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When someone says they “believe” that the Bible is “inerrant” (without error), what do they mean? What does it mean to “believe” something in this way? Is believing the Bible is without error the same thing as “believing” that there are 24 hours in the day or that we perceive the sun to rise in the east? Are there different ways of “believing”? In this episode, Dan argues that there ARE different ways of believing, and that understanding this is vital for understanding claims about the authority of the Bible and, even more importantly, for understanding why such claims are powerful tools for coercion and social control.
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As always, welcome to It's in the Code, the podcast is part of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am the professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am, as always, delighted to be with all of you.
Thank you to everyone who continues to support us, support me, listening to great feedback.
As always, I welcome your insights, comments, questions.
I am falling behind.
in my responses, but I continue to plug along and respond to the ones that I can, but I do read your emails, value those.
So reach out, Daniel Miller Swadj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Keep the ideas coming, thoughts, questions.
Again, really appreciate that and value all of you who listen and spend time with us doing the things that we do every week.
Dive right in here with We are continuing our kind of deep dive into what a certain kind of Christian means when they claim to be quote-unquote biblical, when they believe that the Bible is true, etc.
And we've covered a lot of ground on this.
If maybe you're new to this, if you're sort of tuning in and haven't for a while, I invite you to go back and take a listen to the last few episodes if you want to sort of catch up on that.
But we've been looking at what it means when somebody says that the Bible is inerrant, which literally means without error, claims that the Bible is without error.
That's what people usually mean when they say they're being quote-unquote biblical or they accept the authority of the Bible or whatever.
And we started to take a look at what claims that the Bible is inerrant actually do, how they are put to use, how they operate within the communities that make those claims.
We've taken a look at what the claim is, what it means, and I've given you my reasons, more than you probably wanted, about why I think those claims don't work.
But now we get into what I'm really interested in in this series, which is what do those claims do?
How do they code our practices and the language we use and so forth?
And last episode took a look at the claim that you'll sometimes encounter if you're talking to Cousin Lonnie or somebody like that, if you're reading theologians like Millard Erickson or Wayne Grudem, the people I've been kind of taking a look at, the evangelical theologians.
And they'll say that the claim that the Bible is without error is somehow a kind of historical claim, that it's based on an empirical consideration of the actual claims of Scripture, that you read what the Scripture says, you go out and you check it against history, and somehow it's some sort of empirical claim.
We saw that that isn't the case.
And we saw that claims to inerrancy, they're actually dogmatic claims.
They're not the effects or the results of historical inquiry.
They are presupposition that comes along before any kind of historical inquiry.
We looked at the claims.
We said they're actually dogmatic claims that masquerade as historical for various reasons on the part who make them.
And when we come to that, that notion that they are dogmatic claims, we come against the topic that I want to tackle today, okay?
And the idea that I want to get at today is that there are different ways of believing something.
And I think we need to understand this if we're going to understand how claims like those of inerrancy actually work.
And this is something that I've talked about a little bit in other contexts, and so bear with me if there's some repetition.
If you're like, I've already heard you say part of this, you probably have.
I'm going to go in some different directions here, okay?
But that's what I want to talk about, this notion that there are different ways of believing.
And I want to start with a story, okay?
So once upon a time, Long, long ago.
Getting longer ago all the time.
And some of you know this if you've heard me talk.
You've been with the podcast for a while.
I was a pastor.
So, I was one of two pastors at a conservative evangelical church in Seattle, Washington.
It's a small church.
It was like a hundred members or so, a hundred attendants or so.
And I was one of two pastors, and I was what's called the associate pastor.
So, there was a head pastor who was my boss, and there was me.
We were the two full-time ministerial staff.
And like a lot of small churches, it was strictly a sort of volunteer organization.
We were the only paid staff.
There was a secretary who was paid part-time and that was about it.
And so we would have these periodic kind of work weekends where we and members of the congregation would come to the church and sort of do different projects to kind of, you know, upkeep on the building and things like that.
And we were having one of these.
And I was working in the little, this like kind of library study room kind of thing that we had.
And it was me and the pastor and a couple other parishioners and we were painting.
We're painting the library.
And just talking, and the pastor starts this conversation.
And he started, and he just, not in a threatening way, it was just in a conversational way, starts talking or kind of going around the room and having people chime in about what it would take for them to doubt their faith.
What would have to happen for them to really doubt their faith?
And you're listening to you're like, that sounds kind of weird.
And this guy's like supposed to be a spiritual authority in their lives.
He's putting these people on the spot and asking what would cause them to doubt their faith.
Yeah, it was weird.
And I knew it was weird at the time, but like, whatever, this is what he was doing.
And he finally comes around.
I mean, I tried really, really hard to sidestep the issue.
I was like, Oh, I just, I really, I don't know that anything could or, you know, whatever.
For lots of reasons, partly again, he's my boss.
And when you're in this kind of church context and your ministerial staff, it's a weird thing because Like, your spiritual beliefs are like part of your job description, so if, you know, they don't like what you're saying about what you believe, you could, you know, your job's at risk, whatever.
There's parishioners there, and I'm like, I don't really know if I'm supposed to be a spiritual authority to folks.
I want to be talking about, like, what can make me doubt my faith in front of them, whatever.
Anyway, but he kept pressing me and pressing me and pressing me, and so finally I answered, and what I said was, I said, you know, if some of the historical critiques that people have brought against the Bible If they were correct, that would call the Bible's authority into question for me.
Now, what I mean by that, I've talked about this some.
By the time this conversation happened, I already wasn't an inerrantist.
I did not think the Bible was without error.
My pastor didn't know this.
So there were already chunks of the Bible that I took as myth.
I did not think that they were historically accurate at all.
I didn't think that the earth was created in seven literal days.
I didn't think, I don't think I thought, that the first two humans were created sort of just as God made them and so forth.
I did not think that there was a global flood and so forth, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in the Bible that I largely thought was historically accurate, and I think I still probably accepted a lot of views of traditional authorship of the Bible, etc., etc., etc.
The point is, this is what I said, as I said, and I meant it, that if other parts of what I thought was still a largely historically reliable text, if they were proven not to be, That would call the Bible's authority into question for me, and that would make me have to really reconfigure my faith, which of course is part of what eventually would happen.
But this is what I answered, and the pastor responded.
This is why I wanted to avoid the conversation.
The pastor responded this way.
He said, well, in this church, we affirm the authority of the Bible, and no one who doesn't is going to have a place on the ministerial staff here.
So he forces me to respond to this question in this conversational way, and then when I do, he threatens me with my job in front of other parishioners and so forth, and I had not even said that I didn't accept the authority of the Bible.
Whatever.
That was his response.
And when he affirmed the Bible's authority, that's what he was affirming.
He was affirming inerrancy.
When he said, in this church, we affirm the authority of the Bible and no one who doesn't will have a place on the ministerial staff here, that's what he was saying, okay?
Why do I tell this little story?
I tell it because there were two important dynamics at work here.
The first one was the use of the doctrine of inerrancy as a means of control and enforcement.
When I even posed the possibility of not accepting the authority of the Bible, and again, I was already a closeted non-inerrantist, right?
You didn't know that at the time.
I was threatened with losing my job if I didn't affirm it.
The sincerity of my faith was questioned, at least implicitly, and I think, you know, very close to explicitly.
So the first dynamic here was the use of the doctrine of inerrancy as a means of control and enforcement.
I'm going to pick up that thread and really pull on it next episode, okay?
For right now, I want to focus on the second dynamic, which is that this conversation, in retrospect, it highlights different operative conceptions of what we mean when we say that we believe something in a way that I think is really, really pertinent when we're talking about religion.
And that's what I want to talk about, these different conceptions of belief.
And I want to give credit where credit's due for this discussion.
I spent some time last fall into the winter reading a book by Neil van Leeuwen called Religion as Make-Believe, and I'm taking my cue from some of the ideas he develops in that book.
I think it's a really cool book, and he develops this notion in key ways that I hadn't Sort of had intuitions about, but had never been able to articulate.
I found it really useful and thoughtful to think through it.
I will warn you, if you're interested in that, by all means take a look, but it's probably not a great book for the uninitiated.
It's analytic philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, etc.
Could be pretty tough sledding.
So, what he argues, what Van Leeuwen suggests, and this is what I've really been thinking about a lot lately, and it snapped a lot of things in place for me, He says that we need to recognize that we can have different what he calls cognitive attitudes about things we believe.
My way of saying this is there are different ways of believing or different kinds of belief, okay?
And one is the most straightforward is we can believe things factually.
We could call factual belief.
And what analytic philosophers mean by belief, like Van Leeuwen, they mean just starting with pretty basic things.
Like, I believe that I'm sitting at my desk right now.
I believe that it is raining right now.
It is, as I record this, it is raining where I'm at.
I believe that it is data, like really basic stuff.
That's what they mean by believe.
And it can go up to really important things.
I believe that vaccines are effective against COVID-19 or whatever.
Things like that.
And I'm simplifying a lot of stuff if you straighten it down, but what makes factual belief factual belief is that it can be disconfirmed when you give counter evidence.
So I make a claim and I say, I believe it is raining outside.
Well, if it turns out that, you know, I take a closer look and maybe it's not, or somebody heard me say that, no, actually it stopped like 10 minutes ago.
And I said, really?
And, you know, I go outside and I check and it's not raining.
I revise my beliefs.
That's what sort of is a hallmark of factual belief.
And I may be reluctant in that.
I might be invested in something being the case.
But I'm open to changing my beliefs in the face of counter-evidence.
Okay?
We can believe things factually.
We believe a lot of things factually.
We couldn't move around in the world if we didn't believe things factually.
Okay?
But we can also believe things in a creedal way.
That is, in the sense of taking something as a creed or a dogma.
And I think most of the things when we think about this, they're the things that we believe that they're the big things.
I think this is maybe even the way that we regular people, those of us who aren't philosophers, this is probably how we talk about belief.
Like if you say, what do you believe?
We probably mean something really big and significant, a significant belief.
Not, I believe it's raining right now, but believing that things are immoral or things about religion or whatever.
So most of the things we believe creedally, they're the big things.
They're not just mundane facts around the world.
And they might be things that we feel define us, things that we feel we need to believe.
We wouldn't be the people we are if we didn't believe them.
We couldn't belong to the communities we belong to if we didn't believe them and so forth.
And when we believe something creedally, what makes creedal belief different from factual belief, for me, the big thing, and there's more than one, is that when we believe something creedally, we're not really open to counter-evidence the way we are when we believe something factually.
I would actually go further and say that it's more a matter of like what we count as belief, but for now let's just say we just we're not open to counter-evidence the same way.
And here's the other point, okay?
So factual belief is basically can be revised in the face of facts of counter-evidence.
We believe something credally, we're not as open to changing that on the basis of counter evidence, on the basis of facts.
And here's the other point here, is that the same content, right?
can be believed by one person credally and by another person factually.
In other words, two people can say, I believe in the same thing, and for one person, factual counter evidence can change that belief, and for another person, factual counter evidence won't.
Okay?
And the last thing I want to say about this is, I think that it's not always clear to people that there are these different ways of believing.
In fact, I'm positive about this.
I have had some intuitions about this for a long time, but it wasn't until I read Van Leeuwen's book that everything kind of snapped into focus for me.
And back when I was in that library, painting the room in the church and having this conversation, I certainly was not working with some conception that there are different ways of believing things.
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Why does all that matter?
It matters because it's pretty clear.
It's easy to see that creedal belief can play a big role in religion.
Okay?
I think that's clear.
But I think we also encounter it in other places.
And again, I've used some of these examples before.
We experience denial when maybe we're confronted with loss.
When somebody dies or somebody goes missing and we sort of won't accept the factual evidence in front of us of what that means.
Or maybe we get bad health news of some kind and we just sort of won't accept what's factually placed in front of us.
Or maybe it's about how somebody feels about us.
Maybe there's somebody in our lives, everybody around us is saying, this person doesn't really care about you.
They don't have your best interests in mind.
This person is toxic to you, whatever.
And we just won't see it.
We won't believe it.
No amount of counter evidence can convince us of that.
Deeply held political beliefs.
We talk about this all the time in this podcast.
So it's not just religion.
And I think that if we're honest, we're all familiar with this distinction.
I think all of us with some reflection can look at topics or maybe just times in our life when we held factual beliefs about something, but then those things that were like something that we held credally, something we held as a kind of dog.
Okay?
So, two different ways of believing.
Why does all that matter?
Let's bring this back to inerrancy.
Most inerrantists believe in inerrancy credally.
This is what we talked about last time.
They will talk like they believe it factually.
They will say that they welcome challenges and critiques, that they invite historical objections.
They will tell you that they're open to counter-evidence.
You talk to Cousin Lonnie, he will tell you, hey, you know, I'm an open-minded person.
I'm rational.
You've got proof.
If you could actually show me proof that the Bible's not what I say it is, I would accept it.
They'll tell you that.
And they might even believe that that's what they believe.
They might even believe that actually that they would change their views if they were presented with counter evidence.
But when push comes to shove, it's clear that their claims about the Bible's inerrancy, they are not factual claims.
They're not believing that factually.
They believe it credally.
We saw this in theologians like Grudem and Erickson.
You take the kind of proclaimed intellectual elites of evangelicalism, we see this.
They talk a good game about meeting historical challenges and considering evidence.
I talked about Grudem, who's like, We should welcome hard historical inquiry and so forth, but at the end of the day, they simply assert their creedal assurance that the Bible is what they say it is.
They even say, even if no evidence for the positions or no responses to counter-evidence ever turns up, we're confident that God has the answer and we don't need to question inerrancy.
They believe it creedally.
But this isn't just a thing theologians do.
If you reflect back to that story I told about this encounter with my pastor, we also see it in my conversation with him.
What I think is that at that time, as I say, I still believed that big chunks of the Bible were sort of historically reliable.
That was a factual belief for me.
I actually was open to counter-evidence, and over time, as I collected that counter-evidence, as I read other things, as I heard other accounts, as I learned more about things like biblical archaeology and the composition history of the Bible and what have you, I actually modified my views accordingly.
I came to modify those, and that was why, by the time this conversation happened, I already took huge chunks of the Bible as myth.
Not history, because I was actually open to factual evidence, and I found that the Bible just couldn't measure up to the claims of inerrancy, okay?
But my pastor affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible creedally.
There was no circumstance for him according to which he would ever have actually questioned the authority of the Bible as he understood it.
In fact, for somebody who holds a belief credally, that's a sign of the strength of their convictions, the strength of their faith.
For him, it would be a lack of faith to even be open to the possibility of rethinking what it is that they hold, of changing their views based on factual evidence.
What does all that mean?
It means that in that context, Which didn't start out, wasn't sort of staged as a debate, but that's kind of what it was.
There was no way for me to win.
I was in a no-win situation.
He asked me what evidence could ever be given that would make you question your faith, and there was no answer I could give.
Because as soon as I sort of acknowledged it, I said, well, if this or this or this happened, I've already lost.
Because factual belief for him was evidence of a lack of faith.
And what happened there is that, and this is what I'm driving to here, right?
In that conversation, I kind of missed a bait and switch.
Because of the way the discussion was structured, I thought we were all talking about things we factually believed.
I took it for granted that when somebody said, is there anything that would make you call your belief into question or call your faith into question, that they were actually engaging in factual believing.
What counter evidence could make you question your faith?
What I didn't realize is that I could never win an argument with someone about something I believe factually.
If they believed it creedally.
That was the bait and switch.
It had the appearance that we were talking about factual belief, when in fact I was operating from a position of factual belief, but my pastor, my interlocutor, was speaking from a position of creedal belief.
Why does that matter?
It's because this bait-and-switch is what we encounter every time we engage in an errantist who presents themselves as advancing factual arguments when their belief is actually creedal.
They will demand evidence from us, but it won't actually convince them because creedal belief cannot be dislodged by the evidence that they demand.
Cousin Lonnie can tell you till he's blue in the face that if you can just provide evidence that counters the claims that he's making from the Bible, he's open to it.
But he's not, because it is not a matter of factual belief for him.
It is a matter of creedal belief.
And when we don't understand that, friends, when we miss that, and we step onto the terrain of engaging with somebody, we're in a no-win situation.
This is why, again, going back to the last episode, inerrantists can claim that they're open to historical evidence, but their actual beliefs are never in question.
And that's why if you engage at the level of argumentation or trying to convince people of different things or apologetics or whatever, it's why you just can't win if you are holding factual beliefs.
If you're playing by the rules of factual belief and they're playing by the rules of creedal belief, it's an advantage you can't overcome.
By definition, as soon as you start engaging with them, you will either acknowledge that they're right or you're wrong.
It's impossible for them to be wrong because they will never sacrifice that creedal belief.
You've lost the game before it ever begins.
All of that brings us full circle, then, which is why claims to inerrancy and biblical authority are such potent tools for manipulation and social control, because they can't really be called into question on the part of those for whom they operate as dogma, where they are assertions of faith, where they are creedal beliefs.
That status as a creedal truth for those who hold them is what makes inerrancy and claims to biblical authority potent tools for manipulation and social control.
You see that in the story with me and my pastor, that basically the threat to fire me if I don't believe the right things, if I don't share this creedal belief that he has.
That, by the way, was a go-to for him.
I got threatened to be fired by him a lot.
But it goes beyond that.
It goes beyond my experience.
It goes beyond reading theologians.
It goes beyond just engaging Cousin Lenny.
We're going to take a longer, deeper look at that starting in next week's episode.
Again, looking at the uses of the doctrine of inerrancy and understanding that once somebody holds this is a creedal dogmatic belief that is not really open to question.
We're primed for coercion.
We are primed for social control.
That is a big part of what the doctrine actually does.
You want to know more about that?
Join me next episode.
We'll talk more about that.
In the meantime, again, as always, thank you so much for listening.
I am constantly sort of humbled by knowing that people listen, knowing that you stick with us, that you stick with me, that you pay attention to what we do.
If you have not subscribed to the podcast, I just ask you to consider doing that if you find what we do useful.
If you want to see us doing more, if you want access to the full archive of episodes and things that we've done, consider subscribing.
Certainly, whether you subscribe or not, we'd love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Feel free to drop me a line.
It takes me a long time to respond, but I do respond.
