It's In the Code Ep. 91: "So Much for the Holy Spirit"
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High control Christian communities often claim that the Bible is without error, that its teachings are absolute, and that if we read our Bibles we can learn about God for ourselves. But is that how it really works? What if, instead, claims that the Bible speaks with “inerrant” authority are actually mechanisms of religious control and coercion? What if those claims really boil down to the insistence that the teaching of pastors and other church leaders are absolute or beyond question? Dan dives into these themes in this week’s episode, and shows why claims that the Bible is inerrant are a powerful mechanism to control and coerce members of religious communities.
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As always, I want to welcome folks to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And as always, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen, supporting us in all the ways you do.
Again, if you're in a position to consider subscribing, it means the world to us, helps us keep doing the things that we're doing, always trying to expand what we do, and it would help us do that as well.
I'm going to dive right in here.
We are continuing on with this kind of look we've been taking at what a certain kind of Christian community means when they say that they are biblical, when they affirm biblical authority, and so forth.
And this has brought us into a discussion of the doctrine of what's called inerrancy, right?
The view that the Bible is without error in all areas.
The Bible is absolutely authoritative and is without error.
And we've taken a look at this for a while now, started with some episodes looking at the many problems of this conception of the Bible and how it's just an incoherent doctrine.
And we've been turning to look at how the doctrine is actually used within high-control religious contexts.
Despite the fact that it can't stand up under scrutiny, that this doctrine can't, despite the fact that it's incoherent, it persists.
And we've been talking about how, you know, the role that it actually plays within these religious communities.
And last episode, we looked at the kind of implicit claim within inerrancy that the Bible gives us unmediated access to God.
Within a popular conception of American Christianity, People are encouraged to read the Bible.
They're encouraged to go to the text.
Why?
Because it is clear.
Because it teaches what God is like.
Because it is inerrant, we can trust it.
And I think the implicit claim there—and sometimes it's explicit—is that we gain a kind of direct encounter with God.
We have a direct, unmediated access to God through the Bible, and so we should be reading the Bible and engaging it.
And last episode what I looked at was the way that by the time you ever get to a Bible to sort of pick it up, pick up a copy of it, to read it, it has already been mediated to us for thousands of years and histories of interpretation and decisions about what the text says and decisions about how to translate it and on and on and on and on.
So in other words, there's a promise of this unmediated access to God.
But it doesn't really deliver on that promise.
That's the idea here.
In this episode, I want to consider the sort of concrete mediations of the Bible in the context in which it's actually engaged.
And this brings us to the ways in which the Bible is used to exercise authority over religious adherents.
The way that it is used to exercise authority over those within the kinds of religious communities that would appeal to the Bible as inerrant.
So, the kind of mainstream, high-control religious contexts that affirm the inerrancy of the Bible, they typically also affirm, again, broadly, Individuals' direct experiences of God, and not just through the Bible, right?
There's the idea that this is part of what it is to be a true or authentic Christian, is that we ought to be experiencing, encountering God.
All the language about having a relationship with God through Christ and so forth often has this kind of experiential dimension.
This can come through powerful experiences of the Holy Spirit, especially in, say, Pentecostal and Charismatic kinds of movements.
It can come with the sort of affective experience that we have when we sing worship songs in church, or hearing a pastor's sermons on Sunday mornings.
But what I'm interested in, of course, is that it's also supposed to come through the Bible, okay?
Not just the Bible when we read it, but the Bible as it's preached to us, the Bible in Bible study in church, and so forth.
That's why these things are considered central.
So, let's connect some dots here.
As we've talked about, and this is why I spend time talking about it, and those of you who have actually read the Bible, you've dug into it, maybe like me, digging into the Bible is part of what led you to questions about what it is and so forth.
We've talked about, you'll know if you've read it, there are lots of places you can find out.
There are parts of the Bible that are really hard to understand.
Despite the claims that it's clear and so forth, there are parts of the Bible that are very murky and opaque, and it's not clear what they mean.
There are parts of the Bible, or claims in the Bible, that on the face of it are simply factually untrue.
We talked about that.
There are passages in the Bible that say opposed things about particular topics.
For example, what Christians' attitudes toward political rulers should be, or why Israel got a king.
There are two different creation accounts.
There are two accounts of the story of Noah.
You name it, they're there.
Okay?
We've talked about that.
At the same time, again, a core element in the claim that the Bible is without error is that it is clear and precise in its teachings.
It's a primary means, as the Doctrine of Inerrancy says, that God has designed to speak to Christians and anyone who wants to know about Him.
So, a gap opens up between the claim that the Bible's without error, that it's clear, that it's precise, that it's the primary way God wants people to know about God, and yet In this primary way, there are opaque passages, there are passages that seem to be contradictory, there are passages that don't line up with other things that we know about the world, on and on and on.
We've talked about that.
So a kind of gap opens up between the claims of the Bible as inerrant and what we find in it if we're just regular people trying to read the Bible, okay?
So how does a regular Bible reader figure out what those complex passages mean?
And I'm talking about regular people.
I'm not talking about the seminary educated.
I'm not talking about people who have access to go and read critical commentaries.
I'm not talking about people who, you know, have studied biblical studies or something like that.
I'm talking about just regular old people.
What are you supposed to do to figure out what those complex passages mean?
How do we figure out how to reconcile those passages?
Here's the answer.
We're supposed to submit to the spiritual authorities in our life or our religious community.
What does that look like?
We ask our pastor.
What does that mean?
If we're growing up in the church, maybe we ask our parents, and they're going to turn around and they're going to ask their pastor.
They're going to ask their Bible study leader who's going to ask their pastor.
The pastor doesn't know.
The pastor might reach out to a colleague somewhere, or might reach out to their old seminary prof, or they'll go to trusted authorities who write books about this, or whatever.
Maybe we do that.
Maybe we read books by popular figures within the evangelical movement.
But in other words, what happens is we submit to recognized and authorized spiritual authorities.
And spiritual authorities might sound like a heavy term.
If you grew up in church, and, you know, churches I grew up in, the pastors, they were very friendly people and very approachable, and you could talk with them.
And, you know, when we were in youth group and stuff, they would come and hang out with us.
Spiritual authority sounds really heavy, but that's what they are.
And why do I say that?
I say that because they are the ones who are authorized to settle and teach those issues within a religious context.
If we're all encouraged in principle to be Bible readers, they're the power readers.
And so, despite all the talk about individual Christians' responsibility to read and interpret the Bible, they, these spiritual authorities, they are the ones who ultimately determine what the Bible means and how the Bible is used within their religious communities.
They are the final mediation of the Bible and its teachings.
Why does that matter?
Because as much as they might talk about individuals reading and interpreting the Bible, they are the mediators and the arbiters of the Bible and its purported teachings.
And when I say they, that's a shorthand.
They themselves are shaped by and sort of continue to transmit a certain kind of Christian and evangelical subculture that has shaped them.
They perpetuate it in their actions.
They are the mediators and arbiters of the Bible and its teachings.
So despite the prominent claims—you can have a pastor who stands up and says that individuals should encounter God directly, might even demand that they should, that if you're not doing things like reading your Bible on your own, you're not being a good Christian—despite all of that talk about encountering God directly, we never get to God in some unmediated way.
What we always get to are those who are authorized to speak for God.
And we've come across this idea before.
Those of you who've listened to this series for a long time know this is a common theme of mine.
But I believe that one of the most common ways that you can exercise authority is to claim a sort of transcendent truth, transcendent meaning, meaning, value, truth, political identity, whatever, that transcends our ordinary realm And then give yourself the authority to mediate that transcendence to others, and this is what we find here.
We come across this notion again.
In practice, with the claim that the Bible is absolutely authoritative, that it's without error, in practice what that boils down to is that those who have authority to speak for it cannot be questioned.
That when the pastor says, this is what the Bible teaches, that's without question.
When the pastor says, the Bible's inerrant and it says this, therefore, that's the truth, you can't question that.
You can't push back on that.
You can't press on that.
Their interpretation is accorded absolute practice.
In practice, then, it's their interpretation that's inerrant and beyond all question.
And again, that might sound extreme.
It may sound pretty intense.
I've known people, I've talked with them who say, look, I like what you say, Dan, but I grew up in these contexts and I get it.
Like, I don't agree with the ideas anymore, but the pastor was never claiming that his teachings were inerrant or absolute.
And my answer is, yes he was.
And the fact that you didn't see it, that you didn't feel it, that you didn't recognize it, that's the point.
That's why we've got to decode that language and those practices.
If we understand how incoherent the Bible is, how incoherent the doctrine of inerrancy is, if we understand all the mediating layers that inevitably stand between us and our engagement with the Bible, Claims to be definitive or to offer definitive, authoritative interpretations of the Bible, they can't be anything but absolute claims.
The logic and the social dynamics of this are absolutely clear to me, and it's clear even if those spiritual authorities don't recognize or intend it themselves.
This is the pernicious element of this.
I believe there are lots of pastors out there who would cringe at the idea that they are claiming somehow to speak with absolute authority, and yet they stand up and do it every Sunday morning.
I think it's an inevitable outflow.
It's a logical outflow of the doctrine of inerrancy and the claim that the Bible is absolute, that everything we do comes from the Bible, etc., etc.
So, let's look at this, because this will illustrate the dynamics.
Because another theme that comes out here oftentimes is that When we read the Bible, the reason we can understand it, the reason that we encounter truth in it is because God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, is sort of speaking to us, is guiding and directing us.
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And we read this in our theologians.
We read this in Grudem and Erickson, that the testimony of the Holy Spirit affirms the truth of Scripture, that the Spirit leads us in how to read the text.
When we talk about all those mediating layers between us and the Bible, it's the Holy Spirit that is supposed to sort of overcome that.
That we can trust in things like that the right meaning will come through despite translation and text issues and so forth, because the Spirit will be guiding us.
The Spirit will be speaking to us.
And again, this emphasis on the Spirit gives this impression, feeds this impression, that what we're after is, again, a direct encounter with God.
But here's something to think about.
Just see what happens if somebody believes sincerely that the Holy Spirit is affirming a reading of the Bible for them that departs from what is authorized within their community.
And I've done this.
I've had these conversations.
What if somebody says, you know, Pastor, I've been reading the Bible, and Galatians 3.28 says there's no longer Jew or Greek, there's no longer slave or free, there's no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
You know, and I've been reading that, and I really feel that the Spirit is telling me that we need to take that passage as a central passage, and we probably need to rethink our views on things like queer inclusion and marriage equality and gender identity.
And allowing women to be pastors, and a whole bunch of other things.
This should be the verse that we use to interpret others.
I really feel led by the Spirit.
We need to rethink these things.
Tell your pastor that you've been reading the Exodus story of God's deliverance of the Hebrew slaves from bondage, and you feel the Spirit is leading you To interpret that passage in the way that folks in the black church tradition have for centuries, that the Spirit is telling you that your church should be standing in solidarity with communities of color, that if we affirm that Bible story, that is the truth for us today.
Tell your church leaders that you've been reading the book of Genesis, and it says that, you know, women's submission to men, that men exercising authority over women, husbands over wives, that that's an effect of the curse that was put on human beings after they sinned.
And so you really feel that, you know, the Spirit is highlighting that to you, because if we've been redeemed in Christ, Men and women should be treated equally.
They should have the same roles.
The female submission is an effect of sin and a curse that is overcome in Christ.
We need to really rethink our understanding of gender relations in the church.
Right?
Try having that conversation with those religious authorities.
Try appealing to the Spirit and the Bible and the text of the Bible and the inerrancy of the Bible.
See what happens when you marshal those arguments against those religious authorities who actually mediate the Bible and its meaning for you and your community.
If you want to know whether a church is high control, and not all churches are, okay?
But if you want to know if a church is high control, the response that those leaders give to challenges and questions like these will tell you everything you want to know.
And again, I've had these conversations about those passages with religious leaders, and it turns out that when you come to them and say, I really feel led about the spirit of this, it turns out it's not really the leading of the spirit you're supposed to follow.
No, it's the direction of your spiritual leaders, because what they will tell you is, What you're hearing, if you read it that way, that's not really what the Spirit's saying.
I know we said that you're supposed to read the Bible, I know we said the Spirit would lead you, but sorry, you've been led astray.
The Spirit tells us that women are supposed to submit to men, that men exercise divinely ordained authority over women, and that's not what that passage means.
What are they doing?
They're the voice of the Spirit.
They are the ones who speak for the Spirit.
That's what they're going to tell you.
And if you persist in questioning their interpretations and practices, If you say, I get all that, and I've been praying about it, I've been thinking about it, but I still really feel that we need to rethink this.
Maybe we've been wrong about this.
You persist in questioning those interpretations, they will exercise authority to bring you back in line.
And this can take lots of forms.
From very kind of almost intangible informal mechanisms to much more formal mechanisms.
People can be banned from leading Bible studies.
I have known of and been involved in churches where somebody had a home Bible study group or something that they did and they basically sort of lost the church sanction to do that because they were, you know, suggesting some things were outside of the norm.
I shared this story a couple episodes back about, you know, I was threatened with being fired when I suggested even the possibility that there might be parts of the Hebrew Bible in particular not historically accurate.
Whisper campaigns are started against people whose faith is now viewed as suspect.
It's the same way that when you're a kid your parents will tell you, like, not to hang out with another kid because they think that they're a bad influence.
Those kind of things, you know, just Let's do this.
But Jessie over there, she's been kind of throwing around some ideas that Pastor John says are just not biblical.
And so we need to maybe steer clear of her.
She could lead us astray.
People can be asked to stop attending churches.
They can even, in really high control environments, they can be shunned by the church.
The members of the religious community will be directed not to associate them with anymore.
So they are threatened with a loss of community.
Fall in line or give up your community.
Those are your options.
People can be called out publicly by the church leadership.
I have sat in congregations when a pastor stands up, and often it's nameless.
It'll be the, you know, recently some people in the congregation have suggested that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but everybody kind of knows who they're talking about or everybody's on guard.
I have seen it where they name a person by name and says, That until they repent and bring their views back in line with this church, they'll no longer be hosting Thursday night's Bible study or whatever.
I've seen that, right?
Those are the mechanisms of control.
So, so much for the testimony of the Spirit, right?
So much for direct access to God.
Surprise, surprise, it will inevitably turn out the claims to speak for the Spirit are used to support misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and anti-black affect and on and on and on.
The marks of so much of high-control Christian religion in America.
What a shocker.
It turns out that appeals to the Spirit are used, appeals to the Bible are used, to support those views.
Okay?
Gotta wind this down.
Here's something else to think about, okay?
Religious communities that use the Bible, they're not all high control.
And I feel it's important to say that, especially because so many people coming out of high control religious environments, coming out of white American evangelicalism and similar religious subcultures, that's the only view of religion they have.
And so I will often hear people say, churches that read the Bible are all that.
They're not, okay?
There are other ways of reading the Bible.
There are other ways of using the Bible.
There are other ways of finding meaning within it.
There are Christian communities that are perfectly comfortable with people questioning the Bible, or challenging the Bible, or even rejecting its authority, or the authority of received interpretations.
There are religious communities that are perfectly comfortable having a room full of people who don't agree about what the Bible says or if we should even be looking to the Bible to say something.
But none of those religious communities are claiming that the Bible is without error or that it is inerrant.
The central impulse of claims to inerrancy, the central driving impulse of the claim that the Bible is without error, is authority.
Authority is in the code of inerrancy.
Claims to an inerrant Bible, better yet, claims to be the arbiter of an inerrant Bible, to speak the truth of an inerrant Bible, those claims have always been a powerful mechanism for religious control and coercion.
Always.
And in my view, this is a logical outcome of the doctrine.
It is an irreducible social effect of the doctrine.
This is why, for me, it's important to understand the incoherence of the doctrine.
It's why I spent episodes talking about that.
It's important to understand how the Bible, by the time it ever comes to us, is already this constructed document that has been mediated in so many ways.
All of those things are important because the central impulse to doctrines of inerrancy is coercion and control and the exercise of authority over others.
And in my view, that has to be called into question.
It makes no sense to claim that the Bible is without error, that it is an absolute authority in all areas, if you're not going to employ those claims to control others.
It is the ultimate legitimation.
So when you encounter claims to inerrancy, you are almost certainly encountering a high-control religious context.
And when you go to a church website and it says, we preach the Bible as the truth, they're inerrant, it tells you a lot about that community.
You can decode quickly what a religious community is probably like based on the claims they make about the Bible.
All right, as I say, I have to wind this down.
We're kind of coming up against our time here.
I want to thank you all for listening.
Please keep the comments, questions, insights coming.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com, best way to reach me.
I am, as always, behind in responding to emails, but I will get to them.
I do value them.
Great feedback, great questions.
I am not an inerrantist.
I am not inerrant.
I don't speak without error, and so I welcome your comments, your questions, and we're winding down this little sort of sub-series within It's in a Code.
We're going to leave the questions of biblicism and inerrancy behind here in an episode or two.
We're going to turn to some other topics, so please keep those coming.
Always welcome topics, themes, slogans, things your pastor said, things your mom or dad said, something you saw on a church sign, whatever it is.
Keep those coming.
Thank you so much.
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