Review
The concept of biblical inerrancy has recently piqued my interest, and I ended up writing about it. I picked up Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy in the hopes it would show me a spectrum of well-researched, well-argued opinions on inerrancy, and it delivered completely!
The essence of the book is this: biblical inerrancy is hard; its definition is confusing and debated amongst modern scholars. In this book, we get to see five modern scholars from across the Christian spectrum define inerrancy, express their opinions about it, and engage their definition with three “problematic” biblical texts (some call them “contradictions”). After each of the five essays, the other four authors give a short response essay.
The book’s format was well-thought-out and made the content easy to digest, even as a layman Christian like myself. I found something to appreciate from every author, even if I didn’t end up agreeing with all their views. The essay responses helped me formulate my own ideas and opinions about each view, and come to my own conclusions.
Below my takeaways, I’ve summarized the positions of the five authors, and given my opinions about each.
My Takeaways
- Inerrancy is not essential for salvation. It’s not a first-order doctrine. It is a subset of infallibility (the Bible will not fail in its purposes) and authority.
- The obsession with inerrancy is a uniquely American one.
- The CSBI is a very narrow view of inerrancy. It represents the perspective of some American evangelicals. I think it would have been better if it discussed (at more length) and emphasized more strongly its dependence on infallibility and authority of scripture, as predecessors of inerrancy.
- The CSBI does not require a strictly literalistic interpretation of Scripture— but a cursory reading of it certainly suggests that this is the intended method of interpretation.
- “We must make every effort to avoid identifying… inerrancy with our ideas of what a Perfect Book must be.” — Vanhoozer
- Many Christians weakly argue that Scripture, or God, must be ________ (perfect, inerrant, always historically accurate, etc.) because he is a “Perfect Being”. These claims wrongly superimpose a human standard of Perfect onto a God who is above our thoughts and ways.
- I love this short definition of inerrancy: “…inerrancy tells you that what is said is true, but it cannot tell you what is said.” — Vanhoozer
- Moving forward, I think I’ll follow the advice of Vanhoozer and “refuse to say whether I hold to inerrancy until my interlocutor defines the term (or allows me to do so).”
R. Albert Mohler Jr.: The Conservative
Mohler is a classic, fundamentalist evangelical figure. As President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and young-earth creationist, it should come as no surprise that his essay largely exists to prop up the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI), a famous inerrantist document signed by ~300 evangelicals in 1978. Mohler has a strictly literalistic definition of inerrancy, and refuses to engage in any further nuance beyond what the conservative CSBI states.
Like the other authors, I would criticize Mohler for being so closed-minded about his definition of inerrancy. His arguments for inerrancy are not compelling and mostly boil down to “the Bible is God’s word, and God wouldn’t lie, so the Bible must be inerrant”. Because inerrancy is Mohler’s presupposition about the Bible, he fails to actually address the problematic texts in a meaningful way beyond circular reasoning.
I would add that Mohler, like Enns, incorrectly conflates inerrancy with literalistic inerrancy. Mohler attempts to justify his position with an appeal to authority, saying the church has always believed in inerrancy, but the truth is that historical Christian inerrancy has always been flexible to both literal and allegorical interpretations, not strictly literal as Mohler’s CSBI would posit.
To be quite frank, Mohler comes off as afraid. Using the slippery-slope argument, Mohler argues that evangelicals need inerrancy— because without it, truth is so hard to come by. He asks: if we don’t have a perfect historical Bible, then what are we left with? In this way, I think his argument is based on fear more than he would probably admit. We must deal with the Bible as we have it; not as we wish it were.
(As a side note; Mohler did a poor job responding to the other essays. His responses are mostly just a re-telling of what the other essay said, with little argument or substance.)
Peter Enns: The Liberal
Peter Enns is a liberal Christian, well-known for attacking fundamentalist Christian beliefs in recent years. He was on staff at Westminster Theological Seminary until 2009, after he published a book called Inspiration and Incarnation that ruffled the university’s feathers. He has written many posts for the BioLogos Foundation, a Christian pro-science organization.
I found Enn’s take to be unsurprisingly liberal, but interesting nonetheless. He clearly has a problem with the term “inerrancy”— unlike Bird, Franke, and Vanhoozer, Enns rejects all definitions of “inerrancy” and refuses to redefine it, but is willing to admit that even his position could be morphed into some definition of that term (though he’s not interested in doing so himself).
I agree with Vanhoozer’s response that Enns is tackling a specific definition of inerrancy he doesn’t like— literalistic inerrancy. Enns incorrectly conflates this with inerrancy as a whole, when in reality there are other ways to define it, as the other authors point out in their essays.
Enns is not rejecting a particular definition of inerrancy as much as a set of interpretive practices that have come to be associated with inerrancy. Inerrancy is, in Enns’ court, guilty by association, and apparently there is no appeal (“however defined”).
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer
I agree with Enns that literalistic inerrancy is a dangerous, false, and prescriptive way to see the Bible; but unlike Enns, I see value in other definitions of inerrancy. Among Enns’ conclusions, I found myself in closest agreement with this one: the word “inerrancy” has been incorrectly defined, abused, and weaponized by too many evangelicals. Perhaps it is time for a new word or phrase that speaks more clearly.
Michael F. Bird: The International Representative
Bird is an Australian Anglican, evangelical, and vice principle/lecturer at Ridley College in Melbourne. His essay is primarily concerned with America’s obsession with biblical inerrancy, and its use as a weapon to form political boundaries.
Bird mostly agrees with CSBI, but makes this point about a particularly literalistic view being twisted into it:
…the CSBI covertly embeds a particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3 into its assertions about inerrancy… Thus inerrancy becomes a clandestine method that smuggled one particular interpretation of the biblical creation story into its doctrine, with the concomitant result that to deny this literalist interpretation is tantamount to denying the inerrancy and authority of the text.
— Michael F. Bird
In fairness, Mohler and Vanhoozer defend the CSBI by stating that many of its signers would not adhere to a 6-day creation story, thus implying there are multiple “acceptable” interpretations of creation within the bounds of the CSBI.
In a similar vein to Mike Licona, Bird submits that the Gospels should be read in the literary genre in which they were written, not as perfectly accurate historical accounts of events.
I think his statement about an international emphasis on infallibility and authority is apt:
What best represents the international view, in my opinion, is a commitment to the infallibility and authority of Scripture, but not necessary a doctrine of Scripture conceived in the specific terms of the American inerrancy tradition as represented in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI).
— Michael F. Bird
In sum, I think Bird’s point is that the CSBI is uniquely American, and the international church largely ignores the term “inerrant”. It’s probably fair to go a step further and say that the CSBI is a very narrow definition of inerrancy, and only applies to some American evangelicals— mostly white, male ones. Like the early church, most international Christians are satisfied with infallibility (the Bible won’t fail to accomplish its purposes) and authority.
Vanhoozer responds by suggesting that the world will eventually need inerrancy as America does, but I’m not so confident. There is something uniquely American about our desire to find absolute historical accuracy in every Bible story and lay down absolute rules for reading Scripture, and many churches (arguably most churches) abroad simply don’t need that.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer: The Postmodernist
Vanhoozer “is an American theologian and current research professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois” (Wikipedia). If Mohler represents the conservative view, and Enns the liberal one, then I would put Vanhoozer somewhere on the right. He clearly values inerrancy as a Christian doctrine, but rightly places it underneath the resurrection and the trinity, calling it “not a doctrine of first dogmatic rank” and admits it has been a “stumbling block” for many. He also, rightly I think, distinguishes the unessential doctrine of inerrancy from the essential doctrines of infallibility and authority of Scripture.
For Vanhoozer, the definition of inerrancy is significant: “I regularly refuse to say whether I hold to inerrancy until my interlocutor defines the term (or allows me to do so).” I think I’ll take this advice moving forward, as well. He spends a good deal of his essay criticizing other inerrantists (including the CSBI) for enforcing a literalistic interpretation into their definition of inerrancy. In Vanhoozer’s eyes (and my own), there is room in inerrancy for both literalistic and allegorical readings of the Bible.
Vanhoozer proposes his own definition of inerrancy, something he calls “well-versed inerrancy”. The definition goes something like this: is “the authors speak the truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly).” I find myself in agreement with this definition, because it leaves interpretation outside inerrancy. Though, I did love this less precise definition he gave at one point:
…inerrancy tells you that what is said is true, but it cannot tell you what is said.
— Kevin Vanhoozer
For Vanhoozer, Augustine is a significant church father who displayed an excellent example of inerrancy, even calling him “the patron saint of well-versed inerrancy”. To quote Augustine:
An if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand.
— Augustine
At one point, Vanhoozer makes an distinction between “literalistic” and “literal”. He praises a “literal” reading of scripture, as in, we should take the authors’ truths literally, but not always in a “literalistic” sense (as in, not metaphorical). I found this distinction awkward and needlessly confusing. Why use the word “literal” at all in this context, unless you’re referring to a literalistic interpretation?
A better and more interesting distinction was one Vanhoozer makes between our idea of who God should be, and who he really is. He argues that many Christians weakly argue that Scripture, or God, must be ________ (perfect, inerrant, always historically accurate, etc.) because he is a “Perfect Being”. These claims wrongly superimpose a human standard of Perfect onto a God who is above our thoughts and ways. As Vanhoozer puts it: “We must make every effort to avoid identifying… inerrancy with our ideas of what a Perfect Book must be.”
John R. Franke: The Progressive Pluralist
John R. Franke is a theologian and affiliate professor of theology at Christian Theological University and Fuller Theological University. Of all the views in this book, I found Franke’s to be the hardest to pin down. In his essay, he gives a nuanced, generally progressive take on inerrancy, and spends a lot of time writing about the structure, purpose, and limitations of language, before ending on the idea of “plurality” and its importance in Christian doctrine.
Certainly, it can be said that Franke, like Enns, Bird, Vanhoozer, and many other modern evangelicals, does not believe in a literalistic interpretation of the Bible. In his mind, the word inerrancy “conjures up artificial notions of precision and exactitude that are decidedly unhelpful in the task of reading and understanding the Bible”. He doubts the church fathers would endorse the CSBI or use the word “inerrant” as it does. Like Bird, he prefers the terms “infallibility” and “authority” over inerrancy.
Franke goes on to discuss “foundationalism”, which “seeks to overcome the uncertainty generated by the tendency of fallible human beings to error, by discovering a universal and indubitable basis for human knowledge.” Apparently foundationalism is a post-Enlightment Western way to think, but I guess I’m so used to it, I can’t imagine seeing the world any other way. I can see how literalistic inerrantists take this principle to the extreme, claiming the Bible is either entirely truth or entirely false— Franke simply responds “this is nonsense.”
When it comes to language, Franke has a lot to say *wink*. He’s a believer of “divine accommodation”, which essentially means that God squeezes his infinite power and wisdom onto our imperfect and non-comprehensive language and limited capacity to understand (supposedly John Calvin also believed this). Because of divine accommodation, all language (the Bible included) cannot fully encapsulate God— according to Franke, “The early church theologian Irenaeus captured this idea by asserting that while it is true and faithful to say that God is light, it is also truth that God is unlike any light that we know.” I found this concept and Franke’s explanation quite convincing.
In a related sense, Franke believes that the essence of Biblical authority is not the words themselves, but rather the ways the Holy Spirit speaks through them:
The reading and interpretation of the text are for the purpose of listening to the voice of the Spirit, who speaks in and through Scripture to the church in the present. This means that the Bible is authoritative in that it is the vehicle through which the Spirit speaks.
— John R. Franke
Because he believes it’s ultimately the Spirit that speaks through the vehicle of the Bible, I think it’s easier for Franke to digest problematic or contradictory Biblical texts. He recognizes that the Bible is a collection of texts from different settings, perspectives, authors, and time periods; our four similar (but not identical) gospels point out this fact. I think Vanhoozer’s response summarizes it quite well: “In short, Scripture is not a deposit of propositional truth (too static) but rather an instrument the Spirit uses linguistically to construct the community of God.”
In this way, Scripture can be seen as “plural” in the sense that it conveys a plurality of truth and perspectives on God. Franke takes this concept to the next level, believing that the Bible can be used to authorize multiple perspectives of God and Christianity. For me, this is quite a striking and fringe concept, and something I’ll have to think about.
Scripture itself authorizes multiple perspectives within a set of possibilities that are also appropriately circumscribed by the shape and content of the canon. The plurality of the church is a faithful expression of the plurality of Scripture…
— John R. Franke
In a fascinating twist, Franke uses inerrancy as a tool, showing that it prevents the development of a single normative system of theology— much to corporate Christianity’s chagrin.
The inerrant plurality of Scripture frustrates attempts to establish a single universal theology. It reminds us that our interpretation, theories, and theologies are always situated and perspectival; none simply rise above the social conditions and particular interests from which they emerge.
…
Inerrancy calls on us to surrender the pretensions of a universal and timeless theology.
— John R. Franke
I’m not entirely convinced that Franke is right here; his statements, for me, toe the line of relativism.