MetaCatholic

The inerrancy conversation will probably rumble on. For a summary, see Nick Norelli’s post, or the last paragraph of John Hobbins’ reply. For a very slant-wise look at creeping inerrancy see ElShaddai Edwards on translations. In some respects, however, it is less the formal declaration of inerrancy which is the problem, but rather the literal wooden-mindedness of many of those who adopt this badge.

As well as having so thoroughly claimed the idea of inerrancy as to render it entirely impossible to use the term (sorry, John), “fundamentalists” have also overdosed on claims about the literal sense of scripture. Unfortunately, they have created the impression that reading the literal sense of scripture is the same thing as taking it literally.

Despite claims sometimes put forward that the Reformation restored, or even established, the importance of the literal sense of the text, the importance of the literal sense goes back a long way. Here is St Thomas Aquinas:

Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one — the literal — from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epis. 48). Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense. (ST 1.1.10)

St Thomas accepts the other traditional senses of Scripture: allegorical (by which the Gospel is found in the Old Testament), moral (by which things and events understood christologically signify how we should behave) and anagogical, by which scriptures are related to the final end of all things in glory. However, he clearly subordinates these to the literal sense, saying that no passage may be expounded by any of the other senses to teach something that cannot be found elsewhere in the literal sense.

More importantly, he goes on to explain the literal sense further:

The parabolical sense is contained in the literal, for by words things are signified properly and figuratively. Nor is the figure itself, but that which is figured, the literal sense. When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power.

The literal sense is not taking things literally. It is slightly unclear whether Aquinas is saying they should not be taken literally if they are not intended to be taken literally, or if they cannot be taken literally. It is certainly true for him that it is impossible that God has an arm. It is perhaps less clear that every use of language either Aquinas or most of us would interpret figuratively was entirely figurative for the original authors. The degree to which, say, OT anthropomorphisms are self-consciously metaphorical is open to question.

This means that the “literal” sense of the text is determined both in a theological framework, and by literary sensitivity to language, rhetoric and genre. It is, sometimes, the exact opposite of taking the text literally. By and large the magisterial Reformers are in continuity with Aquinas on this point. However, by moving away from the other senses, they perhaps desensitise their followers to pluriform readings and multiple meanings of the sort that have only started to emerge again through newer forms of literary criticism. Without that wider hinterland of reading, they may have helped pave the way for taking the literal sense literally.

I suggest that our biggest issue with the inerrantists is not per se their professed belief in inerrancy, but they combine it with a preference for reading the text literally, confusing that with the literal sense, and displaying the literary sensitivity of a Dalek.

written by doug

I have discovered how to encourage people to read this blog in a hurry. Insult someone in the title of a post. I do not, in fact, believe that John Hobbins is a fundamentalist, nor an inerrantist, nor a Calvinist, despite his protestations of so being. He’s far too erudite and thoughtful. (Oops, I don’t mean that quite the way it comes out!). I think we shall have to agree to disagree over the appropriateness of the language of inerrancy to describe a position a million miles away from that adopted by those who badge themselves up in this way.

However, while looking around for what card-carrying everyone-else-excluding inerrantists really were about, I stumbled across a site I’d never heard of before — Theopedia. (Perhaps I’m just thankfully late to this particular party.) I feel obliged at the very least to draw this to Jim West’s attention, since I know how much he relies on wiki sites for accurate, scholarly information. Such as the following:

• The Bible is the sacred book of Christianity, a collection of ancient writings inspired by God which comprise the sixty-six books of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. No debate about the number of the books there.
  The Reformation brought a renewed emphasis on the fact that Scripture is the “only rule of faith and practice.” Love that “fact”.
• Inerrancy is the view that when all the facts become known, they will demonstrate that the Bible in its original autographs and correctly interpreted is entirely true and never false in all it affirms, whether that relates to doctrines or ethics or to the social, physical, or life sciences. See, John, that’s why you’re not an inerrantist.

To be fair, while the site is overwhelmingly conservative and evangelical, it is quite variable in just how biased it is. The articles on creation and evolution are nowhere near as bad as one might have feared, and are broadly descriptive of views held among evangelicals, as well as citing resources for and against particular views. On the other hand, the featured (today’s featured?) article on the Emergent Church carries, I think, a clear slant towards warning that it might be a slippery slope away from real Christianity.

Want to join in? Well you have to negotiate the hurdle of their statements of faith. Yes, that’s statements, plural. The one you have to personally accept is a fairly standard conservative evangelical one, but you also have to agree that what you write, though not your personal belief – a strange dichotomy – accords with a second statement of faith. Any entry must (among other things):

• hold to plenary verbal inspiration
• accept the historicity of biblical events (which may mean less than they intend it to)
• believe in penal substitution
• be a complementarian
• believe you can do nothing to affect your salvation which is based solely in God’s eternal decrees
• agree that justification by faith alone is the article by which the church stands or falls

and, generally be a Calvinist. Finally, “In doctrinal matters unspecified here, content will conform to traditional, evangelical Protestantism”. The link to all this is tucked away in small print at the bottom of the page. The big print just says it’s an encyclopedia of “Biblical Christianity”. No doubt this is a Protestant application of Newman’s doctrine of reserve.

written by doug

John Hobbins confesses to being a fundamentalist inerrantist, as he has previously to being a five-point Calvinist. Of course, being John, he immediately offers an interpretation of these terms which is entirely different from anything anyone else commonly means by them. He is, in other words, a Humpty-Dumpty type of inerrantist Calvinist: his words mean precisely what he intends them to mean, and nothing else.

In the comments on his post, he says that by rejecting these words “infallible” and “inerrant”, I “put myself in a corner by myself”:

You deprive yourself of core common vocabulary you might have shared with, for example, contemporary Catholic Christians, as in Roman Catholic, and evangelical Christians of many varieties. You might have argued about how best to use that vocabulary, how best to contextualize it.

Okay, first of all, I accept that a whole range of mainstream theology has used language similar to what John quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.” The inspired books teach the truth. “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”¹

There is, of course, quite a get out here: the only respect in which the Scriptures are without error are about “that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to” them. Generally such classic statements of inerrancy have included similar provisos. The question is whether, even with such provisos, the language of inerrancy is helpful today (even when appropriately contextualised).

I don’t think it is.

• I note that John can’t really appeal to Rome for this statement, unless he also wishes to accept the context within which Rome makes that statement. The right interpretation of these inerrant Scriptures is a Church which guided by them also teaches without error in respect of faith and morals. Their “inerrancy” is inherently communal. Many of us who remain outside the Roman fold do so at least in part because of our inability to accept this.
• The mainstream of patristic treatments as well as those of later Catholic and Orthodox tradition that teach this kind of limited inerrancy teach it about more books than John (denominationally) accepts as Scripture. It is an odd thing to seek to maintain their teaching about the Scriptures, while not accepting some of the books they teach it about. Indeed, the question of the Canon (about which John knows a great deal) throws up a significant problem for any teaching about inerrancy. Whose inerrancy, and which books?
• The problem for Protestants of every stripe is a multiplication of the Roman solution. In practice a vast many people identify their interpretation of Scripture with Scripture itself. Asserting the inerrancy of scripture is all too often a way of asserting one’s own infallibility, or the infallibility of one’s own tradition, often denying that interpretation or tradition have got anything to do with what is plainly (!) the inerrant teaching of Scripture.
• Finally, and in the end most significantly (for all of the previous problems could, I think, be more-or-less adequately addressed) words depend for their meaning on usage. Here, the clear everyday meaning of “inerrant” has been taken over by a late-Enlightenment “scientific” attitude to facts and data by the fundamentalists, to interpret Scripture not as a literary text but as a mix of encyclopedia and almanac, which offers an alternate “science” based on an entirely different set of “facts” of revelation. This construction of Scripture is diametrically opposed to those traditionally associated with the idea that they do not err when guiding us towards salvation, because it has stripped out all the communal and relational aspects of reading them.

John quotes St Augustine as saying:

I dare to believe that none of them has erred in writing; and I do not doubt that if I come upon anything in them which seems contrary to the truth it is nothing but either a faulty codex or that the expounder has not comprehended what has been said or that I have not understood it.

However, Augustine, like the other fathers, had in his armoury a whole range of interpretative method, not the least of which was allegorising, which allowed him to perform all sorts of subtle moves with the text which brought it into line with what could be plainly known of the world through philosophy and the science of the day. Many of our own forms of literary criticism may allow us to do the same. In doing so, however, we often do precisely the opposite of what those most fond of the language of inerrancy believe should be done.

This suggests that the language of inerrancy serves no purpose which may not be equally, or indeed better served, by using words like authoritative, trustworthy, normative and inspired. Or indeed, the one that is used in Second Timothy: “useful”. These say something about how we relate to Scripture, relying on it, wrestling with it, discerning ourselves and our world by it, and living in the light of its story. That seems to me a lot more sensible than holding on to an older vocabulary which has so changed its meaning that it serves as little more than a badge of obscurantist inclusion and exclusion.

At the end of the film Wargames Joshua (the computer that has nearly blown up the world by playing what it “thought” was the game Thermonuclear War) says: “A strange kind of game. The only winning move is not to play.” That is exactly how I feel about John’s challenge to contextualise the language of inerrancy.

1. Pt 1, Sec 1, Ch 2, art 3 107-8 — The quotations are from Dei Verbum [↩]

written by doug

Humans are very fond of labels, especially as a tool for dismissing people. There’ve been a couple of recent blog examples of this. First there was the all-too-typical-of-a-certain-mindset discussion (I’m sure there ought to be a single German word for that) of whether Mike Bird was a Christian. Theo Geek Andrew picks up on that and adds some further examples, concluding:

But then, what would I know, since apparently I am by definition not a Christian. Oh well, at least I’m in good company, along with most Catholics, most people who thought they were ‘Christians’ prior to the 11th century, St Paul, and apparently the Calvinist scholar Michael Bird.

The implication of this kind of (typically) very conservative Protestant labelling of people as “non-Christian” is always: “They’re “them” not “us” and therefore we don’t need to listen to their arguments.”

But from the other end of the spectrum Jim West exhibits a somewhat similar behaviour by labelling people (on this case Darrell Bock and Dan Wallace) as fundamentalist. At least Jim offers some arguments on his way to dismissing their work, so it’s not quite mirror behaviour, but I can’t escape the feeling that Jim attaches this label as a way of dismissing their arguments.

Challenged to a definition of the term fundamentalist, Jim comes up with this:

A fundamentalist is a person who believes that the Bible is inerrant or infallible.

Now Jim and others will know that I think belief in inerrancy is simply wrong. But I don’t think this definition works. There are plenty of people who wish to maintain the language of inerrancy or infallibility, sometimes drawing a sharp distinction between them, while reinterpreting it quite drastically. Among them surely is Jim West’s personal devil friend Chris Tilling. For a whole variety of reasons, a number of broadly evangelical scholars want to maintain the language of infallibility while being committed to a generally accepted critical methodology. I happen to disagree with them, but they provide a good reason why Jim’s definition doesn’t work.

I’m not entirely sure that any definition does work. The fundamentalist label doesn’t, in my view, convey that much information: rather it usually establishes in-groups and out-groups, and so I’m inclined not to use it. The definition of the term depends on who’s using it. On the lips of Darrell Bock or Dan Wallace, it means one thing, whereas on Jim’s lips it means something else. It’s a useful insult, and an “out-group” classification, but it’s not a word that bears any useful information, or has a meaning that can be defined.

written by doug