It's In the Code Ep. 86: "The Last Line of Defense"
What do those who insist that the Bible is inerrant, literally “without error,” do if they’re finally confronted with contradictions or errors in the biblical text that no one can plausibly explain? Does this lead them to abandon the doctrine? Do they finally have to give in to the evidence of the text they themselves claim as an authority? No! Instead, they marshal one, final, ultimate defense of an inerrant Bible. What is it? Check out this week’s episode and Dan will tell you!
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Hey everyone, as always thanks for tuning in to It's In The Code.
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Now we go to It's In The Code.
Hello, once again, uh, Welcome to It's in the Code.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host for this series.
And as always, I want to thank all of you for listening.
Again, ask if you're in a position to subscribe and to support what we do at Straight White American Jesus that you'd consider doing so.
All of you who email me, thank you so much.
Keep the ideas coming.
I am once again trailing in responding to emails, not as badly as I was.
Again, I won't call it a New Year's resolution, but my commitment to do better about staying up on emails is there.
It's there.
It's holding.
I just can't match the pace I had when I wasn't teaching during the winter break.
But I am still there.
I do read the emails, value so much of what you have to say.
Keep the ideas coming.
I'm always soliciting ideas for It's In The Code and new topics and feedback.
I've got a lot of them sort of in the queue, ready to go.
Have been doing this deep dive into the concept of inerrancy that we're going to continue today, but other topics.
Welcome your insights as well.
So, let's dive in here.
As I say, we're continuing this deep dive into this conception that the Bible is inerrant, and we've covered a lot of ground here.
In last episode, we kind of looked at the collision of two issues, right?
One was inerrantists—that's a hard word to say—inerrantists' insistence, the insistence on the part of people who believe the Bible is inerrant, that the Bible is accurate, that it says what God wants it to say, right down to the exact words of the text that are used, And together with that, the claim that even though the words are what God wants them to be, it doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is factually accurate.
Okay?
And if you're just tuning in, you're like, that doesn't make sense.
Those two statements don't line up next to each other.
Take a listen to the prior episode.
Reach out.
The bottom line is I've suggested I find the doctrine of inerrancy to be incoherent, and this is part of why.
If somebody says, How do you put those two things together?
My response is, you don't.
They don't fit together.
And waving a magic wand and saying, but God did it, doesn't fix it.
But that's where we've been.
What it means is that all the words are what God wants them to be.
They are without error, but it also means that being without error doesn't mean that they are all factually accurate.
Let alone literally true.
That's why they're not literalists, to go back to an early episode in this series.
So why do evangelical theologians advance this line of reasoning?
And folks, I've been reading a couple of them.
There are lots of others you could read.
In my view, they're all basically the same here.
They go through a lot.
of conceptual hoops and and gymnastics to try to kind of square this circle.
And the reason is, and we kind of talked about this a little bit last time, is that there are all kinds of things that would strike an uninitiated reader as errors, quote-unquote, right?
physical descriptions and metaphors, and I think the most significant for me are parallel passages, accounts of the same event in the Bible that contradict each other, right?
That's why they have to try to do this, is to try to reconcile all of those with this view that the Bible's without error and so forth, okay?
So, let's imagine that you've followed me this far, okay?
And you're ready for Cousin Lenny, right?
Cousin Lenny Our cousin who's in seminary, he's an evangelical, he's reading the same theologians that I'm talking about.
He's a little more knowledgeable than your average run-of-the-mill churchgoer, a little more knowledgeable than Uncle Ron.
But maybe you're also hearing from Uncle Ron's pastor, right?
He's the one that, you know, when you send Uncle Ron the emails that you're penetrating questions about the Bible, he has his pastor write the responses because he doesn't really know what to say, okay?
Let's imagine that you've followed me this far and you're ready for them.
You've got all the points that I've raised.
You've got them in your back pocket.
You're ready.
Next time you're at that cookout and you've had a couple beers and you're feeling pretty loose and ready to go, you're ready, okay?
And they come at you with all the lines of reason we've been talking about.
You explain why they don't work, and maybe you highlight some of these examples that, in my view, these evasions can't get around, right?
So, for example, there are two different accounts of creation in Genesis.
There are two different accounts of Noah's Ark, the famous story of Noah's Ark, the big flood, all the animals on the boat, all of that.
Two different accounts in Genesis.
There are two competing accounts of the Israelites appointing a king and so forth.
You can multiply the examples.
And let's imagine that you finally bring up Cousin Lonnie or Uncle Ron's pastor short.
Even they recognize that they just don't have an answer for those.
And the slippery moves that they've made to distinguish what the text says from what it affirms—we talked about that last episode—they don't work.
Appeals to non-existent manuscripts that we don't have and never will.
They just don't make sense.
You've effectively brought the doctrine of inerrancy to its limits.
Cousin Lonnie's on his knees.
You're about to deal the final blow to his doctrine of inerrancy.
Is it over?
Have you succeeded?
No.
What happens?
Cousin Lonnie and Uncle Ron's pastor?
They break the glass and they pull the handle on their failsafe.
They have one final insurmountable line of defense.
The inerrantists, when they're confronted with all of this, and you've amassed all this time, you've spent all of this time listening to frustrated podcasters giving you reasons why inerrancy doesn't work, and you marshal all of that, and you're there, and you think you've taken away every line of reasoning they have, they have a fail-safe argument.
You ready for this?
Because what could it be?
What could this final, impossible-to-overcome line of defense be?
Here it is.
You ready?
It is the fact that inerrancy just can't be wrong.
It is just simply the assertion of the doctrine itself.
That's their failsafe.
And I promise I'm not making that up.
I could imagine a critic—I don't get that many emails from hardcore inerrantists defending the doctrine to me—but I can imagine the conversation where somebody says, anything you say is overstated.
It's not true.
We don't just assert the doctrine and so forth.
I'm not making it up.
This is not a straw-person argument to try to make an errantist look bad.
I'm reading some of the best theological arguments, in their estimation, that evangelicals have to offer.
And that's the fail-safe argument is to just assert the doctrine in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
And so I'm going to prove it here, right?
I'm just going to take another quick look.
At what Wayne Grudem and Millard Erickson, the evangelical theologians, have been sort of guiding me on this hellish vision of inerrancy, right, of what they have to say about this.
So let's start with Erickson, kind of the older, reigning kind of figure of these two.
After running through several ways of dealing with apparent errors in the biblical text, we've got a long discussion of here's how you can deal with this and that and, you know, here's how inerrancy works and so forth.
Erikson finally addresses the issue of what to do if there simply is no apparent way to explain those apparent, I say apparent, hear apparent in quotation marks, those apparent contradictions.
What does he say?
He says this, difficulties in explaining the biblical text should not be prejudged as indicative of error.
Oh, well, I mean, your whole doctrine is that the Bible's without error, that it is so clear and precise that right down to the words that are used, it's without error, That sounds like it should be pretty obviously without error.
And here you are saying, well, if you find apparent errors, you shouldn't assume that they're actually errors.
Oh, okay, Millard.
Interesting.
Why?
Here's what he says, quote, it is better to wait for the remainder of the data to come in with the confidence that if we had all the data, the problems could be resolved.
In some cases, the data may never come in, end quote.
He says, no, we just have to assume that the data to prove that the Bible's inerrant, it's out there.
The data to fix those contradictions, it's out there.
It may never come in.
We have to know it'll probably never come in, but we just have to be confident that it's there so we can trust the doctrine of inerrancy.
Grudem says something really similar.
He says, you know, if we can't address the problems we find in the biblical text, and he makes really strong statements about how there are virtually no unresolved problems and so forth.
I think everything he says is overstated in this, but that's what he says.
But he says kind of the same thing.
He says, if we do come to problems we can't address, this is because there are facts that are, quote, presently unknown to us, end quote.
And he goes on to insist that because of this, they should not trouble us.
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Erickson and Grudem, what does that mean?
It means that the fail-safe argument is, even if you can show us the inerrantists, those of us who claim we are quote-unquote biblical, we're the biblical Christians, we believe in biblical authority, we're inerrantists, we believe the Bible is without error and accurate and so we believe the Bible is without error and accurate and so forth, but even if you can show us errors we can't respond to, errors we can't explain, errors that there is no data or evidence to account for, even if you can show errors that
What?
Hey, we're not worried.
We're not worried.
Why?
Because we believe it's out there.
The data is out there.
The evidence is out there somewhere.
Even if we never get it, we know that it's there.
We trust in that.
So an errantist like Erickson are literally like, you know, hey, give us your best shot.
He says in one place, he says, those of us who claim the Bible's inerrant, we should invite these criticisms.
We should invite people to come to us and challenge our view of inerrancy with these purported errors, right?
There's this tone of confidence.
We're the inerrantists.
Bring your best shot, right?
And of course, that's their tone because it turns out That no matter what that shot is, it can't disprove the assertion that the Bible is without error.
There is literally no number of factual errors we could cite that can disprove the claim that the Bible is without error.
Because even when their back is against the wall and they can't give you any, any plausible explanation or meaningful alternative or different translation or whatever they try to do, They just know.
We can rest assured the evidence exists.
We just don't have it.
So, there you go.
We can still maintain inerrancy.
Once again, The inerrantists have insulated their view of the Bible from any assault of reason.
Anything that those of us who are critical or skeptical about this doctrine, or even people who aren't like me, people who aren't sort of out to debunk inerrancy, they just want to understand it.
They're open to the idea.
Maybe they're even looking for the idea.
The idea of a text that is divinely given and has all the answers and says exactly what God wants it to say is very, very attractive in a lot of ways.
Maybe they really want to believe that and they just got some questions, real questions.
It turns out that there's no answer that can be given other than the assertion that we've got the evidence.
I mean, the evidence exists.
We don't have it.
But we have it.
Because we know it exists.
So we can just depend on it.
Okay?
So where are we?
Let's tie all this together.
Let's review for a minute.
The Bible is without error, right down to the very words that are used.
Okay?
But without error doesn't actually mean without error.
Okay?
So, but don't worry, we Biblicalists, like, if somebody says, well, without error, hold on, like, here's this place where there's something that's not factually accurate, or here's this place where they're quoting, I don't know, the prophet Isaiah, and it doesn't actually line up with any
manuscripts that we have, or here's this account of a historical event that we now know was inaccurate, that's not how it happened, or here are these competing accounts of the same thing within the biblical text, all purporting to be from God, etc., etc., etc.
Those look like errors.
Well, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
There can be errors, right?
Without error, saying the Bible's without error doesn't mean everything's factually accurate.
So, don't worry, said a Biblicist, we can explain why all those errors don't really count as errors, right?
And here's the logic again, folks.
If the Bible says something factually inaccurate, that's because God wanted to say something factually inaccurate.
So it's still inerrant and without error, even though the inaccuracies are there because the inaccuracies aren't errors because God put the inaccuracies there.
Or something.
Okay?
Folks, I'm really not trying to reduce it to some, you know, caricature.
This is the argument.
Okay?
And again, if you're like, that doesn't make sense to me, it doesn't make sense to me either.
Okay?
But what about all those things we could say that seem to be errors or contradictions that we inherit?
We just can't explain.
We don't have good explanations for them yet.
No worries.
We can just be assured that if we did have all the information, it would resolve those difficulties.
So even unresolvable errors?
Turns out they're not errors after all.
Contradictions we can't explain, differences in account, textual mistakes, what have you.
No explanation for them.
Don't worry.
We don't need to worry about it.
Those aren't errors either.
It brings us back to a point that Gruden made a few episodes back, right?
He said, That inerrancy, it's basically a self-affirming doctrine.
He says it's the witness of the Holy Spirit that compels us.
The Bible itself, as we read it, commends itself to us as inerrant.
And remember, he acknowledged and said, yep, that's circular reasoning.
The Bible is the authority for biblical inerrancy.
We're right back to that.
What about all the contradictions?
What about the mistakes?
What about the things?
What have you?
Well, nope, we don't have to worry about those.
Because why?
Why do we have the conviction?
Why are we justified in the conviction that the Bible is without error?
Because we have the conviction that the Bible is without error.
That's what it comes back down to.
Okay?
We've come full circle.
Why have we come full circle?
Because up to now I've been kind of focusing on what a certain kind of Christian community means when it calls itself biblical.
Go back and listen to some early episodes in this series.
I did an episode on what it means to be biblical or the concept of a Bible church.
When a church has the word Bible in its name or when you go to a church website or something like that and you read it and it says that they preach the Bible or the Bible is the authority or whatever, what does that mean?
That's what we've been diving into.
What we've been talking about under the name of the doctrine of inerrancy, that's what theologians call it, is what millions of a certain kind of Christian believe when they say they quote-unquote believe the Bible.
When regular Christians say the Bible, they believe the Bible is literally true.
They don't mean literal, they mean inerrant.
I think what they mean is that every word in the Bible is literally what God wants it to be, but as we've seen, the doctrine of inerrancy is more complicated than that, okay?
What we've been looking at is what the doctrine of inerrancy is, and I've been arguing why I just don't think it works.
And this is dear to me.
This was a big part of my own movement out of evangelicalism was the growing awareness that this doctrine of the Bible just didn't work, okay?
But here's where we're going, okay?
If you have stuck with me this far, if you've listened to this series—I know I've got a lot of longtime listeners out there who've been with me for a long time as we've done this series—you know that my interest isn't just in, like, what is this doctrine of the Bible, right?
What I'm interested in is, what do claims to biblical authority do?
And you can think about it this way, if the doctrine of inerrancy is so thoroughly unconvincing, and folks, I think it is, and I don't think it's hard to see, I think anybody coming to it from a perspective of just curiosity or analysis or something, somebody who's not already deeply committed to the truth of the Bible or whatever, It's not hard to show that it doesn't work as an idea or a concept, okay?
If it is so thoroughly unconvincing, why is it so prevalent?
Why is the most visible form, the most active and vocal form of Christianity in America at present a form that holds this view of the Bible?
Why are almost all of the, say, 25 largest seminaries in America, do they affirm this view of the Bible?
Why is it so prevalent?
Why does it persist in people like Cousin Lonnie and Uncle Ron and millions of other Christians who could not articulate it the way that the theologians do, but it's a gut-level assertion that they have?
That's what we're going to go look at.
And looking at that, it brings us to the question of what the Doctrine of Inerrancy does, how it codes and structures high-control religious practices in various ways.
And I'll give you the punchline now.
The plot twist.
Surprise, surprise.
For me, the reason it persists is because it is useful for high-control religion.
We are going to come back and see how this doctrine persists, because it provides control and structure for a certain kind of Christianity, in particular.
There are also other traditions, scripturalist traditions, where I think a lot of the same points would hold, right?
But they're different, and they're different enough that I don't feel as prepared to discuss them.
Love to hear your thoughts on that.
That's where we're going to go.
We're turning a corner here.
I've done the work to say, here's what the doctrine is.
When people say that they're biblical or biblicist or they believe the Bible, this is what they're talking about, and this is why I don't think it works.
But what does that doctrine do?
And that's my answer.
Why does it stick?
Why do people hold to it?
Because it does some real things.
What does it do?
That's where we're going from here.
That's the corner we're turning.
Gotta wrap this up.
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