Most people think “inerrancy” means believing that the Bible is true. Well, no, it does not. Throughout Church history, people have believed the Bible to be true and inspired, but the notion of inerrancy is quite another thing. Most people don’t realize that the notion of biblical inerrancy was never held in the history of the Church until the Modern Age, when Fundamentalists, in their attempt to rescue the Bible from the 19th century attacks of modernism, actually ended up devaluing it by claiming it was “perfect” and “inerrant” in some scientific sense. Catholicism did the same thing, only it went the way of claiming papal infallibility (also a 19th century reaction). The claims that the Bible is “inerrant” and “perfect” in that sense actually was doomed from the start—for it’s quite obvious that there is editorial work in the Bible, there are anonymous authors, there are apparent “factual discrepancies” that, if judged by today’s modern criteria, cast doubt on the Bible.
But the problem with all the modern attacks on the Bible and the Fundamentalist attempts to defend the Bible is that one is using 19th-21st century standards and assumptions to judge ancient texts that are 2,000-3,000 years old. It also ignores how the Church throughout history understood the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible itself does it ever claim to be “perfect” or “inerrant” in some modern-scientific sense of the term. It is not an “inerrant guidebook” that speaks directly to all times and situations. Such a view of the Bible is ultimately idolatrous, in the biblical sense of the word.
The Bible is Subjective…(stay with me, I’ll explain!)
Instead of using this problematic concept of inerrancy, how should we describe the Bible? First we must realize that the Christian faith is not based on the Bible. The Bible, rather, bears witness to the faith communities of OT Israel and the NT Church. It is the product of faith, not the source of it. And since that faith involves relationships, both between the faith community and God, and among the members within that community, faith is unavoidably personal, and thus subjective. This should not be a shock or surprise, for human experience is, by its very nature, relational and subjective. Even “objective facts,” if they are to mean anything beyond the fact of their existence, must be interpreted by human beings who live relationally and subjectively with one another.
Now, just because something is subjective, doesn’t mean it’s not true or that it is completely relative. I believe the Bible is certainly true. But to acknowledge subjectivity simply means that no human being can ever completely detach himself from human existence and see “the whole picture” from the outside looking in. Our vision will always be bound and colored by our circumstances, cultures, upbringings, and individual circumstances. Just because you and I, for instance, might see and interpret a certain event in different ways, that doesn’t mean that that event didn’t happen.
What it does mean, though, is that each one of us is simply interpreting it in a different way and that even though one interpretation might be nearer to the truth about that event than the other, both interpretations probably have some truth to them. Therefore the best way for us to arrive at a clearer understanding of that event isn’t to try to step outside of the human experience to try to view it “objectively.” That is simply impossible. Instead we need to interact, relationally and subjectively, with each other. And it is through relationships between people, and between people and God himself, we come to a clearer understanding of the truth of events of history.
All that is to say that if one approaches the veracity of the Christian Faith as something that is solely dependent on the “provable and objective facts” regarding the Bible, and if one assumes that unless the Bible has to be read literally in every case in order for it to be true, one is already starting off on the wrong playing field with the wrong set of rules to the game.
The Bible Bears Witness, and is Inspired Revelation…(just not an “objective history”)
So, the Bible is the product of faith, and it bears witness to the faith of the biblical communities. In addition, the Bible is also revelation, and is thus inspired. Anything that is revealed is obviously the result of one person revealing it to another. Thus inspiration (that is, by God’s Spirit) is how God has revealed himself to us. Such inspired revelation, therefore, means that the Bible, by its very personal nature, is to a certain degree subjective in its communication with human beings. For it is not simply revealing facts about God (although it certainly does that), but more importantly it is revealing the person of God himself, living relationally with human beings. The Bible, therefore, is the inspired revelation of God and his actions within the history of OT Israel and the NT Church.
That inspired revelation, though, takes the form of a host of various genres, none of which claim to be “objective history.” There are laws, poetry, proverbs, narratives, letters, prophecies, and even mythological language in the Bible. But there is nothing in the Bible that would be categorized as “objective history” in the modern sense of the word. Like I said earlier, such a notion of “objective history” is a 19th Century creation that ultimately is a false narrative in and of itself—for there’s no such thing as “objective history.”
All history-telling is interpreted, and is thus subjective. In that sense, all history-telling is “biased” to a degree—for the one telling the history is, by his very human nature, interpreting the facts, choosing which facts seem to him to be more important than others, and weaving a narrative of that history. But again, just because there is no such thing as “objective history,” that doesn’t mean that understanding the truth about a certain historical event or person cannot be known. It just means that an understanding of the truth will (and indeed must) come through subjective human beings.
Why is that important? Because the Bible doesn’t claim to be “objective.” On the contrary, it certainly does have an agenda! That agenda is to show that God has worked through the history of ancient Israel to bring about salvation, renewal, and re-creation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the subsequent out-pouring of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the testimony of countless people who have interpreted the history of Israel and the historical events of the first century AD in such a way as to say, “This is what these events mean. This is how these events give meaning and understanding to the question of the purpose of human existence.”
Therefore, when someone of today reads and interacts with the texts of the OT and NT, he is interacting relationally with not only God, but also with the people of those faith communities back then and throughout history through the inevitable subjective experience of the Holy Spirit. And it is in that experience of the Holy Spirit where the life of faith is lived. No, that experience is not “objective,” or “perfect”—but it is living and active, going wherever it pleases. And that, I submit, is much more important than any claims that reduce the Bible to a mere collection of “objective facts.” For you can’t live in relationship with an “objective fact.” You can only live in relationship with a person on a living, active, and subjective level.
The Bible: Kind of Like an Impressionist Painting…(kind of!)
Perhaps the most succinct way to understand what the Bible is on a practical level of reading is this: the Bible is (A) historically reliable in what it records about history, but at the same time is also (B) artistic and literary in its interpretation of that history. The biblical writers were not newspaper reporters who just wanted to give facts. They were authors and artists of tremendous literary genius. Or to put it another way, they weren’t trying to take snapshots of historical events. They were impressionistic painters of those events.
To use that analogy further, let’s say I showed you a few famous paintings by Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. If you criticized them for their “errors,” in that the bridges in Monet’s paintings “don’t really look like that,” or the stars in Van Gogh’s paintings “don’t look at all like actual stars we can see with a telescope,” I’d tell you that you are judging them by the wrong standards. They aren’t meant to be “realistic” in a factual sense. They are interpretations—and because of that, they actually bring out more true beauty and wonderment than an actual picture of a bridge or a snapshot of the night sky.
Nevertheless, both are realistic enough for you to recognize what they are depicting. Both give enough realistic details for you to be sure of the subject content, but both also give impressionistic interpretations of those real things that draw you out and beyond the “objective facts” of a bridge or the night sky, to ponder the truth about the beauty and wonder of creation, and ultimately our own humanness. Therefore, in terms of understanding our humanity, I would argue that those paintings are truer than the actual bridge Monet viewed or the night sky that Van Gogh observed.
The same goes, I submit, for the historical reliability and what I call the “literary brushstrokes” of the Bible. I think there was a real Abraham, a real Exodus in which Hebrew slaves made their way from Egypt to Canaan, real kingdoms of David and Solomon, a real civil war between Israel and Judah, a real exile, a real return from exile, real prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah who really prophesied, and a real birth, life, ministry, arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus. But at the same time, I also fully accept and expect that those texts which tell of these historical events do so in a highly literary and creative way. Why? Because that’s how the ancients wrote about historical events.
For example, I believe that the Hebrews in the Exodus somehow got across the Red Sea and escaped the Egyptians. I just don’t think it happened like Charlton Heston did it in The 10 Commandments. We have to realize that the way in which that event is told in Exodus is purposely crafted to allude to the ancient Near Eastern myth regarding how God conquered the great sea serpent Leviathan, who represents the powers of Sheol. Even in the Psalms, Egypt is equated with “Rahab,” another name that alludes to Leviathan. The point is clear: the writer of Exodus interpreted the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt against the backdrop of that ancient Near Eastern myth of slaying the sea serpent. In other words, they viewed the escape from Egypt as “myth made incarnate,” if you will.
The Bible: History Through a Literary Lens
Simply put, the Bible is history through a literary lens. To demand that everything in the Bible must be scientifically literal is to, in fact, deny the creative, literary nature of the Bible. Even when talking about real history, the Bible does so through imaginative and creative means. Why should that scare us or surprise us? Our God is a creative God. He communicates to creative human beings who are made in his image through creative means. It is through such inspired creativity that the Word of God is living and active, and able to slice through to the very soul. Instead of bowing to the idol of scientific-historical literalism, we should breathe in the inspired air of God’s creative Spirit and Word, enfleshed in Christ, whose presence dwells within the Church.
nice…
How about saying: the Bible is inerrant, in the way that is proper to it ?
1. Any claims about the Bible as a whole or about any parts of it, that in turn claim to be true, have to be in accord with the realities of the Bible or of those parts.
2. Claims of inerrancy seem to centre on what amount to – or become – “Bible trivia”: whether Shem was really 600 years old when he died, as Genesis implies; whether Samuel was an Ephraimite or a Levite; whether the capacity of the “brazen sea” in the Temple of Solomon was 200 or 300 *bath*s; whether Goliath was killed by David or by Elhanan.
But maybe inerrancy is applicable to the Bible only as an entirety, rather than being predicated of each several part of it.
What seems certain, is that assertions of inerrancy cannot be separated from interpretation: a Bible in which the relations of Abram are understood as moon-gods, is being interpreted differently from a Bible which is taken to assert that they are historically real individuals: functionally, one has two different Bibles, and two different claims of inerrancy, because two different claims of inerrant truthfulness are being made.
I hear what you’re saying, but my point is simply that “inerrancy” is ultimately unnecessary, and often misused (as you’ve noted in point 2). I’m perfectly happy with saying it is inspired and completely true in what it reveals about God and humanity. In our modern world, “inerrancy” is linked to “getting every solitary fact right,” and I just think it detracts from understanding the Bible on its own terms. It doesn’t matter if there were one or two demoniacs of Gennesaret–Matthew and Mark weren’t trying to “get every fact right” about the story. Both bear witness that Jesus cast out demons, and at the same time they used creativity and literary license to shape their stories.
As far as your Abraham example goes (moon god or historical individual), I don’t think the issue is “inerrancy” there. The issue is simply genre recognition. Inerrancy only comes into play when, once it is acknowledged Abraham was a real person in history. At that point inerrancy comes in and says, “Since the Bible is ‘inerrant,’ everything in Genesis 12-25 has to be factually accurate, or else the Bible is full of errors. If Abraham wasn’t EXACTLY 100 years old when Isaac was born–if he was really only 90–then the Bible is not perfect.”
I think that kind of thinking is just problematic.