Biblical Inerrancy: The Search for Certainty in an Uncertain World

I had originally planned to do something else this week, but there wasn’t enough support to pull it off. Instead, I thought I’d focus on a broader topic that I hope will bring discussion on both sides, that being biblical inerrancy combined with a few thoughts about postmodernity.

First, biblical inerrancy. I had an interesting conversation with an older lady from our church today having to do with a Bible class where I mentioned the topic of inerrancy. She did not like what I had said about it, but wasn’t even sure what the word I used was. Since then, she has not been back to any of the classes I taught, but she jokingly said that was not the reason. I tried to explain something about what I had said, but she just ended the conversation with something like, “I’ve just always believed God preserved his word in that way and there’s nothing you can say that will change my mind.” This is a typical response from many in Churches of Christ. I have always believed this and I won’t even consider the possibility of things being otherwise.

Let me define my understanding of what the current belief is among Evangelical Christians regarding inerrancy. It primarily concerns the New Testament, but could by extension be applied to the Old Testament. It is the belief that at least for the books regarded as Scripture, whatever the original author wrote in the original manuscript was inerrant, i.e. there were no errors as regards facts, truth claims, spelling, or anything else. They were pristine and perfect. For a fuller definition see this link. This was primarily a response to the fruits of a few hundred years of Textual Criticism, which is the study of the thousands of copies of portions of the New Testament written in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, as well as many more copies in translations such as Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Old Slavonic, to name a few. I choose not to go into detail here, but I have had both an introductory graduate course in the field as well as an advanced graduate course in the field, which was a guided study under the tutelage of a well-published expert in the field. I say all this just to let you know that if you have questions, I can most likely give you a sufficient answer.

The results of this field of New Testament study showed that there were thousands of differences in manuscript copies of the writings of the New Testament, and this just in the Greek copies. Although the vast majority of these can be reconciled as minor spelling problems, unintentional errors, etc., there are plenty of significant ones. In fact, though for a long period, the purpose of the field was to establish what was the “original text” as written by the author, the move recently has been more toward understanding how the various manuscripts functioned in their historical church settings, realizing that the history of the text is so complicated that establishing the “original text” is not an achievable goal.

All of this is background to why the need for such a belief. For most evangelicals, as well as Churches of Christ, not to believe this is tantamount to not being a faithful Christian. However, one of the main problems I have with this belief is that it is not based in fact or reality. Before you are turned completely off, try to hear me out. The belief is focused on how God must have (or even should have) preserved his word, though no Scripture supports this belief—the Bible does not say this about itself. Even the facts of history do not bear out this belief. The belief is based on documents that we do not have. We do not have the original manuscripts from the original authors' pens. If it were so important to God for us to have the original text, surely he would have either preserved these originals or he would have preserved an exact copy of them if what we need was the original text as it came from the hand of the authors. We have no such originals or exact copies; every manuscript we have contains at least a few errors, or at least a few uncertainties, even in the shorter books like Philemon, 2 John, 3 John, and especially Jude. The belief is in a phantom text for which we have not a shread of proof. We cannot prove that Paul did not misspell a word here or there. We cannot prove that one of the gospel writers did not get a placename wrong or a detail mixed up. We don’t know exactly what Jesus taught on divorce (for more on this see a previous posting). What we have is thousands of copies of manuscripts, all with a certain amount of differences and errors. We don’t have an inerrant text. So why do we need to believe in something we don’t have? From the evidence, it is clear to me that God does not work to preserve his text in the way that this belief suggests. Instead, he relied on us clumsy, imprecise humans to copy his text down through the ages. Why is this such a problem for us? For me the heart of the matter is a need for certainty.

Let me explain. From my understanding of church history, part of the problem came up during the evolution debate and the “monkey trials” in the last century. This was part of a larger problem of “liberal” biblical scholarship that tried to challenge the credibility and reliability of Scripture, especially regarding certain beliefs such as creation and the resurrection. As a generalization, Evangelical Christianity, rather than attempting to give a serious argument to the questions, entrenched in their beliefs and made them a test of faith rather than trying to explain them and deepen them. So, rather than deal seriously with the criticism, we felt threatened and just decided we wouldn’t play anymore; we would create our own rules. Part of this was the need for certainty when it came to Scripture. If people were challenging its credibility and reliability based partly on the results of Textual Criticism, let’s just refuse to deal with the questions by pushing back to a time when nothing can be proven, i.e. the time of the original writings, and say that they were inerrant. Any scholarship, without the original documents in hand, could not prove otherwise. So if there were problems in the text, that was the result of copying errors and none could be attributed to a problem in the original manuscript. It was a great move in some ways as there was nothing that could challenge it.

The problem occurs when you have people of intelligence, who did not grow up as Christians or left the Christian faith for some reason, who know there are problems and are unwilling just to believe something that is unproveable, and perhaps unnecessary. Is there another, more satisfying explanation that could answer critics and accord with faith? I say, “yes.” The original documents could have contained errors, but could still communicate truth. Let me illustrate by way of analogy. We have, since the invention of the printing press, been able to make countless identical copies of writings. We have come a long way from the time of individual people handwriting copies of the Bible or anything else. Yet I would challenge anyone to show me any recently published book, that has used all the modern technology of spell check, grammar check and numerous editors, that does not have a single typographical error, grammatical error, or for that matter, factual error. My own experience has proven that the first two are in evidence in every book I have ever read and postmodernity has taught us that the latter one is true because every “fact” is still told from a certain point of view and is not unbiased. This includes science textbooks, history books, novels, and many other varieties of literature. And yet no one would deny that these published works communicate reliable truth.

In my opinion, it is the need for certainty, on both sides of the issue, that drives our beliefs. On the Christian fundamentalist side, it is the need to believe in a certain, inerrant text, which seems to amount to idolatry, that is a belief in the text more than a belief in God so that the Bible supplants God as the ultimate object of faith. On the other side, that of unbelief, perhaps as a result of Evangelical Christianity’s belief in inerrancy, nonbelievers are certain that if the text does contain errors, it cannot be a source of truth and so cannot be said to accurately portray God, Jesus or the like. I will reiterate that this is a standard up to which even contemporary publications have failed to hold. Yet we rely on them nonetheless as sources for truth and learning.

A final note on certainty, to open this discussion up even farther, is my observation on the current political divide in the United States. We are uncertain about so many thing in this age of postmodernity that we seem to want to grasp onto whatever we have that is certain. I think that many of our bitter fights have to do with this grasping for any certainty we can find. It is in the thought that drives us, on both sides, namely, “I may not be completely correct in what I know or believe, but I am certain that you are wrong.” And so we home in on that certainty that the other person is wrong, all the while refusing to grapple with the uncertainties in our own position. It is so much easier this way, yet it is so much more detrimental. We don’t grow and we grasp for something that will not satisfy. And so we attack and so we dehumanize and we fail to ever really try to learn from others and see the merits in what they are saying.

These are just some of my thoughts. Let me know yours. It is through genuine dialogue that we all grow.