It's In the Code Ep. 88: "The Bible is Historically Flawless"
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Christian inerrantists, those who claim that the Bible is literally “without error,” often present this as a “historical” doctrine. That is, they often claim that the view that the Bible is without error is the result of historical investigation, that the historical claims of the Bible have been tested against real history and have passed that test. The claim that the Bible is without error is then presented a fact established through historical investigation. In this episode, Dan tells us why that simply isn’t the case, and highlights what’s at stake when Christians make this claim.
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Now we go to It's In The Code.
Again, welcome to It's In The Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, so glad to be with all of you.
And as always, thank you so much for your support, for the time, The interest, those of you who take the time to reach out, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at Gmail.com.
Continue to welcome the emails, the thoughts, the ideas, working to stay up with those, to get back to folks.
I know that there's a lag, and I thank you for your patience, but can't keep this series going without you.
So, if you have thoughts or comments about The current episodes have been doing on this concept of inerrancy and what it means within a certain kind of Christian community in the U.S.
to claim to be biblical or to take the Bible as truth or what have you.
But keep those ideas coming, but series beyond this, ideas, topics, open to all of them.
We'll not be talking about inerrancy forever, and we'll be shifting to some other things.
So, as always, keep those coming.
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Want to dive right in here today.
And last episode, we took a look at why the doctrine of inerrancy.
And again, this is the view that's the fancy word for the doctrine that the Bible is literally without error.
And so last episode, we're kind of looking and saying, look, if the doctrine just doesn't work, and in several episodes trying to establish that.
In my view, it's just a doctrine that does not work.
And yet, despite that, it is so widespread and persistent within American evangelicalism.
In most evangelical contexts, it is a core doctrine, okay?
And so, kind of looked at the answer, you know, to why is that?
And I argue that the reason is, or a key reason, is that inerrancy is an apologetic doctrine.
In other words, it's a doctrine about the Bible that appeals to those who are already a certain kind of Christian, which means that it works or appeals to a certain kind of Christian who is already predisposed to accept it.
They talked about the notion of almost a kind of confirmation bias when somebody is presented with this doctrine.
And I also suggested that it meets a deep-seated need within a particular kind of Christian identity.
I want to be clear, not all Christians are inerrantists, not all people who take the Bible seriously, not even all people who would say that they think the Bible is true in some way are inerrantists, okay?
I'm not trying to paint with the broadest brush here, okay?
But for those who do, The vast majority, I think, are Christians for other reasons when they come to this doctrine.
They're already Christian.
And as I say, I think it meets a deep-seated need.
Don't want to rehash all of that.
Go back, take a listen if you hadn't had an opportunity to do so.
The takeaway for me is that inerrancy is a doctrine that most inerrantists will hold no matter what.
It is a deep-seated theological faith commitment.
And in practice, inerrancy is as central a doctrine within most evangelical contexts as the doctrine of Christ's divinity, or the doctrine of the Trinity, or the idea that God's omnipotent, or any other sort of thing.
And folks, I'd love to hear from folks.
You think I'm overstating that?
Let me know.
I don't think I am, having spent a lot of time in the evangelical world As both a layperson and a minister, I think it's a true statement within lots of evangelical contexts to deny or to question the inerrancy of the Bible is tantamount to abandoning core doctrinal convictions like those around Jesus or the nature of God or whatever.
The point is, it functions as a presupposition of the faith.
So, that's where we've been.
Why rehash it?
Here's why that matters, and here's why I wanted to rehash that, and here's what I want to focus in on this episode.
That is not how the doctrine of inerrancy is typically presented.
When I say typically presented, I mean either to members of congregations.
When pastors stand up and preach about inerrancy, that is often not how it is presented to the members of their congregation.
When theologians talk about the doctrine of inerrancy, That is often not how it is presented.
And if you ever find yourself in a conversation with somebody who is trying to convince you that the Bible is inerrant and without error or trying to convert you and they're appealing to the Bible and they're explaining why or whatever, that's almost certainly not how it's presented to you.
Okay?
In fact, the opposite is true.
The doctrine of inerrancy is often presented as a doctrine that is drawn from historical investigation and is almost a kind of empirical doctrine.
That is, those who say that the Bible is historically accurate, that it's without error and so forth, often will claim that that statement comes from historical investigation, that it comes from a kind of empirical examination of the Bible.
So within that framework, the doctrine of inerrancy and the claims about the Bible that come from it, the stuff we've been talking about, it fits within a certain kind of argument that is common within this brand of Christianity, that Christianity is a fundamentally historical tradition.
And again, would love to hear from folks.
I hear from folks who've said that, who've brought up that question, you know, what do Christians mean when they say it's a historical tradition or it's the most historical religion or something like that?
And this is what we're getting at, okay?
What they mean by that is, within a certain kind of discussion, and again, this is often a discussion where somebody is trying to convince you that you should become a Christian or convince you that you should be the kind of Christian that they are or that you should be an errantist or whatever, The argument will say that Christianity is a fundamentally historical tradition.
What do they mean by that?
The claim is that it's a tradition that is grounded in empirically verifiable history.
And so the claim is that when somebody says, hey, look, I believe in Christianity, I believe Christianity is true, but that's not just me saying that out of nowhere.
That's not just a faith claim without any evidence.
It's a reasonable, fact-based claim, because Christianity is a historical tradition, its truth is founded on a real examination of history, and that gives it a kind of unique authority or truth.
Okay?
And so within this framework, evangelical Christianity is presented as being the most reasonable belief system because it is quote-unquote historical.
So maybe you're listening to this.
Maybe you've encountered this argument and you're like, I don't even know what to do with that.
Maybe you've never heard it, but you're like, that kind of goes against how I think about religion or how I think about Christianity.
How does that work?
Here's how the line of reasoning goes, okay?
The line starts with this saying, you know, the core claim of Christianity is what?
It's that God entered into history, entered into human history.
How?
For Christians, fundamentally, it happened before this, but it culminates in Jesus of Nazareth, who is God incarnate, that God literally becomes a human being and enters into human history in this concrete, real-life person, Jesus of Nazareth.
So following from that, it's the claim that Christianity is therefore based in real history in a way that other traditions are not.
That's the claim, folks.
I'm not trying to say that there's no historical basis for elements of the Islamic tradition or the Buddhist tradition or whatever.
I'm just saying this is the kind of argument that's put forward, okay?
That Christianity is based in real history in a way that is unique, And so then the move goes and they'll say, so we're not afraid of historical inquiry.
Quite the opposite.
Christianity demands it.
We welcome historical inquiry.
Why?
Because we take history so seriously.
We're a tradition that places history and verifiable historical claims right at the center of our tradition.
We have nothing to fear from historical inquiry.
In fact, we invite it.
Bring it on.
Okay?
Now, It'd be a whole other series to start picking apart all the ways that I think this claim to historical objectivity works and the problems with it and so forth, all the work that it does.
But what I want to highlight is the way that that claim affects the way that inerrantists present the doctrine of inerrancy or the way that they talk about the Bible.
Because what they'll do is they will claim that when they say the Bible is historically accurate, when they say it's without error, which means historically accurate and so forth, they present that as if it follows from the evidence of historical inquiry.
This is how the doctrine is presented to church congregations and other non-specialists.
And folks, I've been in sermons, and I have heard this.
I have heard pastors say, the Bible is the most studied book in the history of the world.
Every historical claim it makes has been checked, every historical claim has been challenged, and we still hold to it, we still know that it's true, it has withstood every assault that's put on it on historical grounds.
This notion that the reason why we say the Bible's without error is because we've gone and checked, we've gone and done the historical look, we've taken a look at it.
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So what does that mean?
It means that the inerrantist or the person who says they believe in the Bible or that the Bible is true or that they're biblical, they say or their pastor says or somebody says that the reason they hold that is because they've gone and they've looked at the history and the Bible has stood the test of time.
The Bible has stood up to questions about its historicity and so forth.
Okay?
And we see this even in those theologians like Wayne Grudem and Millard Erickson that we've been looking at.
They argue that Christians should invite historical investigation into the Bible.
That they should invite challenges to the claims of it.
It's on this logic that, hey, we have a historical tradition.
We have nothing to fear from historical inquiry.
And they will say, and they do say, that the Bible is able to meet every such challenge.
And this is one of those places where If you're talking to regular church people, this can be really disconcerting.
Most people in their churches are dependent upon and trust people like their pastors.
for knowledge about their tradition.
Their pastors, if they are formally educated theologically in ministry, they will have gone to a seminary, and they will have taken theology courses, and they will have trusted what was presented to them by theologians like Grudem and Erickson and so forth.
Why do I bring that up?
I bring it up because the vast majority of people who will tell you the Bible is historically accurate, they're not just claiming it, they're leaning on authorities that they trust who have told them that.
And most people do not have the time or the resources or the opportunity or the expertise to go and test those claims.
They have to accept that the inherentist claim about the Bible are truthful or honest.
When their pastor says it, they believe it because their pastor is somebody they trust.
Their pastor, when he took his seminary class, his theology class, he believed it because So I think that many, probably most just regular people who accept that the Bible is without error, they probably believe this.
They believe something like this, that when they claim the Bible's without error, somebody has gone and they've checked and they've proved it and they've backed up all that historical data.
They've checked it all and they can rely on it.
So where are we?
Here's the claim.
The claim is, the way that it works, Christianity is a fundamentally historical faith, and when we examine the historical claims of Christianity, including those made by the Bible, we find that they are accurate.
In fact, we find that they are so accurate that there are no historical errors.
This is what you find in the Millard Erickson's and the Wayne Grudem's of the world.
This is what you hear in thousands of sermons.
That's what you hear.
So the idea is, if you tie all those strings together, the belief in the teachings of the Bible, it's certainly an act of faith, okay?
But it's a faith that is eminently reasonable and historical.
It's a way of trying to break down the gap between, you know, what we might call faith and knowledge and say, yes, it's a faith that the Bible's true, but it's not quote-unquote blind faith.
It's faith that's based on real historical inquiry.
And so you'll even get people, and I've had these conversations with folks who will take the argument to the extreme and say, you know, if you're actually serious about history, if you secularists or liberal humanists or whatever have been called all those things,
If you really believe in reason the way that you say you do, if you really believe in trying to be empirical, if you really believe in having historical evidence and evidence for the claims you make, you should be a Christian, because nobody has spent more time looking at history and putting the Bible to the test than committed Christians.
That's the logic.
That's the argument.
So, the doctrine of inerrancy is often presented as a result of historical investigation.
And the move here, the work that that's doing, the rhetorical shift, is to present this kind of Christianity as eminently reasonable, as rational, as fact-based, as evidence-based.
That's the trick.
And it sounds really reasonable.
To all of those churchgoers who are told by their pastors that the Bible is the most tested book in the world, no book in the history of humankind has been tested and investigated as much as the Bible, and when it makes historical claims, you can trust them because of that.
That sounds reasonable.
Who wouldn't jump on board with that?
And it's supposed to sound reasonable.
Just the same way that evangelicals make it sound as if their climate denial, their anti-vaxxing views are based on scientific evidence and not articles of commitment sort of against the evidence.
Okay?
So it sounds reasonable.
It's supposed to sound reasonable.
But here's the problem.
And if you've been listening to the other episodes here, you know where I'm going with this.
This is why I set it up this way.
That isn't how the doctrine actually works.
For all the reasons we've discussed, you got the philosophical and theological reasons, the fact that in my view, it's just an incoherent doctrine.
But if you even get past that, you have the fact that it simply is not the case, that it has met all of those challenges or that the doctrine itself comes from historical inquiry or something like that.
You would not have theologians and others who go through the kind of intellectual gymnastics they have to go through to try to defend the doctrine if the doctrine was actually the result of going out and looking in the world, okay?
And we see this specifically in the way that theologians like Grudem and Erickson—again, I keep hammering on Grudem and Erickson because I want people to know, like, I'm trying to take a serious view of inerrancy and pick it apart.
But the way that they actually deal with historical questions about the Bible, we talked about this before, but this is where it comes rushing back in to show us how it actually works.
Because remember, they do say that the Bible will meet any and all historical challenges that are put to it.
They do say, we've got nothing to fear from historical challenges.
Ours is a historical faith, a historical tradition.
We are making bold claims about the Bible.
We should welcome that kind of investigation.
Great.
Good.
But when you bring evidence to them that they can't deal with, that doesn't support the Bible, contradictions or tensions in the Bible that cannot be easily reconciled, what they say then is that all historical challenges can be met.
But even if there isn't actually any evidence to counter a historical challenge, Even if no historical evidence is ever uncovered to meet a particular challenge, we can still trust that the Bible is true because God is its author.
See, when push comes to shove, it's not a doctrine that is drawn from historical evidence.
It's a doctrine that continues to be maintained despite it.
It turns out that the claims about the Bible and Aaron Smink, they are not drawn from an examination of history.
They are taken into examinations of history.
The reality is that the truth and the historical accuracy of the Bible is a faith presupposition that we take out into the historical world.
It is not the result of historical inquiry.
It's a presupposition that a certain kind of Christian takes into it.
What's the effect of that?
The effect is that the Bible is insulated from historical inquiry, which allows it to then judge history.
The way it actually works is not that well-meaning Christians go out and they look at all the historical evidence, and then from that they somehow distill a doctrine of what the Bible is, and they say, Oh my God, the Bible is so accurate!
We can't find a single error.
It's trustworthy in all things of history and everything else that it talks about.
That's not what happens.
Instead, what happens is that when we encounter historical evidence that contradicts or challenges or fundamentally calls into question the claims of the Bible, or at least of certain interpretations of the Bible, they are dismissed on the basis of the Bible.
So when you bring arguments in about, say, climate change or human evolution or insights about human development and psychology that would maybe relate to queer identity or something like that, when those pieces of evidence, historical or scientific or what have you, are brought in, instead their reality is denied
on the presupposition that the Bible is historically accurate, and then if the Bible says something different, it means that the facts themselves must be wrong.
That's the way the doctrine actually works.
So you get this kind of paradox or contradictory setup where Christian claims to be historical actually stand as an effect of a denial of actual historical investigation.
And that's why in the modern period, as history and scientific inquiry and other forms of human investigation into the world around us have more and more fundamentally challenged the assumptions about what the Bible is, that the doctrine of inerrancy has actually become more prominent over time.
So the effect of this is that Christians will appeal to inerrancy and they will claim to be open to arguments and counter evidence.
They will claim to be open to historical or scientific evidence that challenges their faith assertions, and they'll say, our faith assertions can meet this.
Bring it!
But the openness is just an illusion.
The reason why somebody like Wayne Grudem can say, we should invite historical inquiry, we should invite those challenges, is because he can also turn around and say, even if the evidence never shows up, Even if we can never actually respond to those historical claims, even if we can never actually address the issue that's raised, we can still have confidence in the truth of the Bible.
They can be open to historical inquiry because they have already determined, as an act of faith, that nothing can contradict the Bible.
It's a fundamental act of circular reasoning.
It's a fundamental act of begging the question, of assuming the very thing that needs to be proven as the basis of demonstrating it.
Okay, so where are we at with this?
This line of reasoning, you might well run up against it if you're engaging the cousin Lonnies of the world.
The people who will tell you that their faith is objective or empirical or based on historical inquiry, but the way that they do that, the reason that they can say that is because they've actually insulated their faith from the kinds of intellectual challenges that those investigations bring.
Which is why it's so important to recognize that inerrancy is a presupposition of a certain kind of faith.
It is not a historically based or objective conclusion of some kind.
It is not something that is deduced by looking at the empirical world.
It is a presupposition.
This is also why, if you enter into one of these kinds of conversations, if you get drawn into an argument about this with someone, With those who claim to quote-unquote believe the Bible, you will often find yourself drawn into a discussion that seems reasonable at the outset.
You're talking to somebody and you're like, I don't know if I really want to discuss religion or debate this.
I mean, you're just going to appeal to the Bible and you're not going to accept any evidence.
No, no, no.
What are you talking about?
Nope.
I'll accept your evidence.
Bring the evidence.
Bring the science.
Bring the history.
Bring it all.
I'm ready.
I'll respond to it.
And then you're like, okay, this seems reasonable.
So you start engaging that, and then after a while it turns out that it's a no-win game, precisely because they're actually using their claims to history to insulate their doctrine of the Bible from history so that they can then appeal to it without any evidence at all.
That's the bait-and-switch that takes place.
We're going to say some more about this.
I'm also going to tell a story about one of the many times I was threatened with being fired as an evangelical pastor because I wasn't an inerrantist, or kind of feared that maybe I wasn't.
I'm going to talk about that and share some more about how this dynamic works, because again, we're getting into the discussion of what the doctrine of inerrancy does, and this is part of what it does.
I'm going to pick back up with that next episode.
In the meantime, thank you again, sincerely, for listening.
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