Inerrancy: The New
Catholicism?
Biblical Authority
Vs. Creedal Authority
By Robert M.
Price
The current
struggle among Southern Baptists over the inerrancy of the Bible is only
the latest episode of a controversy that began to rage among American
Evangelicals a decade ago (1976). Then the opening salvo was the
publication of the gossipy bombshell The Battle for the Bible by Harold
Lindsell. Though Lindsell was himself a Southern Baptist, he aimed his
guns at other bastions of Evangelicalism like Fuller Theological
Seminary, with which he had also had some connection. At the time
Lindsell complained that some scholarly Evangelicals were a bit too
friendly toward trends in modern(ist) biblical study and that their
resultant rejection of rigid inerrancy was simply a continuation of the
Modernism of the past led by Charles Augustus Briggs, Harry Emerson
Fosdick, and others. Thus his polemic was quite intentionally opening a
new battle in the long and never-concluded Fundamentalist-Modernist
Controversy. Our current denominational crisis over this issue is yet
another engagement in this continuing conflict.
One tactic of the
inerrantist camp in the phase of the struggle immediately preceding our
own was the founding in 1977 of the International Council on Biblical
Inerrancy (ICBI) which seeks to coordinate a ten-year program to promote
belief in inerrancy. The most visible accomplishment of the ICBI is the
promulgation of two “Chicago Statements” (in 1978 and 1982) on inerrancy
itself and on the proper hermeneutics (or rules of interpreting the
Bible) entailed by inerrancy. I want to examine some features of the
first two, because I believe they indicate the direction of the
inerrancy movement as a whole. The Statements themselves are symptomatic
of a trend, for one thing both the Melodyland School of Theology and the
Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, produced similar statements of what one
must believe about the Bible and how one is to interpret it, and it
would not surprise me to see the fundamentalists who now control our
church issue something similar. And beyond this, the Statements
crystallize inerrancy thinking as a whole, even where it is not so
directly distilled.
The Chicago
Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) was sometimes unclear on details,
perhaps because it was a conference document, and such texts are likely
to be compromise documents containing, at some points, a little of this
view and a little of that. Even among inerrantists, it seems, there are
conservatives and moderates! But the general drift is certainly clear:
“We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to
spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in
the fields of history and science” (Article XII). Why is the scope of
inerrancy so far-reaching? Simply because, as we often hear, what
scripture says, God says. There is a one-to-one identification. We are
not left to guess at this; the Statement affirms that “the very words of
the original were given by divine inspiration” (Article VI). Perhaps it
is finally time for inerrantists to come clean and admit that they do
after all believe in the medieval dictation idea of inspiration. If the
words just quoted from Article VI do not equal a definition of
dictation, what can language mean? It is superfluous for the drafters to
say, “The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us”
(Article VII). If we are to take Article VI seriously, the mode of
inspiration is no mystery at all to the inerrantists. In fact this is
the whole point of the controversy. If we really did not know how
inspiration “worked” (some of us admit we do not), we could not be sure
whether scripture could contain incidental inaccuracies or not. It is
only because God is supposed to have said directly and exactly “what
scripture says” that inerrancy is thought necessary.
Article VIII
suggests that the drafters were indeed uncomfortably aware of how close
they were to the dictation model. Here they repeat the standard
indignant repudiation of the dictation theory. The Article denies that
divine inspiration “overrode [the biblical writers’] personalities. “ In
other words, as J. I. Packer put it in his ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word
of God, verbal inspiration doesn’t imply “that the mental activity of
the writers was simply suspended” (p. 78). But this is all just a
smokescreen. The psychology of divine dictation is not the relevant
point (“Were Paul and Isaiah in a trance?”). If you believe in any
version of inspiration that forces you to say God caused Paul to write
word-for-word, “I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius... (I
did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know
whether I baptized anyone else.)” (I Corinthians 1:14, 16), my friend,
you believe in dictation. Pardon me if I do not.
Another
interesting example of using rhetoric and euphemism to cover the
embarrassments of one’s position is the Chicago Statement’s words on
“progressive revelation.” Though the signers claim to believe in it, “We
deny that later revelation... ever corrects or contradicts [earlier
revelation]” (Article V). Now what is going on here?
It is obvious to
any sane reader that Deuteronomy 24:1 and Mark 10:2-12, to take but one
example, simply do not say the same thing about the legitimacy of
divorce. Do the Chicago inerrantists actually intend to commit
themselves to harmonizing this “apparent contradiction” by some
mind-torturing rationalization? Or do they simply mean to avoid the
nasty-sounding word “contradiction”?
I do not believe I
am merely carping here, because this is what so much of fundamentalist
harmonizing results in. The inerrantist says there can be no real
contradictions in the Bible, yet he or she freely admits that there are
plenty of “apparent contradictions.” (Gleason Archer has written a bulky
“encyclopedia” of such “biblical difficulties.”) The fundamentalist’s
job is to show how some barely possible interpretation of “problem
passage” A would square better with the plain sense of passage B, which
A “apparently contradicts.” Do you see what is almost being admitted
here? An “apparent contradiction” between A and B means that we cannot
believe and obey the “apparent, or plain, sense” of both A and B, so we
must resort to an admittedly strained exegesis of one or the other. For
instance, I have often heard it admitted that Philippians 2:12, “Work
out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” does not sound very
much like Paul’s doctrine that attaining salvation has nothing to do
with works (Ephesians 2:8-9), even if you throw in the
synergistic-sounding v. 13, so we had better assume (pretend? ) that
Paul really meant, despite what it looks like, “work your already-secure
salvation outward from within, so everyone can see the fruits of it. “
Besides swallowing
your better judgment, what is the problem with such harmonizing?
Basically, though it is intended to save the doctrine of biblical
authority, it does just the opposite. Why? Because Protestants
(including, explicitly, the Chicago inerrantists-see Article XVII of the
1978 Statement, Article XV of the 1982 Statement) believe that it is the
plain, literal, apparent sense of the biblical text that is
authoritative, not some alleged esoteric meaning beneath the surface. To
a model of biblical authority based on the apparent sense of the text,
“apparent contradictions” are the most fatal kind!
To hide behind
euphemisms like “biblical difficulties” and to hope piously that once we
get to heaven God will explain them all like puzzle-solutions in a kind
of celestial ICBI seminar changes nothing. Suppose I need to know
whether I may or may not seek a divorce, or whether my salvation is
purely a gift or somehow needs to be “worked out” by me. The hope of
finding out the right answer someday in heaven is not going to do me
much good now. If a denial of inerrancy would rob the believer of the
comforting certitudes of biblicistic proof-texting, then dropping the
problems into the convenient bin of “apparent difficulties” should have
the same effect. Either way, the troublesome passages are effectively
useless as prooftexts.
The problem of
contradictions between biblical teachings finally drives the Chicago
inerrantists to a complete abdication of critical reason. In the
explanatory section “Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation,” the
signers affirm that one day all “seeming discrepancies” which stubbornly
resist the best ingenuity of harmonists on this side of the hilltop,
will in the light of eternity “be seen to have been illusions. “ Thus
inerrantists render their opinions forever immune from disproof: “My
mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.” The Christian Science
sect is also adept at this kind of sleight-of-hand; they insist that
sickness and evil are just illusions, too.
The 1978 Chicago
Statement leaves generalities aside long enough to focus its guns on a
particular aspect of modern biblical studies, form-criticism, the
attempt to trace original, simpler units which have been elaborated,
reinterpreted and embellished in their present canonical form. A good
example of such critical study would be Joachim Jeremias’s The Parables
of Jesus. Jeremias tries to show how we can sometimes reconstruct an
earlier form of this or that parable and show how Jesus would have meant
something a bit different by it than Matthew or Mark did when they
reinterpreted or updated it for use in their gospels.
The Chicago
signers do not like such attempts to go back behind the canonical form
of the text: “We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or
quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing [it]...”
(Article XVII). At least they think they do not like this kind of thing,
but the fact is they have always loved it. What do you think Harold
Lindsell and company are doing when they harmonize the contradictions
between the various accounts of Peter’s denial by suggesting that Peter
denied Jesus six times? This hypothetical “original version” of the
story (which is only imperfectly reflected by the surviving canonical
versions) rivals anything put forward by “Modernist” form-critics. What
are the constant appeals to an unavailable “inerrant autograph,” but a
desperate retreat to a lost and purely hypothetical “original version”
superior to the text we have today?
Both Chicago
Statements try to give the impression that inerrantists are really as
interested in serious biblical scholarship as anyone else. The drafters
of the 1978 Statement affirm that the Bible student must be ready to
“take into account [scripture’s] literary forms and devices” (Article
XVIII). The 1982 Statement similarly affirms “that awareness of the
literary categories, formal and stylistic, of the various parts of
Scripture is essential for proper exegesis, and hence we value genre
criticism as one of the many disciplines of biblical study” (Article
XIII). But not so fast! Chicago 78 pulls the reins at genres which might
“reject... [a biblical book’s] claims to authorship” (ibid.), while
Chicago 82 rules out “generic categories which negate historicity [in]
biblical narratives which present themselves as factual” (ibid.). In
other words, we may recognize the biblical use of proverbs, acrostic
poems, parables, allegories, genealogies, court chronicles, etc., but we
cannot admit the possible presence of midrash (edifying fictional
expansion or creation of stories) or pseudonymous authorship.
Both of these
allegedly ungodly genres were quite common and unobjectionable in
ancient times, so why are they excluded from the Bible, like unicorns
from Noah’s ark? Simply because they do not conform to the prior dogma
of absolute inerrancy held by the Chicago divines. A good example of a
text taken as an inspired piece of midrashic fiction by virtually all
mainstream biblical scholars is the episode of Peter’s walking on the
water (Matthew 14:28-31) The spiritual meaning of this text (which
appears only in Matthew) has been plain to every preacher of it,
fundamentalist or Modernist: as long as we fix our eyes on Jesus, we
will not sink amid our troubles. The story teaches this point
incomparably well. But if it were literally true as historical fact, it
is just inexplicable why Mark and John (or their sources) could have
failed to mention it. The inerrantist, instead of drawing the obvious
conclusion, will wait till he or she gets to heaven to find some other,
more acceptable explanation, because according to the dogma of
inerrantism, the midrash explanation sounds like “sibboleth” (Judges
12:5-6).
What is the
problem with deeming Matthew 14:28-31 a piece of edifying midrash? It
involves no denial of miracles per se. It involves no “disbelieving of
the Bible,” because a midrash is not asking to be (mis)taken for
historical reportage. Midrash only poses as history in precisely the
same way parables do. I once had an eccentric student who insisted that
all the parables actually happened: there was, literally, a prodigal
son, a particular dishonest steward, etc. Inerrantists by and large do
not insist that parables are nonfiction, but for some reason they do so
insist when it comes to evident myth (e.g., talking snakes) and midrash.
Are these the same individuals who “deny that Scripture should be
required to fit alien preunderstandings” (1982, Article XV), who “deny
that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth
and error that are alien to its usage or purpose” (1978, Article XIII)?
All of the above
observations lead to the most important criticism of the Chicago
Statements. They are essentially Catholicizing documents. This, of
course, is no fault if one a Catholic, but our drafters affirm instead
that “the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the
conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that
of Scripture” (1978, Article II). But in practice, the Chicago
Statements subordinate exegesis to prior doctrine; indeed, this is their
express purpose: why else draft a statement of how the Bible may and may
not be construed, what it may and may not be heard to say?
At the beginning
of the Protestant Reformation, the lines were clearly drawn on issues
that were no less clear. On the one side was medieval Catholicism. It
had determined that the Bible might only be interpreted so as to support
Church dogma. The only way to ensure this was to see that traditional
dogma governed the interpretation of scripture To that end the Church
fostered the allegorical method whereby the troublesome literal meaning
of texts might be cast aside in favor of a subtle “meaning” that would
accord with Catholic dogma. If such a course were not followed,
Catholics feared, every Bible reader would become his own Pope and the
monolith of Catholic theology would be replaced by a thousand competing
“heresies. “
On the other side
were the Reformers who proposed to peel away the layers of dogma and at
last see what the biblical writers had intended to say, let the chips
fall where they might. Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) must be
the only court of appeal. To avoid the Church ventriloquism of
allegorizing exegesis, the Reformers proposed the
“grammatico-historical” method of exegesis: in other words, interpret
the Bible as you would Ovid, Livy, or Tacitus. If God there is no other
way to understand it than to understand it as human literature. There
could be no “sacred hermeneutics,” only the sacred authority of a text
interpreted in a “secular” way.
Indeed, once this
step had been taken no external authority could reimpose the lost
monolithic unity. The Reformation did result in the feared sectarianism
and subjectivism. It could not be otherwise if each individual were to
interpret scripture for him Or herself, with all of us seeing in a glass
darkly. But surely the fresh hearing of the (often shocking) voice of
scripture was worth the dizzying diversity that ensued.
But then as now
some people could tolerate only so much diversity, perhaps because their
own faith was not secure unless it could depend on a majority consensus,
and Protestants began to try to impose uniformity by enacting creeds of
their own. “We believe in the Bible, and the essence of that belief is
thus and so.” So the cycle began again, and new nonconformist “sects”
and “heresies” arose, using Sola Scriptura or “Back to the Bible”
as their cry. The dynamics of this ever-repeating process are probably
more psychological than theological.
At any rate, I
think that in the Evangelical “battle for the Bible, “ no less in our
own Southern Baptist imbroglio, we are again lining up in the same old
roles. Conservatives have determined that the “old time religion” must
be maintained and that any contrary interpretation of scripture must be
disallowed. The heresies that threaten the inherited “orthodoxy’ today
(Christian Feminism, Theistic Evolution, Liberation Theology, etc., some
explicitly named in the 1982 Statement) seem to depend on modern
biblical criticism, just as Protestantism itself was made possible by
the grammatico-historical method. So biblical criticism must be ruled
out by a set of theologically determined rules of interpretation. Do you
think this is a distorted caricature? In the June 1986 ICBI newsletter,
chairman James Montgomery Boice rejoices that “our two sets of
‘Affirmations and Denials’ have achieved almost creedal importance in
many places” (p. 1).
At the dawn of the
Reformation, the position of each side was at least self-consistent.
Catholics were candid in their elevation of ecclesiastical tradition and
creeds over the Bible. But today it is otherwise. The tragic irony of
our Evangelical battle is that the “Catholics” think they are the
Protestants! It is the authority of the Bible they think they are
defending! Yet what kind of “biblical authority” is carefully filtered
through a hermeneutical grid constructed by church dogma?
I believe that to
believe in, to adhere to, the authority of scripture alone that may
upset our scholastic systems, our cherished assumptions, or our
comfortable certainties. Those not willing to take that risk may be
“zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20) but they are unwitting opponents of
biblical authority.