Undeception

In his latest post, Mike mentions a Facebook conversation with someone puzzled by his rejection of inerrancy; I was involved with the conversation as well. As Mike described, this individual raised the common IYCBIAYCTAOI objection (if-you-can’t-believe-it-all-you-can’t-trust-any-of-it), asking, “Why do you believe the Bible is true?”

I responded by asking, “What makes you think it’s necessary that the Bible (as in the entire thing cover-to-cover) be ‘true’ (by which I assume you mean perfectly conforming to and accurately depicting objective reality)?” It’s this question I want to explore in this post.

Among other things, he responded that unless the OT (for instance) is 100% accurate, we cannot bear witness to Jesus. But this is manifestly false: the first century apostles evangelized to Gentiles who had no reason to accept the OT’s reliability, which wouldn’t even have been available to them in print, since copies of Scripture were not carried around for distribution in the first century. Yet somehow, these Gentiles believed the witness of Jesus’ apostles anyway. Moreover, early believers didn’t even have a New Testament to witness to Jesus; hearsay and word of mouth were all they had to go on. I contend that we’re no better off — nor worse off — than they are. We too are dependent on the testimony of fallible humans who have experienced God in Christ, and by faith we trust Him to lead us through fellow believers’ human testimony.

One of the most annoying things about the divide over inerrancy is that people like me who reject it are somewhat forced by the nature of the debate into the position of pointing out the flaws in Scripture. But I dearly treasure the Bible: even while not positing its perfection, I find it to be an invaluable witness to what our faith is supposed to be about. We depend on the Bible no less than we depend upon a guy at the gas station to give us directions. Could his directions be imperfect? Could it be 13 miles down the road instead of 10? Might we have been told to turn left at “the third red light” despite there being only two lights and a four-way stop? Yes, but we have no reason to believe he’s lying to us, and plenty of reasons for trusting that he has an idea of what he’s talking about and that we’re a lot better off having asked for directions than having driven around unguided. Besides, when we’re seeking direction (in both the literal or metaphorical sense), aren’t we supposed to trust God to deliver us to our destination?

So although I reject inerrancy, I still do find the Bible invaluable as an historical witness to God’s work in the world, and especially in the personhood of Jesus. This makes it all the more necessary for us to honestly and earnestly dig down inside the Bible and recognize how, when, why, and by whom it was constructed: this is the goal of biblical studies, which includes the disciplines of textual and historical criticism often unjustly maligned as being destructive of the text. And yes, we may end up discarding commonly accepting beliefs about the Bible like “Paul wrote 2 Timothy” or “We inherit Adam’s fallen nature because of his sin,” but if our faith is truly in God and not those beliefs about Scripture and what we’ve been told it says, we’ll come out on the other end with our faith purer for having stripped away the distractions.

For inerrantists, the Bible must be accurate through and through. For one thing, they want it to be provable as inerrant in order to substantiate the doctrines they have been taught. After all, you can’t prove anything with a source that’s got problems, right? And this is what they can’t allow: the Bible must not only be usable to prove the validity of their faith to others but, to an alarming extent, to themselves as well. I still believe God shows evidence of Himself in life circumstances, that He speaks to us in various ways; I believe I have experienced Him at work in my life in many ways. But none of it constitutes “proof” of any kind. My own faith bears a striking resemblance to the faith we see in the Bible. For instance, Abraham is a model of biblical faith: how much do you think he understood about the Bible, the atonement, or bodily resurrection? Or even the nature of God: like even many Israelites of later periods, he almost certainly wasn’t a true monotheist: YHWH was simply the supreme God, the right God rather than the only God. How much did any of this matter? He walked with God.

Biblical faith, the kind that pleases God, is not presented as carefully maintaining certain propositions about God (no one seems to be able to agree on just which ones) while stubbornly and myopically defending the interpretation of those propositions accepted by one’s tradition. Biblical faith is believing in God as a person, even when He isn’t fully understood; its key characteristics are trusting and allowing Him to guide us. Christians are guided by the example He provided us in the person of Jesus. The Christian faith can’t be proved, certainly not through a book that requires the reader to accept it as proof a priori – no matter how much we expect or would like for that to be the case.

Let me ask you: why is it logically necessary, rather than merely preferable for one reason or another, that the Bible be entirely true through and through? (Please try to answer without begging the question of its divine authorship and what that should look like.)

Related posts:

1. Christocentric readings of the Bible in the blogosphere 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...
2. Bible contradictions: why they matter, and why they don’t 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...

January 24th, 2010

Tags: Biblical studies, Bibliology, concordism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Inerrancy, Scripture, Theology