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What is the idea that the Bible is “inerrant,” that it is without error of any kind, is not a central Christian affirmation? What if it’s actually bad theology, contradicting other core commitments that orthodox Christians hold? What if inerrancy turns the Bible into a tool for high-control American Christianity, detracting from what Christians actually say is the cornerstone of their faith? In this episode, Dan looks at an “immanent critique” of the doctrine of inerrancy, showing why it’s a bad doctrine from within the theological framework of the very Christians who affirm it.
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My name is Dan Miller, and this is It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
Pleased to be with you today.
I want to dive into a topic that sort of continues on the theme from the last episode.
The previous episode was on this notion of bad theology, right?
And as I noted, a lot of people had asked, you know, what do I mean by that when I say that?
And I talked about sort of different meanings of that term and so forth.
As I was thinking about that, it also ties in with some additional questions and issues that people have reached out about.
And again, specifically dealing with the Bible and conservative Christians and high-control religion and so forth, I think when it comes to popular, high-control Christianity in America, the Bible is just the gift that keeps on giving.
And so I don't mean to talk about the Bible all the time, but just so many insights and questions and comments from folks that come up with this.
And so I wanted to tie this notion of bad theology and revisit some of this notion of the Bible as being inerrant, that is, as being without error, of having absolute authority, and so forth.
And don't worry if you listen to the series of episodes on inerrancy, I'm not going to repeat all that here, right?
I'm not going to double up on that.
But folks have reached out with questions and some really insightful comments and basically saying, well, isn't like the whole idea of inerrancy bad theology in the sense that you talked about?
One is the sense that it's incoherent or self-defeating.
I've already talked about that.
I referenced that last episode.
I think that that's the case.
But there's another one, and I said that bad theology can also refer to this idea of imminent critique, right?
That is, where you take the perspective of somebody that, you know, you're arguing with or debating or whatever, and you try to show that something is, you know, problematic or contradictory or whatever from within their own sort of conceptual framework, even if it's not a framework you share.
And where I think people are reaching toward, and what I was thinking about, and what I've experienced, and it was, you know, really actually pivotally important for me in my transition out of high-control American Christianity, Was this notion that from within the perspective of conservative Protestant Christianity, I think the doctrine of inerrancy is deeply flawed, right?
Setting aside the whole thing that I think it's, you know, it's incoherent and so forth, okay?
And this is sort of if I'm distilling, you know, a lot of emails I get from people, conversations I've had with people, things that my clients bring up that I do the religion trauma coaching with.
And you could boil it down to this question, right?
People will say, isn't the view that the Bible is inerrant?
And everything that comes with that, right?
As always, I'm interested not just in like the statement of a doctrine, but like how it's used, what it does.
And so people will say, well, isn't the view that the Bible is inerrant and kind of everything that goes with that, isn't that inconsistent with The central theological convictions that conservative Protestants have, and I think that it is, right?
And I want to talk about that for a few minutes.
I want to be clear, this is not unique to me.
Inerrancy, as I'll reiterate in just a few minutes here, has not been a historical or consistent position throughout Christian history.
It's a relatively modern way of reading the Bible and understanding what the Bible is.
It has always had critics.
It still has critics, and many of them will argue exactly that.
They will say that, among other things, the doctrine of inerrancy is actually not consistent with Christian teaching.
Not just that it's conceptually incoherent or something, but that it's bad theology in the sense that it goes against fundamental Christian values and conceptions, okay?
And here's what's really being claimed.
If you wanted to sharpen the concern or critique, Critics will say, and I'm one of them, right?
I developed this view or came to this perspective as an evangelical pastor, okay?
Critics of inerrancy will say that that view of the Bible actually represents a form of idolatry, right?
And within sort of orthodox Christian thinking, There is no greater sin than idolatry, of elevating something to the status that only God should hold.
And again, let me be clear, what I'm going to talk about here is, as I say, this notion of inerrancy as bad theology from within an evangelical perspective.
I don't share that perspective.
Folks, I'm not here to critique idolatry.
I'm not here to say that whatever you hold to be of ultimate value is somehow quote-unquote idolatrous if it's not God or something like that.
I have no dog in that fight, as they say, no horse in that race, what other metaphor you want.
But I'm adopting the perspective here of saying, okay, let's imagine I was having this discussion with a committed evangelical, and we're debating this, or we're talking about it, and they're saying that, you know, the centrality of inerrancy and so forth, how would I articulate to that person that I think is bad theology in their own terms?
That's the perspective I'm taking here, okay?
And that's the perspective that I've talked with folks, and I know that you have talked to co-workers or siblings or parents or pastors about this.
I know that many people have a kind of Maybe an intuition about this, but they feel like they haven't been able to formulate it well.
That's what I'm trying to do here, okay?
So, my argument is—and again, I didn't invent this, this isn't unique to me, you might have heard this other places, other people think this—my argument is that far from reflecting a Christian theological cornerstone, the notion that the Bible is an error actually represents one of the most serious theological mistakes that Christians could possibly commit.
It's a mistake.
It's bad theology.
Right?
And that idea might sound outlandish.
And I've had this conversation with evangelicals, and they look at me like I'm the strangest person, or they're like, how can you possibly claim that a quote-unquote high view of Scripture, that's what they'll describe it as, How could you possibly claim that that's a form of idolatry?
Or people who are not in that evangelical world, but they know of it, or maybe they've been in it, they will know that the claim that the Bible is inerrant, that it's without error, that it has authority over all matters, they will know that it is such a central pillar of conservative Protestant theology that it just sounds ridiculous to claim that it could be idolatrous.
How could you possibly have This very, very visible, dominant expression of Christianity and claim that one of its theological cornerstones is in fact a form of idolatry.
Just try saying that to Uncle Ron.
Or the theologian Wayne Grudem, that I talked about a fair amount in the series on biblical inerrancy, just tried saying to Uncle Ron that they're committing idolatry when they affirm the Bible's authority, and it's just, if you ever want to have that conversation, go have that conversation, see how it goes.
But I would maintain that it's not crazy, it's not extreme, it's just, it's bad theology, right?
And as I say, it's something, a view that I came to as an evangelical pastor, and it's actually one of many, Theological considerations that moved me out of evangelicalism.
So let's talk about this.
A long time ago, I did an episode on the idea of the Bible as God's Word, and what people mean when they talk about God's Word.
And it's that language of God's Word that is the heart of the matter, because that's how the Bible is understood.
It is God's Word, it is God's message, and therefore it has to be without error, and so on and so forth.
Okay?
But here's the trick, right?
Orthodox Christians have affirmed for a couple millennia at this point that Jesus of Nazareth is God's Word, right?
That when the language of God's Word is used, it doesn't refer to the Bible, it refers to Jesus of Nazareth.
And that comes directly itself from a Bible verse, right?
That was influenced by Greek philosophical thought that was dominant at the time it was produced.
And the verse I have in mind—and for a lot of you, if you grew up in the Church, you know anything about the Bible, this passage is going to be very well known to you—it's a passage in the Christian New Testament.
It's in the Gospel of John.
It's in the first part of the Gospel of John, and it has come to be known as the so-called prologue to the Gospel of John.
And this is part of what it says.
So, verses 1 and 2 in chapter 1 of the Gospel of John says this.
It says, "...in the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
And then if you jump down a few verses to verse 14, it says, And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory of a Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.
Okay, skipping a bunch of stuff.
I'm not trying to give a sermon.
I'm not trying to give a Bible lesson.
But what that reflects is that Partially on the basis of that verse, most Orthodox Christians have held, again for a couple thousand years at this point, that there is some kind of identity between the human being Jesus of Nazareth and God.
That there's some identity between those and that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest revelation of God's self to human beings, that in the person Jesus of Nazareth, God showed what God is to human beings.
And this verse is a big part of the reason why that idea developed, right?
The word—the Greek word, translated word in English, is logos.
And I'm just going to say this as a person who needs to be able to say, it's logos, it's not logos.
I know that's how everybody says it, and I say it sometimes because everybody looks at you, where did you say Lagos?
It's Lagos.
The word, or the Lagos of God, it's more than speech or information, right?
That's part of it, right?
Speech or information.
Elsewhere in the Bible, And reiterated in the prologue, God's Word is also represented as God's agent in the world, the means by which God does things in the world.
It's the means by which God creates the world, it's the means by which God redeems the world, and so forth.
If you don't know this, many, probably most people in the New Testament period, when they read the Hebrew Bible in much of the Greco-Roman world, they read a Greek translation of it, and so this word logos appears numerous times in that Greek translation, and this is what it reflects.
So here, in this famous passage in the Gospel of John, Jesus is said to be this Word, right?
This agent of God, this presence of God in the world, this means of God's creation, this means of God's redemption.
Jesus is said to be this Word.
He is said to be eternal.
He is said to be eternally present with God.
He is identified with God and is said to have been incarnated, right?
Christians talk about the incarnation.
It literally means enfleshed.
In the person Jesus of Nazareth, right?
So that's what this pretty hefty set of Bible verses says.
So, Orthodox Christians, For centuries have affirmed that there is this identity between Jesus and God, that Jesus was eternal and so forth.
Certainly, Christians have argued and still argue for centuries about exactly how to understand that, right?
What does it mean to say that there's some identity between God and Jesus and so on and so forth, but they've affirmed that, okay?
And what this has meant, again, for Orthodox Christians, is that Jesus as the Word of God is the fullest revelation of God that human beings have, right?
That if we want to know what God is like, you have to look to Jesus.
Jesus is the one who shows what God is like.
That in encountering Jesus, we encounter and know the very essence or presence of God.
Okay?
So when Orthodox Christians have spoken about the Word of God, the reference is to Jesus, not to the Bible.
Okay?
So, let's come to this.
Critics of inerrancy argue, and they always have—again, this is not new, I'm not inventing this—critics of inerrancy argue that that view of the Bible, and more importantly the way that inerrancy is used within conservative Protestantism, effectively places the Bible equal to or above Jesus of Nazareth.
That it takes the Bible as quote-unquote Word of God and elevates it to a level equal to Jesus, and that this is a form of idolatry.
You'll run across the phrase Bible-olatry sometimes, or Bibliolatry, this notion of elevating the Bible to an idolatrous status.
So what do they argue?
They would argue and say, look, the Bible is a testimony to Jesus and what we learn about God through his life, death, and again, if you're an Orthodox Christian, his resurrection.
This is what the language of the New Testament, quote-unquote, Testament captures, right?
The Bible is this kind of testimony to Jesus of Nazareth, but the Bible itself is not divine.
It's not on a par with Jesus.
Yes, there's language in the Bible about scriptures being God-breathed.
It does not say that they are eternal, that they are present with God, and so forth.
And so, basically, critics will say, if you're going to use the language of word of God and apply it to an errancy, or think that it follows from an errancy, you're elevating the Bible to a status that only Jesus should have for Orthodox Christians.
And this is reflected, you know, for example, in the really obvious fact, but I think often played down by conservative Protestants, that the Christian community predates the Bible, right?
There was a Christian community testifying to the significance of Jesus and, you know, drawing together because of how what they understood Jesus to be before there was a Bible, right?
They're the ones who wrote it.
They are the ones who created this testimony to try to make sense of what they'd experienced and so forth.
Okay?
You're talking to Uncle Ron?
Or, I don't know, have you ever had the chance to sit down and chat with Wayne Grudem?
They'll agree with that.
They'll say, of course they don't elevate the Bible above Jesus, of course Jesus is the Word of God, and saying that the Bible is a testimony to that is exactly what they're doing.
But in my view, they're wrong.
And here it's not about what the doctrine says, it's about how it actually operates.
within conservative Protestantism that shows that the Bible becomes essentially an object of worship.
Not a means of understanding God, not a means of worshiping God, but the Bible itself is elevated to an object of worship within the doctrine of inerrancy, which means it was bad theology in evangelicals' own terms.
Now, here are some reasons why I say that.
This is not an exhaustive list All of these deserve more detail.
I hope I'm not like putting people to sleep by being too theological here.
But here are some reasons of this, right?
And the first is that the doctrine of inerrancy is distinctly modern, okay?
Now, I don't mean contemporary.
I don't mean that it's new, but I mean modern in the sense that sort of like historians of ideas or cultural history will talk about.
So really sort of, you know, 16th century forward form of modern.
The doctrine of inerrancy reflects intellectual and cultural currents that became prominent in the modern period, right?
The idea that the Bible, for example, is a text that should be taken according to its plain, or yes, some people will say literal meaning, is relatively new, as opposed to much of Christian history, especially the medieval period, when it was held that there was a deeper, sometimes hidden spiritual or allegorical meaning that was the truest meaning of the scriptures.
Or the idea that the purpose of the Bible is to impart information or beliefs about God—that more modern sense of a word, a word as information, as knowledge.
The idea that the primary purpose of the Bible is to impart information or beliefs about God—again, that's a modern view.
In contrast, for example, to those who would argue—traditionally have argued, and contemporary theologies still do—that the Bible brings about an encounter or a spiritual union with God, right?
Its purpose is not But for lack of a better term, it's more mystical.
Those are intellectually modern conceptions that have not been applied to the Bible for most of Christian history, right?
The second problem with that view, or the second reason why I think it elevates the Bible to an idolatrous status, understood within evangelical terms, is that I think the doctrine of inerrancy loses view of the Bible as a testimony to Jesus of Nazareth.
It gets twisted into the view That because the Bible is inerrant, it has no errors, and because this has to apply to everything in the Bible, the view arises that everything in the Bible is of equal authority, of equal worth, or equal usefulness in Christian life.
And this is often something that is explicitly claimed by evangelicals.
Right?
It's not typically practiced, but it is claimed.
And if you're listening to this, and you have, you know, if you grew up in an evangelical church, you have suffered through months-long sermon series on, like, the book of Deuteronomy, or the book of Numbers, or these other passages in the Hebrew Bible that are just Quite frankly, to most people, stultifying, but pastors feel obligated to try to preach these and show that they're relevant and draw lessons from them.
Why?
Because the whole Bible, every word in it, has to be inerrant and useful to us and so forth, right?
Or the tortured practices that conservative Christians have to come up with to defend ancient practices or cultural beliefs or what have you, right?
In contrast to that idea, in case you're familiar with that, you're like, well, how else would you use the Bible?
The idea that recognizing Jesus as God's revelation should guide how we read and use the Bible.
That understanding Jesus as God's revelation means there are parts of the Bible we need to be critical of.
There are parts of the Bible we need to set aside.
There are parts of the Bible that I think are just plain wrong in light of what we see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.
The doctrine of inerrancy completely masks that, obliterates it.
Which, by the way, is part of why it becomes so useful for high-control religion.
And I think the final one, and this is the one that really pushed me away from another reason, that pushed me away from inerrancy.
Is that for conservative Christians, belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and the things that come with it, right?
So when somebody affirms inerrancy, almost always they deny the truth of, say, evolutionary theory.
They affirm gender essentialism.
They condemn the LGBTQ plus community and so forth.
These things usually come together as a package deal, right?
Belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, for those conservative Protestants, is itself an article of faith.
They will tell you one cannot be a Christian without affirming this.
And I've had this conversation, I don't know how many times, so they'll say, well, if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, you cannot be a Christian and affirm LGBTQ plus inclusion.
And to be a Christian, you have to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible.
It's elevated to a core, central doctrine of the faith, and I think that from within a conservative, Protestant framework, that's bad theology, right?
Why do I say that?
With evangelicals, I think it flies in the face of the evangelical insistence that being a Christian means, quote, having a personal relationship with Jesus, if you've ever heard that language.
When I was a pastor, again, this is what moved me out of this.
I had a realization that, you know what, as an evangelical, what I believe being a Christian is, what I believe quote-unquote being saved is, is that somebody has trusted Jesus to bring about their salvation and has a quote-unquote personal relationship with Jesus.
What I realized was it is completely possible.
For that to happen without somebody ever reading the Bible.
They don't have to know what the Bible is.
Somebody could tell them about the story of Jesus.
Somebody could explain, you know, how significantly their life has been changed by putting their faith in Jesus.
And somebody could make that decision and so forth.
In other words, it's completely possible to be a Christian, to be saved, to have a personal relationship with Jesus and, like, not believe that, I don't know, the book of Genesis is literally describing how God created the world, or how the world came to be, or without affirming a bunch of passages in the Hebrew Bible about LGBTQ plus inclusion.
In other words, elevating this to a core doctrine of faith, again, it's a form of idolatry.
It's bad theology, right?
So those are the things that came to mind here.
So why am I bringing this up?
To sort of bring this full circle, I'm bringing this up because I'm not just trying to be theological, I'm not trying to keep revisiting the Bible, but I've had a lot of regular listeners and others who pose these concerns who have said, you know what, I always feel like there's something off.
About the centrality of the Bible, right?
Or some who've said, I think that the Bible is really problematic for these reasons, and I think it goes against other theological commitments and so forth.
These are great insights, and I think that this is what's going on.
I think that from a perspective of imminent critique, the doctrine of inerrancy, the belief about the Bible, and more importantly for me, the use of the Bible within conservative Protestant circles, Is bad theology.
And I think what it means is, and the way that it actually works, and I talked about this a lot in the series on inerrancy, is the Bible becomes not a tool for sort of divine encounter, not a tool for spiritual freedom, not a tool to, you know, as the word gospel means good news, right?
To tell the good news of God bringing people to God's self.
Instead, it becomes a tool of high-control religion.
It becomes one more mechanism for determining to people what they have to believe, how they have to believe it, how they have to comport themselves in all areas of life.
It becomes a bludgeon to use to keep people in line.
So, those are my thoughts on, you know, the Bible as idol, right?
Why the doctrine of inerrancy and the way that the Bible actually operates for most conservative Protestants is, in fact, a form of idolatry.
It's bad theology, okay?
Again, just to be clear, I'm offering this as a kind of imminent critique of evangelicalism.
If I'm sitting down and I'm talking with an Uncle Ron and I want to move him away from inerrancy or I want to try to make clear why inerrancy might be a view that he should give up as a conservative Protestant, this is the line of critique I could make, okay?
I'm not intending to communicate that anybody has to have any particular views on the Bible, that anybody has to, you know, say that the Bible is a way of encountering divine revelation, or that anybody has to have any views on Jesus of Nazareth, or believe Jesus of Nazareth is divine, or anything else.
I am saying that given core theological commitments of historical Orthodox Christianity and conservative Protestant Christianity more specifically, I think the doctrine of inerrancy, it's bad theology.
It's a form of idolatry.
It takes something that is not divine and elevates it to divine status, masking what I think are some realities that could be very meaningful to people if they can encounter the tradition differently.
Again, if you're not a Christian, that's fine.
I'm not here to convince anybody to be Christian or that they have to think those things.
But if you're talking to the Uncle Rons of the world, if you're talking to the people who tell you that to be a Christian means you have to accept the inerrancy of the Bible, you can argue not just that you don't have to accept the inerrancy of the Bible, but that in fact, maybe affirming inerrancy is bad theology.
Maybe, despite your best intentions, Uncle Ron, you're a bad Christian if you are an inerrantist.
See how the conversation goes.
If you've got real Uncle Rons in your life, you want to try that out, I'd love to hear about it.
I would love to hear other topic ideas that folks have.
I would love to hear feedback, as always.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj, at gmail.com.
I continue to plug away on the emails.
I continue to close the gap, getting up to date on responding to those.
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A lot of personal things going on this summer, as I've indicated in the past, but doing the best.
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Thank you so much for listening.
As I always say, and as you'll hear when I respond to your emails, I say it because I think it's true.
I know that everybody could be doing something besides listening to this right now and taking the time to do that.
