It's in the Code Ep. 90: "Direct Relationship with God"
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One of the effects and purposes of the doctrine that the Bible is “without error” is to provide assurance that when we read it, we have unmediated access to divine teachings. But do we? Can the Bible provide the kind of “immediate” access to God this doctrine promises? In this week’s episode, Dan talks about why this isn’t possible, highlights some of the intermediaries that intervene between readers and their Bibles, and discusses what’s at risk if we don’t recognize this.
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As always, welcome to this week's episode of It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
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Let's get started here.
We are continuing our exploration of the claims that the Bible is without error, literally that the Bible is inerrant.
We've been on this theme for a while now, looking at what a certain kind of Christian, a certain kind of religionist, a certain kind of person typically in a high-control religious environment means when they say they are quote-unquote biblical or they appeal to the authority of the Bible.
What they mean is the Bible is inerrant, and we have been taking a long look at that.
We've looked at reasons why I think this idea is incoherent, why I think it's nonsensical.
We've also begun to look at why the idea persists despite this, and that brought us to considerations of what the doctrine does, not just what the doctrine is or problems of it, but what the doctrine does within high-control religious communities, the uses to which the doctrine is put.
And this is an idea that, you know, as those of you who listen, you know this occupies me a lot, hovers over sort of everything that I do, but It's the idea that we do things with doctrines.
We do things with teachings.
They're a kind of tool that we use in different ways, and that's what I'm interested in.
What do we do with this doctrine of inerrancy?
How is it used?
Last episode considered an important dimension of this, and we looked at the idea that people who affirm the inerrancy of the Bible often present it as if it's a factual belief, and by which I mean as if it's a belief that's open to counter-evidence, that they're open to reasonable discussion, etc., when it's actually a creedal belief.
That is, it's something that they hold dogmatically.
It's not open to counter-evidence.
They're not open to reasonable discussion.
And I told a story from my time as a pastor that illustrated how that conception can be used as a means of control and coercion.
The mere suggestion of a question of that, you know, threatened my job.
I want to continue moving in this direction in this episode.
I want to look at another one of the mechanisms by which the doctrine of inerrancy operates as a means of control, or a mechanism that sort of prepares the way for acts of control and coercion using this doctrine.
And what I want to focus on is the role of inerrancy in feeding the idea of our unmediated access to the will of God through the Bible.
That is, the way that the doctrine of inerrancy is used or appealed to to create this sense that we have a sort of direct access to God, that our access to knowing what God is or what God thinks or what God teaches is immediate, that it is not mediated by anything.
Okay?
And where am I going with that or what do I mean by that?
What I mean is that one of the rationales for affirming inerrancy is that it ensures that ordinary Christians can come to know and understand God's will and God's teaching by directly engaging and reading the Bible.
Okay?
It's a doctrine really aimed at regular people.
This is why theologians like Erickson and Grudem, they insist that the teachings of the Bible are clear and precise, right?
In the kind of language that if you were to go to churches that talk this way, if you were to be a part of the congregations where this doctrine figures, you'll often hear people refer to, quote-unquote, the plain meaning of Scripture.
It's the idea that there is a plain meaning of Scripture, that anybody can read it and we can understand it because it is clear and it is precise.
And it is the idea that the quote-unquote plain meaning of Scripture gives us access to what God wants us to know.
And within that framework, insisting that the Bible is without error, that it is inerrant, what that does is guarantee that that plain meaning of Scripture that you or I or other regular people can go out and we can read and understand, it assures us that that is without error, that it's accurate.
Okay?
And what this illustrates, and what I'm trying to get at with this, is that one of the functions of a doctrine like inerrancy is to preserve individual Christians' immediate—that is, unmediated—access to knowledge about God.
In other words, that nothing stands between the regular Christian and being able to know or encounter God through the Scriptures.
That's why inerrancy is a classically Protestant doctrine.
It is not a part of accepted Catholic doctrine.
Catholicism, Catholic theology has never taught that the Bible is inerrant or absolute in the sense that Protestants have taught this, okay?
Why?
Because one of the impulses—there are lots of things going on with the Protestant Reformation way back in the 16th century—but one of the impulses was to challenge the notion that human beings needed mediators to access God.
The sort of Protestant big idea was that Jesus was the mediator between humans and God, and after Jesus died and was resurrected through faith, we have direct access to God.
We don't need these other kind of mediators.
We don't need priests.
We don't need complex rituals.
We don't need people who can read the Bible in Latin and so forth.
That's why the Reformation also was accompanied with lots of translations of the Bible into vernacular languages and so forth.
So, a key part of Protestant theology was that human beings could come to know God without those mediators, and even there are these kind of Reformation slogans that those of you who've studied anything about Christian history will know this, but there was the idea of sola scriptura, Scripture alone.
Through Scripture alone we can come to know God, and there was the doctrine of the so-called priesthood of all believers, the idea being that every individual Christian is a priest before God, and through the Bible they can come to know God and so forth, okay?
Those are basic Reformation principles, that idea of a kind of immediate access to God.
It was always much more a part of sort of the theory of the Protestant Reformation than its actual practice, but that idea continued to develop over time.
What came to be known as the Radical Reformation sort of intensified or radicalized these emphases and, excuse me, As you move forward in times, Christian movements like Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement, you know, sort of heightened this sense of a kind of immediate access, immediate knowledge, immediate experience of God.
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So what inerrancy does, the doctrine of inerrancy, the view that the Bible is without error, is it kind of brings together these theological and popular traditions.
It promises that because the Bible is clear, that because the Bible is precise, that because the Bible is true, That we as individuals can all come to the Bible directly and have unmediated access to God through it.
And this is even, if you grew up or are a part of or have been a part of these kinds of churches, these kinds of Christian communities, you know that this is even an expectation Part of being a good, devout, and sincere Christian is the demand and expectation that you will read the Bible and study it on your own.
Studying the Bible is not something you're just supposed to do in church.
It's not something you're just supposed to do during the pastor's sermon.
It's not something you're supposed to just do during Sunday school.
You're supposed to have daily times of reading the Bible.
Growing up in that world, this is a measure of one's spirituality, is reading the Bible on your own.
This is a built-in, baked-in piece of evangelicalism.
It's part of the code, okay?
So you have this emphasis on a kind of direct, unmediated access to God, and that all sounds great, okay?
And I just want to say that in practice, if you look at Christian history and social movements and so forth, individuals and local communities engaging directly with the Scriptures can and has had radical and sometimes liberatory effects.
Okay?
No doubt.
But it's almost entirely a myth that operates to mask exactly the opposite reality.
In other words, The emphasis on our unmediated, direct access to God through the Bible masks the fact that our access to God, or whatever, through the Bible is never immediate or unmediated.
The Bible, by the time it comes to us, is already a document that has been mediated to us.
It's gone through lots of intermediaries by the time it ever comes to us, so the notion that we are sort of immediately accessing God through it is, in my mind, incredibly problematic.
Why do I say this?
Well, here are some considerations.
If we just think about, for today, What the Bible actually is and how it actually comes to us in the first place, we'll see what I—I hope we'll see—what I mean by this.
Okay, so first let's think about where the Bible came from in the first place.
I don't have time to get all into this.
I've had some email, some folks asking me about this.
I'm going to try to respond to those.
But when you think about where the Bible came from, there was a time in Christian history and a time in earlier Jewish history when there was no Bible.
Christians predate the Bible.
It's one of the sort of fundamental problems of the notion that everything in Christianity is supposed to come from the Bible is the fact that Christianity is older than the Bible.
There were Christians before there was a Bible.
Over time, groups of Christians made decisions about which books they believed constituted divinely inspired scripture.
And here's the trick, folks, right?
They often disagreed with one another.
And they would develop what were called canons of Scripture, collections of recognized Scripture.
They have differed for different traditions, and they still do.
To this day, there are Christians that read different Bibles.
Often there's a lot of overlap, but there are books that are recognized as Scripture, and some that are not recognized by others.
Okay?
The point is, as soon as you talk about the Bible, the first sort of mediation is that the Bible itself was constructed by humans.
They're the ones who came together and said, this is what we determine to be Scripture.
So the Bible, when you pick it up to encounter God and have unmediated access, it's already mediated and intermediary already is this historical process.
But let's think about the text of the Bible, and we talked in an earlier episode about the fact that we don't have any original manuscripts of the Bible, and there are lots of points on which the manuscripts that we do have, they don't agree.
So there are scholars who have dedicated their lives to trying to reconstruct, as best they can, a version of the biblical text that is probably closest to what the original manuscripts might have said, okay?
And I think lots of reasons to think that, to a large degree, they're probably more or less accurate, but the point is, that's another intermediary.
It's another layer of mediation.
The text itself is the result of scholars having to try to reconstruct text that we don't have.
And then let's talk about the translation of the Bible, okay?
We talked about this a little bit in the past too.
Those of you who know anything about translating, you've ever worked in other languages, if you're bilingual you know this, you know that there's almost never a single way to quote-unquote properly translate a passage from one language into another.
That's true about languages as such.
It's true of Greek and Hebrew.
There is almost never a single way to translate Greek or Hebrew into a modern language.
And a quote-unquote literal translation or word-for-word is not always the best or most effective translation.
That's just something that comes along with translation as such.
So there's that issue.
Okay?
But you get another layer when you're talking about translating something like the Bible, because the meaning or significance of biblical texts are often contested on theological grounds.
That is, preconceptions about what the Bible says, what Christian doctrine is, what God is like, etc.
often condition how the Bible is interpreted.
Interpreters and people that practice what's called hermeneutics, theories of interpretation, will say that this is what we call pre-understanding.
We come to the text with a pre-understanding of what it teaches and then translate accordingly.
So, translations can be affected by theological concerns, which means that theology is shaping the text it's supposedly flowing from.
A great example of this, a few years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention commissioned its own translation of the Bible, a new translation of the Bible, because they didn't like the way that gender-inclusive language was being used in other translations of the Bible.
So, I mean, here was a case where They were using theology to determine what the translation of the Bible should be.
What does all that mean?
It just means that here's another mediation of the biblical text, another intermediary.
By the time you get the Bible itself, you have the historical mediation of the formation of the Bible.
You have the mediation of tradition and scholars trying to reconstruct the text of the Bible.
Then you have the mediation of people translating the Bible into a language that you can actually read.
So if you're like me, and I don't read Greek and Hebrew anymore, I need an English language Bible, it's already been mediated to me in all of these different kinds of ways.
And then a final level here is just the issue of the Bible's precision and clarity.
The Bible is not clear or precise in everything it says, and if somebody wants the evidence of this, I'm going to point to Bible commentaries.
Now, if you've never formally studied the Bible, if you've never taken a course on the Bible, if you've never been to seminary, you might not know what these are.
I don't know that there's a parallel to the Bible commentary in sort of any other area of literature, but for every book of the Bible, There are people who write these books called commentaries, and so they'll be like a commentary on the book of Genesis or the book of Matthew or whatever.
And folks, sometimes the commentaries are multi-volume.
They are much longer and more in-depth than the books of the Bible themselves, and what commentaries do is they lay out You know, what they think is the historical background and the context, and they get into translation issues.
They go literally word for word for word in the Bible and offer interpretations and highlight areas of disagreement and complex interpretation and so forth.
And if you were to study the Bible, if you were to do that at a formal level, you would have to read these commentaries.
Here's the point.
If the teachings of the Bible were clear or precise in everything they say, You wouldn't have to have commentaries.
You wouldn't have dozens of commentaries for every book of the Bible.
You wouldn't have thousands of pages, literally thousands of pages that are written to try to understand and interpret passages in the Bible.
And if it were so clear and precise, you would not have the kinds of disagreements that you encounter among those who study the Bible with this level of depth and precision.
Somebody like Wayne Grudem, who says that the Bible is clear and precise, he calls his systematic theology an exposition of what?
Of biblical doctrine.
He sees it as an unfolding of the teachings of the Bible.
It's like a thousand pages long, 1,200 pages long.
Folks, if it was clear and precise, you wouldn't need people to devote their entire careers to producing thousands of pages trying to explain what the hell it says and means.
It's not clear and precise, and so what happens is—and we're going to get into the role of pastors and others in this in the next episode—but by the time you come to reading your Bible,
It's passed through so many levels of mediation, including oftentimes the mediation of maybe parents who tell you how to read the Bible, pastors who tell you how to read the Bible, the pastors who told them how to read the Bible, the seminaries that taught them how to read the Bible, the courses they took on biblical interpretation, or books that they read about how to interpret the Bible.
What does all that have?
It's the mediation, again, of these generations of scholars and hundreds and sometimes thousands of years of histories of interpretation and debate about the meanings of these texts, that is yet another layer of mediation.
Okay?
What's the point of all this?
The point is, we never have unmediated access to what the Bible says.
If we think that the Bible is a means of knowing about God, okay, and you can think that, that's fine.
If we think that the Bible is somehow a means of getting information about God and knowing about God, it doesn't provide immediate or unmediated access.
No, when we go to the bookstore, if you're like me and you're old school and you still like going to bookstores, or you go to Amazon, or you go to christianbooks.com, or people go wherever they would go to find a Bible, if they just go to some online version of the Bible, wherever you go to select a Bible, by the time you get your hands on it, by the time you set your eyes on it, before you ever read a sentence, it has gone through multiple levels of intermediary.
It is never coming to you.
Immediately or in an unmediated way.
Whatever teachings are coming from God, the words of God, the supposed inerrancy of it, it's been mediated over and over and over and over.
Okay?
Now, is that a problem?
Not necessarily.
For me, in my view, in the sense that we're talking about this sort of mediated nature of reality, it's just part of the human condition.
There's no escaping it.
No matter who or what we are, we are born into a world where interpretations are given to us, and we have cultural norms and languages and everything else that mediate reality to us.
Fine.
Bible, it's in good company.
It's just part of what it is to be a human.
But if our claim is that we've somehow escaped that, that the Bible or anything else gives us a way to circumvent that, that it gives us unmediated access to the nature of things, that it grants us a unique insight into the nature of reality or truth, then that is problematic when we come to realize that that's false.
Because what a claim like that does is it masks the nature of reality.
It masks our human situation and our human limitations.
And that's a problem because then the claim to have unmediated access to ultimate truth, it misleads us from the recognition that all claims are mediated.
That's when it becomes a problem.
That's the mechanism for me that is at work when somebody claims that access and that claim, again, is implicit in the doctrine of inerrancy.
It's part of what the doctrine of inerrancy does.
It holds this promise.
That when we read the Bible, we're getting this kind of window into who and what God is, aside from other kinds of mediations, and we're not.
By way of contrast, when we read the Bible, for whatever reason—if you're reading it for an act of religious devotion, if you're reading it because there's a sign in a class, if you're reading it because you've just never read it before, you're curious about it, if you're reading it because you consider it, you know, a work of human literature that's significant or whatever—whenever you read it, we're reading a text that has been mediated to us many times over.
It is irreducible and unavoidable.
And to be sure, it's a text that has flowed through a long history of people who are trying to get it right.
All of those people selecting which texts they believe are scripture, the people trying to nail down what they think the manuscript said, the people who are trying to kind of find the most accurate translations that they can, the people writing the commentaries trying to get out what they think is the best interpretation of the text and so forth, they're trying to get it right.
They're not trying to mislead anybody.
But folks, there has never been unanimity, and there is still not agreement on what the Bible even says, let alone what it means.
So, we are misleading ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be misled, or misleading others, when we mistake our engagement with the Bible with some sort of unmediated encounter with its supposed contents.
And if we don't know this, and this is where it becomes a problem, if we don't know this, if we miss this, if we don't recognize that we're reading a text that has been mediated to us many times over, we are in a prime position to be actively manipulated by appeals to the Bible.
We are in a position to be actively manipulated by appeals to the plain meaning of the text.
We are in a position to manipulate and coerce others by appealing to that text.
That's the risk when we don't recognize that the Bible has only ever come to us through a series of mediations.
And that's all true just for the Bible itself, okay?
We haven't even gotten into The ways in which those who appeal to it actively mask this when they act as mediators.
We haven't even gotten into the significance of the pastor who mediates the Bible to us, of the church tradition who mediates the Bible to us, of the theologian like Wayne Grudem who mediates the Bible to us.
We haven't even gotten into that.
That's where we're going to go into next episode.
Got to wind this down.
I'm watching the clock.
I'm realizing I'm hitting my limit here.
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