Last week, evangelical New Testament scholar Scot McKnight wrote this about the concept of biblical "inerrancy," brouhahas about which crop up from time to time, marked by conservative "gate-keepers" uttering their "concern" about certain theological developments in the academy and in the churches:
It’s not that easy to define a theological construct term like this – the term is not used for the Bible in the Bible – and it is even more difficult to get a group together and reach some kind of consensus …
Which is what the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy did … Two words are now clearly operative: faithfulness and authority. These are the two major implications of the term today and, when the term “inerrancy” is used, the users are usually asserting faithfulness and authority — their own faithfulness, their tribe’s faithfulness, and the authority of the interpretation/idea they are promulgating …
Scripture is an all-or-nothing claim for inerrantists: if you embrace it all, you’ve got foundations; if not, you lose your footing (eventually). If you think there is one error the entire thing collapses. This notion, which is widespread, is theologically disastrous for many a young adult has walked from the faith when learning that science and the interpretation of Genesis 1-2 are at odds. Choose one, the inerrantists have said over and over. They do, and they walk away …
Finally, they agree that it must be interpreted. Plenary doesn’t work without “interpreted.” One can argue that Scripture is true and realize there’s no such thing as as uninterpreted text (Webster). But one could argue the text itself is inerrant apart from any appeal to interpretation. What is increasingly clear to many is that what many claim to be “inerrant” is a theological construct or an interpretation of the text itself, a text that could be interpreted in another way. At which point, the word interpreted gets put into the dock …
The impact of the CSBI is a bold affirmation of the authority of Scripture and an announcement that it marks off those who are faithful. This is what inerrancy has come to “mean” – it is a construct that determined who is “in” and who was “out.” That’s the rhetorical edge of this term over and over.
Read the whole piece here.*
I grew up and was taught in an environment in which the classic doctrine of biblical "infallibility" was considered insufficiently rigorous. Fuller Seminary founding professor Harold Lindsell wrote his (in)famous The Battle for the Bible** while I was an undergraduate, which I dutifully read when assigned to read it in class. My New Testament mentor, Harold Hoehner, was a board member of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, the group responsible for the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy―included in its entirety in McKnight's article―that serves as the defining standard of the doctrine for the Evangelical Theological Society, of which I have been a member for decades.
I also attended the 2013 Annual Meeting of the ETS at Baltimore, in which the five contributors to the just-released Counterpoints book, Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy***―Al Mohler, Mike Bird, Kevin Vanhoozer, John Franke, and Pete Enns―presented their perspectives in a well-attended plenary session. Tellingly, there was no agreement about the doctrine among the speakers, which should have been a warning sign to all the attendees about the workability or viability of the theologoumenon.
More than eight years ago―indeed, some nine months before the Baltimore conference―I wrote a post**** in response to the "controversy" over Michael Licona's eminently sensible view of the strange little story found in Matthew 27:52-53 about the emptying of tombs around Jerusalem consequent to the death of Jesus, not to mention his easily demonstrable comments about the nature of the "accuracy" of the Gospels' historical narratives, which conform, as anybody but the most stridently positivistic, foundationalist modernist―because it is fundamentalist doesn't make it any less modernist―readily acknowledges, to the conventions of ancient historiography (sorry, Al Mohler). Today, the dustups seem to be related disproportionately to the increasingly common rejection, by academic evangelicals, of what its proponents call "complementarianism" or, what such usually amounts to, "patriarchalistic hierarchicalism" in gender relationships in the home, the church, and, among the most strident, in society as a whole.***** The most pointed barbs are often directed, sometimes under the guise of "concerns,"****** at so-called "trajectory" or "redemptive movement" hermeneutics, pioneered by my old friend, Bill Webb, which often serves as the hermeneutical foundation for such a reappraisal******* (full disclosure: I find Webb's redemptive movement hermeneutic compelling, persuasive, and necessary in articulating both biblical authority per se and its proper contextualization in the 21st century Western world).
What is plainly demonstrable in such "controversies," just like in those that concern the creation narratives in Genesis 1-3, the Genesis Flood narrative, the Old Testament conquest narratives, or any of a host of historical-critical or salvation-historical issues, is that the issue is not biblical inerrancy per se, but rather the interpretation of these sacred texts. What strident hard-liners like Mohler do is tie the concept of biblical "inerrancy" necessarily to their own traditionalist interpretations of those texts; from there it is only a short move to impugn the "faithfulness" of those with whom they disagree. And this is, to be frank, illegitimate as well as bad form.
In my former post, I put forward two propositions that I considered necessary if "inerrancy" was to be considered a viable concept:
- We must always keep in mind that inerrancy and hermeneutics are distinct issues
- Inerrancy must be gauged in accordance with both authorial intent and the literary and historiographical standards of the ancient world
These propositions, I maintain, still remain true. Perhaps, however, it is better simply to realize that the term "inerrant," as a negation, is inherently suboptimal; hence it might be helpful to replace the term "inerrancy" in our discourse with positive terms such as "veracity" (Bird), and the descriptor "inerrant" with terms such as "true" (McKnight). As to the matter of scriptural "authority," it would also be helpful to realize, as N. T. Wright reminds us, that the expression "the authority of Scripture" is merely shorthand for "the authority of God exercised through Scripture." ******** The text may indeed be inerrant as an implicate of its inspiration, its "God-breathed" nature (2 Timothy 3:16). But in practical terms, "inerrancy" only applies insofar as one grasps the divine intent in the words of the text. Scripture, it should go without saying, is perfectly capable of conveying the truth God intended through it.
Yet tribalism remains, and (unfortunately) will do so. And "inerrancy" is one of the shibboleths used to enforce interpretive boundary markers. In such a situation, McKnight may just be right: "For this reason the term is not that helpful. Like the word 'evangelical,' it has had its day in the sun."
*https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/inerrancy-or-inerrancies.
**Zondervan, 1976.
***Zondervan, 2013.
****https://jamesmcgahey.blogspot.com/2013/02/is-inerrancy-victimless-crime-ask.html?showComment=1498408754540.
*****E.g., Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2021).
******E.g., Brandon Smith, "William Webb's Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic: Some Consideration and Concerns," https://cbmw.org/2015/11/16/william-webbs-redemptive-movement-hermeneutic-some-considerations-and-concerns/.
*******Cf. William J. Webb, Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 2001); William J. Webb and Gordon K. Oeste, Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? Wrestling with Troubling War Texts (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2019).
********N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (New York: HarperOne, 2011). In an earlier publication Wright fleshes this concept out in Trinitarian terms: "[T]he doctrine called 'authority of scripture' … declares that scripture is the way through which God the Holy Trinity activates, through the Spirit, the authority which the Father has delegated to the Son" ("Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: 'Atonement' as a Special Study," in Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics [ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008] 59-71 [at 71]).
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