Position Paper: Bibliology

The following is the unabridged version of a paper I wrote for my systematic theology class. The prompt was simply to write a paper stating and defending my view of the Bible, providing a snapshot of my beliefs. I'm quite satisfied with the result.

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I'm reticent about developing a "theology of Scripture" not because I don't respect the Bible, but because I do. Nowhere in it do we see the Bible give a sustained discourse about itself; the church fathers similarly focused on matters like God, Jesus, the Incarnation, salvation, and the everyday moral and practical challenges of living as a Christian when the religion was still underground. Additionally, dwelling too much on bibliology risks giving the impression (to myself, if no one else) that these kinds of rational systems of propositional knowledge are the end goal of studying Scripture, when this is only a shadow of the truth. But nonetheless I find myself doing so, not just because I was assigned to but because of its singular and important role in the Church as a window to the glory and mysteries of God, a "verbal icon" of Christ,¹ His written Word to His children. As the written record of God's revelation, the Bible is divinely inspired, an infallible bearer of truth, and authoritative divine speech in human words that resound through the centuries.

My view of the Bible falls under three main heads. First, the Bible is inspired. It almost seems cliché to bring them to bear here, but 2 Timothy 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 both help illuminate what inspiration entails. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says that "all Scripture is inspired by God [literally theopneustos, "God-breathed"] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." (RSV) Here we learn what the (inspired) nature of Scripture means for its usefulness and its purpose: it is good for "training in righteousness", to build Christians up as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. St. John of Damascus similarly testifies to the salvific purpose of Scripture: "He [God] Himself worked out our salvation for which all Scripture and all mystery exists." We must not become exclusionary about this truth and deny that salvation can come through other means, but God has given the Bible a unique place in our salvation just as it is a truly unique collection of writings. 2 Peter 1:21 adds that "no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The Bible testifies to its own transcendent nature: inspired writing is speech "from God", divine as well as human in origin. Of course, both of these passages were referring to the Old Testament, which was the only Scripture anyone had in the first century, but the Church has always believed that the New Testament is inspired as well, and they apply equally to it.

I find the "incarnational hermeneutic"² helpful for understanding the inspiration of Scripture. In light of the fact that Jesus Himself, God in the flesh, is the true Word (Jhn 1:1), the fullest revelation from God (Hbr 1:1-2), and the Truth of God (Jhn 14:6), we can draw a parallel between Christ's dual divine/human natures and the natures of the Bible. "As Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible."³ This means that the Bible is divine speech clothed in human words, human language, human cultures. Though this can sometimes make it hard for us as modern people to understand it, it also reassures us that God does not dispense abstract spiritual truths but incarnated truth (namely His son), coming to us wherever we may be. This also ties in with the fact that all of the written word, teleologically, serves for the Christian as a witness to the person and work of the living Word Jesus (see Luk 24:27, Jhn 5:46). "The center of the Bible as the written Word of God in human form is the person of the Living Word of God in human form, Jesus Christ."⁴ Though His written word, I believe God is able to speak to us as He did in the first century and before, and to bring us to a fuller knowledge of the living Word, that is, Christ.

Second, the Bible is infallible, and reliable. (I will also affirm that it is inerrant, after an extensive qualifying discussion below) Proverbs 30:5 says that "every word of God proves true". Jesus, probably at least obliquely referring to Himself, says "your [the Father's] word is truth" (Jhn 17:17), which certainly describes Scripture fairly. What this means, practically, is that we can trust God to lead us truly us through His written word. It is a profitable well from which to draw truth of God, and there is no better written foundation on which to build our lives. (Of course, this point is not proof against our misunderstanding the Bible any more than Jesus in human flesh was immune to the abuse of the Jewish and Roman authorities)

Third, the Bible is authoritative. This follows straightforwardly from the fact that it holds the words of the Lord of the universe, the ultimate authority. But what does this authority entail? Commonly it is thought of as "the right to command belief and/or action",⁵ and it does certainly involve this. But not all of the Bible is composed of didactic teachings or commands, and not all of these necessarily apply to modern Christians. How is a historical narrative authoritative? A parable? A Psalm? By finding the propositional content and making it mandatory to believe? N.T. Wright offers an interesting alternative: he imagines a Shakespeare play whose fifth act has been lost. The actors are tasked with devising and carrying out the fifth act themselves. The "authority" of the first four acts would not manifest in a definite script for the fifth act, but there is no denying that it would be authoritative for the actors.⁶ In a sense, their authority would create the fifth act of the play according to the pattern or vision they lay down. And so with the scriptures, whose authority comes not just from the God who is Lord over us but who spoke the world into being, an authority to create a people for Himself or recreate a troubled creation as well as to command. It is not so much that God has delegated His authority to the Bible as He exercises His own authority through the Bible, just as the Bible itself depicts Him doing in its pages.

I identify and agree with the Catholic/Orthodox view of Scripture as existing within the Church and its traditions, not separately from (and over against) them. Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware wisely says that "it [the Bible] must not be regarded as something set up over the Church, but as something that lives and is understood within the Church (that is why one should not separate Scripture and Tradition)."⁷ He explains that we both receive and interpret Scripture through and in the Church.⁸ Regarding our reception of the Bible, obviously the Church has produced and preserved the Bible we have today, and it was the Church that did the important work of establishing the New Testament canon in the first few centuries AD. Of course this was not an arbitrary decision that conveyed authority to the books of the NT, but a recognition of the inspiration that produced them and their pre-existing authority. Nonetheless, the decisions that hammered out the canon were also made authoritatively, and no individual Christian is up to the task of it (as, for instance, Luther's doubts about certain books show). This process points to an organic relationship between Church and Bible, not simply the Bible's being set up as a sort of charter for the Church to abide by (the early Church went well beyond the "bounds of Scripture" before the New Testament was written and collected). God exercises His authority and gives His Spirit through both.

We also interpret Scripture through the Church. The Bible is authoritative, we say, but it can be misused. It never speaks to us without a (fallible) act of interpretation on our part. How does the Bible's authority transfer through this process? Is a flawed interpretation still authoritative in some way? Who determines which interpretation is correct? Sola scriptura Protestants who reject the notion of an authoritative arbiter of interpretations try to fill this gap in a variety of ways, usually by prescribing a correct, authoritative method for interpreting Scripture authoritatively. A common one is the method of "Scripture interprets Scripture", based on the idea that "the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself;⁹ in other words, we can discern the meaning of unclear passages of Scripture in light of the clear ones. But this only works if what is "clear" about Scripture is the same to everyone involved, which (due to varying presuppositions, cultural backgrounds, hermeneutical priorities, etc.) is seldom the case.¹⁰

What is there to prevent hermeneutical anarchy from prevailing? Tradition. A tradition is simply "an opinion, belief, or custom handed down from ancestors to posterity."¹¹ Every Christian sect or denomination is guided by traditions, even those that explicitly reject their authority. These traditions form an underlying rule or structure for making sense of the Bible, like the "rule of faith" that guided the early Church. Atonement theories, ecclesiologies, and even the "Scripture interprets Scripture" approach are traditions, as are styles of worship, forms of prayer, and even religious music and works of art. Protestants who recognize this maintain that tradition should be based on Scripture, always under its authority, never replacing it, metaphorically serving a "judicial" rather than "legislative" role.¹² But this view misses the fact that all of our handling of Scripture, including using it to verify traditions, is itself conditioned by tradition. We can never "step outside" traditions to evaluate them purely objectively. The line between allowing tradition to guide our interpretation of Scripture and allowing it to generate new beliefs is porous, not rigid. Even doctrines like the perpetual virginity of Mary, purgatory, or the veneration of icons have scriptural correlations, if not scriptural "proofs". Rather than seek to elevate Scripture above tradition or draw a distinction between the two, Catholics and Orthodox see Scripture as part of Holy Tradition (albeit the most authoritative and valuable part), the whole of which is the living fulfillment of Jesus' promise in John 16:13 that the Spirit will guide the Church into all truth. I agree that this is the way to position the Bible within the Church.

Half a century ago my work might be done, but I would be remiss if I did not address the (relatively) recent challenges that have been made to the Bible's truthfulness. Atheists, liberal Christians, and other skeptics have challenged—not always groundlessly—the Bible's factual claims, the morality it expresses, and the historicity of the events it depicts. In response a good deal of attention has been devoted in conservative Christian circles to upholding the reliability of the Bible to speak truth, under the doctrine of inerrancy. This the view that the Bible, being inspired by God and effectively His speech in written form, in light of the fact that God speaks only truth and does not lie (Num 23:19, Prov 30:5, Titus 1:2), is thus "without error or fault in all its teaching",¹³ authoritatively true in all that it affirms. For Scripture to be incorrect in any of its statements would be for God to speak falsely in His (apparently unreliable) revelation, which cannot happen. Some qualifications are important to avoid misunderstandings: inerrancy applies to things that the Bible affirms, not merely reports. For the Bible to record the words of a person who was speaking falsely does not jeopardize its inerrancy. Additionally, the words of Scripture are inerrant when judged in the context of the (ancient) cultural setting from which we have received them and the purpose for which they were written. This includes the propensity of the Bible's prescientific authors to use phenomenal language (describing the way things appear to the eye), making no attempt to scientifically describe what was happening as we might expect.¹⁴

These statements and deductions must be tested and integrated with the phenomena of Scripture, however. There are a great number of places in which the Bible actually does seem to say something false, or at least difficult to believe with intellectual integrity, and it will not do to simply say over them, "we have not found an explanation for this yet." First, the Bible appears to make a number of historical errors, disagreeing with the external evidence and even itself. For example, in the flood narrative, Gen 7:10 says that the flood began seven days after Noah and his family entered the ark, but 7:13 says that he entered it "on the very same day" that the rains began. Gen 7:12 says it rained for forty days; 8:2 says the rains continued until at least after 150 days (7:24). A common theory for resolving these discrepancies is that it consists of two distinct narratives interwoven, but this hardly resolves the issue. If the Bible really is inerrant divine speech, why did God not at least inspire the editor of the combined account to resolve such obvious contradictions? Additionally, there is no geological or archaeological evidence of a global flood as we would expect,¹⁵ to say nothing of how people of every race could have come to live all over the world after the flood left only eight alive. As far as we can tell, the flood never actually happened, even though the Bible seems to regard it as history.

The Bible exhibits a number of examples of ancient science which we see paralleled in contemporary ancient Near Eastern literature. For example, it expresses a belief in the ancient view of the universe as consisting of three tiers (Phil 2:10) with foundations supporting the earth from below (Job 38:4-6, 1 Sam 2:8, Psa 104:5), an earth surrounded by a circular sea (Prov 8:22-31, Job 26:7-14) and having actual ends (Dan 4:12, Gen 11:31, Mat 12:42), an underworld (Num 16:31-33, Prov 5:5), a flat (Matt 4:8), fixed/immobile earth (1 Chr 16:30, Psa 83:1), a solid firmament fixed as the sky over the earth (Gen 1:6-8, Psa 19:1) holding back the waters above the heavens (Psa 104:2-3, 148:4) as well as storehouses of snow (Job 38:22-23) and the sun/moon/stars (Gen 1:14-19), that stars were small enough to fall to Earth (Dan 8:10, Mat 24:29, Rev 6:13), that the heavens could be rolled up like a scroll (Isa 34:4), that rabbits chewed the cud (Lev 11:5-6), that bats were birds (Lev 11:13-19), that seeds died before sprouting (Jhn 12:24-25, 1 Cor 15:36-37), and the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Mat 13:31-33, Mar 4:30-32), all of which we now know to be false just as surely as we know that it gets dark at night. There is far too much biblical evidence like this to believe that the biblical authors were expressing something like our current knowledge of the universe and simply speaking phenomenologically or poetically, especially given the correlating evidence of the same ancient worldview in contemporary ancient cultures.

In the story of the exodus and Canaanite conquest, God does and commands some things that are dramatically at odds with Jesus' later teaching of love for one's enemies (Mat 5:44). In Deuteronomy 20 God commands the Israelites to enslave those who surrender to them and either slaughter or enslave those who resist (He especially commands them to "save alive nothing that breathes" of the towns in Canaan in 20:16-18). We see Israel carrying out these orders in the book of Joshua, especially chs. 6-8. Joshua 10:40 says that Joshua "defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded." 11:16-23 boasts of Joshua's complete extermination of numerous Canaanite tribes; verse 20 confirms that this extermination was the Lord's will. (The whole book takes pains to assert that this whole conquest was the Lord's will) In any other book, we would immediately (and rightly) deplore these conquests as genocide, the systematic extermination of nations to take their land and their possessions. And yet the Bible says that it was commanded by God, making no attempt to reconcile these commands with Jesus' teachings. Such "texts of terror" paint a seriously morally ambiguous picture of God, as countless biblical skeptics are happy to point out.

For one last example, the Old Testament does a surprising amount of hemming and hawing about the number of gods out there. For all the emphatic assertions that the Lord alone is worthy of worship, the Old Testament (at least, parts of it) doesn't seem to rule out the existence of other gods. For instance see Psa 86:8, 95:3, 96:4, 97:9, 135:5, 136:2, which praise the Lord by comparison with unnamed other gods; Psalm 82:1 and 89:7 refer to His presiding over some kind of divine council. Yet Isaiah (45:5) and Paul (1 Cor 8:4) both exclude the existence of any gods other than the true God. Wouldn't we expect God, in inspiring His inerrant revelation to His people, to get such a basic fact crystal clear?

These are undeniably difficult issues, but I believe that the aforementioned qualifications to inerrancy, when applied consistently, are able to explain them. For example, ancient historiography operated by a considerably different set of rules than modern historical studies. We see abundant evidence of this in contemporary literature such as the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh epics, which both have numerous parallels with the Genesis flood narrative(s)¹⁶ and which preceded it by centuries,¹⁷ indicating that the Genesis account was at least partially based on them. Ancient history was an outgrowth of ancient storytelling, which was heavily based on oral tradition,¹⁸ which made it considerably more fluid and prone to evolution and embellishment than modern history. The goal was not to provide an objective account of "what really happened", as in modern journalism and history, but as a way for a people to creatively interact with and retell its past so as to address present concerns and answer important questions of origin, identity, and meaning.¹⁹ Ancient history had a lot in common with mythmaking, though it had a basis in actual past events and was not simply "made up". If we evaluate the Old Testament by the standards of its own culture for doing history, rather than our own, our objections lose their grounding.

Add in the ancient perspective on science and the nature of the universe (which we have every indication Israel shared with its ancient neighbors,²⁰ and on which the flood narratives rely), and we begin to realize a way to make sense of discrepancies in the Bible's witness by respecting its ancient viewpoint. Most evangelicals, especially conservatives, tend to be uncomfortable taking the reasoning this far, to the point of allowing the Bible to affirm things that we now know to be factually untrue like a geocentric universe or a flat earth. I see inconsistency in this refusal. If we have established that we must judge the truthfulness of Scripture by the standards of its ancient culture²¹ and this ancient culture did history and viewed the cosmos in ways that we consider false today (should we be surprised at this?), then Scripture should be allowed to make statements that hold together in its ancient worldview without their also being forced to conform to our modern one. Simple assertions that the Bible does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact fail to make the distinction between something being considered factual in the ancient Near East and its being considered factual today. A Bible that envisioned a heliocentric (much less a galaxy-based) universe, a spherical earth, and the vacuum of outer space would have been considered seriously in error (if not incomprehensible) by the ancient Hebrews! In light of this, it seems as though the traditional doctrine of inerrancy will have to be adjusted—but it already has.

It is true that the Church has historically affirmed that the Bible is true and without error in everything it affirms.²² But this is slightly misleading. Before the Reformation, and especially in the early Church, theologians believed that divine inspiration allowed Scripture to speak in multiple senses,²³ and routinely appealed to the truth of the higher, more spiritual or allegorical senses when a passage appeared to be factually untrue/nonsensical or to portray God in an unworthy manner. Historically, the church fathers have been much less attached to the literal, factual truth of Scripture than modern defenders of inerrancy. Additionally (and this should go without saying, but I will say it anyhow), throughout most of the Church's history no one had a reason to doubt the Bible's scientific or historical accuracy. Until the modern age, no one had any idea that there was no archaeological evidence for many of Israel's conquests in Canaan,²⁴ that geological evidence and radiometric dating indicate that the earth is much more than about 6,000 years old,²⁵ or that there is not a layer of water above the sky. The few exceptions (such as the spherical shape of the earth which was established by Plato, albeit for philosophical and aesthetic reasons²⁶) were accommodated to the Bible fairly easily, using allegorical interpretation if needed.

Our much more extensive knowledge of the differences between the Bible's claims and the way we know the world through science, combined with the unacceptability among defenders of inerrancy of interpreting troublesome passages allegorically, have tended to lead them to one of two options. First, they can change their reading of the Bible so that it supports new knowledge about the world. Prima facie, this doesn't seem like an option at all, since it makes our reading of Scripture dependent on current trends in academia and prevents us from reading the Bible the same way our Christian forebears did. Yet this method is commonly used, albeit subtly; when we read Genesis 1, how often do we envision God hovering over a spherical earth and creating the Sun at the center of the Solar System? (No one did the latter until after Galileo) In this way we lose sight of the Bible's ancient worldview as we read it as speaking to our modern one instead, often without noticing how much strain we are placing on its ancient words. Alternatively, they can not accept this outside information that would seem to contradict the Bible's claims, reaffirm the Bible's truth and consistency despite appearances, and in the case of scientific knowledge hold out hope that it will eventually be corrected by more complete information. But this means setting up an adversarial relationship between the Bible and what we can learn from the rest of creation, which is unacceptable if God created us to know Him through both sources.

How are we to understand the Bible's inerrancy in light of its proclamations about itself and the way it actually behaves? How can we trust the Bible to speak truth on spiritual matters if it gets empirical facts wrong?²⁷ I believe we can, and that doing so is not a denial of its inspired nature but an affirmation of its dual human/divine nature, analogous to Jesus. Like our Savior during His ministry on Earth, the Bible is situated in a particular historical and cultural context. It occupies that context, rather than speaking abstract spiritual truth into it from outside. It was written by human authors who, though lovers of God and inspired by His Spirit, still had a limited, human perspective of the world, just as we do. We should expect Scripture to communicate the truth we need, most especially Jesus Himself, in that context and through that perspective—and so it does. Just as Jesus had a limited, mortal human body but was able to truly say "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jhn 14:9), so the Bible is able to lead us to the truth of God not just in spite of its human nature, but through it. Whatever errors exist in Scripture are due not to any ignorance or deception on God's part, but to the limited perspective of its human authors which in no way imperiled God's speech through their words. Realizing this frees us to read the Bible as God's word without being obligated to defend it where its ancient authors' cultural, historical, or scientific perspectives clash with our own.

I see two specific ways to do this. First, we can seek to understand the Bible's ancient viewpoint as best we can in order to discern what would have been revelatory for its first hearers (e.g. that God created the cosmos alone and made the first man for a personal relationship with Himself) and what would simply have been background knowledge (e.g. that there was divine act of creation or a first man). Theologian and biologist Denis Lamoreux calls this the "message-incident principle", which distinguishes between the inerrant "messages of faith" in Scripture and the incidental ancient history.²⁸ Second, drawing on Christian interpretive tradition can help us to see what earlier theologians thought of "problem" texts before their factual accuracy was under debate, and so indicate how to constructively move past these debates. This helps us "do" theology as involved participants of the same body, not merely as quasi-historians studying ancient documents and reconstructing the beliefs of the authors for our own time (which is a risk of the first method). The inerrancy of Scripture means a lot more than its communicating correct information; in our sparring matches against modern skeptics we are apt to forget this, but the living tradition of the Church is there to remind us of the ineffable richness of God's written word.

Like the early church, I believe Jesus is the key to the Bible. In his unity of divinity and humanity we see how it can be written from an ancient perspective that we now consider primitive, yet speak the truth to us with the very voice and authority of God, making them manifest to the Church wherever she meets. And in Jesus' identification of Himself with the truth of God and the way to Him (Jhn 14:6), we understand the true purpose of God's written word for us: to manifest Christ, the true Word (logos) of God, to us and to make Him known long after His ascension, even as He makes God known to us. He is the center of the Bible, the key to its interpretation (see Luk 24:44), and the reason a two-thousand-plus-year-old collection of writings matters to us at all. May we come to the scriptures seeking to know Christ as well as to know of Him!

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[1] Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 201.
[2] Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 17–21.
[3] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17.
[4] Thomas Hopko, "Sources of Christian Doctrine," The Orthodox Faith, 1981, (13 September 2014).
[5] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 212.
[6] N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: Fortress Press, 1992), 140–143.
[7] Ware, The Orthodox Church, 199.
[8] Kallistos Ware, "How to Read the Bible" in The Orthodox Study Bible (eds. Jack Norman Sparks et al.; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 1760–1763.
[9] Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.9. (13 September 2014).
[10] Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 21–22.
[11] Ware, The Orthodox Church, 196.
[12] Erickson, Christian Theology, 228.
[13] Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, (13 September 2014).
[14] Erickson, Christian Theology, 202–205.
[15] Denis Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 280.
[16] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 27–29.
[17] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 221.
[18] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 180–182.
[19] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 40.
[20] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 148–176.
[21] Erickson, Christian Theology, 203.
[22] Erickson, Christian Theology, 194–195 and Michael Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture: What the Early Church Can Teach Us(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 87–92.
[23] Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture, 48–55.
[24] Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 58–60.
[25] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 422–427.
[26] E. Edson and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Universe in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages (Bodleian Library: Oxford, 2011), 22.
[27] Erickson, Christian Theology, 196–197 asks this question in more words.
[28] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 239.

Personal Doctrine of Scripture

The following is an unabridged version of a paper I wrote for my Biblical Hermeneutics class on my "personal doctrine of scripture."

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I'm naturally wary of the idea of coming up with a "personal doctrine of scripture", as if what I say about the Bible establishes anything. Scripture is scripture, regardless of what I tell it to be, and my only goal is to understand it for what it is, a task to which preconceptions of the nature of scripture can be a detriment. What we say about scripture is not nearly as important as what God says to us through it. Nonetheless, knowing what I believe about the Bible can help me to explain it to myself and others better for clarity's sake, so I press on.

I maintain no illusions that my entire doctrine of scripture is read directly from scripture itself; not only is this a circular argument (for you must already have some idea of how scripture works to learn anything from it), I have never met anyone whose entire (functional) approach to scripture did not involve bringing in outside sources or preconceptions. For reasons I will get to, I don't necessarily see this as a problem. If I must make assumptions or bring in outside notions, I will at least try to clearly state them instead of trying to convince myself they're right there in scripture, which (on an institutional level) is really the evangelical equivalent to the Catholic and Orthodox concept of "church tradition".

I believe, as all Christians do, that the Bible is an inspired set of books. What does this mean? In my limited research for this paper I interacted with two sources whose definitions were helpful. Our textbook defines inspiration as "the controlling influence that God exerted over the human authors who wrote scripture", and later says that "the messages spoken by the authors of scripture originated not with them but with the Holy Spirit" Anglical Biblical scholar N.T. Wright gives a very clear definition, saying, "'Inspiration' is a shorthand way of talking about the belief that by his Spirit God guided the very different writers and editors, so that the books they produced were the books God intended his people to have." I would generally agree with Wright's definition and am comfortable adopting it as my own, but I will say more on how I see this process working.

My big assumption about inspiration is this: I don't think inspiration was a singular, unique event never totally unlike anything else God has done, but draw a parallel between the inspiration God provided to the biblical authors and more generally what I know, from Biblical knowledge and experience, about how the Holy Spirit, the same one who inspired, works in and through us today. This doesn't mean people are still writing what should be scripture today, but I think the process was of the same kind, and that to deny this puts the biblical authors unfairly on a pedestal over other believers.

I have reasons for making this assumption. 2 Timothy 3:16, a commonly cited verse in doctrines of scripture, states that "all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness". The statement that scripture is breathed out by God is a common foundation for definitions of inspiration. I note that the other thing the Bible says is God-breathed is Adam (Gen 2:7), and by extension humankind. For all our flaws and weaknesses, the breath of God flows, acts, and does through us, not simply a part of us as if the Spirit of God were "a thing to be grasped" (Phl 2:6).

So I reject any dichotomy or purported conflict between something being "from God" and "from man"; the incarnation of Jesus Christ destroys any such distinction just as His death destroyed the curtain in the temple separating the dwelling of God from the people (Mat 27:51). I don't need a definition of inspiration that is "sufficiently God-centered" or "not too human" because inspiration is fully human and fully divine, just like Jesus. Just as the Spirit of God is not trapped inside or possessed by us, but dynamically moves through us, so He speaks God's power through the words of scripture, which are not intrinsically divine but are made divine by His ceaseless acting (which is also why translations or typos of the original manuscripts can also be inspired).

Regarding the reliability of the Bible, I hold fast to what is commonly called its infallibility while rejecting inerrancy. There is no debate as to whether the Bible can have factual errors in it; it does. The clearest I have found is in Mark 4:31, where Jesus says "[The kingdom of God] is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth," and Matthew 13:31-32: "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds..." Being that the orchid seed is smaller than the mustard seed, I see no reason to accept Article XII of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

So if we define truth as "statements corresponding to reality", it seems that the Bible doesn't always tell us the truth. Luckily, this is not the Bible's definition of truth. Instead, Jesus tells us, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (Jhn 14:6). Jesus is also the word (Jhn 1:1) which he later says is truth (Jhn 17:17). Biblical truth is not found in statements or knowledge, but in a person: Jesus Christ. The purpose of scripture is not to tell us impersonal truths but to bring us to knowledge of the One who is Truth, and it is reliable in that it never fails to do this (though we might fail to let the Spirit into our hearts). So when Psalm 18:30 and  Proverbs 30:5 tell us that the word of God proves true, we can be sure that through the Bible He can and will guide us into the truth we were made to know.

But more than simply being reliable, scripture also has authority. But what kind of authority? We often think of it as simply the authority to tell us what to do or believe, and it certainly means this; as Wegner says, "Scripture, then, has authority because it comes from God, who has the prerogative to tell us how to live our lives." But it also has more authority than this. N.T. Wright's book Scripture and the Authority of God is again very helpful here. He says, "When Revelation speaks of God and the Lamb receiving all power, glory, honor, and so forth, it is because through the Lamb's victory the whole of creation is being brought back into its intended harmony, rescued from evil and death. God's authority, if we are to locate it at this point, is his sovereign power accomplishing this renewal of all creation. Specific authority over human beings, notably the church, must be seen as a part of that larger whole." In other words, authority is not so much God telling us what to do and believe as it is the potency and exercise of His sovereignty over all creation, in pursuit of the renewal of all things.

Wright offers another very helpful clarification: "[The phrase 'the authority of scripture'] can have Christian meaning only if we are referring to scripture's authority in a delegated or mediated sense from that which God himself possesses and that which Jesus possesses as the risen Lord and son of God, the Immanual. It must mean, if it means anything Christian, 'the authority of God exercised through scripture.'" If all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus (Mat 28:18), then of course any authority scripture has must be delegated by Him.

To my imaginary interlocutor who believes the Bible dropped from heaven in an angelic language, I would simply point back to Jesus, "the image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), the clearest revelation of the true nature of God. Jesus did not descend from heaven like an angel, "but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" (Phl 2:7), and He rejected several tempting opportunities to solve human problems with divine power (Mat 4:1-11, 26:52-54, 27:39-43). If Jesus came in the form of a human, lived as a human with human limitations, and yet accomplished the atoning work of the gospel that the Father sent Him to do, and if this Jesus is the Word of God (Jhn 1:1), should we expect the written word of God to be any less human? By writing His word through the words of human authors, God illustrates what I see as a great pattern of the gospel: the new, the spiritual, the kingdom of God springing up from the midst of the old, the fleshly, the kingdom of this world, in the most unexpected ways and places, and transforming it from the inside out. So it is with us who know Christ, so it will be in the world to come, so it is with the Word.

Biblical Adventures in Botany and Inerrancy

Mark 4:30-32 reads (with emphasis added):

And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

And similarly, Matthew 13:31-32:

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

For size reference, this is a mustard seed:

Pretty small, huh? I should probably mention the orchid seed, shown here on a penny:

Here is a side-by-side comparison of both seeds on a penny:

Did Jesus just lie? Or does this prove that He was not God but a mere man, ignorant of modern botany?

Biblical Inerrancy

Wayne Grudem's landmark systematic theology defines inerrancy thus (emphasis the author's):

[In the previous chapter] it was argued that all the words in the Bible are God's words, and that therefore to disbelieve or disobey any word in Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God. [2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:21, etc.] It was argued further that the Bible clearly teaches that God cannot lie or speak falsely (2 Sam. 7:28, Titus 1:2, Heb. 6:18). Therefore all the words in scripture are claimed to be completely true and without error in any part (Num. 23:19, Pss. 12:6, 119:89, 96; Prov. 30:5, Matt. 24:35). God's words are, in fact, the ultimate standard of truth (John 17:17)...with evidence like this we are now in a position to define biblical inerrancy: The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact. This definition focuses on the question of truthfulness and falsehood in the language of Scripture. The definition in simple terms just means that the Bible always tells the truth, and that it always tells the truth concerning everything it talks about. This definition does not mean that the Bible tells us every fact  there is to know about any one subject, but it affirms that what it does say about any subject is true.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy summarizes itself:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself.
2. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises.
3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.
4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.
5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, describes inerrancy on his blog:

The affirmation of biblical inerrancy is nothing more, and nothing less, than the affirmation of the Bible’s total truthfulness and trustworthiness. The assertion of the Bible’s inerrancy — that the Bible is “free from all falsehood or mistake” — is an essential safeguard for the Bible’s authority as the very Word of God in written form. The reason for this should be clear: to affirm anything short of inerrancy is to allow that the Bible does contain falsehoods or mistakes.

Biblical inerrancy remains a strong theological presence in modern evangelicalism and fundamentalism, especially in the United States.

Possible Responses to Matthew 13:31-32 and Mark 4:30-32

Obviously, reconciling this belief about the truth of the Bible with these passages about the sizes of mustard seeds is not a trivial matter. I am not sure whether I would have been troubled by this passage if I had been presented with the seed size comparison when I held my earlier, hyper-logical view of Scripture, but I can try to guess at the most probable and logical answers an inerrantist might field when confronted by this tension:

• Ask whether an orchid seed falls under the category defined by the Greek word translated as "seed", σπερμα.
• Assert that mustard seeds in first-century Israel were smaller than the ones we have today, or that orchid seeds were larger.
• Admit that the ESV text contains a factual error, but argue that this error was not present in the original manuscripts and was inadvertently introduced by a translator or scribe.
• Accuse me of "proof-texting" and say that a complex and weighty doctrine like inerrancy can't be conclusively disproven by a single verse.
• Accuse me of faking the images, or otherwise affirm that the Bible is correct and any other evidence is false, even if it isn't presently clear how.

Counter-responses

To the first answer, σπερμα is used in the Bible to refer to either 1) generic seed, the kind sown in a field or 2) someone's offspring or descendants. It is difficult to conceive of a meaning for σπερμα (in common, nontechnical Greek, mind you) broad enough to incorporate both of these but narrow enough to exclude orchid seeds, which are much more similar to wheat seed than human descendants.

The second is difficult to prove conclusively since any first-century mustard or orchid seeds have likely germinated and died by now, but it is rather ad hoc and difficult to believe that such a change in the seeds of these plants could have taken place in less than 2,000 years and the burden of proof certainly falls on anyone who would claim otherwise. The microscopic size of the orchid seed is actually an integral part of its method for reproduction, due to the fact that it lacks endosperm (literally "inside-seed"), the part of a seed that provides nutrients to allow it to begin growing, relying instead on symbiotic relationships with fungi to complete their lifecycles, and it would be quite significant for the orchid seed to evolve into such a different form since then.

The third is very difficult to hold to given that the assertion is present in both Matthew and Mark, which would both have to have been corrupted in the same way from some similar but inerrant form, and the same parable is also likely mentioned in Luke 13:19. According to my 28th-edition Nestle-Aland textform, the biggest relevant known textual dispute in these verses concerns the grammatical form of "has grown" in Matthew, and of "grain" in Mark. Not much room for disagreement here.

It is true that I am trying to show that belief in Biblical inerrancy is unjustifiable with a single Bible passage, a practice which I would count as "proof-texting" and which I try to avoid doing. But the thing about inerrancy is that by making such a strong, sweeping claim about the nature of the Bible's statements, it makes just this sort of proof-texting possible. To allow for meaningful conversation, I am arguing under the assumptions of the view I am trying to speak to, not my own. And inerrancy is, in fact, able to stand or fall on a single verse like this because the strength of the claims it makes also makes it very fragile. See the last point of the Chicago Statement: "The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded," which presumably includes the finding of a single counterexample that definitively violates it, in the same way that finding a single rock levitating in midair for no discernible reason would call the theory of gravity as we know it into question.

Accusing me of faking the images would be unjust (and, may I say, unchristlike), since I didn't (Matthew 5:37). (In fairness, I did simulate the last one) And, of course, this charge would fall apart as soon as one did any research into the (public) sources I used, unless they are also all faked. Continuing to believe that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds in the face of clear evidence to the contrary (such as a display of actual orchid and mustard seeds side-by-side) would be downright conspiratorial and raise the question of what, if any, evidence is required to get you to change your mind.

A high-maintenance doctrine

Of course, to the inerrantist this stubborn persistence in the "truth" is not only reasonable, but commanded by God; as Grudem argues, "all the words in the Bible are God's words, and that therefore to disbelieve or disobey any word in Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God." The Bible, God's revealed word, says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed on earth, so that's what they believe. This is troubling for a number of reasons. As I have previously argued, this way of allowing the words of the Bible to "trump" all other information assumes a hierarchical, premodern view of truth (remember that Jesus is the Truth) that casts the Bible as the only reliable source of information we have, and all other truth claims, even what we plainly see with our own eyes, as suspicious and aimed to deceive us. David writes that we are intended to learn about the nature of God from His creation: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."

This placing of spiritual knowledge over empirical knowledge, in turn, has the effect of situating the inerrantist in a very dualistic, "two-storey" universe. The Bible is God's truth over and against the claims of this fallen world, and no dialogue or meaningful connection is possible between them. The truths of the Bible are believed in isolation from experience, reason, or any other possible qualifiers to them. This casts serious doubt on how God made us. Our very perception and reasoning abilities, rather than being part of our being made in His image, testaments to His handiwork, and gifts to allow us to appreciate and steward His creation, become suspect and unreliable, with our faith (blinded by being deprived of its companions reason and perception) our only trustworthy guide to living as Christians. And so the Bible becomes our book of science, cosmology, biology, and botany, over and against the fallen claims of "this world". The task of the Christian is to simply believe, without questioning, the revealed truths of God and not the lies of the world.

In the Mohler post, I found another quote relating to a book by Michael Licona that questions whether the earthquake and resurrections that are documented in Matthew 27:51-54 actually happened and specifically points out the absurdity of the implied inference that the saints who were raised waited in their tombs doing nothing until His resurrection. Mohler says, "First of all, if we ever accept the fact that we are to explain what anyone in the Bible was doing when the Bible does not tell us, we enter into a trap of interpretive catastrophe. We are accountable for what the Bible tells us, not what it does not." The text itself says, notably, "And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many." The implication that the saints were raised when Jesus died and came from their tombs after He rose is manifest, but Mohler says that we aren't supposed to make it but instead to disconnect our belief in the pure and true words of the Bible from whatever relation they may have with the rest of reality. In other words, we are expected to suppress our critical reasoning whenever it would lead us to question scripture. This suppression of doubt and disconnection of spiritual truth from the rest of life is, as I have experienced, not healthy.

Peter Enns describes inerrancy as a "high-maintenance doctrine" in that significant time and resources must be expended to maintain its accuracy in the face of clashes with reality as in Matthew 13:32. In fact, I am convinced that maintaining inerrancy is counterproductive to an authentic Christian witness. It destroys rather than creates dialogue with nonbelievers and leads to unnecessary divisions with other Christians who dare to be so audacious as to trust their God-given eyesight and say that orchid seeds are smaller than mustard seeds. What remains of the dialogue between inerrantists and the "world" is inevitably shifted from the central "point" of Jesus and the Gospel to peripheral points of friction like the age of the earth, the relative sizes of seeds, or whether Adam and Eve had bellybuttons (let alone existed); the Bible is expected to speak to these issues just as much as it does to the person and work of God, and not only that but to speak a truer word than any number of the "empty claims" made by people specifically studying these things in the 2,000 years since.

A context-free Bible?

And after all, inerrancy is simply not a very high view of scripture, despite its ardent claims to the contrary. Rather than being taken at face value, the Biblical text is twisted, the simple meanings of its words complicated, hidden subtextual information added, or its integrity questioned in order to defend the integrity of inerrancy. In my own journey I have found an abundance of other examples of this kind of twisting that has to take place to defend the unambiguous truth and logical coherency of Scripture. As I became aware of just how much of my own preconceptions and biases I was reading into the text in order to maintain this view, I lost faith in it--and would have lost faith in God, had I not been able to dissociate the two.

Inerrancy forgets or willfully disregards the role of the reader-interpreter in the Bible by considering it to be "God's own words", "wholly and verbally God-given", implying that it is as direct a form of communication as God speaking audibly and individually to us. Unlike our merely human words, though, God's statements are expected to be free of context or any trace of relativization to limit their scope. I simply don't think this is how communication works. In fact, I don't even think this is the default way inerrantists approach the Bible.

For example, we, almost without thinking, interpret language like "the vault of heaven" (Job 22:14), "the four corners of the earth" (Isaiah 11:12), or "in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Philippians 2:10) (or also "the waters under the earth", Exodus 20:4) to fit into our modern cosmology as "poetic language". By doing this we are automatically recontextualizing these statements from speaking about a premodern cosmos where the solid sky is supported by four great mountains and the earth's land sits on top of a subterranean ocean to our modern one in a way that flies in the face of inerrancy's insistence on God's words being eternally true and context-free. Similarly with David praising God for "knitting him together in his mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13), which came from a culture with virtually no knowledge of human embryology as we have today but which we read as speaking to our modern understanding of gestation. I have found that I am better able to appreciate the premodern context the Bible is situated in by recognizing it for what it is and how it is different than my own.

For another clear example of ancient cosmology espoused by the Bible, see Revelation 8:10: "The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water." From what we now know of cosmology, we know that a star could not fall to the earth in such a way as to affect only a third of the rivers and springs; the earth would fall into the star, be engulfed in thermonuclear fire, and eventually be reduced to its component elements. We read "star" to be a meteorite without thinking about it, but the Greek used is simply αστερ, aster; John likely saw little distinction between "stars" that stayed in the sky and "stars" that fell to earth.

A Theopneustos Scripture

How do we move past such an unhealthy view toward Scripture and reality? For starters, by taking Matthew 13:31-32 and Mark 4:30-32 at face value and reading them like first-century hearers rather than twenty-first century ones: Jesus really is saying that the mustard seed is the smallest seed on earth. The mustard seed was likely the smallest commonly known seed at that time, so Jesus, a human situated in a particular human context trying to make a point not about plant biology but about the kingdom of heaven, used it for His parable rather than the "correct" plant His audience wouldn't have known about. (Also, the orchid doesn't grow that large anyway) This explanation is simple and intuitive, not suspicious like the evasions inerrancy must field to fit this text into its system. It recognizes the contextualized nature of both the Bible and of us, its readers and tries to bridge the gap between contexts.

This introduces the general principle referred to by Denis Lamoreux as the "message-incident principle": that we are to "separate not conflate" the infallible theological message of the Bible from its culturally contextualized incident, which may work in ancient views of cosmology, biology, etc. that we now know to be inaccurate. Inerrancy completely conflates the message and incident of any given part of scripture and argues that their indivisibility is an essential part of the Bible's being God's true and authoritative word. As I think I have satisfactorily established, there is at least one definitive counterexample to this claim, and many likely others. Recognizing the existence of this principle is essential for having a constructive conversation with other Christians or non-Christians about evolution, Biblical violence, or the Bible's treatment of slavery and gender.

2 Timothy 3:16 is frequently fielded to show how Scripture is "God's own words" and therefore incapable of speaking any falsehood: "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." In other words, all Scripture is inspired by the Spirit and therefore wholly true. You know what else says the Bible is God-breathed? Humans. Finite, fallible humans. "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." (Genesis 2:7) Just as Jesus had all the perfection of God in a limited, aging, ordinary human body, so the Bible is the infallible truths of God conveyed by, or perhaps "breathed into", ordinary, fallible human words. Just as God can work with or through imperfect people, so He can speak through the Bible we have, not just the Bible inerrancy claims we have.