the story of Jesus. After such a course of study our seminary students will be able to withstand the wiles of the Fundamentalists, whether of the atheist or the creation scientist varieties. 

Bulkeley doesn’t much address the other, perhaps more likely reaction to solely critical approaches to the Bible, namely faith abandonment, focusing more on the essential escapism that motivates and perpetuates Christian faith skeptical of mainstream academic analysis of the Bible, but he does state that the medicine he prescribes will prevent both brands of “fundamentalism”.

I am uncomfortable with some of his characterizations of the contributions of non-confessional, “secular” tools of biblical and historical research, but I do agree that teaching Christians what to think about their faith should be something other than merely deconstructive. It is no crime against the scholarly understanding of Scripture to present it without undermining faith in the Christian God, either through the wrecking ball of critical scholarship or starvation brought on by concentrating on everything but personal faith. Recognizing that you can’t get a daily devotional out of each and every passage doesn’t preclude an abiding awareness of the meaning of God we have inherited from the community of faith we are heirs to.

On this blog, I have sought on multiple occasions to examine the reasons why critical studies have in my life been the reflex of a healthy personal faith and not been considered an attack upon it. When reading Bulkeley’s post I was reminded how differently my own introduction to critical scholarship was, and I’d like to take this opportunity to offer an example of a satisfying presentation of Scripture as analyzed by critical scholarship that is pervaded throughout by a deep reverence for God and for the men whose testimonies of their evolving understanding of God are chronicled in the Bible.

When I was in undergrad and starting to wrestle with the nature of the Bible, I happened upon the recently late Catholic scholar Lawrence Boadt’s Reading the Old Testament among the books my dad had accumulated for some theology courses he took when I was a youngster. Although in some need of a revision incorporating more recent critical scholarship, I still think this book holds up fairly well, not only as an introduction to the study of the Old Testament, but especially as a template for what an approach to the Bible looks like that takes its mind from honest biblical scholarship and its heart from within the “faith of our fathers, living still.”

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 3: “Inerrancy Stunts Your Growth”

Now, this is one chapter I thoroughly enjoyed. Stark spends the greater part exposing and surgically excising the internal logic used to defend inerrancy. Yet although this can be much like shooting fish in a barrel, and many of his points have been made elsewhere many times before (including on this blog), his accessible prose and razor sharp reasoning makes quick and elegant work of it. But I do have one beef, on which, keep reading.

The first claim usually offered by inerrantists is suitably the first to fall: the Bible claims inerrancy for itself. “The inerrantists talk about the Bible as if it were some self-aware being, like an artificial intelligence that, once assembled, achieves a sort of quasi-consciousness” (p. 47). But the simple fact is that these people who are the quickest to demand scriptural support can point to no scriptural basis for this belief. No passage speaks of the entire canon in which it has become enclosed, much less claiming inspiration or inerrancy for it. Instead, their belief comes down to “logic”, falsely so-called: if the Bible is inspired from start to finish — as surely it ought to be — than it will be inerrant — for surely, it ought to be. This is Stark’s next target, for even if we extrapolate from claims of authority given to certain segments of the text to the entirety of the canonized scriptures, by no means does there result an unavoidable trajectory from inspiration toward inerrancy. As I have pointed out before, 2 Timothy 3.16′s ”God-breathed” does not specify that this means the Bible was essentially “exhaled” through God’s lungs, with a practically incidental detour through human authors’ hearts and pens, as inerrantists suppose; Stark notes that it was more in line with first century thinking to rather understand divine inspiration as the animation and empowerment of the texts themselves. “To say that scripture is ‘God-breathed’,” Stark suggests, “could very well mean that God breathes new life and new meaning into even obscure texts that are outdated, irrelevant, and perhaps even wrong” (pp. 47-48, emphasis original).

Showing that he’s no stranger to arguments with inerrantists, Stark accurately predicts the inerrantists’ next line of defense, what he refers to as “the dominical trump card”: the belief that Jesus believed the Old Testament was inerrant. Ably, and I sincerely believe convincingly, he addresses and problematizes a fairly exhaustive list of proof texts for that claim, a list put forward by Norman Geisler in defense of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy substantiating his belief that “one cannot reject the divine authority of Scripture without thereby impugning the authority of Christ…” (p. 48): Matt. 5.17-18; Luke 24.44; John 10.34-45; 14.16; 16.13.

But what about those times in which Jesus cited Old Testament stories as evidence for a point? It’s quite possible that Jesus was more aware than most of his peers about the deeper truths of the universe, but merely adapted his teaching to them in condescension. The CSBI crowd anticipates that possibility and rejects it outright, because they feel that Jesus should not have lent his considerable credibility to unhistorical stories. Stark has little to do but gesture at the gaping hole in that logic: there is a chasmic difference between alluding to a point from a well-known story and committing oneself to the entire spectrum of truth claims possible for or about that story, including its historicity. But even if Jesus did hold inaccurate conceptions about the Old Testament, history, science, etc., not questioning the common understanding of those things handed down to him just like his contemporaries, Stark suggests that it approaches a violation of the unadulterated humanity of Jesus as affirmed at Chalcedon:

…[D]enying Jesus the right to have faulty assumptions is just another form of Docetism. It is a denial of Jesus’ humanity, because an indispensable part of being human is being a product of one’s own time and place…[I]f Jesus believed the world was flat, and that Daniel wrote Daniel, it is not because he was an inferior or imperfect being; it’s because he was fully a human being, which is precisely what the Council of Chalcedon affirms about him. [p. 55]

Stark spends the next several pages exposing a few more faulty and inconsistently applied presuppositions needed to maintain inerrancy. The highly selective appeal to the authority of church history is highlighted and critiqued as example after example of wildly inappropriate judgments by different presumably authoritative ecclesiastical magisteria is presented (Calvinists, beware: Servetus comes up). He also takes aim at the notion that we must believe the Bible’s authority and ostensible inerrancy just because it (supposedly) claims it for itself all the while denying such claims in other holy books like the Qur’an.

Despite finding the content of this chapter to be on the whole compelling and useful, I was nonetheless a bit disappointed that the purported theme of the chapter as suggested by the title was not really addressed until over halfway through. The shortcomings of inerrancy described above needed to be pointed out in this book somewhere, but if Stark thinks that these particular ways of being wrong-headed and inconsistent contribute to growth stunting, he never made it clear how or why. Yes, being wrong is something to avoid, but we’re all wrong in some way: why, my friends ask me, must I harp specifically on inerrancy? “Yeah, great, you’re not convinced of inerrancy, but why waste so much energy just to prove that you know better than us? How exactly is this supposed to help Christians out?”

Stark really begins to answer these questions with his discussion in the penultimate section of this chapter. Elucidating unwelcome side effects of inerrancy that he cleverly terms “the inerrancy tax”, he argues that accepting the inerrantist view of how the inspiration process worked leads to some compromises in a couple highly prized beliefs: the taxing of both free will and divine sovereignty. His point about the sacrifice of free will required in the CSBI’s conception of inspiration was valid, but not quite as compelling as his fair, careful, but deep-cutting critique of the problems associated with maintaining both inerrancy and a Reformed view of God as sovereign. This is particularly hard-hitting considering that the most hardcore advocates of inerrancy, including many of the most important framers and defenders of the CSBI, consider inerrancy to be the very foundation of the Reformed tradition. His tactic in this section is to show inerrantists that they, upon close examination, will themselves find inerrancy unsatisfactory for theological reasons. This contributes to an answer to the question, “Why should I care about this debate?”

The final section is (finally) devoted to the promised subject, “Inerrancy Stunts Your Growth”. This was the most original and interesting portion of the chapter by far, but I found it painfully short. I do not really mean that I found it underdeveloped or lacking in explanation, because it’s a relatively simple concept; I mean, rather, that I would have enjoyed continuing to hear his approach explained, for reasons akin to the exhilarating feeling one gets when one finds oneself staring at a waterfall and not wanting to continue hiking down the trail just yet. I hesitate to summarize it in detail here for fear of “spoiling” the book, as it’s one of the gems of his view of the Bible and alone worth reading the book for. The essence is that inerrancy “taxes your development as a moral agent” (p. 67): much as Christians have tended to view the Law contra the Spirit for salvation (“the letter kills,” etc.”), we can never mature in our growth as human beings so long as we insist on affirming every misconception, politically motivated mandate, and cultural prejudice recorded in Scripture as though each and every one of them is God’s very word to us. This is one of the most compelling defenses for assaulting inerrancy.

A word about the tone of the book so far: it’s excellent. His attempt at conversational style is, in my opinion, dramatically successful because he does not give the impression either of speaking too harshly or talking down to those Christians whose beliefs a reader will, based upon Stark’s thoughtful discussion, nonetheless infer are benighted and naive. For this reason, as of the end of chapter three this book is drifting to the top of my “recommended for conservative Christians” books list even though I am aware of some pretty perilous waters beginning in the next chapter.

This has been out for a while now, but here’s a stunning chart commissioned for Project Reason by Sam Harris attempting to map out contradictions in factual claims of the Bible. It was apparently based on a very different project by someone mapping out correlations and connections in the Bible.

See the entire PDF.

Explains Suzanne Labarre,

The organization here is pretty simple. You’ve got bars at the bottom representing the 1,189 verses of the King James Bible. White’s for the Old Testament, gray’s for the New Testament. Then a red arc links all the verses that contradict each other.

I haven’t checked all these out. Labarre cites as an example conflicting testimony as to Abraham’s age when Ishmael was born. I imagine that several of these contradictions are only apparent, and that a great number more of them will be treated as though there were only apparent by inerrantists.

This chart was no doubt intended to be paraded about as a great reason to dismiss the Bible altogether, but that’s unnecessarily reactionary. How foolish we’d be if we distrusted and discarded every thing in this life which could be shown to be fallible (cars, anyone?).

All of these sorts of conflict come as no surprise to those of us who reject inerrancy, and shouldn’t trouble anyone who recognizes the organic nature of the Bible’s construction. I agree with Thom Stark, John J. Collins, and others who argue that the Bible is, and was always intended to be, “an argument with itself,” and its authors disagreed on matters far weightier than Abiathar’s precise familial relationship to Ahimelech.

I think Labarre’s succinct “moral of the story” serves as a useful caution against views of the Bible that fail to regard its importance as secondary to the reality of God Himself to which its authors pointed:

So to anyone who thinks the Bible’s the last word on anything, remember this: It isn’t even the last word on itself.

We cannot but expect the Bible to be human, through and through, and leave God Himself to be the only one upon whom all our hopes must rest. “Let God be true, and every man,” writer of Scripture or not, “a liar” — or at least, “frequently mistaken.”

H/T @CircleReader