The doctrine of inerrancy isn’t convincing philosophically, theologically, or factually. Yet it remains a cornerstone of belief within a conservative Christian circles. What explains its persistence? In this episode, Dan begins exploring this issue by suggesting that the doctrine of inerrancy, despite all of its intellectual failings, speaks to a deeply felt need within a particular kind of religious adherent, and that this is one significant reason it persists. Check this week’s episode to hear more.
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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.
As always, 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, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
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New ideas have been in this series on inerrancy, this kind of deep dive into a certain concept of what the Bible is and what a certain kind of Christian means when they say that they're biblical or that they believe the authority of the Bible and what have you, but going to go in different directions soon and always welcome additional insights and comments and thoughts about topics as well as just reaching out for any reason.
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Let's take a dive in here.
As I said, we've been in this kind of deep dive.
of what a certain kind of Christian means when they claim to be biblical or they believe in biblical authority and so forth.
This has brought us into the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the view that the Bible is without error, and we've spent the last few episodes looking at the reasons why, in my view, this doctrine simply doesn't work.
In theological, philosophical, and even practical terms, I think the Bible simply is not, and I go further and say it cannot be, what Biblicists claim that it is, okay?
And if any of the reasons I've offered for this seem pretty straightforward, it's because I think that they are.
In other words, I've had folks who come to me, not necessarily in response to this, but just, you know, other times in my life, and say, it seems really, really, really straightforward to show that the Bible's not without error.
All those kinds of things that we talk about, like, you know, just Two different accounts of creation or two different accounts of this or that or competing accounts or whatever.
It doesn't seem like it's hard to show that it isn't.
And it seems like people who want to defend inerrancy have to go to these like extreme elements of like intellectual gymnastics to try to show that.
And I think what that shows is that When we consider factual or philosophical claims about inerrancy, the doctrine isn't hard to knock down.
It's really not, okay?
And yet, what people are getting at is that it remains one of the most centrally held beliefs within this kind of Christian practice.
And this is true from the level of professional theologians.
I mean, I have been looking at Millard Erickson and Wayne Grudem.
I'm kind of done with them now, but that's where I was looking.
Seminary professors, people with terminal degrees, all the way down to Pastors, regular pastors and regular church goers like Uncle Ron.
So what gives?
If the doctrine is not hard to knock down, if anybody sort of examines it from, let's say, a certain distance or with a certain critical eye, it's not difficult to show that it's not plausible, that it's not compelling, and certainly that it isn't convincing.
So what gives?
Why does it hold?
Why is it so significant?
A few episodes ago I shared that almost all of the largest seminaries in the United States have some statement of faith where they affirm a doctrine like inerrancy.
This is what I think is significant because what it shows is that the doctrine of inerrancy is not just about what it is.
It's not just about what it explicitly teaches.
It's about what it does.
And this is what we're interested in, in this series, really more than anything else.
Yes, we're interested in what is the doctrine of inerrancy?
Does it work?
What does it hold?
What does it teach?
We want to understand that.
But the reason why I want to understand that, the reason that I'm interested in that, is because I want to know, okay, so what does the doctrine actually do?
How is it used?
And when we get to that, that's where we start to say, here's why this doctrine holds on.
If we want to understand why the doctrine of inerrancy has the hold that it does within broad swaths of American Christianity, and not just Christianity in the U.S., Christianity around the world as well, It brings us to those questions of what the doctrine actually does, how it's used, okay?
How it's part of, in many ways, the source code of a particular kind of conservative Christianity.
And so that's where we're going.
That's the corner that we've turned in this and looking at inerrancies.
We're shifting from the what is it and does it sort of work in a kind of And so in turning that direction, the first thing I want to look at, what I want to talk about today, is that I think we have to understand that the doctrine, one of the first things it does, is it plays a strongly apologetic role within this form of Christianity.
And what do I mean by apologetic?
Some people will be familiar with this term, some won't.
But apologetics is the element of Christian thought that is aimed at defending the faith or providing sort of intellectual justifications for the faith.
That's what we call apologetics.
It is essentially an element of Christian thought that aims to defend Christianity against different kinds of objections, okay?
So if I say it's an apologetic doctrine, it's part of Christian apologetics, what I mean is that this is a doctrine, and we have to understand this, it is a doctrine that is intended to strengthen the faith and commitment of believers rather than persuading people to believe.
In other words, in my view, inerrancy, it's really a doctrine for people who are already Christians of a certain kind.
Not all Christians are inerrantists.
Not all Christians hold that the Bible is what inerrantists say it is and so forth.
But for Christians who do, I think it's a doctrine that's for them.
It's a doctrine for people who are already Christians.
There's a medieval theologian named Anselm of Canterbury, and he famously described the relationship between faith and reason, this kind of old Christian tradition of saying that theology is seeking understanding, right?
And I think this is how inerrancy works.
For those who already identify as Christian, for whatever reason, whatever brought them to that identification, whatever brought about their conversion or their personal experience or whatever that they now would say, you know, sort of profess that they are Christians, I think a doctrine of inerrancy serves to bolster their existing faith.
But here's the key.
I think it rarely, if ever, convinces people to become Christian.
I have never met anyone.
This is when I was a pastor, this is when I was an evangelical, this is since I've been an evangelical, this is doing this work, this is talking to coaching clients, this is talking with students, this is talking with people who reach out to me, this is talking to people out in the wild, out in the real world.
I have never met anyone who first came to believe that the Bible was inerrant and then came to identify as a Christian.
Or I've never met anybody who became a Christian because They first came to believe that the Bible was inerrant and without error, and then they said, oh, it teaches this and this and this.
I need to become a Christian.
Okay?
I've always encountered the relationship between these developing in the other direction.
In other words, somebody is a Christian, and they'll have whatever story they have of how they came to be a Christian, and then their views on the Bible follow from that.
And that's what I mean when I say that there's a strongly apologetic dimension to the doctrine of inerrancy.
That inerrancy arises not as a doctrine to convince non-believers, not as a doctrine to make non-believers become Christians, But as a doctrine that arises to defend the existing Christian faith of Christians.
So all the things we've talked about, the talk of assurance, the talk of biblical authority, the talk of the Bible needing to be trustworthy, that it has to be without error, all of that talk is aimed at ensuring Christians That their faith makes sense, that it can provide answers to problems they face, that it can stand up to the challenges of a hostile secular world, and so forth.
It's an apologetic doctrine.
And I think that that's the first thing to recognize about why it holds on, is to understand that the first use of the doctrine is to bolster the faith of those people who already identify as Christian.
I really don't think that its aim or its use is to convert people.
If that is an aim that folks have, it's a terrible tool for it.
As I say, there will be counter stories out there.
I'm sure there is somebody who comes to believe that the Bible is without error first and then becomes a Christian, but I've never met them, I've never encountered them, and I suspect that if I talked to most pastors or theology professors or others, they would tell the same story.
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It's primary function, a primary function of the doctrine of inerrancy is to bolster the faith of those who are already Christians.
Okay?
We talk about this notion of apologetics.
That's like it's its own sort of field primarily within conservative Christianity.
And there have always been two schools of thought when it comes to apologetics.
There are those that argue for strong apologetics.
Those are the people that argue that defenses of the Christian faith can be so robust and so intellectually strong and compelling that they can convince others to convert to Christianity.
And there have always been those who argue, for example, that the Christian account of reality is so intellectually robust that people are literally irrational not to believe it.
Okay, for example.
That's not very common.
What's more common is what's called weak apologetics, and it's called that because it makes a weaker claim.
Basically, what they argue is that apologetics can strengthen the faith of those who are already Christian.
It can give good reasons for people who are already Christians, who already have faith in the truth of Christianity, etc.
It can give them good reasons for confidence in that faith, but it can't prove Christianity to non-believers and so forth.
I have always, going all the way back to my days as an evangelical, I've always found that weaker view of apologetics more compelling.
Again, I've never met anybody who identifies as a Christian and they became a Christian because of philosophical or theological reasoning.
Those people exist.
They've written books.
They've done other things.
I know that they're out there, but I think they're a minority.
I think they're an exception to the rule.
In all of my time, people first come to identify as Christians for any number of reasons.
Some sort of effervescent experience, some moment of crisis where, you know, somebody presents them the story of Christianity and they feel a sense of assurance or something like that.
It's often a kind of emotional, affective response of some kind.
But in all of those cases, people first come to identify as Christians, and then they turn to intellectual arguments.
Then they try to understand their faith.
It's faith seeking understanding.
They try to understand it.
They try to bolster it.
That's when they start reading theology or doing theology.
That's when they start talking about the Bible in certain ways.
That's what apologetics does.
That's how it works.
It bolsters the faith of those who are already Christians.
So what does all that mean, all that kind of wonky stuff about apologetics and bolstering the faith and whatever?
What does all that mean for the idea of inerrancy?
Here's what I think it means.
It means that inerrancy will be experienced as convincing by those who are already predisposed to find it convincing.
And this is going to be important because we're going to move forward in the next few episodes and talk more about how the doctrine is actually used, what it actually does.
Okay?
But this first point, the sort of foundational for that, is that people who are predisposed to be convinced by a doctrine of inerrancy, they are the ones who are most likely to actually hear the doctrine and read a Wayne Grudem or read a Millard Erickson or talk to Cousin Lonnie who's in seminary and actually say, huh, yeah, I think that makes sense.
We can think of this as a kind of confirmation bias, okay?
For somebody whose faith teaches that there has to be an absolute authority on ethical matters.
For somebody whose faith teaches them that there has to be absolute assurance that we can know what God wants, that we can know who God is, that we can know what God thinks about, say, sexuality and gender or whatever.
For somebody whose faith teaches that our entire faith is threatened by uncertainty, that a lack of certainty is a threat to faith.
For somebody whose faith is articulated in that way, and folks, there are lots of ways to have faith, to express faith, and they don't all take that shape.
I'm not here to be anti-faith.
In fact, I would argue that faith is a kind of fundamental experiential dimension, whether you're religious or not.
It's a whole different discussion, okay?
But for people whose faith is shaped in that way, the doctrine of inerrancy fulfills a need.
That kind of faith needs something like a doctrine of inerrancy.
If you have a faith, if one has a faith that demands certainty, assurance, clarity, that sees any notion of error as an inherent threat to the very concept of faith, you need something like a doctrine of inerrancy.
That kind of faith actively searches for something that fulfills that need.
And so in comes the doctrine of inerrancy offered by theologians like Erickson or Grudem or preached by Uncle Ron's pastor.
That doctrine of inerrancy shines like a beacon of light for them.
It draws them.
When we talked about Grudem, he talks about the doctrine of self-authenticating, that the Bible itself teaches it, and we simply experience it as true.
Now, he says that's the movement of the Holy Spirit, but somebody a little bit more critical, maybe a little bit more cynical, could look and say, That's exactly the kind of experience somebody has when they want something like a doctrine of inerrancy to be true.
They need something like a doctrine of inerrancy to be true.
And so when they start reading these passages about how the Bible is that, and they hear sermons about that, and maybe they read books about that, of course it resonates with them as deeply true.
No surprise about that.
So, when Christians like this confront the doctrine of inerrancy, they're not considering it with sort of cold rationality or objective logic.
Neither is a theologian like Wayne Grudem when he writes his theology book.
Neither is a theologian like Millard Erickson when he writes his theology book.
Neither one of those, them, articulated a doctrine of inerrancy sort of from, we might call it an outsider perspective.
That's not how the doctrine works.
When people encounter the doctrine of inerrancy, They are encountering something that meets a deep-felt need.
And when they're presented with ideas that do that, when any of us are presented with ideas that do that, they are hard to resist or evaluate in a critical way.
And I want to be clear here.
I'm not just saying this to slam or mock conservative Christians or something.
I think we've all had experiences like this, where we want or need something to be true so much That we will believe almost anything that presents itself to us as fulfilling that need.
Maybe we haven't all fallen prey to, but we've known people who have lost money to that investment opportunity that was just too good to be true, and it turned out that it wasn't true.
Man, when the opportunity stood in front of us, it met such a need and fulfilled such a desire and a hope that we were drawn in.
Or the person that insists that their partner, the person that they're with who mistreats them, they really do love them after all.
Despite all the evidence that everybody on the outside can see, they know they need it to be true that this person really does love them.
Or people who are confronted with an illness, or maybe the illness of a loved one, and they believe against all evidence that the person's getting better.
They're gonna beat this.
Because they need that to be true.
Parents of missing children who never come back, who hold on to the hope day after day after day, a deeply felt belief that the child is going to come back, tomorrow could be the day.
I say none of this to try to be morbid or dismissive, but to illustrate that I think we're all familiar with this kind of belief.
We are all familiar with holding on to something and finding something believable because it meets a deeply felt need, because it resonates with us on this level.
And we even make this explicit when we say, you know, I have to believe that they're getting better.
I have to believe that my partner will change and treat me the way that they should.
I have to believe that they could be home tomorrow.
I have to believe.
We say it.
We have all encountered, we all understand, if we're honest with ourselves, the appeal of beliefs that present themselves to us on this level and that we hold because of that.
That is part, the sort of first layer, of what the doctrine of inerrancy, I think, does.
One reason, then, that I think the doctrine of inerrancy has the hold that it does within the kind of Christianity that we talk about a lot in this series is that it meets this deeply felt need and it strengthens and confirms the faith within a particular form of Christian practice.
Which means that for all of us who are not practitioners of that kind of Christian faith, we're not practitioners of any faith, perhaps.
Inerrancy will be unconvincing, at least in part because it doesn't speak to that deeply felt need.
Or, I would say this is my story, it's not just my story, maybe it has stopped speaking to a deeply felt need.
And we can dig into that in future episodes of how people come to abandon a doctrine like this that meets this deeply felt need.
All of which is to say, for those of us on the outside looking at this, who are looking at it from, let's call it a sort of purely intellectual or cognitive or abstract or critical distanced or whatever perspective, it's thoroughly unconvincing.
But if we recognize that one of the things the doctrine does is resonate with a deeply felt need of those who do participate within a particular kind of faith tradition, it begins to make sense why the doctrine has the hold that it does for those folks.
So let's sort of tie all this together here.
We've got to wind this down.
For those of us individuals, people who are already Christians, they already identify as a certain kind of Christian, the doctrine is compelling or plausible in a way that it simply isn't for those who are not already part of that community.
And we see that in the evasions that say, even if we can't meet the objections to this, we can be confident that they'll be met in the future or that God has the evidence or whatever.
That kind of what feels to those of us who are unconvinced is just simply a denial of evidence that explains it.
That's why almost nobody who isn't already an evangelical, for example, spends time reading Wayne Grudem or Millard Erickson.
I'm not an evangelical.
I spent some time reading them recently.
I don't know other people who do that.
So, the first stage of this is that the doctrine of inerrancy meets this kind of apologetic need of bolstering the faith of a certain kind of religious person who needs something like a doctrine of inerrancy.
That brings up some other questions, though, and the big one is this of, okay, so who cares?
If a certain kind of Christian wants to or needs to understand the Bible in this way, especially if we can be sympathetic and recognize that, wow, we all have beliefs that we've held onto that are kind of playing a similar role for us by meeting a deeply felt need, if that's what this is, Why should we worry about that?
Cool, that's their faith.
It's their faith expression.
Let them go live it.
I mean, who cares?
Why spend all this time unpacking the idea of inerrancy?
Here's the reason.
I don't think that the doctrine of inerrancy is only about bolstering individuals' faith.
If the doctrine of inerrancy was just about people and their own personal views of faith and their personal views of God and their private religious experiences or something, that would be fine.
But that's not how religion works.
I always say that bad theology hurts people, and the doctrine of inerrancy is bad theology.
And the reason I say it's bad theology is not that it isn't intellectually persuasive.
I think it's not.
The reason I say it's bad theology is that when we dig further into the uses of the doctrine of inerrancy, I think what we're going to find is that it is a central mechanism within high-control religious contexts.
With that kind of Christianity I'm talking about tends to be a form of high control religion, and inerrancy is central to that.
Inerrancy is also central to the claims that those kinds of Christians make beyond the church.
Claims that they put on you, claims that they put on me, things that they put on LGBTQ people, and on and on and on.
It's a doctrine that might meet a deeply felt need for them, but it doesn't stop there.
It has a very public focus.
And within those communities, it maintains high-control religious environments that I think are very damaging for people.
That's why it matters.
That's where we're going, okay?
We're going to dig deeper.
We're going to do some more episodes talking about the uses of inerrancy.
We're going to talk about what it means to believe it as a sort of creed or an act of faith.
We're going to talk about the significance of the fact that that notion of need is actively cultivated within churches.
We're going to talk about how inerrancy promises an immediate engagement with God, but it actually legitimizes mechanisms of control and coercion and so forth.
That's where we're headed.
We can't do it today.
I've got to wind it down, so I will say once again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for your time.
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