July 5, 2017

Biblical Inerrancy: What It Is & What It's Not

Preface: I had a somewhat troubling conversation recently with someone who questioned my convictions on the Bible being inerrant (in other words, that there are no errors in it) based on the fact that I teach evolution and Big Bang theory in the context of Genesis. So, this excerpt is from a book I'm working on and addresses just that. How can Scripture be inerrant and not totally literally true? Furthermore, how can you put stock in Genesis and modern science? Well, this article is just the first of many steps to understanding that by distinguishing between the types of errors that exist in any document. I assure you, it can be done and done comfortably, and should be done by anyone who hopes to engage the Bible as an authority while also living in our scientifically advancing world without constant struggle between two non-conflicting truths.

Contrary to the unexamined presumption that some of us might have held since we were children, the Bible didn’t fall out of the sky just as it is, nor did God hand it down himself from the clouds to the Church. It was a long process during the time of early Judaism and then was another long process during the time of early Christian development. There were translation disputes, discernments over which books were genuine and which were forgeries, as well as figuring out what books were inspired and which ones weren’t.1 And, some folks still aren’t even sure those decisions were entirely the right ones.

This brings me to the two types of errors to think about when you read the Bible. There are two fundamental types of errors one can encounter when reading any text, which are material and formal. One you will find in the Bible (quite often) and the other you will not find there, at least under the pretense of the Judeo-Christian faith.

The first type, material error (or, more accurately, material imperfection), refers to an imperfection that is just part of the material and human condition. These are errors (or just limited truths) that result from the imperfect human perspective, which is limited by time, culture, and a number of other transient things, which are by nature temporary. There are major things to point out about material imperfections, which do occur in the Bible. One is that once we recognize that there were different time periods and cultures at work on the human authors, we can acknowledge some historical factors, like the fact that some cultures in the Ancient Near East (where the Old Testament was written) measured the span of a year differently than others in the neighboring areas. This obviously makes some of the more fantastic claims of exceedingly long life spans of Old Testament2 figures a little easier to swallow (but don’t be too quick to take that as an explanation, just one factor at work among many).

The other point about this is more abstract, but nonetheless crucial. God is the one who reveals prophecy to the human author. If there’s two things we know about God and man, it’s this: God is perfect and man is not. So, God doesn’t (and really can’t) give human prophets full revelation. This means that what you get in Scripture is a partial truth. This is not a less valid or “half-truth,” mind you, but just an incomplete or limited truth—limited in terms of being within the boundaries of our limited animal capacity for understanding. The only one who has the whole, entire, unlimited story is the Big Man, God Himself. We might assume that if any one human got the whole divine truth, his head might bust like melon in Gallagher’s kitchen.

The second type of error, the formal error, is the type you won’t find in divinely inspired Scripture. A formal error is something that’s asserted for its own sake, like a command or statement of absolute truth. This gets into some more complicated concepts, but the easiest way to imagine this is to remove the factor of time and ask whether or not something is still true anytime, all the time, yesterday as well as today and tomorrow. So, in the Bible, you shouldn’t find anything that just plain is not true at all under any circumstances ever.

One example of what may seem like a formal error and is just the result of the passage of time is the famous Old Testament command to exact equal vengeance—an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:24), which the New Testament later recants.3 In those days though, what we’ve lost sight of in modern times, which are already shaped by a couple of thousand years of New Testament morality, is that it was pretty common to have totally unbridled vengeance. In other words, if you punched your neighbor in the eye, he might burn your crops and/or kill your whole family, depending on how ornery he was that day.

That sounds pretty severe to us, but those were more brutal times, mostly without standardized moral teachings and most often completely without organized law enforcement. So, when God inspired the prophetic writers to take an “eye for an eye,” they were making a restriction, not a prescription. To the 3,000-something B.C. Israelite, it wasn’t big news that you got to punch your neighbor in the eye after he punched you, but to only punch him in the eye if he did so to you first (and leave his wife and kids alone) was breaking, headline news material.

When Jesus, in the Gospels of the New Testament, recants this law and tells everyone to “turn the other cheek,” he’s not saying that there was a formal error in the Old Testament. What he was doing is pointing out a material imperfection, something that was written for a specific time, place, and people, and giving it a further update in a new and more developed time.4 This development, rather than being seen as confusing or contradictory, then becomes pretty impressive to track since it went from restricting a more primitive culture to a reasonable system of equal justice to teaching a younger generation about mercy. And, even better, what we’re really seeing is God teaching people, or giving revelation, in stages that we can digest as a species. Just like your parents first taught you how to not poop in your pants, then (much later) taught you how to wear dress pants for a job interview, God first taught us how to be humans and coexist, then started teaching us how to be like Himself.

Above all, remember to read everything in its own context. You don't read a science textbook to get spiritual advice, so don't read religious scriptures to get scientific information; don't read poetry for history, and don't read history for inspiration (because it's often pretty depressing); and, I don't swim in your toilet, so don't pee in my pool.5

1. The canon of Sacred Scripture was firmly established for the Catholic Church during the Council of Trent in 1546 (see CCC, §120), for the Anglican Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in 1563 (see BCP, p.867), and for the Protestant Reformation in the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647 (see WCF, §2).
2. E.g., Genesis 5:3-31; 9:28-29.
3. Matthew 5:38.
4. This precept also applies to the book of Leviticus, which is a book of priestly instructions, not moral laws as is often misunderstood to be (cf. Acts 10:9-16).
5. I don't really have a pool. But, if I ever get one, please don't pee in it.