Introduction
I have recently encountered more and more Christians who believe the Bible is not the inerrant word of God and, in fact, contains mistakes originating with its authors as they struggled with concepts the Holy Spirit was dropping on them. Most famous of these is the author of That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley-Hart, about whom I have already written. Thinking for me is always a dangerous thing, but this got me wondering all the same.
In this article, I will be arguing such a position is not only untenable, but unbiblical and dangerous.
Scripture as a Category
One may wonder why we need to get into some of the history of Scripture as a category. Christian beliefs in the early church about scripture and what was defined as scripture are vitally important to any debate about the Bible’s inerrancy or otherwise.
In 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Paul makes this comment:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
And this begs the question: just what is this “scripture” thing? What writings were included in “scripture”? Writing to the Philippians some time in the early to mid-second century AD, Polycarp, the teacher of Ignatius of Antioch and disciple of the Apostle John, quoted the Epistle to the Ephesians and explicitly referred to it as “scripture.” (Polycarp, Philippians 12:1) Clearly, very early on, Paul’s epistles, often intended to be read publicly in a Christian fellowship, were considered to be on the same level of authority as the Torah and other First Testament writings.
There are indications this categorisation extended even further back into the lifetimes of the Apostles themselves. In 1 Timothy 5:18, the Bible says “For Scripture says, ‘Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,’ and ‘The worker deserves his wages.’” The first quote is from Deuteronomy 25:4, and that should be no surprise coming from Paul. The second quote comes from Luke 10:7. For Paul, the category of “scripture” included, at the very least, Luke’s Gospel.
Even the Jesus’ disciple, Peter, has something to say about scriptures and what writings should be included in that group. In 2 Peter 3:15-16, Peter writes:
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Peter is clearly collecting Paul’s letters as a group into what Christians consider “scripture” with the word “other”. The language he uses suggests he is not expecting this statement to be controversial to his readers. He is just throwing the comment out there about “other scriptures” with no attempt to justify the statement.
When we consider these verses, the scriptures we can accept as “God-breathed” include those we would consider part of the canon. The canon itself had long been in common use before the Council of Nicaea gave it a more “official” ratification in 325 AD. Very early on, even in the first century, Christians understood the epistles of Paul and at least the Gospel of Luke as scripture. That is, to be held on an equal footing with the First Testament. Polycarp’s reference only serves to confirm that.
What does it mean for a writing to be “God-breathed”, or in other words, inspired by the Holy Spirit? This is where the metal meets the meat. For some Christians, seemingly referring to themselves as “progressive” for the most part, divine inspiration means the writer can and has introduced mistakes into the Biblical text. Some Christians hold this as part of the process of the author struggling with and working through what has been revealed to him. Some even say not all of the Bible is “God-breathed”. On the other side of the garden, some Christians hold the Bible is without error because it has been divinely inspired.
Inerrancy is Not Literalism
One of the misconceptions I have bumped into a lot is the idea that Biblical inerrancy requires one to be a Biblical literalist. A common argument to support this, and therefore a progressive understanding of the Bible, is based on the creation account in Genesis. Clearly Moses got it wrong when he claimed the cosmos was created in seven twenty-four days, including one for God to kick his heels up and admire His handiwork. Undoubtedly, there are some Christians who hold to this view of a seven-day creation, but I have not met any who have been willing to admit it. From what I understand, even in the USA, such Christians would be viewed something like a weird aunt who freaks people out at family gatherings.
Assuming believers who accept inerrancy need to accept literalism is a false argument, valid to a small minority of Christians at best, in my own experience. The Genesis account is clearly not a scientific text in the sense of...well...any scientific text. The very structure of Genesis 1 speaks against a literal interpretation. The repetitive structure suggests the text is something far more artistic and theological in aim. Christian writers like Robert J. Asher (Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Palaeontologist) appear to be in the more mainstream. Therefore a literal interpretation of Genesis is highly improbable and I would think the original authors may have understood that. They were not writing something scientific even in their own minds, but expressing theological truths about what God did in bringing about the cosmos and how it all got screwed up.
In talking about marriage and divorce, Jesus has this to say: “’For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” To believe someone would interpret this literally is truly to beggar the understanding. Clearly, Jesus was not referring to a literal union of flesh. At most, an oblique reference to the sexual act, or, more probably, a point and lesson more profound was in His mind.
It is patently clear that inerrancy requiring an absolutely adherence to literalism is neither desirable nor tenable. The Bible itself is far more complex and far richer than literalists seem to believe. It is literalists who make the easiest targets for people who agree with Bentley-Hart.
Therefore, what follows will be based on the divorce between these two falsely conjoined concepts. While literalism needs inerrancy, the same is not true going the other way.
The God Bit - His Nature
As the Bible is “God-breathed”, there are some comments to be made about the character of God as revealed in the Biblical text.
The first thing is God does not lie. In Numbers 23:9, the Bible states “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” Titus 1:2 also states much the same thing. God is not in the business of lying or giving us the run around. I think most Christians would agree with that, if not all.
Second, God is omnipotent. That is, He is all powerful. Jesus states this when he says in Matthew 19:26, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” In Genesis 18:14, God Himself claims omnipotence when He asks Abraham and Sarah, “Is anything too difficult for the Lord?” The Lord God asks the same thing in Jeremiah 32:27. Many verses in the Bible emphasise the Lord’s omnipotence through His control and reign over different parts of our universe, such as its creation, nature, rulers and kingdoms or queendoms, and even death itself. From a Biblical viewpoint, I am quite satisfied the Lord has revealed Himself as all-powerful. In other words, God is omnipotent.
Third, God is omniscient. That is, He knows everything there is to know. In Psalm 147:5, “[God’s] understanding has no limit.” In Hebrews 4:13, the Bible says, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” In Isaiah 40:28, the Word of God says, “He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” We cannot understand the meaning of or the reason for why God’s understanding is what is, and this is a deep comment on the nature of God’s knowledge and omniscience. Basically, we have no idea the scope and depth of His understanding and knowledge about everything, in this world and any others nor anything about how His understanding works. For these reasons, and many more verses in the Bible, I am quite happy to accept God’s omniscience as a given and I am happy to admit I have no understanding just how deep the rabbit hole of the Lord’s omniscience goes.
God is not a liar or a con. God has all the power He needs and more. He is all-powerful. God is all-knowing. That is, God is perfect truth, and He is omnipotent and omniscient.
The God Bit - The Dilemma
The nature of God leaves those who believe the Bible has mistakes in it with something of a dilemma. There are two equally unwholesome implications deriving from this understanding of the Bible.
First, God is neither omnipotent, nor is He omniscient. What’s more, His so-called “inscrutable understanding” is questionable. If the Lord cannot ensure His own personal revelation to humankind is error-free, he lacks omnipotence. If he cannot ensure the circumstances of divine inspiration at the time of writing are not going to induce errors, and that also includes the writer’s psychological state at the time, He is not omnipotent. More indirectly, there is a good case to question God’s omniscience while we are at it, if this inability is actually true.
Second, if we are still to stubbornly hold to God’s omniscience and omnipotence, then an even more unpalatable implication comes to the surface. If God is truly omnipotent and omniscient, and He allows mistakes to enter His revelation through the Bible, God is a liar. Mistakes are untruths or actions based on incorrectly held untruths. When we make a mistake, we are acting on incorrect information which we consider to be true and accurate at the time. We as humans have that excuse, as we are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. God does not have that excuse. If there is a mistake in the Bible, God knowingly allowed it to get there. That makes Him a liar.
Neither of these choices is palatable, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If the Bible has mistakes in it, God is either not God or He is a liar. Neither of these implications are Biblical. Therefore, personally, I conclude the Bible is error-free, but not always literal (see above).
The Human Bit
There are also some worrying implications for how we use the Bible, if there are mistakes in it. There are two serious weaknesses. There are probably more, but I am not smart enough to think of them.
Christian philosopher Norman Geisler, many years ago, wrote: “Ideas have consequences.” In my experience, I have yet to observe anything which would prove Geisler’s comment incorrect. The idea of the Bible having mistakes has consequences, and we have already seen many of them work their way into the church and weaken it.
The biggest weakness from a Christian viewpoint is we can throw out whatever we dislike as “culturally specific to the time of writing” or simply “a mistake.” We have already seen this happen in areas of morality and ethics. The church has compromised on so many issues it should have taken a stand on. If the Bible has mistakes in it, we can discard even central doctrines like the physical resurrection of Christ. Science tells us, and has done so for centuries, physically returning to life from death is impossible. Based on science, the resurrection of Christ was impossible. Therefore, it never happened. In fact, Docetists and Gnostics both argued for this very idea. If the Bible has errors in it, who knows what really happened on that day? The disciples probably got it all wrong. Or they lied. Or they simply made a mistake. With errors in the Bible, we are able to toss out what we find inconvenient and disagreeable.
One can observe this “discarding” easily in how people’s understand the characters of God and Jesus Themselves. The justice and violence of each one is unpalatable to our culture. If God is perfect love, how can He then inflict genocidal violence on various nations around Judah and Israel? If Jesus is the reconciliation maestro, how can He then return in judgement and with a sword in His mouth? Let’s not sanitise this image of Christ from Revelation. A sword is rarely good news for anyone not holding it. Rather than accept both of these facets in the one person, people discard the aspect they find disturbing. There truly is nothing new under the sun. The Gnostics did exactly that. Marcion did exactly that.
This brings me to what I see as the second weakness of the idea the Bible has mistakes in it: we cannot know which parts are mistaken and which are not. We have nothing on the level of God by which to judge what mistakes are in the Bible and where they are. To weed out these so-called mistakes, we need to use something other than the Bible. That is a normal part of Biblical interpretation. For example, in seeking a deeper understanding of ecclesiology, Church tradition has its uses. For example, Ignatius of Antioch had a few things to say about church organisation. But what about divorce, which is a sin? Jesus says quite clearly if someone divorces, except for marital unfaithfulness, and then marries again, they are committing adultery. Our culture in the West seems to have taken precedence over the Bible and it raises tough questions for those of us who have remarried. Interpretation and application are not always easy to work out. I would argue the historical teachings of the church in history, especially those of the Church Fathers pre-Nicaea, should carry a fair amount of weight in understanding a Christian response to Biblical interpretation.
Issues such as sin, however, are much more fixed. God is very clear He does not change and Jesus is “the same yesterday, today and forever.” God’s morality is not up for debate. When we allow culture to determine what we retain and what we discard in the moral sense, we are treading on very thin ice indeed. Here, I am talking about where the Bible clearly categorises an act as sin and bad enough to deny someone entry into the Kingdom of God. Culture and societal norms should never take precedence over Biblical revelation. For example, Jesus is clear that no Christian should ever use violence against any other person, no matter what that person does to us. The Apostle John takes that a step further when he writes that even anger with someone makes you guilty of murder. When a Christian says they have a gun for “protection”, one must ask some serious questions. When a church uses violence, those questions should be more strident. Culture and politics must never dictate what the Body of Christ believes about sin or what it does.
Imagine a dystopian world where all of humanity live in subterranean towns, never venturing to the surface at all. John, your town’s librarian finds an small archive, from which he is able to recover only the following three facts.
The earth is round, from a group calling themselves MIT.
The moon always points the same surface to the Earth, from someone called NASA.
The sky is purple with orange dots all over it, from a repository of images.
The only reason we know which one is false is we have access to equally authoritative sources external to any limited space like subterranean town. In our scenario, we need go outside on a fine day and check which ones are false. When it comes to much in the Bible and who God is and what He requires of us, we have no other authorities to turn to. We cannot “step outside” the Biblical revelation to check. Anyone who claims they have such an ability is lying. And those who claim the Bible has errors and claim to know which verses are said “errors” are lying.
A Bible with errors in it means some of what we believe about God and sin becomes mere personal choice. It makes things easier in the short term, but merely reduces the Bible and God to nothing more than a motivational speaker with the latest fad. God’s character and ethics are not up for debate and they are not a fad.
Let me illustrate by returning to the violence of God question. This is a question I am delving into at the moment, myself. For a Christian who considers the Bible has mistakes in it and is not all “God-breathed”, this is a quick question to resolve. If you are a judgemental prick, you may possibly throw out anything that speaks of God’s love for the sinner and alien. If you are a more merciful soul, you might discard the violence aspect. For those who uphold the inerrancy of the Bible, there is no such luxury. Both aspects of God’s character are true. After all, He told us so, and it is up to us to deal with that honestly and openly. At this point in my search, I can honestly say I don’t get it yet. But God is God and, like the clay in Jeremiah, who am I to question what God is or is not?
Conclusion
To wrap up, the Bible is inerrant and without error. To hold otherwise is playing a dangerous game involving millstones and deep seas. Much of the church is in error. This does not mean we all have to become Biblical literalists denying the scores of scientific breakthroughs we have seen in the last few centuries. Our scientific understanding of our world evolves, (pun intended), but the revealed character of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ and their law are immutable. God is God and will forever be God.
You can grab another of my book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!
