“The Bible is without error.” This claim, the claim that the Bible is “inerrant,” is what lies behind most Christians’ claims when they insist they are “preaching the Bible,” that they attend a “Bible church,” that “the Bible is true,” and so on. When most conservative Christians claim to be “literalists,” what they mean is that they are “inerrantists.” But what does this claim mean? Why is it so central and widespread among conservative Christians? Dan explores these topics in this week’s episode, and argues that we need to understand the claims of inerrancy to understand why it ultimately doesn’t back up claims about the authority or accuracy of the Bible.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a podcast series that is part of the bigger podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted as always to be with you, delighted as always to hear from all of you, the great ideas, great feedback, great comments that you have.
I want to invite you to share those with me.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I am proud to say that I am closing the gap on the emails.
I am almost, almost caught up in my backlog of endless emails.
And as many of you have heard, if you have received one of my emails, I am committed to being better in the new year and not falling so far behind, but I am slowly catching up.
Always value what you have to say.
So many great insights, such a great list I have just sort of ongoing of topics and themes and so forth.
DanielMillerSwatch at gmail.com.
Please keep those and comments and feedback coming.
I want to dive in this week.
Last episode was the first in what's going to be a series of episodes taking a deeper dive into what a certain kind of Christianity, and primarily we're talking about white evangelicalism in America, but there are other conservative Christians who would fall into this category as well.
Taking a dive into what a certain kind of Christian community means when they claim that they are biblical, that they preach the Bible, etc.
And again, go way back, some of the earlier episodes, earliest episodes in this series, and we talked about the notion of the Bible Church, what it means to be biblical, and so forth.
It's a deeper dive into what the Bible is for them, sort of taking some of those themes and expanding on them, and what I describe as a kind of scripturalist religious identification.
And so, last episode, I tried to show why The claim that they are biblical or whatever does not mean that they are quote-unquote literalists, that they take the Bible literally and so forth.
I talked about how this is a view that lots of people attribute to a certain kind of conservative Christianity.
It's also a view that lots of Christians will use to describe themselves, and what I suggested there is that it's an incoherent notion that no one is actually a biblical literalist.
In fact, I argued that the biblicists, the people who claim to be biblical, are the least able to be literalist because they have to reconcile different parts of their text and use different interpretive means and so forth.
Got some feedback from folks, and I don't want people to misunderstand me on this.
That was not intended as a defense of biblicism.
It was not intended as a, we say they're literalists, they say they're literalists, they're really not, therefore somehow what they say about the Bible is right.
Quite the contrary.
I think knocking down The idea of literalism is pretty simple.
It's pretty straightforward.
I got feedback from folks, and you're absolutely right.
You can point out to them that they cherry-pick a particular passage that they choose to take literally, and they don't take other passages literally.
You can talk about, you know, what I think is actually more significant.
Contradictory accounts of things in the Bible.
In the beginning of Genesis, you've got two different creation accounts.
You have two accounts of Noah's flood.
There are two diametrically opposed accounts of why the Israelites decided to choose a king.
One where this is viewed as disobedience to God, and one where it's a command from God, and on and on and on and on.
You can highlight all of those things, and yes, it will show that the people who claim to be literalists actually aren't, okay?
You can knock that down easily.
But where I'm going with this is that the view that Biblicist or Scripturalist Christians have is actually more complicated than that.
Literalism is the soft target.
It's the fallacy of the straw man, is what it was known.
I guess we should say straw person now, but I admit that that sounds strange to me.
A straw man or a straw person argument is one where you take kind of a weak version of what you're arguing against, so it's easier to knock down.
Just like knocking down a scarecrow would be easier than knocking down a real person.
And I think that that's what literalism is.
Where I want to move now is say, let's take a deeper dive than, okay, so when people say they're literalist, what do they really mean?
And this is what they really mean.
What they're really talking about is the claim that the Bible is inerrant.
And that's where we're going to go.
We're going to spend a lot of time this episode and episodes moving forward on the concept of inerrancy.
I'm going to explain what that is, and over time, I'm going to attempt a takedown of inerrancy.
I'm going to argue that inerrancy is no more cogent than literalism, that it seems philosophically and theologically sophisticated to people who hold it.
There are many evangelical theologians who spill a lot of ink trying to show the complexity and sophistication of inerrancy and defend it.
I'm going to argue that none of that works.
I'm going to argue that the conservative Christian understanding of the Bible is either incoherent and contradictory or, that's kind of worst case, best case for them, they can claim that it's true, but it's impossible to argue for that or convince anybody of it.
It's going to take us some time to get there.
I want you to bear with me.
Today what I want to do is just introduce the term of inerrancy.
And if you grew up in a certain kind of church, if maybe you attend a certain kind of church, if there are people in your lives who do, you may know this term, okay?
But you might not have ever heard it.
It's a less likely term that's going to float around in popular Christian circles.
It's likely that if you're chatting with Uncle Ron and you're getting into a religious discussion, Uncle Ron is much more likely to call himself a literalist than an inerrantist, okay?
But in theological seminaries, in evangelical theology books.
Inerrancy is the doctrine at the heart of this.
So maybe you won't hear Uncle Ron talk about inerrancy, but you'll hear it from Cousin Lenny.
I've invented a new family member.
We now have Cousin Lenny, who's studying in seminary.
He's going to be a pastor, and so he's in seminary.
And he is studying for that.
You're talking to him.
You're going to hear arguments about inerrancy from Cousin Lenny.
Or maybe you do, you know, that email follow-up, email discussion with Uncle Ron, and you get that email back that you're pretty sure his pastor wrote for him.
Like, he didn't know how to respond to what you were asking, so he reached out to his pastor who sent you, you know, kind of put some stuff together for it, and then he kind of cleans up the language and sticks it in an email you're hearing from his pastor.
There, when you're hearing from his pastor in the background, his pastor who studied in maybe the same seminary that Cousin Lenny's in, There you're going to hear about inerrancy.
And a doctrine of inerrancy, it is, in my view, it is more sophisticated and complex than a simple claim to literalism.
Okay?
It's also more complicated and it's harder to articulate, which is why a lot of times pastors who hold to a doctrine of inerrancy will still preach about literalism or taking the Bible literally or so forth, because it's just easier for parishioners to understand.
It's a simpler concept.
It has more popular appeal.
There are certainly pastors in churches where theological education sort of isn't there.
They haven't been to seminary, and so when they say the Bible is literally true, they just mean that it's literally true.
But most times, with a little bit more theological education behind it, this is what you're talking about.
So when somebody says, I'm a biblical literalist, or I take the Bible literally, or the Bible is literally true, or you read on a church website, we preach the Bible is literally true, or something like that, Often that is code for, or a kind of popularization of, the doctrine of inerrancy.
And you'll still find lots of churches that say, we believe the Bible's inerrant and so forth.
Okay?
Why do I think all that matters?
It's because if you do encounter a conservative Christian who does know something about the doctrine of inerrancy, and you come at them with the same statements about literalism and so forth, they'll say, well, yeah, of course the Bible's not literally true.
What kind of idiot would think that?
They'll suddenly spin the argument around, and then you look like the person who was doing a takedown of something that's not real, instead of the person who has real concerns about this doctrine.
And I have concerns about this doctrine.
We'll get into those.
So today, what are we doing?
I just want to define what inerrancy is.
I've spent some time going back and revisiting and taking a long look at inerrancy.
And again, arguing that there's this veneer of sophistication, but it is just a veneer.
So, what is the doctrine?
As the name suggests, inerrancy is a claim that the Bible is without error.
Just like we say something is inaccurate, that i-n prefix negates it.
Inaccurate means non-accurate.
Inerrancy means without error, or that the Bible doesn't err in what it says.
So, inerrancy names a particular doctrine about the Bible.
And it's a doctrine about what Christians call the inspiration of the Bible.
And this is a term that maybe you've heard of.
There's a Bible verse in 2 Timothy chapter 3 that says, All scripture is God-breathed, that's the literal translation, or inspired, breathed into.
All scripture is inspired or God-breathed by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, So there's this notion within a certain Christian that says that the Bible is a significant text, an authoritative text, because it is God-breathed, it is inspired from God.
And there have been, throughout Christian history and still at present, lots and lots of different understandings of what it means to say that the Bible is inspired.
Not all people All Christians who would say the Bible is inspired by God think that that means the same thing.
Okay?
Inerrancy is only one way of understanding this claim, but it's a very dominant way of understanding this claim.
And what it means, in other words, if somebody says, okay, so if the Bible's God-breathed or inspired, what does that mean?
It means it's without error.
It's inerrant.
Okay?
And again, this is absolutely the dominant claim about the Bible within the evangelical world.
I did a little digging around, and I went to the Association of Theological Schools.
Some people pulled data.
That's the accrediting agency for seminaries and divinity schools and so forth.
And if you look at it, 24 of the 25 largest theological seminaries in the U.S., and we're counting full-time students, students who are enrolled full-time, 24 of the 25 largest seminaries in the U.S.
are evangelical, and the vast majority of those affirm biblical inerrancy in their statements of faith.
I went through the top 10.
I just want to throw out there are six Southern Baptist seminaries All of them are in the top ten, including the seminary that I went to, in terms of size.
And I went through, I think, all of those top ten, and nine of the top ten explicitly articulate inerrancy as their view of the Bible.
And if you go to a seminary, a divinity school, and you go to the section that's usually in the About section, it'll have something about what we believe, or statement of faith, or something like that.
It'll tell you what their view of the Bible is.
Or if you have seminaries like Southern Baptist seminaries that are part of a larger denomination, that denomination will have a statement that tells you what their view of the Bible is.
Okay?
What does all that mean?
It means that the vast majority of theologically trained pastors in conservative churches preach that the Bible is inerrant.
That's what they were taught.
Which means that almost all members of theologically conservative churches get this view of the Bible.
If it's not taught explicitly, it is presupposed.
So when people say that they are biblical or that they're Bible churches, that is code, it's shorthand for being an errantist.
And that includes, for those of you who sometimes ask really good questions about, you know, non-denominational churches versus churches that are part of different denominations and so forth, most non-denominational churches, if they have a pastor who was trained theologically, that person was trained at one of these theologically conservative seminaries that affirms inerrancy.
Okay?
So, inerrancy is the view that the Bible is without error.
Now, I hear somebody say, okay, but that doesn't sound like literalism, Dan.
Like, what are you talking about?
How is it different from literalism?
If inerrancy is the view that the Bible is without error, and if Uncle Ron and my friend at work and my mother-in-law all say that they are literalists, What's the difference?
What does that mean?
Well, here's what it means, okay?
And to get at what it means, I decided I was going to make sure that I'm attacking real targets, that I am not putting up a straw person argument, that I'm not taking a weak version or just Uncle Ron's version or even Cousin Lenny's version of inerrancy.
So what I did when I was prepping all this stuff—and we'll be talking about this as we go forward—is I went back to two of the most significant theology texts written by contemporary evangelical theologians.
And I looked at what they say about inerrancy, and that's where we're going to live for a while, okay?
First is a guy named Millard Erickson.
He wrote a book called Christian Theology.
I believe it's now in its third edition.
An earlier edition of this text is the text that I used in seminary, and it's still a popular text in a number of those conservative seminaries.
The second is a tome by a theologian named Wayne Grudem called Systematic Theology, an Introduction to Biblical Doctrine.
And this is, perhaps, Grudem's is probably the most popular evangelical systematic theology text at present.
In most seminaries, most evangelical seminaries, I would bet, or maybe not most, but certainly a lot, if you surveyed the texts that they use for their systematic theology courses, Wayne Grudem's going to be high up on that list, probably the highest.
Okay?
Now, in case that name sounds familiar, this is the same Wayne Grudem who founded the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
argues for gender complementarianism, gender essentialism.
This is the same Wayne Grudem who assured evangelical voters that voting for Trump remained the best moral choice even after the Access Hollywood tapes came out where he boasted about sexual assault.
It's that Wayne Grudem who is a huge intellectual figure within evangelicalism, okay?
So these are two heavy hitters among evangelical theologians.
And so I figured, you know what?
I'm going to spend the next few episodes doing what I think is a pretty systematic takedown of inerrancy.
Not just explaining what claims about the Bible are within those contexts, but why they don't work.
And we'll get into, you know, after the sort of takedown pieces here, we'll get into the question of like, if inerrancy doesn't work, if it's not compelling the way that conservative Christians think it is, Why does it persist?
Why do they still make these claims?
Why do evangelical theologians write hundreds of pages about this that people consume and teach and so forth?
We'll get into all of that, okay?
But here, I wanted to make sure that when I'm critical of inerrancy, that I'm hitting a real target, something solid.
So I want to start with this.
Here's Erickson's definition of inerrancy, and I want you to listen to it.
This definition is why, it's a prime example of why a doctrine of inerrancy is more sophisticated than a simple claim to literalism.
This is what he says, and I'm quoting, and it's long, I apologize, I didn't write it.
The Bible.
When correctly interpreted, in light of the level to which culture and the means of communication had developed at the time it was written, and in view of the purposes for which it was given, is fully truthful in all that it affirms.
Okay?
Lots of qualifications there.
Grudem's statement is more brief and to the point.
He says, the inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture, in the original autographs, does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
In his longer discussion, this is a cleaner statement, in his longer discussion, he adds a lot of the same kind of qualifications that Erickson does, and these are typical of evangelical theological articulations of inerrancy, okay?
Folks, we are going to get into those definitions and those qualifications and pick those apart in episodes moving forward.
Right now, all I want us to hold on to is that you can maybe trip up Uncle Ron if you critique literalism, but if Cousin Lenny has taken his required systematic course and he's read some Wayne Grudem, he's read Millard Erickson, he's read—there are other names we could put on the list—or if Uncle Ron's pastor dusts off his systematic theology book from when he was in seminary or he emails his seminary professor because Uncle Ron sent him a question,
Critiques of literalism won't do the trick.
Why?
Because somebody like Erickson will point out and say, well, of course there are metaphors in the Bible, but they have to be properly interpreted.
Or when we talk about the purposes for which the Bible was given, that can include non-literal descriptions of events, or numbers that are symbolic and not literal, and so on and so forth.
Okay?
It can include lots of non-literal things.
So theological conservatives who know their stuff and they're serious about the Bible and they're serious about defending it will know this and they'll be ready to knock down arguments against literalism.
So what we're really talking about when people say that they are a Bible church, that they believe the Bible, that they preach the Bible, that the Bible dictates what they do and so forth, I'd bet money when that kind of language floats around it is code for literalism.
Excuse?
Not for literalism, for inerrancy.
When they say literalism, that's a code for inerrancy.
Inerrancy is a term that lots of just popular, regular churchgoers might never have heard, but that's what's floating around in the background.
Okay?
So where are we going with this?
I just want to lay that out, introduce that term.
We need to wrap up this episode.
A well-articulated doctrine of inerrancy, a doctrine articulated by somebody like Millard Erickson, by somebody like Wayne Grudem, is more sophisticated than literalism.
It can deal with things like metaphors and non-literal descriptions, or somebody reporting an event inaccurately in the text, or something like that.
But I also said that the doctrines of inerrancy have a veneer of theological and philosophical sophistication.
Why?
What I mean is, they don't do what their adherents think that they do.
They don't do the trick.
They don't show that the Bible is what theological conservatives say.
Basically, anticipating what we're going to develop going further, all those qualifications that you put in, Ultimately undermine your claim that the Bible is without error.
It's that simple, and we'll look at why that is going on.
I'm going to argue that if you develop a doctrine of inerrancy that tries to persuade people who aren't already convinced that the Bible is inerrant, that it's inerrant, it's doomed to fail.
I think it's a self-defeating exercise.
And if you have a doctrine of inerrancy that doesn't have to try to convince other people, it just simply becomes irrelevant to anybody outside a community of the already convinced.
And we'll revisit that as we go, okay?
Why do I say that?
Why is all of this important?
Because I think if we're going to understand, first of all, this kind of Christianity—claims about being biblical, claims that we will hear all the time, and we don't just hear it in churches, we hear it in courtrooms, we hear it in legislative assemblies seeking to defend the quote-unquote biblical view of gender or sexuality or whatever,
If we're going to combat that, we need to understand what that's a code for, and we need to understand the work behind it in allowing that code to operate.
We have to delve into the meaning of these terms.
So that's the meaning of inerrancy.
Next episode, I'm going to turn a corner and we're going to start looking at the first of a couple reasons why I would argue that the claim to inerrancy is itself sort of theologically doomed, okay?
That's my view.
We'll get to it.
We'll get to it in the next couple episodes.
In the meantime, I have to wrap this up.
As always, I want to thank you all so much for listening, the great emails, the support that you give.
I said, I don't know how many times, At the end of emails that I respond to, the emails and the feedback that I get, the great ideas, the discussions that that spurs, they're what keep me going.
And I mean it.
And so I say that to all of you.
Thank you for those of you who support us that way.
Thank you to those of you who have chosen to support us financially.
We can't do this without you.
We do regular, you know, episodes three times a week.
As Brad said, wrapping up our weekly roundup last week, we are committed to doing things that we can to try to do even more in the upcoming year and beyond.
Can't do it without you.
Thank you so much.
I know that all of you listening to this right now could be doing something else and you're choosing to be here with me.
I thank you for that.
Please feel free to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swedge.
DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
And please be well until we get a chance to talk again.
