Jun 08
The errors of inerrancy
Michael Bird raises some questions about inerrancy on his blog. In answer to one of his questions, namely:
To what extent has the “Battle for the Bible” been a product of the Christianity’s battle/struggle with Modernity, and have conservatives tried to win the war by using the rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment?
It seems to me that the answer’s an unqualified “yes”. Mark Noll has some interesting things to say about the history of this in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I would also draw attention to the way in which this is paralleled, in roughly the same time period, by the rise of papal infallibility in Roman Catholicism.
I have to say that I don’t understand why anyone should even want to talk in these terms about scripture (or, indeed, the papacy). First, as I’ve noted in a comment on Michael’s post, there’s a certain logical nonsense to it all. An unread Bible (and an un-listened-to pope) might well be inerrant or infallible, but in practice they are read or listened to, expounded or interpreted, by fallible erring human beings. No non-interpreted statement actually exists as a communication, and so no infallible or inerrant statement actually exists in the intersubjective world of human interaction.
More than that, however, it seem to me that their is a certain disrespect paid to scripture when people start from the position of dogmatic statements about it, and then seek to squeeze the writings into this dogmatic statement. Propositions about the nature of scripture are logically derived from the statement that it is the “Word of God”, and then fitted as a straightjacket onto the scriptures. Surely it is much better to fill out the dogmatic content of “Word of God” from the nature of the actual writings received by the community to be that word. Furthermore, any attempt to wring the doctrine out of any verse of scripture is impossibly contorted.
As far as I can see, the main point of the language is to serve as a boundary marker. The language of infallibility has now been used in such diverse ways that (at the very least) most evangelicals are willing to use the word, whatever critical methods they employ or conclusions they adopt. That worries the more conservative, who want a word that excludes precisely this sort of thing, and so they have fallen on inerrancy instead. If evangelicals who are comfortable with the full range of critical methods, narrative-mythopoeic interpretations of Genesis, etc. also prove comfortable with using the language of inerrancy, then the conservatives will seek a new word that ups the ante.
The whole discussion founders on mutual incomprehension. Some people think they’re saying something (right or wrong) abut scripture. But others are actually saying something about “who’s a proper Christian.” And they “know” you’re not! 
June 8th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I don’t quite follow how your objection to the doctrine of inerrancy (or papal infallibility) is a real objection to the doctrine. Of course, you are correct that divine communication is always subject to error if only because of the fallibility of the human who receives it. But that objection can be no more than a caution about the practical impact of inerrancy, not an objection to the truthfulness of the doctrine. Surely the propensity for error on the parts of Bible readers does not prove the existence of a propensity for error on the part of God whose word the Bible is.
June 9th, 2007 at 12:18 am
You may deduce from the rest of the post that I don’t believe in the truthfulness of the doctrine. But the objection you refer to is that anyone who claims the inerrancy of scripture always, in my view, confuses that with the inerrancy of their, or their tradition’s, interpretation of scripture. A doctrine of scripture is used to mask a claim about other things.
I also would personally wish to qualify claims about scripture as the “word of God” very carefully indeed for two reasons: first, most such claims end up as docetic, and effectively deny the “word of a human” aspect; secondly, the title is most fully and properly attributed to Christ, and therefore texts by themselves are in some hard-to-define sense less than “word of God.”
I would, in fact, wish to develop the idea of “word of God” sacramentally and christologically, and “inerrancy” in my view makes no space for that.