Inerrancy without the weasels

The Bible is “breathed out by God,” as Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16 (ESV). The ESV actually translates the text here, unlike most other Bibles which explain it as “inspired”—as if the metaphor God actually used were too difficult for English-speakers to parse. All kinds of books are inspired by God—Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance—but only one is breathed out by him, as someone breathes out when speaking.

Scripture’s God-breathedness has traditionally been a sufficient ground for maintaining its inerrancy. The argument is simple:

1. All Scripture is God’s speech (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20);
2. God is truth and it is impossible for him to lie (Jn 14:6; Heb 6:18);
3. Therefore, all Scripture is true and free from falsehood or error (Jn 17:17).

Simple in theory—not so much in application. Enough ink has been spilled over this topic to destroy an ocean, so Christians generally turn to certain, popular formulations of inerrancy when wanting to understand or defend or explain it. Unfortunately, these formulations are fundamentally compromised by weaselly language at their most crucial points. This ends up causing much angst—and I have observed it leading many believers away from inerrancy.

Let me show you what I mean:

Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching. ❋ “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy”. http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html.

When we say that the Bible is inerrant, we mean that the Bible makes good on its claims. ❋ John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, cited in Justin Taylor, “What does inerrancy mean?” (July 2013). https://web.archive.org/web/20150928233319/http://www.thegospelcoalition.org:80/blogs/justintaylor/2013/07/26/what-does-inerrancy-mean/.

The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact. ❋ Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan Academic, 1994), 90.

Now let me illustrate the difficulty implicit in all these definitions by asking you a simple question: In Jude 1:9, is the Bible “teaching,” “claiming,” or “affirming” that the archangel Michael disputed with Satan over the body of Moses? Or, do Job 37:18 and Isaiah 40:22 teach, claim, or affirm a solid domed sky above a flat earth? ❋ Dominic Bnonn Tennant, “What if the Bible depicts a solid domed sky and a flat earth held up by pillars?”. https://www.bnonn.com/what-if-the-bible-depicts-a-solid-domed-sky-and-a-flat-earth-held-up-by-pillars.

You see, the difficulty is that often it is far from obvious what it means for the Bible to teach, claim, or affirm something. Using this kind of language is weaselly because it slips right around how complex and difficult it is to define these key terms themselves. Using simplistic placeholder words where what we actually need is clear-cut explanations of their meaning is not helpful to anyone.

This is especially true since most Christians see the simplistic words and therefore figure that their meaning must be simple. They struggle to reconcile inerrancy with passages like those mentioned above, because their straightforward understanding of teaching/claiming/affirming leads them to think the Bible is doing these things about facts which are either questionable or obviously wrong.

I am not saying that a good definition of inerrancy will resolve the question of what constitutes teaching, claiming, or affirming. That is a hermeneutical issue—a difficulty of interpretation, not a difficulty of doctrine. But it should at least make the difficulty clear, and point the way to finding a solution; rather than obscuring how it might be resolved, and even its existence in the first place.

A more helpful definition of inerrancy

Here is what I propose that it means to say that scripture is inerrant:–

You can see that I am trying to cover some broad bases here. A scribe can be an author or a redactor, for example. But my primary concern is in recognizing that while God superintended the creation of scripture—whether breathing out the words or breathing out the canon; they are the same process ❋ Dominic Bnonn Tennant, “Can we distinguish inspiration from canonization?” (September 2015). https://www.bnonn.com/can-we-distinguish-inspiration-from-canonization. —he used particular people with particular beliefs (many of them false), and particular expectations about what truth would look like, and particular ideas about how to convey it, to achieve his purpose.

Often that’s messier than 21st century, scientific-age Western readers would like. Sometimes it presents hard interpretive questions as we try to figure out where the message God intended to convey differs from his chosen “delivery mechanism.” To take an analogy, if human expression is like a four-pack of crayons, which seems about right, God’s communication with us will look rather different than if he had had access to a technical drawing kit.

But if God was fine with crayons, we should be too.