Please forgive the play on the title of Mark Dever’s well respected book. About a month ago I posted a reply to Tim Challies’ three posts on inerrancy. A fairly lively discussion ensued both on this blog and on Challies’ blog (1 & 2). In the midst of discussion on one of his threads I decided to answer a call for examples within the Bible that pose problems for a more traditional American-Evangelical understanding of inerrancy. I quickly typed out nine examples from off the top of my head.
Now, about a month removed from the inerrancy discussion both here and on Challies’ blog, I thought it might be fitting to re-visit some of the issues in question. Discussions about inerrancy, what it means, why it is so important to us, what the implications of the doctrine are for how to read the Bible, and what we are really trying to defend through the doctrine, etc—these questions occupy a prominent place our American Evangelical and Reformed consciousness right now. If this is news to you, feel free to ask what I am talking about. As I pondered how to re-visit inerrancy and how to spark some discussion of it and the many related issues, the idea of posting the examples I gave on Challies’ blog about a month ago seemed fitting. So, below I have posted those nine examples…
There are many questions or thoughts I would like to leave in your minds as you set out to read these examples—too many to mention here. I hope they come up in discussion in the comments. Most of these questions and thoughts appear in my lengthy original response to Challies. I hope we can have an edifying discussion of these examples and how they might be windows in on ways we might nuance our understanding of what it means that the Bible is God’s Word. Just to get it out there, I believe the Bible is fully inspired by God and that everything in it is inspiredly doing exactly what God wants it to be doing. This still leaves us with the question, what did God actually do when he gave us the Bible; what are the writings and details of the Bible actually doing? If our impulse is ‘to explain’ these and other such examples away—‘to explain’ them in ways that make us more comfortable—why do we have this impulse? Is it possible that the Bible actually does things that do not square with a more traditional conception of inerrancy?
(1) Mark 12.9 attributes words to Jesus that Matthew’s version of the pericope attributes to the crowd (Matt 21.41). For another fun synoptic ‘who said what’ instance compare Matt 19.16-17 with Mk 10.17-18. In Mark the man said to Jesus ‘Good teacher.’ In Matthew the man says uses good with reference to the deed in question. What is going on here? We could multiply examples such as these from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) almost endlessly. The Matt 19 and Mk 10 example has an interesting history of discussion in Westminster circles. Both E.J. Young and Ned Stonehouse treated it at some length. Young essentially harmonizes while Stonehouse refuses to do so, looking at how the differences reflect the freedom and creativity of the author and as such serving as windows in on the theology of the writings in question.
(2) The Synoptics portray Jesus as eating his last supper with the disciples as a Passover meal (Thursday night), being arrested that night, and being crucified Passover day, Friday (c.f. Mk 14.12 / Lk 22.15; then follow the narratives). John portrays Jesus as eating supper sometime prior to Passover and then being crucified on the eve of Passover precisely when the Lambs are being slaughtered for the Passover meals for the Jews (see John 13.1-5; 19.14-16). It seems that John has a rich theological reason for what he is doing—Jesus being killed with the Passover lambs fits in nicely with his emphasis of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1.29; cf. 1.36). Or, perhaps the Synoptics were motivated in their chronological presentation to cast the last supper (eucharist?) as a new Passover meal? It seems we have the authors of the Gospels (or at least one/some of them) modifying the ‘facts’ for their theology.
(3) Does Jesus tell the disciples to take a staff (Mk 6. 8) or not (Matt 10.10)? I have heard it suggested that the only way to ‘deal with’ this is positing autographs that did not have this problem—therefore this issue arises from corruption in the transmission history of either Mark or Matthew. This would seem like an extreme case of ‘special pleading.’ What do you all think?
(4) Do you mind if I mention a canon ‘issue’? Jude quotes the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36; a Jewish apocalypse of the 3rd century BCE) as Scripture, Jude 14-15. The way he introduces it corresponds to ways other parts of our Bible (and contemporary Jewish literature) cite what the authors in question would consider Scripture. Such a view of the Book of the Watchers for Jude makes sense since the Book of the Watchers—along with many of the other writings making up 1 Enoch—were viewed as Scripture by Jews in many (most?) strands of Early Judaism in the centuries prior to Jesus and around his time. In fact, the view of 1 Enoch as Scripture continues in the early church as early church writers cite 1 Enoch as Scripture (see, for example, the Epistle of Barnabus with its 3 citations of 1 Enoch with scripture citation formulas!). I am not claiming 1 Enoch or some of the writings in it should be in our canon—but rather that this material makes the Bible messier than we would like.
(5) What did Jesus say on the Cross? You could put all the Gospels on this together and have our ‘7 last words of Jesus’ sermon series. But, that distorts the different theologies of the death of Jesus that each Gospel has. This is especially true if you conflate Mark and Luke on the death of Jesus. They have different views on the death of Jesus and his approach to it—which can be very theologically enriching (after all, it is the Bible) if we do not flatten them out.
(6) Deuteronomy (10.1-5) has a different understanding of where the ark came from than Exodus.
(7) Who failed to dislodge the Jebusites from Jerusalem, Judah (Josh 15.63) or Benjamin (Judg 1.21)? Note, it is exactly the same verse, except that Judges has modified the material from Joshua to fit in with its, basically, anti-Benjamin ideology/theology seen throughout the book. If you delve into this further, you find this to be a window into some rich theology in Judges. But, if you flatten this out, you start to miss something God was saying through Judges.
( 8) Was Hiram/Huram-abi’s descent from the tribe of Naphtali (1 Kgs 7.14) or Dan (2 Chr 2.13-14)? Perhaps one could harmonize this, but then you are missing out on the Chronicler’s rich theology of Solomon and Hiram/Huram (in the building of the Temple) as the new Bezalel and Oholiab (who built the Tabernacle). As the Chronicler draws on his sacred scripture and traditions, he brings out this parallel between Huram and Oholiab by, among other things, giving Huram the same tribal affiliation as Oholiab (see Exod 31.6, 35.34, 38.23). All this has a very important function in the Chronicler’s overall message and theology. But, again, to harmonize this is to get in the way of understanding what God is saying and doing through Chronicles.
(9) Is it ok for a Moabite to enter the assembly of the Lord and be part of Israel (the book of Ruth) or not (Deut 23.3-6)? See also the general theology of Ezra-Nehemiah on foreigners, Israel, and marriage.
As I have mentioned above, some of these may seem to be harmonizable. But, in such cases we are losing the theology and message God is speaking through the text(s) in question. I often hear that to deny or to question inerrancy—or to read the Bible in a way that might lead to a challenge for inerrancy—is to have ‘a low view of Scripture.’ To put another question out there, is it a low view of Scripture for people such as myself to hold up such examples (and endless others in the Bible) and see them as somehow challenging a traditional conception of inerrancy?
I hope this is ultimately edifying and helpful for all of us. What does everyone think? Can such examples nuance what we understand inerrancy to mean?
 

14 Responses to “Nine Marks of (against) Inerrancy?”

  1. goodnight moon Says:
    February 14, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    Foolish Tar Heel, it is helpful just to see all these examples listed out. In your spare time, do you think you could go through the whole Bible and list out all such “problems”? ) That way we could know what we’re dealing with.
    No, but really, it is helpful. Scripture was not written in 21st century America. When are we going to stop trying to squeeze it into our nice little boxes, and then ignoring the parts that don’t fit? If we truly believe Scripture to be inerrant, we have to take it for what it is, and if we don’t, how can we answer people like my uncle who know all the “contradictions” in the Bible and point them out as evidence of fallibility? How can we understand it the way the Lord intended it for us?
    Well, I’m no expert on this, but maybe I’m missing WTS more than I thought…
  2. Craig V. Says:
    February 14, 2008 at 6:56 pm

    I’ll address some of the specifics later (beware of those who promise the theological equivalent of vapor ware), but one question needs to be asked in order to help frame the conversation. What is the doctrine of inerrancy supposed to do for us? In its historical setting there were those who sincerely claimed to believe in the inspiration and the authority of the Scriptures and yet denied that Jesus rose from the dead. Inerrancy is a response to this. That’s why saying that everything in the Bible does what God wants it to doesn’t do enough for me since one could consistently affirm a belief in inspiration and a belief that the Bible does what God intends while denying that Jesus rose from the dead.
  3. Foolish Sage Says:
    February 14, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    Craig,
    Yes, one could do that, but one does not follow from the other. In other words, because one affirms that God can do whatever he wants in and with his word, it does not follow that it is logical or necessary to deny the resurrection of Christ.
    For those of us who believe the Bible but are uncomfortable with inerrancy as it is often formulated by contemporary evangelicals, the difference is that the Bible explicitly states that a historic, bodily resurrection of Jesus is absolutely essential to Christian faith. On the other hand, nowhere does the Bible say that belief in the first chapters of Genesis as a literal historical narrative in the modern sense is essential to faith. So the two are not equal in value in that regard.
  4. JD Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 12:57 am

    I think asking what inerrancy does for us is getting the cart before the horse. We need to first ask whether such a doctrine even has biblical grounding. If the Bible has a inward-looking view of itself, and if that view is something for which the term “inerrancy” best approximates it, only then can we ask what it does.
  5.  Foolish Tar Heel Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 11:18 am

    Craig,
    I look forward to more specifics.
    Also, in this post I am not using my expression ‘everything in the Bible is inspiredly doing what God wants it to be doing’ as a definition of inerrancy so much. Though, as you are aware, I have used it that way in the past–and probably still would : ). In this post I use that phrase more to indicate how I think of the whole Bible–the ‘messy’ parts included–is truly God’s Word and doing exactly what he intended it to be doing. Negatively, I mean that phrase here against what Jason Kirklin described as an adoptionist view of Scripture: “…that God adopts humanity with all its humanness - to err is human! - and chooses to work through it to reveal what he wants to reveal in the Bible” [I should make clear that Jason does not agree with this view].
    I am not a fan of that sort of approach—that there are errors because God chose to work through sinful and erring man. From my point of view this inappropriately tries to distinguish between what is human versus what is divine about the Scriptures. I do not locate the ‘errors’ or issues I bring up with the Bible in their human aspect as opposed to the divine side of Scripture. Rather, I see them completely reflecting his whole Word, divine and human aspects—such messiness also is at the center of its inspiration. The issues I bring up with respect to inerrancy (’errors’), for me, pertain just as much to Scripture being divine as they do to Scripture being human. We only know it as God’s Word in its historical form. Furthermore, this human form is not some compromise by God, as though it was just the best option he had available. This human form of God’s Word and everything about it is inspiredly doing exactly what God wants it to be doing. We only encounter the divinity of the scriptures as it is bound up with their contingent and historical humanity. The so-called humanity of the Scriptures (where, perhaps, ‘errors’ might be located for many who engage in these discussions) are not a husk to be peeled away, leaving us a divine kernel. Again, this is part of what I am getting at when I say that everything in the Bible is inspiredly doing what God wants it to be doing.
    Again, I look forward to your further comments. What do you think of the Foolish Sage’s points?
  6.  FoolishTarHeel Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 11:25 am

    JD,
    You bring up an interesting point, if the Bible has an ‘inward-looking’ view of itself and, if so, what is it (does it approximate inerrancy)? Could you say a little more here? I have some thoughts on this, but I would like to give you a chance to share your thoughts first (I imagine our thinking is somewhat similar).
  7. garver Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    I took Craig’s reference to “what inerrancy does for us” as a historical claim about why the notion of inerrancy came to hold the place it does within evangelical doctrine of Scripture. That’s to say, it gave evangelicals a way to distinguish themselves from liberals who could claim to embrace inspiration, biblical authority, etc., but who countenanced errors in Scripture on the order of “Jesus didn’t rise from the dead” or “Moses never existed.”
    Now, of course, there were probably underlying disagreements that extended beyond the notion of “inerrancy.” For instance, I doubt that evangelicals and liberals really meant the same thing by “inspiration” or “authority” (which is why evangelicals came to qualify inspiration as “plenary, verbal” inspiration). Moreover, there were hermeneutical issues in play, with evangelicals and liberals both embracing a modern, somewhat reductionistic historical-grammatical exegesis, with evangelicals taking that in a more literalistic direction and liberals taking that in a more de-mythologizing direction (for lack of a better term).
    At any rate, there’s a certain sort of historical dynamic at work in these discussions, even if we should try to qualify and accommodate our notion of “inerrancy” (assuming we retain it at all) to the actual phenomenon of Scripture.
    So, the question I keep going back to (whether you want to call it “inerrancy” or not) is this: Is there a way of articulating a doctrine of Scripture that embraces Scripture as wholly divine as well as wholly human, that handles the phenomenon of Scripture as historical text with integrity, that maintains Scripture as exhaustively precisely what God intends it to be, and which approaches the text with humility and deference - a hermeneutics of trust?
  8. Craig V. Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 2:17 pm

    First some responses and then let me try to move the conversation forward a bit with the some specifics.
    Foolish Sage
    I don’t think we disagree as much as you might guess. I certainly don’t believe that from FTH’s view one could logically deduce a denial of the resurrection. I do think one could be logically consistent in such a denial unless we have some kind of a notion of the Bible’s relationship to truth in general and truth claims in particular. You bring this in, it seems to me, when you speak of things the Bible explicitly states as essential to the Christian faith. My point is that in its historical context, that’s what the doctrine of inerrancy is supposed to do. To believe the Bible is to believe it’s true. We may find a better way to talk about these thing, but it’s not enough to see inerrancy simply in terms of God accomplishing what he wants. There has to be some talk about truth or truth claims.
    JD
    I may be getting the cart before the horse. I don’t know if we’ll find in the Bible an inward-looking view of itself. What we will find is the claim that God speaks and that Scripture is an example of God speaking. When we claim that a text is Scripture, we’re claiming that it is at least an instance of God speaking. The doctrine of inerrancy never arises until we find theologians happy to agree that God speaks in Scripture and yet denying that Jesus rose from the dead. If we rip inerrancy out of that historical context we get a distortion. We find ourselves on a fruitless quest to prove that the Bible is consistent and historically perfect.
    FTH
    I’m not too happy about some formulations of the divine/human in Scripture either. I do not think that the Bible is absolute truth in the sense of being truth from God’s point of view. I think this is where a lot (but not all) of the confusion comes in. To misquote a movie “We can’t handle absolute truth.” It doesn’t follow from this that the Bible is some sort of compromise (God wanted to give us absolute truth but we couldn’t handle it so he gave us the Bible instead). I’ll develop this more in my specifics.
    Specifics will follow (I promise) but I need to go to a meeting first (errrr).
  9. c bovell Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    I regret to report that inerrantists are not under any epistemic pressure to respond to your nine points. If in the majority of cases, inerrantists feel that the biblical text supports their inerrantist program then they are free to suspend judgments on the exceptions and maintain in good faith that when all the facts are in their doctrinal formulations will be vindicated. Even if we forget about philosophy, in my experience very few people are ever convinced by the encyclopedia of difficulties approach. I know I never was. Change in belief in inerrancy is a complex affair. Difficulties alone won’t do the trick.
    Unfortunately, the unhappy position doubters of inerrancy may find themselves in is that they may have to expressly formulate inerrancy’s replacement before even they themselves can consider themselves actual non-inerrantists. Without an alternative “acceptably orthodox” position available to them, many doubting inerrantists duly become agnostics. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to approach inerrancy the way I did in my book.
  10. Craig V. Says:
    February 15, 2008 at 5:47 pm

    Garver,
    I posted before I saw your comment, so forgive me for seeming to ignore you. You have caught my meaning and, I think, expressed it better than me. As far as your closing question, hopefully we can begin to develop something like that, on the theoretical level, as our discussion moves forward.
    The Specifics
    Let me start with FTH’s (2). Let’s try two kinds of answers (neither of which is original with me) and then after discussion we may be able to determine if we’ve clarified our doctrines of Scripture. The first answer is to find a speculation which harmonizes the accounts without doing any violence to them. In this case most commentaries provide us with just such a speculation. What if the Passover was celebrated on two days? Perhaps the two days are the result of some dispute (like the later dispute between the western and eastern church) or perhaps it was an accommodation for the large numbers of celebrants in Jerusalem at that time. If this were the case then Jesus may have both celebrated Passover and have been crucified when Passover lambs were slaughtered. John takes full advantage of this historical oddity in order to reinforce his theological themes. Where’s the evidence for the two dates? If memory serves me there is some, but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there isn’t any. It’s pure speculation. What, then, have we gained? We’ve shown that there’s a way that both the Synoptics’ and John’s accounts can be true relative to the Passover and the death of Jesus. We haven’t tried to change either account. A while ago I decided to preach communion sermons from each Gospel. When I got to John I took my text from John 19 not John 13.
    Do we really need such a speculation. No doubt it makes us uncomfortable because 1.) We have no evidence for it so have no reason to believe it’s true, 2.) Some archeologist might find definitive evidence against our speculation and 3.) It feels somewhat dishonest since only one with a prior commitment to inerrancy (or some such doctrine) would have the need for such a speculation. The second kind of answer is a little more radical. It acknowledges that John (or the synoptics) has intentionally reworked the facts. It embraces such re-workings as valid in the presentation of a story teller or a witness. It may even go so far as to assert that one can’t really tell a story (a true story) without such a reworking. To attempt to do so would be to create something both useless and bizarre. At 5:00am the subject, Peter, awoke. At 5:02am the subject yawned. At 5:05am the subject relieved himself … At 4:02pm the subject said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” A narrative isn’t simply a bunch of information. It both tells and draws a listener into a story. To do this, it reworks facts. The question then is how far can a narrator go before we conclude that he or she has not given us a faithful account? How closely does the movie need to follow the book? The answer to this question may vary from culture to culture. It may be impossible to formulate it prior to interpreting a particular story. The doctrine of inerrancy need not answer this question. It need only affirm that the story is faithful.
  11. JD Says:
    February 16, 2008 at 2:36 am

    FTH: you have made my point )
    Carlos: in my experience, I’d have to disagree. Tons of undergraduates I deal with lose their faith in inerrancy–and consequently the Bible and God altogether–when they’re confronted with the data. Not just the sort that FTH mentioned, but others as well. I know I’m among those for whom the data convinced inerrancy wasn’t a viable option, though I didn’t follow the path of my students–in part, for the reason I prompted above, and which I led FTH to explain. Of course, there are many other non-inerrantists who believers as well.
  12. c bovell Says:
    February 16, 2008 at 12:25 pm

    JD:
    Why did your students lose faith and you did not? I think it’s more than just that you were privy to a believing option that others did not give proper consideration to. Philosophy of science has helped show how complex data-observing can be:
    “The knower is seen as a kind of conquerer, like Julius Caesar winning his battles according to the formula ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ A person who wants to know something, so he makes his observation or experiment and then he knows. Even research workers who have won many a scientific battle may believe this naïve story when looking at their own work in retrospect.
    At most they will admit that the first observation may have been a little imprecise, whereas the second and third were ‘adjusted to the facts.’ But the situation is not so simple, except in certain very limited fields, such as present-day mechanics, in which there are very ancient and widely known everyday facts to draw upon. In more modern, more remote, and still complicated fields, in which it is important first of all to learn to observe and ask questions properly, this situation does not obtain—and perhaps never does, originally, in any field—until tradition, education, and familiarity have produced a readiness for stylized (that is, directed and restricted) perception and action; until an answer becomes largely pre-formed in the question, and a decision is confined merely to ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ or perhaps to a numerical determination; until methods and apparatus automatically carry out the greatest part of our mental work for us.” (Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 84)
    If observing scientific facts is such a complex activity, how much more so is observing biblical data?
  13. Rhology Says:
    April 4, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    Hi Foolish Tar Heel,
    I know this is a long time after the fact but I saw your comment on GreenBaggins and wanted to ask a few questions. Hope you don’t mind that they’re from an inerrantist. -)
    1) What does this mean as far as your position on other “contradictions” in the Bible that skeptics apparently spend so much of their time finding? Take G Archer’s “Encyclo of Bible Difficulties” or Geisler’s “When Critics Ask” or sthg like that; are the psgs that they deal with in those books, in your opinion, successfully harmonised w/o exception? With a few exceptions? With many exceptions? Did they fail totally?
    2) Should a book like one of those be written in your estimation? Is it useful for anyone?
    3) Normally books like that and inerrantist apologists have a standard battery of tests that they run a proposed conflict thru in order to find its harmonisability. I note that in, for example, #1, #3, #5, and #7, when such methods are applied, the harmony is easily found. Is there sthg beyond that that you just didn’t mention?
    4) Continuing on that same theme, why did you not mention the other non-Christian/Jewish sources cited in the NT? Was there some reason, or was Book of the Watchers simply the most obvious example? Either way, are you unaware of the standard “one citation does not make the whole of the work inspired” answer to things like that?
    5) In #2, here:
    -It seems that John has a rich theological reason for what he is doing—Jesus being killed with the Passover lambs fits in nicely with his emphasis of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world
    you seem to go against what you said in the intro paragraph, namely:
    -I believe the Bible is fully inspired by God and that everything in it is inspiredly doing exactly what God wants it to be doing. This still leaves us with the question, what did God actually do when he gave us the Bible; what are the writings and details of the Bible actually doing?
    Am I just missing you on that?
    I hope you’ll find time to answer my questions b/c I’m quite interested in your view.
    Grace and peace,
    Rhology
  14. Rhology Says:
    April 8, 2008 at 7:52 am

    Just FYI for other readers, this is just in as another response.
    Grace and peace,
    Rhology