It's In the Code Ep. 85: "I Know What the Bible Says"
Inerrantists who claim that the Bible is “without error,” right down to the individual words of the text, also recognize that the Bible is full of factual inaccuracies. How do they reconcile these two positions? How can they acknowledge factually inaccurate claims and still insist that the Bible is “without error”? One theological strategy is to insist that the Bible is without error only in what it “affirms.” What do they mean by this? And does this slick theological trick work? Unsurprisingly, Dan says it doesn’t—take a listen to this week’s episode to find out why.
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Now we go to It's In The Code.
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Let's dive in here.
Continuing on, as we have been, our deep dive into a certain kind of high-control religion and what it means when they claim to be quote-unquote biblical.
We've been really untangling this, and that has brought us into a discussion of the doctrine of what's called inerrancy, the claim that the Bible is without error, down to its very words.
We've talked about that, and we've covered a lot of grounds with this, We sort of started with my reasons for arguing that the doctrine is incoherent or irrelevant before it even gets off the ground.
Have talked about the idea that every word of the text is directed by God, how that doesn't sort of make any sense, and that that would only work with the manuscripts, the original manuscripts, even if it did, and so on.
And last episode highlighted more problems with that, this notion that inerrancy is really a doctrine about the original manuscripts, which we don't have, and you can't sort of transfer that in language, and so on and so forth.
This week we're going to set all those concerns aside.
I'd be like, why?
Why, Dan, would we set all those concerns aside?
Those are serious concerns of the doctrine of inerrancy.
And the reason is because that's what actual inerrantists like Cousin Lonnie, our hypothetical cousin who's in seminary, knows a little bit more about this stuff than Uncle Ron talks to his professors, reads the same theology books that, you know, I've been reading through as we do this.
And what you'll get, and again, these are real conversations I've had, you'll like put all the evidence out there, and somebody will say, well, I don't know about all that, and you're right, that's complicated, and you know, I can't, you're right, I don't have all the answers, but I still trust the Bible.
And that would bring us back to things like Claims that the Spirit, you know, convinces them that it's true and so forth.
We're going to get to this.
We're going to spend a little bit more time on the problems of this doctrine.
Then we're going to sort of shift into what does that mean and why do people still hold on to it if it is so obviously not a doctrine that makes sense?
Okay, we'll get to that, okay?
The reason I say we set all that aside, the reason Cousin Lonnie at the end of the day will say, yeah, but I still trust my Bible, is because most Christians who insist on the inerrancy of the Bible—and again, they may not use that language, but that's what they're talking about—they're talking about their Bibles.
They're talking about the Bible written in their language.
And the kinds of considerations that I've raised may not be likely to sway them.
You know, it'll keep Cousin Lonnie up at night, or he'll make an appointment to go talk to his seminary professor so his seminary professor can give him answers that, you know, will make him feel better.
It'll keep him up at night, but a regular, irregular, ordinary Christian, not so much.
It's about their Bible.
So let's just assume, as most of these Christians do, and as theologians, honestly, like Grudem and Erickson, the two that I'm reading, as they do, that when we say the Bible is inerrant, we mean my Bible.
We mean the Bible that I use as a good conservative Christian, the Bible that I read on a daily basis, the one that I take to church on Sundays.
The one I read when I'm trying to discern God's will.
And let's remember that the doctrine of inerrancy is supposed to—this is part of the idea of it—it is used to encourage ordinary, everyday Christians to read their Bibles.
That's part of the aim of this.
That's what it's for.
That's what it aims at.
That's how they're supposed to know what God is like.
This is what is supposed to facilitate their encounter with God, and this is a core part of the discourse and rhetoric within this kind of religious tradition, is that people should have direct access to God through their Bibles, and that's why people are encouraged to read their Bibles and to do daily devotions and so forth.
And we'll get to that stuff and how that actually works later on as well.
But the point here is that the doctrine of inerrancy involves a conception of the popular use of the Bible.
And this is part of why, again, theologians, we'll call them the intellectual elites of the movement, the people who write the thousand-page books about theology and arguments about things like inerrancy, this is why they insist on the clarity and precision of the Bible.
This is their language.
Regular, everyday Christians are encouraged to read their English Bibles or whatever their first language is with the full confidence that they are without error and they can be understood by regular people.
And I think this is part of what's in view.
Like, when regular Christians, they don't always know the word of inerrancy, and they might say, my Bible's literally true, or I believe that the Bible's literally... That's what they actually mean, is they can trust it to give them truth about God, and it doesn't have errors.
That's the feel of this within those traditions.
That's what they're talking about.
So here's the problem.
Even the most cursory engagement with the Bible, in English or any other language, Even the quickest read of it makes it clear that it isn't clear or precise.
I was a pastor for years and was in an area where there were lots of people who had not grown up as Christians, who attended the church, who would visit the church.
And we'd encourage them to read their Bibles and so forth.
And I had people reach out to me all the time, including people who also had been Christians their whole lives, saying, I don't understand what this passage means, or I don't understand what this means over here, or help me make sense.
Like, it is not clear or precise.
And there are some pretty obvious ways that it also seems patently absurd to say that it is without error, meaning everything from metaphors to physical descriptions about things that are wrong to, you know, mentioned misquotations of other passages or multiple reports of something.
Lots of places where you would say, yeah, the person in the Bible talking here clearly got that wrong.
That's how we would colloquially say it.
They said something that's not factually accurate, the description wasn't correct, the quotation wasn't correct, whatever.
And these are so obvious that a huge part of theological articulations of inerrancy is devoted to trying to deal with them.
And we don't have time to even begin scratching the surface.
I know that some of you have reached out with like the laundry list of like, here are all these things with the Bible and there are whole books written about this.
I'm not writing one.
If I was, you know, we could spend 200 pages just going through sort of case by case.
But I'm going to touch on a couple significant overarching points that I think highlight these issues, and I want to talk about how it is that the theologians respond to that, how the inerrantists respond to that, and why, again, I still don't think that that works.
All right?
That's where we're going.
And here's how this works.
The way that theologians like Grudem and Erickson meet the challenge like these is actually by limiting the claims to inerrancy.
And if you say, wait a minute, whoa, hold on, inerrancy is all about every word of the Bible is without error.
Wayne Grudem says, if you doubt any word of the Bible, you doubt God.
It's a sin.
And you're saying that they actually limit inerrancy?
My answer is like, yes.
I mean, we've already seen this.
They already technically limit it to the manuscripts, and then they just kind of quietly set that aside and don't talk about it anymore, or the significance of it.
That's what they do, and we're going to come to the significance of it, but here's what they say, okay?
Again, I'm going to quote Wayne Grudem.
This is how he defines inerrancy.
We talked about this before, but I want to just take a listen to what he says.
He says, quote, the inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts—that's what we talked about before—Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
Hold on to that, and I'm going to read how Erickson defines inerrancy, and his definition is longer and it's a little more nuanced, but I'll tease out what I think is the important part for what we're doing today.
Erickson says, 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.
There's a lot in those definitions, and we're not going to dive into all of it, but here's the key for now.
If you listen carefully, both Grudem and Erickson insist that the Bible is inerrant in all that it affirms, that language of affirmation.
Erickson said it is fully truthful in all that it affirms.
Grudem says it does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.
It turns out, if you read them, you read their fuller discussions, what they're actually suggesting is that the Bible says a lot of things, but it's not always affirming them.
In other words, they're saying inerrancy, really, that whole without error thing, that actually only applies with affirmations, and the Bible affirms something.
And this is a useful trick for the inerrantists.
Because the Bible, like I say, it says all sorts of things that, strictly speaking, aren't accurate.
It talks about the sun rising, just like most of us do.
It uses euphemisms.
It misquotes things, all of those things I listed before.
And the solution they offer is to say that all of those things, or the vast majority, are okay because the Bible isn't affirming those views.
It's just using views that were common at the time, or it's reporting events, you know, it's God is choosing to use some other person's perspective and is not advancing God's own, so it's not affirming it, it's speaking metaphorically, what have you.
And Erickson, our two theologians, Erickson and Grudem, he's the most explicit in this move, but Grudem does it too.
And Erickson says, he says it, he says, inerrancy only applies in what he calls the indicative mood.
If you were going to talk about verbs, you'd have the subjunctive and the indicative and so forth.
In other words, he's saying it's basically only statements of fact that are intended to teach.
He says that it is didactic passages, passages intended to teach and offering statements of fact.
He's like, basically, that's the core.
That's the inerrant core of the Bible.
So, in other words, only the places where the Bible is sort of actively arguing for a position or seeking to teach doctrine, that's where it's really inerrant.
So what are they trying to do?
That's technical.
We're in the weeds.
Let's crawl out of the weeds a little bit, and let's look at what they're trying to do with that.
What they're trying to do with that is insulate their claims to inerrancy from the challenges that all of these examples would give to the Bible being without error.
What they're essentially trying to say is, well, yes, there are things that, tactically speaking, are factually inaccurate, but those aren't really errors because they're not things that God is intending to teach us.
Everywhere God wants to teach us something, that's inerrant.
Okay?
As I say, it's a slippery, slick move.
Problem solved!
Does it work?
No, I don't think it does.
It catches flat-footed.
The first time you engage a Cousin Lonnie and you come with, like, you know, I don't know, something about, what about where it says the mustard seed is the smallest seed, and we know it's not, and Cousin Lionel says that's not an affirmation, that's just a story, it was using common language of the time, God's not seeking to affirm anything about mustard seeds there, that's not the intent, therefore, you know, it doesn't bother me at all.
You'd be like, wait, what?
It can catch us flat-footed, but it doesn't actually fix the doctrine of inerrancy.
And in fact, I would argue that it makes it less coherent.
And we can see this.
One way that illustrates it is the way that inerrantists will talk about the Bible and science.
That's a huge issue.
All of you listening know that that's a huge issue.
I'm just going to illustrate a couple of points, but here's one.
Most inerrantists And this is true of run-of-the-mill evangelicals and theologians like Erickson and Grudem.
They do not believe, for example, that the universe was created in six literal 24-hour periods, okay?
And they advance a number of reasons for doing so.
That's a historically old position.
Not all Christians have ever believed that the Bible's description of the creation of the cosmos in six days is literally true, but lots did for a long time and so forth.
The point is, almost I shouldn't say that.
Few evangelical theologians and lots of evangelicals do not believe that that is a scientifically accurate claim.
And if you say, well, is the Bible wrong?
They'll say, no, the Bible is not wrong about this because it isn't actually trying to teach about how the cosmos was created.
It's giving a moral lesson, a theological interpretation, and so forth.
It's not giving us a lesson in science or modern cosmology.
And that would be fine.
You read the Bible that way, and that logic makes sense.
I don't think it's very consistent with inerrancy, but it's really common.
Here's the issue, though.
When it comes to other issues related to science, they think the Bible does teach scientific truth.
They insist to us that it does.
The most famous example is probably evolutionary theory, but let's look at something a little bit closer to, I think, the concerns that motivate a lot of things right now.
They argue that the biological origins of human life, when life starts, Determines that for them abortion is wrong.
That's why they argue that life begins at conception.
Folks, that's a scientific claim.
They argue for the biological basis of binary gender, that binary gender into male and female is a biological fact and that we are born into one of those genders.
And therefore they deny the legitimacy of trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
There, they've got no hesitation in saying that these are scientific views that are affirmed by the Bible, right?
That when the Bible affirms something, it is without error, that it affirms these things about the biological origins of life, when life begins at conception, and about trans and gender non-conforming people, and so forth.
So, with these issues, they're going to say, yeah, the Bible is making a scientific claim, a scientific affirmation, we have to hold to it, But you know, the sun rising, that's not a scientific affirmation.
The cosmos being created in six days, not a scientific affirmation.
Any number of different things, not a scientific affirmation.
That's an issue.
So here's what I think would happen.
You went to Cousin Lenny and said, well, you know, it's not trying to make scientific claims about, you know, how the cosmos was created and science teaches us, and Christians aren't anti-science, honest.
And you say, okay, but like, why do you insist that what it says, what you think it says about the origins of life, that There it's affirming something scientific or about trans and gender non-conforming people.
Here's how it's going to work.
Here's how the slippery theologians are going to work.
What he's going to say, Cousin Lenny, at least if he's been talking to his professors or he's been reading his Wayne Grudem or thinking that way, he's going to say, well, the issue is that those are moral issues.
Abortion and gender identity, those are moral issues.
So, of course, the Bible speaks to them in a different way than the age of the earth.
The Bible does affirm moral truths.
So it'll say, the Bible isn't an authority here because it's making biological claims, it's an authority because it's making moral claims.
They'll try to make a distinction and say that this is a moral issue, so we have to listen to what the Bible says.
It's affirming it.
There's no morality involved with, you know, arguments about the relative age of the earth or whatever.
I call bullshit.
Call it.
And here's why.
The so-called moral claims that they're making are inseparable from scientific claims.
When they say that trans and gender non-conforming identity and abortion are immoral, they say that because they violate a divinely given order, and the order as created by God, and guess what?
That includes the biological order.
If it was not for them, if they didn't believe that it was biologically established that there are two genders, and folks, it is not biologically established that there are two genders, but if they didn't believe that, if they didn't believe that was how God had created things, there wouldn't be a moral issue there.
Does that make sense?
Okay, I hope that makes sense to everybody.
They wouldn't accept the moral teachings or that it's a moral teaching if it wasn't grounded in biology.
So the reasoning here becomes circular.
On these issues, we can trust what the Bible says on scientific issues because they are moral in nature, but our basis for arguing that they're moral in nature depends on there being scientific facts.
So it turns out there's no logic at all, no consistent rationale for why some things that the Bible says about science-y stuff or factually inaccurate things are taken to be affirmations and some aren't.
It's highly selective.
So that's one issue.
That's just one example, but that's one issue where I think that this line that they try to make between what the Bible simply sort of says and describes in some way that's non-affirmative and what it affirms, it's just a distinction that doesn't work, folks.
But being me, being the philosophically-minded person that I am, there's another problem with this whole approach, which relates to more than just a few challenging examples.
These examples sort of illustrate this.
But here's the issue.
This insistence that the Bible is without error in what it affirms, but that it says other things that it might not affirm—it has descriptions, it has colloquialisms, it has what they call descriptions of phenomena, phenomenological descriptions they call them.
It's not a good use of the term phenomenological, but they mean, you know, yeah, it looks like the sun rises, so we describe it that way, we still do that, even though we all know the sun doesn't literally rise, and so forth.
The problem is But what they do is they introduce a distinction.
They create a gap between what the text of the Bible says and what it means.
Anyone, literally anybody who's literate, can read the Bible and see what it says.
They can look at the page and say the words and see what the text says, but that's not necessarily what the text means.
When people would come to me and say, I don't understand this text, they weren't saying, like, I literally can't read it.
They were saying, I don't know what the words say.
I don't know what it means.
Now, and this isn't weird.
This is just how text and communication work.
We have all had the experience with like an email or a text, like a text on a phone that makes this point, where someone, like we send a text and somebody takes it completely wrong.
Or we get a text from somebody like, are they serious?
Are they like mad at me?
Are they being sarcastic?
What is that emoji doing there?
Why do they write this in capitals?
What's the significance of the exclamation point?
Or like this person never uses any punctuation at all.
It's like this run-on thing and I don't know how to read it.
What does it mean?
We all understand that what we say or communicate or write oftentimes doesn't easily get at what we mean, and that's why miscommunication is there, and it just accompanies communication, folks.
This gap between what something says and what it means is just part of how texts work.
No problem, except not if you're an inerrantist.
I'm going to circle back around to a point that I made earlier in this episode.
The entire reason that inerrantists insist on the clarity and precision of the Bible is supposed to do away with this problem.
The whole reason, and you can go back and listen to the episode where we talked about this notion that it goes right down to the very words, their insistence that every word of the Bible is what God wants it to be is there because they say this guarantees the clarity and precision of it, and that guarantees that regular people can read it, that we can read the Bible and it is very clear what God is teaching us and telling us and so forth.
Folks, the whole doctrine is supposed to close that gap, to make it that if we know what the text says, we know what it means.
Erickson tries to develop this in his theology with this argument that I think is just naive beyond belief, but this argument that the Bible is so precise that there was only one way to say the things that it says.
That's their claim.
They want to close the gap between what the text says and what it means, but here, to defend their doctrine of inerrancy, They reintroduce that very distinction because now it's not enough to know what the text says, we need to know if it's affirming something.
We need to know if it's being didactic, if it's intended to teach, or if it's merely being descriptive, or if it's just giving a report, or if it's being poetic, or whatever.
A whole bunch of distinctions are opened up, or introduced rather, that open up that gap.
There's a lot going on there.
That gets pretty philosophical.
I recognize that.
Pretty wonky.
We know that I'm a kind of a theory wonk sort of person.
We got to wrap this up.
So let's put sort of a bow on this.
Let's tie some of these things together.
Okay?
There's a lot going on.
Here's where we are.
We are now in the position of affirming, if we're the inerrantists, that every word of the Bible is exactly what God wants it to be.
Okay?
But it turns out that when God chose what every word should be, God also chose specific words for a lot of things that God doesn't actually think, or that are not factually accurate, or that is not teaching.
So, every word of the Bible is what God wants it to be, but God wants lots of the words of the Bible to be things that aren't factually accurate, even though the whole point of God choosing every word is to be without error.
Folks, we're just moving in circles now.
So we've got the claim basically that God ensures that the Bible is without error, but as long as we recognize that without error doesn't mean factually accurate.
I don't really know what else we're supposed to make of that.
If this sounds like a mess, if I'm going to get emails from folks and you're going to say, you said this and this and this, kind of as you were wrapping up here, can you say more about that?
And he's like, I kind of can't because it is a mess.
Again, these are the parts of the reasons why I was not an inerrantist, even as an evangelical pastor, because I understood these things.
I understood how they worked.
They don't make any sense.
So things now with the doctrine, they're in an absolute jumble, and that's where we're going to pick up next episode, okay?
There's a little bit more we've got to say about how evangelicals try to fix these issues, and that's going to bring us to the question of, they're just unfixable.
It's a mess.
It's incoherent.
It's full of knots and twists, and evangelicals, to preserve their doctrine of inerrancy, The only way they could preserve the doctrine that the Bible is without error is finding ways to allow factual inaccuracies into the Bible.
It just doesn't make sense to me that somehow that's proof that it's error-free.
We're going to see what they try to do with that, and that's going to bring us finally to these issues that are my real driving concern of, if this is what the doctrine of inerrancy is, why does it persist?
How does it actually work?
How does a doctrine of inerrancy with all of these thorns and knots and twists actually serve the interests of the high-control religion in which it figures so prominently?
That's where we're headed.
I'll check some of those things out in the next episode.
As always, thank you all for listening.
Thank you for sticking with this.
Thank you for sticking with me.
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Really look forward to hearing from as many of you as have time to reach out.
And please be well until we talk again.
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