From the outset, as a Christian’s sacred text, I affirm three things about the Bible.
- All we read within it is true, in profound and life-changing ways, as its words lead us to encounter the God it reveals.
- The Bible is the triune God’s revelation of himself to us, most notably in the record of his incarnate Son, Jesus.
- Through the Spirit, its words have the authority to confront us and transform our lives.
This blog post is not about questioning these fundamental ideas. Rather, I am asking if the doctrine of Inerrancy is the best way to understand how God reveals his truth in scripture.
To clarify my position further, this blog is not about finding a way around there are truths in scripture that appear to defy scientific explanations or are beyond our experience. Many of these truths remain essential to the Christian faith. Most notably, the virgin birth of the Son of God and his resurrection, among others, throughout the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. The reality of these events is even more central to my faith as I have gotten older.
Some Christians attempt to preserve these truths with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Matthew Barrett defines the Inerrancy on The Gospel Coalition website as affirming that:
God-breathed Scriptures are wholly true in all things that they assert in the original autographs and, therefore function with the authority of God’s own words.1
While I agree that scripture is, in the mystery of divine and human authorship, entirely God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16), I am not convinced that biblical inerrancy is ‘the best tool for the job’ of affirming the truth within God’s word, for two reasons.
Scripture is a Record of Human Brokenness
First, I am not sure the doctrine of inerrancy takes the Bible on its own terms. I firmly believe the text of scripture is the text that God wants us to have, and its message, as a whole and in its parts, is trustworthy and faithful to God’s message. But, like news from even the most reputable news site, not everything is true in scripture in the same way.
If I read in a news piece that a government politician said, “The economy is in strong shape,” we know there is likely to be some spin and untruth in that message. Still, we understand that the news source is most likely truthfully reporting the politician’s words. The journalist expects readers to understand that political speech is often full of spin. Likewise, God inspired the Bible’s human authors to record untruthful human speech and hoped that its readers could understand the truth of the overall story. Because they knew the context and writing conventions that the authors used, readers should be able to read beyond the surface text to understand God’s truth behind it.
For example, the Bible records that Peter insisted that he did not know Jesus before the sun rose on the morning of Jesus’s death; its readers understand from the context that he was lying. Here, the Bible records an untruth to tell the true story of the day of Christ’s crucifixion, particularly how Peter fulfilled Jesus’s prediction that “Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” (Mat 26:34.)
I love that scripture is unflinchingly honest about the human condition. By telling us about the lying, adulterous, and murderous actions of the heroes of the faith, the Bible shows that all humanity is riddled with sin. Even the most literal reader should know not to imitate those people in everything they do. Instead, we learn that, except for Jesus, no one has ever lived a sinless life.
Biblical Authors Use a Wide Range of Writing Styles.
The Bible does not simply record history. It also has a plethora of genres, not least poetry, prophecy and wisdom literature, where the authors needed to use metaphor and simile to contemplate the truths of God that were beyond their human experience. Indeed, no reader of the 23rd Psalm believes that David was a literal sheep God led to lie down in literal green pastures. No, we recognise that the Psalmist David uses metaphor to describe the truth of God’s loving care over his people.
Finally, internal critique is a fascinating part of biblical literature. For example, the central theme of the books of Deuteronomy and Proverbs is that God will bless those who observe his Law and live wisely. But along comes Job, who, according to scripture, is “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” (Job 1:1). Yes, this man faced indescribable suffering. The book of Job, it seems, is at odds with the simple blessing-comes-from-obedience picture of the other two books. But, together, these two pictures of blessing and suffering speak wisely to the fact that, in this broken world, the righteous sometimes are blessed with abundance, and the evil face the consequences of their folly. Still, at other times, those who live wisely suffer, and those who do evil flourish.
Of course, those who hold to biblical inerrancy recognise that they find biblical truth in the diverse textures of scripture. They know it is not all true in the same way. But, given this highly textured and nuanced text, it seems that the doctrine of inerrancy is a blunt tool if I want to interpret the text well so I can hear scripture’s truth on its own terms. Therefore, I do not expect the truth to always be on the surface of the text, as I would say, in an undergraduate mathematics textbook. Instead, I need to work hard to interpret text well.
The fact that I need to interpret the word of God brings me to the Final issue I have with the doctrine of inerrancy.
Inerrancy Hides the Real Error
But, by holding too tightly to a doctrine of inerrancy, I risk dampening the transformative effect of God’s word. Why? Because I can easily mistake the inerrancy of scripture with the inerrancy of interpretation. Therefore, when other readers suggest interpretations that challenge my reading or, even worse, challenge how I live, it’s too easy to demand that alternate readings cannot be accurate because the Bible is “inerrant.” But, my interpretation of scripture is in question, not the Bible itself.
I find the metaphor of measurement error helpful here. Consider this picture of a ruler.
When we measure the red line, we say it is 23mm. But if you look closely, the red line is a bit more than 23mm, but the ruler is not precise enough to know how much longer. Technically, therefore, there is an error in our measurement. The error is not in the red line but in the ruler’s ability to make a precise measurement. We say the error in the ruler is 0.5mm because we pick the closest mark on the ruler, which is always within 0.5mm of the object we are measuring. So, a more precise measure of the line, which considers the error in the ruler, is 23 ± 0.5mm.
Like the red line, the Bible—in its original manuscripts—is what it is, in the best possible way. By faith, I believe it is all trustworthy and true in some way because God, the Holy Spirit, was intimately involved with the human authors as they communicated their encounters with God. But I come to the text in my fallenness and from a very different world to the world of the original writers. Therefore, inevitably, there will be errors and misunderstandings in my understanding of the text. It takes humility and self-awareness to accept that my scripture readings always contain errors and can constantly be challenged and perhaps even reviewed or discarded. In a word, all my interpretations of scripture are “provisional.”
Therefore, because scripture’s record of truth is so textured, and my interpretations are marginal at the best of times, I will not make my last stand on the hill called “biblical inerrancy.” Instead, I trust the truthfulness of scripture while being aware of my propensity to introduce error into even my most careful reading of the text.
In my Patreon-only post “Why I am a Theological Creationist,” I attempt to show how reading the creation account in its own context reduces interpretation errors that a literalistic interpretation might introduce. Therefore, Genesis 1-3 is a clear example of why Biblical Inerrancy is not the best tool for the job of upholding the truthfulness and reliability is scripture.
1 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/authority-inerrancy-scripture/
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