This is another post which is an attempt to make more precise the views which I am rejecting, and whose rejection has lead to my current intellectual crisis. And, as usual, I am still referring to the more conservative strands of Protestantism; I should have a couple posts coming up which detail my concerns with the less-defined versions. I really do hope that people come up and critique me on all of this, so that I may understand better. And so, on to inerrancy.
To start off, I am not going to argue that the Bible is not inerrant. I don't know whether it is or not, and I don't find either side on the issue to be terribly convincing. Rather, what I want to show is that the concept of inerrancy in the best form of which I know does not do the work which it is supposed to do, and cannot support conservative Protestant theology. I'm using the definition of inerrancy proposed by Paul Feinberg: "Inerrancy means that when all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences."
There are many issues that could be raised here, and which have been. The one which I will focus on is this: there is both human and divine authorship of Scripture. Maybe we will want to identify these, though I will argue for reasons against this. However, even if they are identified, then we still have the two different authorships; two aspects of a single reading. And inerrancy only applies to the divine authorship per se.
The texts used to support inerrancy (That God does not lie, that all Scripture is God-breathed, that Scripture cannot be broken) all point to what God is saying in Scripture. Therefore, it is what God has said which is inerrant. Anything beyond this is to go beyond the definition of inerrancy.
Now, what is it that God has said? I see no reason to equate it with the human authorship, which would include what we get from grammatical-historical exegesis (GHE), though it may go beyond that as well. I argue from these points: (1) The Christological meaning of the OT; (2) The method of exegesis in the NT; (3) The use of Scripture in the history of the church. After all of this, I will argue for why inerrancy really doesn't help us with any certainty issues. But first, I will argue for the possibiltiy of different divine and human readings.
It seems plausible that God could use the human text and say something with it which is not what the human author had intended. Where the human author had intended to write a history, God supplies a moral lesson, or a Christological type. As was said above, it is the divine authorship which is inerrant, as so we must go with what God has intended for Scripture in such a case. Some have argued that the Greek word behind "God-breathed" in 2 Timothy means that this is not how God worked; it means that God himself actively wrote those words along with the human authors. But this does not mean that the intentions could not have been separate, and the following is an argument that many throughout history who should be in a postition to influence our exegesis proposed a view of Scripture which does not match up with GHE.
(1) The OT is Christological. This seems straightforward from Christ's claim that the entire OT speaks of him. However, the OT also made sense at the time when it was written. I see no reason to accept that Isaiah was a bunch of mysterious messianic prophecies, which everyone was baffled about until Jesus came. It makes less assumptions and more sense of the text to posit that at least most of Isaiah (I'm not denying the presence of some real prophecy concerning the future; although even these could have a double-reading) made sense to the readers of its own day and age. However, if it did this, then the historical meaning did not pertain to Christ in the way in which the NT applied it. There must therefore be two meanings. historical and Christological, and not method of exegesis can get at the latter.
(2) NT exegesis is not GHE. When Jesus refers to the passage "You are all 'gods'", his interpretation of this is not what we would ascribe to David. Matthew's quoting of the OT to justify Christ's messiahship is not good exegesis of the relevant passages. And then there's Hebrews. . . . Simply put, the NT looks to be in a sorry state if we hold it up to our standards of exegesis. However, when looked at in its own terms of a more typological exegesis, which pulls meaning out of the "surplus" of OT images, then it can be quite brilliant at points. However, it then is going above and beyond the historical meaning of the texts. So, other it really is not supported by the OT, or it is supported by an alternative reading of the OT which is not found through the human authorship alone. And also, why don't we base our own exegetical practices on the practice of Scripture, if we claim to follow it so closely?
(3) The church has not been able to read the texts in terms of GHE for hundreds of years. Even if we assume that we actually have the correct readings of the texts through GHE (a point on which I am tremendously skeptical), then we still are some of the first to be able to read the Bible. I'm pretty sure that the early Christian were not the best exegetes on our terms (and that suprisingly few in our churches today are as well); they did come up with with "eternal generation" and the "real presence," after all, and most Evangelicals want to deny these as being counter to what we get from GHE. So, we would have to say that God wrote down his word, but in such a way that it would be centuries before anyone got it. Talk about poor communication! When we speak, we speak so that someone can understand. The words themselves are not some free-floating proposition, but addressed to an individual or a group. So, by positing GHE, we make God into a teacher who stands and lectures in front of his students without any concern for their understanding.
So, given all of this, I think that there is a strong case for both a human reading and a divine reading of Scripture, and that the divine reading is what is inerrant. But, even if this is not convincing, I would like to touch on the "certainty" arguments for inerrancy. These go along the lines of "false in one, uncertain in all"; if one thing were found to be false, then everything else would be uncertain. This is just wrong on a number of levels.
First, it is an argument to establish something which needs to be true so that we can hold what we hold. We want to believe something, so we need to pretend that its support exists as well. This is a poor style of argumentation, and gives me no truth-preferring reasons to accept inerrancy; in fact, I find it to be a good candidate for modus tollens.
Second, we form relative certainties based on errant data all the time. People are more likely to get some things wrong than others. Whether or not John was write when he said that they caught 153 fish, does not impact my belief in the resurrection. Histories written a long time after the fact (such as in Chronicles) could contain errors without affecting my perception of the eyewitness view of Jesus' life. We might have some issues with interpreting Paul, as we would have to wonder about whether or not he's correct, but life can be complicated. The argument that life would be easier if we had a straightforward text can be relegated to the first point.
Third, I'm just as glad that I don't need to believe inerrancy to believe that Christ died and rose for me. I find the former to be harder to believe than the latter. At any rate, inerrancy cannot provide any more support for a belief than it itself has as a doctrine. I would have to take it on faith, as it cannot be empirically proven, and then use it to establish all other points; but why not accept the other points as they come up? To accept it as a doctrine is to presuppose it; there really isn't much of a way of establishing it otherwise. So, it cannot add any certainty, as it does not bear much itself, outside of a leap of faith.
Fourth, inerrancy does not decide any hermeneutical issues. We still need to settle genre questions, to determine what the Scriptures intend to say (even in their human authorship, let alone divine). Prima facie it is possible that the entire thing was written as an allegory. Just because something was written to sound like a history, doesn't automatically make it one. If this were possible, then why are we throwing people out of the Evangelical fold because they claim that a particular story is midrash? Why are there debates over Open Theism? I despise the view theologically, and think that the fact that it exists demonstrates the quality of Evangelical thought on the doctrine of God, but they have the right to take the passages in the meaning which they see as intended.
Therefore, I claim that inerrancy is neither effective when paired with GHE, as it applies to the divine authorship which is not automatically the same as the human, and there are historical reasons for believing in the distinction between authorships. Further, if inerrancy were true, it could not settle debates either on certainty or on hermeneutics.
Edit: I've been realizing that th labels "conservative" and "non-conservative" really are akward, and fit the situation less and less. So, in future posts I'll start using "defined" and "undefined" Christian groups instead, which I think gets at my meaning better.
7 comments:
Thanks for working so hard to be clear on all of this Michael; it helps me in my own questioning as well.
My Comments:
(1) I would personally be more comfortable if "wholly true in everything that they affirm..." were replaced with "wholly true in everything that they intend to teach...". This doesn't answer the problem of whose intention matters, and the complex interrelationship of divine and human intentions in the writing of scripture.
(2) Helyer pointed out to us in Bib Sem & Pauline that we have to use GHE in order to find out that the NT exegesis is often not GHE. This doesn't disprove your point, but it should be remembered.
(3) Depending on what we mean by GHE, it might be misleading to say that it has only been in use to read and understand scripture for the last few hundred years. The work we have to do in exegesis is largely due to our separation from the original audience's perspective. That original audience was reading the same thing we *want* to read through GHE, but they didn't have to do as much research to do it. I would theorize that, in general, the closer in time an audience is to the original audience of the text, the less work they'd have to do in order to understand the intent of the text (the inerrant part). This also gives some reason to pay attention to tradition in interpretation of scripture, as a part of GHE broadly understood.
(4) There are probably numerous examples in the NT of non-GHE exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. But I take issue with your example, and I have taken issue with many other examples before. My Psalms & Wis Lit prof gave me a very persuasive exegesis of the Psalm in question and connected it in a way to Jesus' use of the Psalm that made perfect sense (to me).
(5) Still, perhaps it should be recognized that Jesus' contemporaries did not use GHE (at least not exclusively and probably not primarily) to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures.
My own approach to scripture often assumes a very different paradigm for inspiration and intent for the two canons (Hebrew Bible and NT). I read thef
My own approach to scripture often assumes a very different paradigm for inspiration and intent for the two canons (Hebrew Bible and NT). I read the former typically through a canonical criticism lens and the latter I read as occasional. I justify this (in a very amateur way) by differences in the cultural contexts of the two canons.
I don't know if you will find that perspective very satisfying, but there it is.
Thanks for the help, SC. Here are my thoughts on your points:
(1) I think that your revised version is what I had in mind anyhow; Paul's brother John was my Systematic Theology I professor, and I believe that the "intend to" approach was what he took. So I will admit that there is a better version than what I wrote, though I think that it falls victim to the same arguments.
(2) I'll have to think over this point some more, on how it would impact what I have to say.
(3) True, the early readers of Scripture would not have had to use GHE as much. At the same time, I think that fairly early on (within the first couple centuries) you have beliefs concerning the Real Presence in the Lord's Supper. If you want to go as late as Clement, Origen, Augustine, and the Cappadocians, there are many more as well.
(4) I would like to hear the explanation you've heard of the Psalm; I've never been able to make sense of Jesus' use of it myself. However, I still hold that Matthew and Hebrews do not fare well under the standards of GHE, even if under their own standards they make perfect sense.
(5) I'm not sure that I would regard the mixture of "canonically-read OT" and "occasional NT" as a complete description, but it seems to be perfectly accurate as far as it goes. This alone I think would necessitate a move beyond GHE; we at least need to supplement it, as it cannot get at key issues of both testaments.
Re: (5) You need a theory of scripture before you can formulate an exegetical method, sure. So GHE is incomplete insofar as it cannot be its own justification.
I will get back to you on the Psalm interpretation issue.
> So GHE is incomplete insofar as it cannot be its own justification.
I would like to differentiate between internal and external justification. External justification is what would justify my accepting a view from the position of not holding it. From this, nothing can justify itself, except for basic beliefs of one sort or another (which I don't think play much of a role in this issue).
Internal justification is when, the belief having been accepted, use of it supports itself. Even after accepting GHE, or sola Scripture for that matter, I can't find any places in Scripture which tell me that I ought to take those steps (in fact, part of my argument is that Scripture actually speaks against those). These are supposed to be key principles in establishing doctrine, and yet they seem to be ad hoc even on their own terms.
If I understand your last comment, what I am saying is that in a foundationalist structure, GHE should be less basic than some theory of scripture; what you are saying is that in a coherentist structure, the use of GHE to decide theological issues such as the divinity of Christ, the incarnation, and the presence of Christ in the sacraments, does not cohere with what GHE reveals about what scripture says. Rather, according to you, using GHE about what scripture says tells us that GHE is not the appropriate method of deciding these theological matters. (What is, then? Tradition? Philosophical Reflection? The Anglican Triangle/Wesleyan Quadrilateral?)
So, I have been suggesting that GHE is a servant to a broader theory of special revelation; you have been suggesting that if GHE is used to derive a theory of special revelation, that theory contradicts or disconfirms GHE?
I guess I might admit that the theory of special revelation derived by GHE would indicate that more than GHE is necessary, or at least that more is appropriate, in the interpretation of scripture. But I would be more reluctant to admit that this theory of special revelation says that the use of GHE is not illuminating in deciding theological issues.
> using GHE about what scripture says tells us that GHE is not the appropriate method of deciding these theological matters.
I guess I'd nuance that and say that GHE is at best only a partial explanation in theological discussions. Whatever other methods we use (which would depend on the theory of Scripture, ecclesiology, and whatnot) would at least have to pass the baton to GHE in an instance, if it were to decide anything. More or less, I would have to say via some other means that the divine reading matches up with the human reading, and so GHE, which gets us the human reading (when it works), would then also get us the divine reading.
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