Biblical inerrancy
Submitted by Heather on July 06 1999 at 19:36:54
In reply to interpreting or understanding? Submitted by F.O.D. on July 06 1999 at 16:53:43
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I'm not sure where to place this post, so I'll put it after the politest one today. :) I've been reading Harry H. Hoehler's Christian Responses to the World's Faiths, and it includes a passage in which he critiques the biblical inerrancy doctrine. It's a bit long, but I thought it fit in well with what we're discussing here. Heather * * * First, the claim that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is made problematic by much of ninettenth and twentieth century biblical scholarship. One conclusion of that scholarship is that the Bible is an all too human document – the response of fallible human beings to what they discern as divine events. The empirical evidence that the Bible, when taken absolutely literally, is sometimes wrong (God, to the best of our knowledge, did not creat the world in seven days), sometimes conflicting in its narratives (compare the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2), and sometimes morally unworthy (Samuel brutally hews Agag in half to fulfill the Lord's command – 1 Sam 15:33), goes a long way to bolster this conclusion. To thoughtful Christians, it renders the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy highly implausible, to say the least. But the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy raises another issue. In itself it offers no criterion as to which propositions in the Bible are of primary importance and which are of secondary value. It is not enough to say that the Bible as a whole is the infallible word of God and then pretend that no a priori decision has been made as to what are its crucial hermeneutical passages. For clearly such a selection has been made. When conservative/evangelical Christians use such verses as Acts 4:11-12 ("This Jesus . . . has become the keystone . . . There is no salvation in anyone else at all . . .") as proof-texts for theological exclusivism, they have to contend against contrary but equally unerring statements which suggest that the same light which was in Jesus enlightens every person (John 1:1-9) or that God "did not leave himself without witness" (Acts 14:15ff) even among Gentiles who knew nothing of Christ. But by what measure does one decide which passages are key to understanding scripture? For example, by what criterion does one subsume Acts 14:15ff to Acts 4:11-12 or Acts 10:34-35 to Phil 2:11? As one pursues such a question, one conclusion becomes evident: a doctrine which equates divine revelation indiscriminately with all the words of scripture, giving none interpretive priority over others, offers no such criterion. Such considerations have led a good many mainline Christians to perceive revelation not as propositions miraculously dictated by God and inerrantly written down by humans but as encounters, humanly interpreted, between God and humanity. This implies that a distinction must be made between people's encounters with the Holy One and their various ways of reflecting on, judging, and talking about these encounters. Robert Young emphasizes this basic differentiation from the standpoint of mainstream Protestantism. "The coincidence of infallible God with fallible human beings," he writes, "is not infallible revelation." It is fallible revelation which persists after "Christian commitment as well as before it." In short, one's encounter with God's revelation in no way cancels out one's humanity. Because humans are finite and fallible, their understanding and formulation of God's disclosures are finite and fallible. |