The claim that the Bible is inerrant is a claim that it is the sole and absolute authority in matters of religious truth. For millions of American Christians, that also means that it should be the source of social policy and legislation that shape public life for every American. Those are BIG claims. So what is the evidence for inerrancy? Why should we accept these claims for the Bible? As it turns out, inerrantists aren’t able to provide such evidence. The result is that inerrancy is either incoherent or irrelevant. Why? Tune in to this week’s episode to find out.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
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Now, let's go ahead and dive into this week's It's in the Code episode.
So we are in a midst of some series on the Bible, on biblicist Christianity, on the way that the Bible works in a certain kind of high-control Christian environment.
We've talked about why it doesn't make sense to describe that as literalism, as common as that description is.
We've introduced the concept of inerrancy, and we talked about that last episode.
What is that again?
Inerrancy?
It's just the idea that the Bible is correct and without error.
Inerrant.
Non-errant.
It's without error of any kind.
I noted how central this conception of the Bible is for high-control, theologically conservative Christians, and I should say we're really talking about Protestant Christians.
Yes, conservative Catholics can have similar views of the Bible, but Catholic theology, the Catholic tradition itself, has never had the same concept of biblical authority or sole biblical authority that Protestantism does.
That's a complex question.
Feel free to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swagg, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Let me know if you're, you know, part of a Catholic tradition or have been that, you know, says all the same things about the Bible.
I'd be curious to know that.
But typically, there are some nuances to Catholicism that are a little bit different.
But we also looked briefly at the definitions offered of inerrancy by two of the biggest name evangelical theologians.
We looked at a guy named Millard Erickson, another one named Wayne Grudem.
Wayne Grudem occasionally shows up in the news because of his support of Donald Trump and so forth.
I'm going to have a lot more to say moving forward.
We've still got a lot of work to do to really untangle this concept of inerrancy.
So thank you to all of you for your emails.
I am now, folks, I am only one week behind on emails.
I caught up.
I was caught up on everything.
And then more of you sent great emails last week.
But I, as I have said in so many email responses, I'm committed in 2024 to doing better.
So you will be hearing from me shortly.
So many great insights and questions.
I think a lot of those are things that we're going to get to.
Today what I want to talk about is why I think inerrancy is utterly unconvincing as a theological argument.
And this is an argument that for me goes all the way back to my time as an evangelical pastor.
I was a closeted Non-inerrantist.
I was not an inerrantist as an evangelical pastor.
By the time I graduated from college, I was not an inerrantist.
And I should just throw this out there.
This is a theme we'll come back to.
The reason I was not an inerrantist is because I was a biblical languages major.
I could read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, and that alone was enough to make perfectly clear that, to me, inerrancy made no sense.
But these are ideas that go all the way back to there.
And I think really what we're going to talk about, the title of this episode is the proof, quote unquote, of inerrancy, because you can't prove inerrancy.
And yet, inerrantists want to use it as a basis for argument.
They want to use it to persuade other people to believe what they believe and so forth.
And I think if you're an inerrantist, you really, you're stuck with one of two options.
One option is to make your doctrine of inerrancy incoherent.
And the other one is to make it irrelevant.
Those are the only two options for an inerrantist, and I want to talk about why that is, okay?
I also want to note that if you've ever had a discussion with somebody who has this view of the Bible, they probably don't wear a name tag that says, Hi, I'm James.
I'm an inerrantist.
But every time you talk about something, they keep coming back to Bible verses or something, and you'll say something like, well, yeah, but what else you've got?
Or, I don't know anything about that Bible verse.
That doesn't mean anything for me.
Why would I accept the evidence of that?
Can you give me something else?
And it goes in kind of a circular movement, and you feel like you just get nowhere.
This is part of why.
That's the case.
It's why it feels like there's a sleight of hand at work there.
And spoiler, again, we'll get to this some today and in future episodes, there is a sleight of hand, okay?
So let's start talking about all that.
And let's start again by understanding the stakes or the significance of a claim to inerrancy.
I said that inerrancy is the doctrine that the Bible is without error, or a way that a lot of other people will say is it means that it's historically reliable, that the narratives about Jesus actually happened as described, that there were two humans that were created in God's image at the beginning and so humans didn't evolve, things like that, okay?
But inerrancy is also an argument about the authority of the Bible, okay?
Because the Bible recounts the very words of God, That's an important idea.
The words of the Bible are the words of God.
We'll come back to that, too.
But what that means is that what the Bible says has the authority of God.
So Wayne Grudem, one of those theologians that we're looking at—again, I want to make sure I don't get that many emails from angry evangelicals anymore, but if I did, I don't want anybody saying, oh, you're laying out a straw person argument here.
This is weak stuff.
No, I'm citing one of the preeminent evangelical theologians in the world today, Wayne Grudem, and he's very explicit about this.
He says that all the words of the Bible are God's words.
It's a direct quote.
And he goes on to say that quote, to disbelieve or disobey any word of scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God.
It's got a whole subsection on that in one of his chapters.
So a claim that the Bible is an errant is a claim that it's authoritative.
Now, that wouldn't be a big deal for those of us who don't share that view, except that we know that those claims to biblical authority, they're not just about religious belief or the practices of particular Christian communities.
If all this was was something that leads people to argue about, you know, Whether you should baptize adults or infants, or how communion should be carried out, or what kind of music you should have in church, or something like that, nobody would care, okay?
But we know that these claims, the claims to have a divine authority in the Bible, they're the basis of efforts to initiate public policy.
They're what leads people to propose legislation.
People ban books because of this claim to biblical authority.
They limit medical care to trans people because of this claim to biblical authority.
They support a presidential candidate who echoes Hitler because of this claim to biblical authority.
They work to overthrow democracy because of this claim to authority.
Millions of Americans vote the way they do because they are acting on what they understand to be the authority of the Bible.
So, what does all that mean?
It means that claims that the Bible is inerrant, they're not just religious claims.
By which we might mean claims that, you know, they don't stay in church.
They don't stay in people's private lives.
That's what people often think of religion as being.
They are public claims or claims about public life, about political life, about our shared life.
And they are claims that put demands on all of us, whether or not we are Christians who accept the authority of the Bible.
There are claims that affect all of us.
There are claims that seek to legitimize the exercise of political power and social authority.
And obviously, power and authority are two themes of this series, and so we're right back at it.
What does all that mean?
It means that those who claim that authority, they need to have some strong evidence.
If that text is going to have the public life that they want it to have, they need to have some reasons.
We say sometimes on the series that we have the receipts.
I get emails from folks and they're like, you said this or this or this about social identity.
Like, where are you getting that?
And I can send you some information about the scholars that I'm reading or stuff I've written, you know, whatever, whatever.
I can back it up.
They owe us that.
And let's think about why, okay?
Social life is complex.
Our shared political life is complex.
It is not easy to know how to respond to changing norms.
Every one of us who's ever had a conversation about what is normal to us, as opposed to, say, talking with our parents or our grandparents, we know that.
Demands by groups that claim to be marginalized They proliferate.
We meet people who identify as part of this or that community.
Maybe we didn't know that that was a thing.
We didn't know that there was a group of people who identified in that way, and they claim that they're marginalized in some way, and we have to figure out what to do with those claims.
We encounter people whose identities are different from our own, and we are all confronted with how do we respond to that?
How do we understand our identity when we encounter people with different identities and so forth?
And so the promise of a book That would give us absolutely certain authoritative answers to those questions.
That's really attractive.
That would be great.
Somebody comes along and says, I know all that seems confusing, but I got the answers.
Here's this big fat book.
It'll tell us how to figure all this out.
Fantastic.
But we'd want to be sure.
We would want to be sure that we're correct about that.
And even the inerrantists like Greg Grudem say, they say, I don't think they actually believe it, but they say that inerrantists welcome such questions.
Because they believe, because they are sure that the Bible will meet that challenge, they should welcome that challenge.
Okay?
So given the stakes, given the claims, given that inerrantists are saying the Bible is not just a book, it is the words of God, It is absolutely authoritative.
It has the answers for our shared public, political, social lives, our individual lives, our family lives, and we think everybody needs to live according to it.
Those are big claims.
Those are big stakes.
So, inerrantists, they must have pretty strong inerrancy evidence.
They must have some pretty strong evidence for this.
Wrong.
They don't.
And here is where the theology of inerrancy actually undermines itself.
When I say it's incoherent, this is what I mean.
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is a claim that the Bible is the ultimate spiritual authority.
For it to be absolute truth, the words of God and so forth, absolute truth by definition, to be absolute, can't be dependent on anything else.
So it has to be, for an inerrantist, the source of truth.
Which means that the Bible has to be the source of all Christian beliefs and practices and views on society and politics and so forth.
And Christian evangelical theologians and apologists and others will say, we might appeal to other sources, but those are always secondary and supplemental.
The Bible is the ultimate authority.
Again, this is a very Protestant view, okay?
Why does that matter?
It matters because that makes it impossible to prove that the Bible is actually inerrant, at least in a way that isn't question-begging, that doesn't presuppose what it's trying to prove.
Here's how that goes.
One way of trying to prove the authority of the Bible—and this is the line of thought, by the way, that got me really formulating why I wasn't an inerrantist.
As a pastor, I remember engaging with some people, reading some things, and it was this line of thought That to me demonstrated the incoherence of inerrancy.
I was not an inerrantist, but I hadn't realized that the doctrine, at least articulated in this way, was incoherent until I started on this line of thought.
So one way to prove that the authority of the Bible would be to start with arguments about the nature of God or ultimate reality or knowledge and then to demonstrate that an inerrant Bible follows from
That would start with some sort of argument that there must be a God for the following reasons, and if there must be a God and we have knowledge of that God, then here's what it means about our knowledge and what God is, and you try to from there build to a notion that God would communicate with us and that God would be a maximally perfect being, and if a maximally perfect being communicated with us, that communication would be without error and so forth.
Okay?
Here's the problem.
By the time you get to the inerrant Bible there, it is no longer the highest authority.
Instead, your highest authority is reason, or theology, or logic, and you've then undermined the Bible.
In other words, the Bible isn't the source of those views, it is an effect of, or a consequence of those views.
So, a supposed demonstration of inerrancy actually undermines the doctrine.
I just want to say, again, if somebody were to listen, or your cousin Lenny in seminary hears, well, that's a bunch of nonsense.
It isn't.
Guess what?
Wayne Grudem says the same thing.
In his development of the doctrine of inerrancy, he says, you can't prove it.
It can't be proven, or the Bible wouldn't be an absolute and ultimate authority.
That renders the doctrine incoherent, because by the time you have arrived at a Bible that is supposedly inerrant, you have undermined the concept itself.
All right, so what's an inerrantist to do?
Well, what does Grudem do?
What does Millard Erickson, these two theologians we're talking about, what do they do?
They argue that we know—and this is the second way to inerrancy—they argue that we know the Bible is inerrant because the Bible says that it is.
In Grudem's words, he says the Bible is self-attesting regarding its inerrancy.
And the idea here is that the way we know the Bible is inherent is that as we read the Bible, the Holy Spirit will confirm it for us, and the Bible will convince us, and we will become inerrantists.
The Bible itself testifies to inerrancy, okay?
All of you listening, now, anybody who has had that argument with somebody who keeps coming back to the Bible and it goes in a circle, this is why.
They appeal to the Bible and appeal to the Bible and appeal to the Bible.
You say, why?
Why do you think that?
And they'll cite a passage like the one I did in the last episode that says, well, it says, all scriptures God breathed.
Well, that's fine, but the Scripture that says it's God-breathed is what you're claiming.
I could say that everything I say is divine.
That doesn't mean that it's divine just because I said it, right?
It becomes question-begging.
It's a circular reasoning.
And Grudem, he knows this.
He says this.
He argues, though, he says it's circular, the way a philosopher would say this.
He says it's circular, but it's not viciously circular.
And what he says is everybody who claims to appeal to an absolute authority is involved in this circularity because you can't prove absolute authority.
I think that might be true, but, and I argued this in an earlier episode, go back and listen to it.
It's recent enough that you don't need a subscription to check it out.
Not everybody appeals to an absolute authority.
In fact, I think most of us don't, or we wouldn't, the authority that we appeal to in the world, whether it's science or medicine or reason or, you know, I don't know, emotions about family, whatever it is, I think we recognize there are limits to that.
In other words, Grudem says, well, you can't prove it in any external way.
All you have is the Bible itself.
Well, what that means, folks, is that if you're already a Christian, You're already somebody who reads the Bible.
You're already somebody who's convinced that it is an inerrant text, that it's the source of truth.
Then it's inerrant, but you can't prove it to anybody else.
Which brings me back to the point that I was making at the very beginning, which is that I think an inerrantist has two options.
One is incoherence.
If you try to prove that the Bible is inerrant, if you try to prove that, Logically, theologically, through some sort of syllogism, whatever, philosophically.
If you succeed, you'll have failed because you'll have undermined the doctrine of inerrancy, or you just give up any ability to convince others and just assert inerrancy as an act of faith, which is okay if that's what you want to do.
But guess what, folks?
You don't get to force that act of faith on others.
You give up the ability to communicate with anybody else in any intelligible way why they should accept what you're suggesting as authoritative.
So the doctrine of inerrancy is made either incoherent philosophically, theologically, what have you, or it's made irrelevant in terms of actually engaging with other people.
So where does that leave us?
Right?
Let me just tie this up.
We've got to wrap this up.
Some takeaways here.
Again, if you've ever gotten into a discussion with Cousin Lenny or some other inerrantist and felt like you're moving in circles again, it's because you are.
Inerrantists grant themselves moves in an argument that they won't grant to anybody else.
They basically give themselves permission to appeal to something that they just know.
They just know that the Bible's true.
Why?
The inner witness of the Holy Spirit, or the self-attesting words of Scripture, or whatever.
But they won't make that allowance to anybody else.
If you're talking to someone, let's say you're talking about LGBTQ stuff, and they say, well, how do you know it's not wrong to be gay?
Well, God, my kid is gay, and I love my kid.
I know what kind of person they are.
There's nothing wrong or evil or sinful about them.
I just know.
They're going to say, nope, that's not enough.
You need evidence.
You need to prove it somehow.
And yet, all the while, they are appealing to a Bible that they can't prove is the authority that they say it is.
They grant themselves a move in an argument that they won't grant anybody else.
So if you get into an argument with an errantist, oftentimes, just by the rules of the game, it's an argument you can't win.
Okay?
So to those on the outside of those communities, those of us who—maybe we used to be inerrantists and we're not now.
Maybe you were a part of that community and you left it.
Maybe you've never been a part of that and you just encounter these views about the Bible that to you feel extreme or crazy or something like that.
To those of us on the outside who aren't convinced by the Holy Spirit or the words of the Bible or anything else that the Bible is an inherent authority, It's not going to be a sufficient reason for accepting policy proposals or legislative action, obviously.
And the last point, and I think we're going to come back to this as well, I'm going to wrap up this kind of mini-series at some point by talking about what an inerrantist really gets from inerrancy.
What's the draw of the doctrine?
If it has all of the shortcomings, we're going to spend some episodes outlining.
It is a strength for the inerrantist that inerrancy can't be proven.
Because it can't be proven, it can't be disproven.
Not the way that other kinds of claims can.
So what it does is it makes the claims that they put forward, the policy positions they advance, the views they have of people of color or queer folk or whoever, it puts those views outside of argument.
It preserves them.
They occupy a position that becomes intellectually unassailable.
So this is why I think that inerrancy is ultimately self-defeating.
It doesn't work because it's either irrelevant or incoherent.
Nonetheless, for an inerrantist, it's a useful doctrine because it makes anything they say, it removes it from the area of evidence or knowledge or anything else.
We're going to come up and pick up on that point next episode and start looking at some of the ways in which the doctrine really doesn't stand up, some other ways, some of the ways many of you have emailed about and asked about.
We'll start getting into those.
As always, I want to thank you for listening, supporting us in so many ways.
All of you who reach out, please keep the ideas coming.
And I'm still, you know, we're spending some time on this notion of being biblical or biblicist.
Lots of other topics on the horizon.
Please keep those coming.
As I say, I responded to hundreds of emails and so many great discussions and great episode ideas.
Please keep those coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
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