Biblical Inerrancy V: Alternate Views of Scripture

“I want to know one thing – the way to heaven: how to land safe on that happy shore. God Himself has condescended to teach the way. He hath written it down in a book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book.”

- John Wesley

(Previous posts in the series can be accessed here)

When you encounter a present-day view of Holy Scripture, you encounter more than a view of Scripture. What you meet is a total view of God and the world, that is, a total theology, which is both an ontology, declaring what there is, and an epistemology, stating how we know what there is.

The view of Scripture I have defined is called “full inerrancy”. There are other types of “inerrancy” that many claim to believe, yet an examination of them reveals that most are no inerrancy at all. The other types of “inerrancy” include:

Technical or Absolute Inerrancy: This view was expressed in Harold Lindell’s “Battle for the Bible”, and presents that all of what the Bible is can be shown to be true when evaluated based upon contemporary science, historiography, and journalism. This differs from full inerrancy in that it demands that every description in Scripture be defended in accordance with current scientific, historical, and journalistic standards.

Limited Inerrancy: This view holds that the Scriptures are inerrant in its salvific doctrines. It creates a distinction between these and empirical, natural references, ascribing errors to the state of scientific, journalistic and historical limitations of the time of the writers. For the purposes for which the Bible was given, it is fully truthful and inerrant.

Kergymatic Inerrancy or Inerrancy of Purpose: The ‘big picture’ of the Bible gets across, even though there are errors in it. The ‘inerrancy’ in view here is one that holds that the Bible inerrantly accomplishes its purpose, which is to bring people into personal fellowship with Christ, not to communicate truths. While it accomplishes this purpose effectively, it is improper to relate inerrancy to factuality. Thus, truth is not thought of as a quality of propositions, but as means to accomplish an end. Implicit in this position is a pragmatic view of truth.

Accommodated Revelation: Also, there are views which do not claim any inerrancy of the Scriptures at all. This position emphasizes that the Bible came through human writers and thus participates in the shortcomings of human nature. This is not only true in historical and scientific matters, but in theological and moral matters as well. Proponents of this view are those who simply declare that Paul was wrong in some of his doctrinal teachings because of his rabbinical background, or that sometimes he was right and sometimes wrong. Some even feel that Jesus was wrong, not merely unaware, of the time of his return.

Nonpropositional Revelation: This view denies that the Scriptures are revelation at all, preferring to describe only the person-to-person encounter as revelatory. The whole question of truth or falsity does not apply. The presence of errors in the Bible are those of the writers, because the words are those of the writers, not of God, yet these in no way work against the usefulness of the Bible.

The type of theology that arises from full inerrancy is evangelical or perhaps fundamentalist (though many who call themselves fundamentalist demand absolute inerrancy). While there are a smorgasbord of other theologies, the three most prevalent are liberal theology, neoorthodoxy, and historical-critical theology.

As I demonstrated in a previous post (the bottom half of it), full inerrancy was the historical view of the church, both Protestant and Catholic, until the so-called “Age of Reason” and particularly in the subsequent “Enlightenment” of the 18^th century. Even though the Catholic Church added the authoritative interpretation by the church authorities as revelation as well, it did not change the fundamental view of scripture as God’s revelatory word. The Reformers rejected the idea of additional revelation, but their understanding of the nature of the Bible was also the historic position.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the single greatest contributor to the Enlightenment, said that “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s own intelligence without the guidance of another…Having the courage to make use of your own intelligence is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” This movement was characterized by a rejection of external authority – whether the Bible, the church or the state – because people, they said, should not be bound by ancient customs or creeds. Second, human destiny lies in progress, based upon the belief that human nature is basically good. Third, the knowledge of God and religious truth is ultimately attainable through human reason – and therefore divine revelation is unnecessary. As a result of the Enlightenment (the advent of the “modernist” worldview), many theologians came up with new ways to explain the concept of revelation and the nature of the Bible.

Liberal Theology: Liberal theology uses the last two views of scripture (accommodated revelation and non-propositional revelation) to construct its views. Essentially, liberalism claims that revelation comes through human subjective experience.

The primary figure in Theological Liberalism (hereafter referred to as liberalism) is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) who was highly influenced by Kant. He agreed that we cannot know anything for real, the thing in itself. Therefore we cannot know God in Himself, it’s in the ‘noumenal’ realm. We can’t know Him, but we can only know our experience of God. He defined religion as “a feeling of absolute dependence”. We use our imaginations to construct God concepts that help people because the purpose of religion is to help people, and our religion ends up becoming ideological. Liberalism does not believe that God has spoken.

Thus, the Bible is regarded as nothing but the confirmation of the religion of reason, often stated in fictitious stories, and is not the Word of God. Rather, the teachings of the Bible are only the experiences of the Christian community expressed in words. The idea of revelation in the religious experience became popular first in liberalism. Schliermacher’s student, Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) argued that we need to understand Christ as the archetypal man, the Christ-figure (since liberals believe that we obviously don’t know if we know the historical Christ, that Christ is not the revelation of God, and is not God) for how we should live in ethical behavior – social justice. In liberalism there is no sin, no atonement (because there is no need since we are “basically good”), and no revelation. Another example of a leading pioneer of liberalism is Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) a church historian. His claim would be that we read the Bible to discover the kernels among the husk. There are all kinds of “husk” according to von Harnack - miracles, supernatural parts of the Bible, etc (of course he and his followers are Darwinists, and think there is a lot in the Bible that is crazy) but there are some “kernels” of truth that we save and keep.

Liberalism affirms, in Clark Pinnock's words, that "divine truth is not located in an ancient book but in the ongoing work of the Spirit in the community, as discerned by critical rational judgment." Note, however, that "divine truth" means to liberals, not God's instruction nor a permanently valid human formulation, but simply an authentic awareness of God, to which no particular form of words is necessary either as a means or as an expression. As J. Gresham Machen pointed out half a century ago in Christianity and Liberalism, the liberal position in all its forms is deeply anti-intellectual in both its stance and its thrust, and this explains why it is so consistently hostile to the attempts of both Roman Catholics and evangelicals to formulate a definitive theology on the basis of a supposedly definitive Bible.

Liberalism also espouses a type of Christology that is not "from above" in the sense of seeing Jesus Christ as the divine Son, the second person of the Godhead, and the eternal Word made flesh, according to John's Gospel, Philippians 2, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1-2, which the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulae follow. Instead, liberal Christologies are "from below," seeing Jesus in "humanitarian" terms as a prophetic, God-filled man, an archetype of religious insight and excellence, one who, however much he carries for us what Ritschl called the "value" of God, is not God in person. Such Christologies involve, of course, abandoning all thought of a real ontological Trinity and a real divine sin-bearer. They require a reconstructed view of salvation in which Christ's mediation appears as a matter of teaching and trail-blazing only, with no hint of his having borne the Creator's wrath against our sins in order to render him propitious to us - for it would take a divine person to do that. Liberals characteristically cut the knot here by denying that there is any personal wrath of God against us that needs to be quenched and maintain a barrage of criticism against "word-made-flesh" Christology as being necessarily docetic, minimizing the true humanness of our Lord.

Liberalism highlights human religious greatness, as seen in the Bible, in Jesus, and in all Christian, pagan, and secular pioneers who have in any way contributed to man's "humanization" by stressing life's spiritual and moral values. Rightly does Pinnock say that “liberals have sought to replace the idea of the Bible's infallibility as teaching from God with what they saw as proper respect for its human greatness" as "a classical witness of those in whose lives God once worked which can once again serve to alert us to his reality."

Liberalism held its greatest sway from the late 1800’s until the First World War – when the idea of a subjectivity that cannot describe anything, not even the poison gassing of men, as objectively sinful, fell out of favor, and out of the ashes of WW I arose…

Neoorthodoxy: For many theologians, equating subjective religious experience with divine revelation brought God too close to human beings, who were clearly capable of significant evil. Thus, some kind of objective message from God, the One who is transcendent and who can encounter individuals in their sinfulness, is necessary. Revelation and its expression in human words must be more than human insight into spiritual and moral things. In neoorthodoxy, revelation comes through events in which God personally encounters individuals. Neoorthodoxy often uses kergymatic and limited inerrancy to describe its view of the Scriptures.

The initiator of neoorthodoxy was Karl Barth (1886-1968), who embodied the neo-orthodox commitment that God exists and had made Himself known. The events through which God revealed himself include the saving acts of God in history such as the call of Abraham, the Exodus, and the person and work of Christ. God exists as a transcendent, holy God, who made Himself known in Christ. The Bible is a witness to the revelation of God in Christ, and Christ is the Word of God, not the Bible. The Bible does a pretty good job of witnessing to God, but is not inerrancy or a divine product. Therefore, since the Bible is a good witness to Christ, we should preach from it. In neoorthdoxy, however, the Scriptures are not revelation itself. God continues throughout history to use this original witness of the Scriptures to confront people in similar revelatory occasions in which he encounters individuals to reveal himself.

This “encounter” is referred to as God “speaking”, and its content is “the Word of God.” But this Word is never equated with human words, such as those in the Bible. Rather, the “Word” is personal, that is, God himself in revelation, and particularly Jesus Christ, the Word of God. This revealed Word encounters us not as information, but as God’s saving presence, and this calls for obedience, not assent to certain truths.

Barth represents not only the greatest of the neoorthodox thinkers, he also represents its most conservative. Even so, though Barth makes quite a meal of rejecting any formal ascription of inerrancy to the Bible and of affirming its "capacity for errors," he declines to identify particular mistakes in it, although he declares in general terms that there are some, both factual and religious. On the contrary, "while preaching the inerrancy of the Bible, Barth practices its inerrancy": his interpretations, while sometimes novel and unconvincing, are always presented as elucidations of the witness the text actually bears, without any suggestion that anything it says should be discounted as false. Evangelicals will applaud Barth's exegesis as correct in method, if not always in substance; but we must realize that by stating that the prophets and apostles erred in their writings, even if we cannot say where, Barth himself has made his exegetical method seem hazardous, arbitrary, and untrustworthy. It is impossible to maintain high doctrines of revelation and inspiration without at the same time being willing to defend in detail the veracity and historicity of the biblical writings. But here Barth fails us, and the effect of his failure is to make it seem unreasonable for anyone to trust the texts as he seems to. It must be recorded that other neoorthodox thinkers see this very clearly, and therefore do not so trust the Scriptures.

No self-respecting neoorthodox preacher would ever preface the reading of Scripture by saying, “We will now hear the Word of God.” That would be blasphemy, presuming to tell God when and to whom He is to speak. The neoorthodox view is that reality and truth are dynamic rather than static or substantive. Revelation is something that happens, not something that is. Thus, when the neoorthodox speak of revelation, they have in mind the process, not the product.

Historical-critical Theology: The third view of Scripture sees revelation not in or through history, but as history. These theologians, led by Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-), state that God acts through history in such a way that the events actually were and are revelation of himself. They view the acts of God in history as literal, not figurative or metaphorical. The resurrection of Jesus, perhaps the supreme act of God in history, can be proved by reason, just as any other fact of history.

In HC Theology, the history discussed is not exclusively the events in Scripture, but all of history is considered the revelation of God. By doing so, the previously discussed differences between general and specific revelation are eliminated. In this view the revelation of God throughout history does not need the support of any supernatural revelatory Word. Rather, the manifestation of God is open to anyone. When we thoroughly investigate our world and our own human nature, using the best critical tools of modern scholarship, we recognize the reality of God by the light that his presence sheds on our experiences. The resurrection of Christ obviously has significance for human life – it proves that the God of Israel is the one true God. However, it’s further significance is not established, because history continues, as does the revelation of God.

Conclusion:

All of these Modernist views of Scripture have four things in common. First, they are significantly different from the nearly 1800 years of Christian theology regarding Scripture prior to the Enlightenment. Second, they all accept human reason as the final criterion of truth. Even those who have a desire to have a Word that addresses humanity from outside still accept the conclusions of rationalistic scientific historical criticism in saying that the Bible has errors in it and is not the objective truth of God. Third, revelation is conveyed only indirectly through human religious subjectivism. Revelation may come through the exalted insight of human reason – individual or communal – through emotional religious experience, or through an encounter with God. This reason may be described as “illumination by the Spirit”, but it is reason nonetheless, revealed as such because it is almost always in exact agreement with the current cultural view of that time and place. But, revelation is never the direct communication of divine truth, coming to individuals as objective propositional teachings. Lastly, because this revelation is mediated indirectly and never objectively, it never communicates absolute truth. Its truth is always conditional in some way by its limited historical environment and it is therefore always relative. It is only claimed as truth when it cannot be measured in any fashion. Thus, in all cases above one can “follow Jesus” without believing anything specific.

Now that the alternate views of Scripture have been defined, I will finish the series with a post describing “The Need for Inerrancy.”

Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 3:14-18)