An incomplete slogan

When people say "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," I have to ask "But who interpreted it?

The Amalekites, the Creation Hymn, and the Hebrew Learning Curve

I'm redating my post on difficult passages in the Old Testament. I would just add that the what is being referred to as the chaos argument is one that I would be inclined to resist, but has to be taken seriously.

Wagner said: Victor, it seems that you believe in some form of inerrancy.But how do you reconcile inerrancy and a "evolving moral consciousness"? Could you please recommend some essential reads about this problem?

With respect to inerrancy, I start by saying I don't especially like the term, and am not sure quite what is supposed to count as an error. I've covered the Amalekite massacres before here, and my view is that they strike me as morally unacceptable per se from a moral standpoint, suggesting that either there is something I don't understand about the situation, or the actions are wrong, and Scripture reflects what we now know to be an inadequate moral awareness.


It could turn out that, given where the Hebrews were on the moral learning curve, and given their proneness to be influenced by the more agriculturally sophisticated Canaanites, the best thing for God to tell them was to kill everybody in those tribes, even though someone with a better developed moral sense could not be told to do such a thing. It was an essential part of God's plan to sustain a nation of people dedicated to monotheism, and perhaps, under the circumstances, that's what God had to do. It is hard for me to imagine that someone who absorbed the message of the Good Samaritan, which teaches us essentially that there are no national boundaries on neighborness and hence no national limits in the requirement to love our neighbors, could engage in that type of conduct. What is worrisome to us about this is partly the fact that, even if the Amalekites and Canaanites were immoral people, God orders children to be killed, who could not possibly be responsibe for the evils of the tribes. But even the notion of individual moral responsibility doesn't come out of the chute immediately for the ancient Hebrews. It gets clearly articulated in Ezekiel 18, but I am not sure where before that.

The link didn't work about my holding to some version of inerrancy, so I'm not sure what I said. I think there is a lot of vagueness attached to the term. Interpreted broadly enough, I'm sure it's true, but I know those who use it have a more precise meaning in mind, and some, in the name of inerrancy, impose hermeneutical constraints that proscribe interpretations that I would accept. I know that there are passages in the Bible that sound as if they teach the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished on earth, but then Job and Ecclesiastes come along and deal with the fact that, so far as we can see, that ain't happening.

The creation hymn in Genesis seems appropriate to an early stage on the scientific learning curve, and I see it's message as metaphysical (the monotheism of the hymn vs. the polytheism of the Enuma Elish), rather than scientific. I don't think its literal words need to be defended vis-a-vis modern science.

In saying all this I am sure I am profoundly disappointing both the inerrancy police (putting your moral intutitions ahead of the Bible, tsk tsk), and the skeptics among you.

Of course, it is surely open for the skeptic to say that God could, and should, have given the Hebrews a faster learning curve, both morally and scientifically. That's, I suppose a version of the argument from evil. Why didn't God dispel scientific and moral ignorance more quickly than he did. I don't subscribe to a theodicy sufficiently fine-grained to give an answer to that question.

Inerrancy and Scissors

Walter: Even the most fundamentalist of Protestant inerrantists approach the bible like it is a buffet from which they take what they want or need and leave the rest on the table. The truth is that most believers are mentally snipping out sections of the bible that they find hard to believe or morally distasteful. Did Jonah really live three days in the belly of a fish? No, that's just crazy. Did our heavenly Father really order the brutal deaths of women and children? That can't be right.


If you are an "errantist," then in reality you are implicitly doing the same thing Jefferson did overtly with a pair of scissors.

I think Christians would say that even parts that are not taken in a purely literal way are edifying and do have a role in God's inspired message. So they aren't snipping them out exactly, but they are assigning somewhat of a different role to them within the framework of a broadly inspired Scripture, even where the narrow content is, strictly speaking, incorrect.

I think even people who would say they believe in inerrancy do this.


One example of this would be the message of some portions of Deuteronomy and the Wisdom literature that, in the course of earthly life (and there is no robust belief in heaven or hell through most of the OT), that righteousness is rewarded and evil punished on earth. If there's a God then something like this has to be true, but if you restrict your vision to earthly life, it looks pretty obviously false, as books like Job forcefully point out. Narrowly speaking, you can't say "God said it, I believe it, that settles it", and yet it is part of a message which, taken as a whole, is thought to be inspired.

Interestingly enough, debunkers of Christianity really rely on the sort of "inerrancy-or-chaos" argument used by fundamentalists against compromising inerrancy. In his chapter on Ancient Near Eastern cosmology in The Christian Delusion, Ed Babinski lays out the prescientific cosmology of the Old Testament. What of course is going to be the reaction from just about anybody except the AIG crowd, is to ask why we should expect God to give us lots of good science lessons and straighten out our cosmology in inspiring the Bible.

Lessons from the Canaanite Conquest

Did God want the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites? Or is this the response of a repentant group of Israelites who have come to realize that allowing Canaanite influence led to their downfall as a nation?

This solution may seem to "errantist" for some. But that doesn't bother me especially. Should it?

Craig Blomberg and the argument that scholars who teach at schools that require inerrancy statements are biased

This is an argument you hear frequently. Everyone has methodological presuppositions, including methdological naturalists like Bart Ehrman. Craig Blomberg responds to the charge that his teaching at a seminary that requires an inerrancy statement makes his work biased, in a comment on Debunking Christianity.

Hi John. Good to hear from you again. There are, of course, other possibilities about people like me, which are sometimes, though not always, the case. I was raised in a liberal Lutheran environment and went to a liberal Lutheran liberal arts college that held the mainstream critical views you describe. I then went to an evangelical seminary and then to a Scottish university (largely secular but with some Christian presence) for my doctorate. I did "crazy" things while there like decide to follow what I discerned to be the New Testament model and be immersed as a believer in a Scottish Baptist church, cutting myself off from being able to teach in contexts that required me to affirm the legitimacy of infant baptism. It was also where I finally decided that I could believe in an appropriately nuanced form of inerrancy after having been raised in an environment that held "biblical inerrancy" to be an oxymoron, going to a seminary where it was part of the very definition of evangelical and then becoming familiar with the British evangelical scene where it was viewed as a rather uniquely American shibboleth. So I don't believe in inerrancy because I teach at a seminary that includes that in its statement of faith. I teach at a seminary that includes that in its statement of faith because I believe in inerrancy. And I have had enough invitations over the years to teach in places with different perspectives that I hardly feel constrained in my scholarship by that conviction. I examine every new issue relevant to the topic that I become aware of (though I haven't run into very many that weren't already on the landscape during my three degree programs in the 1970s and early 1980s, just in repackaged garb) and if I should decide I could no longer affirm inerrancy, I will go teach at a place that doesn't require it. As for going wherever reason leads, how open are you to returning to Christian faith should reason lead you there? From my now fairly extensive reading of your published and web writings, my sense is "much less so than I would be open to changing my views".

Thom Stark's Critique of Copan: Deceptive Apologetics?

Thom Stark offers a criticism of Paul Copan's defense of the Old Testament. Copan rightly notes that Susan Niditch, on her book on war in the Old Testament, claims that the dominant voice of the Old Testament is against the idea that killing enemies is a sacrifice to God. However, Niditch says there is an earlier, less dominant voice that accepts the idea that killing enemies in war is a sacrifice to God. Copan tells you about the dominant voice, apparently implying that it is the only voice, though I don't see how why the phrase "dominant voice" which he does quote, could fail to imply a not-so-dominant voice. But he doesn't tell you about the less dominant voice, which Niditch also presents. This, Stark says, is deceptive apologetics.

The picture Niditch presents fits rather well along the lines of the idea of an evolving moral consciousness in the Old Testament, an idea I have no problem with. It might be embarrassing to the understanding of inerrancy that Copan endorses. I'm not an expert on applied inerrancy.

I'd like to see what others think about this. I am also going to e-mail Paul for his reaction.

This is an essay by Copan in which he quotes Niditch.

William Lane Craig on Middle Knowledge and the Inspiration of Scripture

How can God make us free, and yet guarantee the inerrancy of Scritpure? (Or Papal Infallibility, for that matter). William Lane Craig thinks that Middle Knowledge will help.

What about a sensible inerrancy?

A redated post.

I have recently read Don Williams essay in the Lewis encyclopedia on
Reflections on the Psalms and find it interesting. Lewis, as we know,
rejected what he called "fundamentalism. " I think what he called
fundamentalism exists in the real world (found, for example, in the
insistence on Young Earth Creationism as the only doctrine acceptable
to Bible-believing Christians). I have often struggled with the whole
issue of inerrancy because I think that the word is just a shibboleth
until we spell out what hermeneutical constraints follow from it. I
could use the word inerrancy if I wanted to and be a Bultmannian,
(that would require some doublethink, to be sure), or I could use it
and insist that literal six-day creation follows from it. The Chicago
Statement is a helpful tool to understand the doctrine as it is
currently defended, and Don is right in saying that Lewis was not
familiar with more nuanced explications of the doctrine.

But how do you answer questions like:

Can you reject Young Earth Creationism and still be an inerrantist.
(as prestigious a preacher as John McArthur has insisted that you can't):
http://www.amazon. com/Battle- Beginning- John-MacArthur/ dp/0849916259
Can you describe the Psalmists as expressing sinful passions and still
be an inerrantist.
Can you believe that Ruth is fictional and be an inerrantist? (I am not saying you couldn't have other reasons for thinking that Ruth is historical, but the question is whether inerrancy requires that it be historical).
Can you beileve that Darius was a Persian, not a Mede, and be an
inerrantist?

Some of the moves Lewis makes with respect to Scripture probably could
be accepted by your typical present-day inerrantist. Others, I
suspect, would not be acceptable.

8/12/09

I think that sensible inerrancy does mean that quick scripture-to-doctrine moves have to be considered a little suspect.

You can find the Chicago inerrancy statement here

Perfect Guide and Perfect Truth Inerrancy

Franklin Mason argues that Perfect Guide Inerrancy, as opposed to perfect truth inerrancy, is what is needed. Please do follow the link back to his original discussion of Perfect Guide Inerrancy,

This is an attempt to avoid the conclusion of what I call the inerrancy or chaos argument. The idea of the inerrancy or chaos argument is that without some firm doctrine of biblical inerrancy, theology will sooner or later give away the store. Everything that our sinful hearts don't want to believe, or whatever doesn't fit with the Zeitgeist, will be swept aside, and Christianity reduced to platitudes.

On the other hand, we want to avoid the kind of literalism that led Martin Luther to condemn heliocentrism because it conflicted with a literal reading of the sun standing still for Joshua, which of course also led the Church to make Galileo be silent about heliocentrism.

C. S. Lewis wrote two letters two American writers relevant to the inerrancy issue, which might be helpful in developing Mason's project. As would his chapter on Scripture in Reflections on the Psalsm.

Some notes in response to Paul

First, my primary argument against Calvinism is semantic rather than moral. I think that there are biblical passages that say that God loves all persons, that God wants all persons to be saved, that God is grieved by sin, etc. etc., that Calvinists in the main don't simply use "reference class" arguments to criticize these positions, but rather accept them and reconcile them with Calvinism. Yes, God loves everyone, but no, that doesn't mean God is out to save everyone. An analysis of the ordinary usage of these terms (and if you accept a verbal special revelation you are bound by ordinary usage) suggests that to say this is to distort the use of those terms beyond all recognition. This argument, you will notice, requires no appeal to moral intuitions.
To defend this objection, I would have to answer the standard "two wills" argument that comes down from Dabney through Piper. But for various reasons, I don't think that argument washes.

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2008/08/calvinism-love-and-biblical-jigsaw.html

Yes, of course, my moral intuitions tell me that a loving God would not choose a world containing reprobates over a universalist world, assuming there is no need for libertarian free will. That objection is, however, in principle defeatable, although, because of the considerations I presented in the paragraphs above, not in fact defeated.

The "divine noble lie" case I had in mind was the fact that, at least on some readings of Scripture, Christ places a short time limit on his return. He leads the church to believe, perhaps by saying so directly, that He will return within the generation. These sorts of considerations have led exapologist to abandon Christianity. Exapologist mentions one Christian biblical scholar (Allison) who takes this position and says "so what?" and I was trying to see if Allison's position could be defended.

The scenario I sketched was one in which God wants people to spread the gospel, giving them the belief in an immanent parousia is the way to do that, as a result the gospel is spread and salvation maximized, even though the claim of an immanent parousia is false.

The point is often raised in the pro-inerrancy literature (at least when I read a lot of it back when Pinnock was a traditional inerrantist), that God cannot lie. And I have been wondering what sense to make of that claim, given that most of us would agree that lying is sometimes morally justified for humans. Pointing out that there is a argument that could support the claim that God cannot lie is different from actually saying that God did. So don't overstate what I am claiming here.

Steve responds to my paradox

Steve responds to my paradox in the direction I thought the reply would have to go. God, with providential control over the circumstances, can and does see to it that his message is delivered inerrantly. avoiding the necessity of false speaking of any kind. He maintains that God could avoid all situations that would require lying for beneficent purposes. But would a world in which God never utters a false statement be a better world than any world in which He does utter at least one false statement. That's not perfectly transparent to me. Intuitively...., oops, I can't trust those.

Of course the Titus 1:2 in the NIV, whereas in the KJV it says God cannot lie. But this does seem to leave the inerrantist with having to defend perfect divine veracity. But the first reading makes it easier, one can accept my argument that there are possibile circumstances in which God ought to lie, but he never in fact gets into them. And I guess if you accept Steve's view of God's complete providential control, that would be easy to see. Nevertheless, you would think that with that kind of providential control that God could.... oh never mind. God reprobates people but he always tells the truth.

There are the wide range of difficulties, however, in God's getting his message across to prescientific peoples, so that it isn't always perfectly obvious to figure out what would constitute an errantist interpretation and what would not. Inerrantists like Bill Craig oppose lead-footed literalism on Genesis 1, for example.

There can be certainly a subset of divine utterances that God seals with a covenantal promise, where God in effect says "God strike me dead if I'm lying," which of course is pretty effective coming from, well, God. I think that's what the Hebrews 6:18 passage is all about. But I don't think you can argue that inerrancy is backed up by that sort of thing.

God, lies and inerrancy

One of the arguments in the inerrancy debate is the assertion that God cannot lie. I want to suggest that although this claim is initially intuitive, (I mean who wants a liar for a God?), there is what seems to me a forceful argument against the claim.

1. God always does what is morally right, and never does what is morally wrong. (The doctrine of divine moral perfection).
2. Possibly, lying is morally obligatory, and truthfulness is morally reprehensible.
(I will call this position anti-Kantianism about lying.)
3. Therefore, possibly God lies.

Now of course you can avoid this conclusion by accepting the Kantian position that if you were hiding Nicole Brown Simpson, and OJ were to come to your door with a knife and ask you where she was, you couldn't tell her that she went to LAX and that if you hurry up in that White Ford Bronco, you might be able to catch her before she leaves for New York. But most of us suppose are on the side of Benjamin Constant on this issue, and accept 2.

But how can you accept 1 and 2 but deny 3? I don't think I've committed some horrid modal fallacy, have I?

P. S. This would neatly solve exapologist's false prophecy problem. God wanted the gospel spread quickly, so he planted a noble lie that he was coming back soon. It worked!

Andrew T on Inerrancy and Methdological Naturalism

The fact that abandonment of a belief might result in one’s being expelled from one’s institution of education doesn’t mean that the position is indefeasible. Someone who starts doubting aspects of Darwinian biology might have similar fears about their status at their own institutions of learning. I don’t want to uphold the whole “Expelled” claim, but I think there is considerable pressure within many academic biology departments not to stray from Darwinism. Further, people in places like Talbot got positions at places like Talbot because their thinking led them to think that inerrancy was true to begin with. There have been people who have left their Christian academic institutions because they had doubts about the doctrinal commitments of the institution. And sometimes these institutional statements are given fairly liberal interpretations. If you apply at Calvin College the official statements affirm the Canons of Dordt, but I know that some people who teach there are not five-pointers (Plantinga, who taught classes there while at Notre Dame, openly said that the Canons of Dordt may not have gotten things right.)

Further, exactly what is built into inerrancy is a little complicated, and what it takes to be guilty of “denying the Bible” may have more to it than just rejecting some popular hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis. The medievals said “Authority has a nose of wax” and that is, I think, true of inerrancy, although there are occasions where you get explusions, or attempted explusions, from groups like the ETS. However, the attempt to get Open Theists out of the ETS failed a couple of years back. I take it you have read the Chicago Statement and know what the doctrine is actually thought to mean by its contemporary advocates.

There are stronger and weaker versions of MN, just as there are stronger and weaker versions of the commitment to inerrancy. It is a framework believe that the advocate will call into question only in the face of considerable evidential pressure.

One of the things I tried to explain in my long exchanges with the Calvinists was that someone might in fact believe that inerrancy is true, but at the same time hold, based on their moral understanding, that the Calvinistic conception of a reprobating God was morally unacceptable. They might think that the biblical evidence supported anti-Calvinism rather than Calvinism, and therefore accept both inerrancy and anti-Calvinism. However, if presented with sufficient evidence (based on Calvinist exegetical arguments) that inerrancy and anti-Calvinism could not be held simultaneously, they might choose, in the hypothetical situation, to give up inerrancy. It wouldn’t follow from that never really believed in inerrancy in the first place.

Even if Craig would believe in inerrancy regardless of whether there were strong evidence for it or not, it could be that he could say he was confident that there were lots of good arguments and reasons for being and inerrantist, or he could say that it was an article of faith. One's faith that something is true doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to make all sorts of ......stuff up to support one's beliefs.

Inerrancy and Methodological Naturalism

This is something I put in the combox of the last post, but it need to be treated separately here.

I think there are difficulties with Craig's apologetical operation. I have some fundamental differences in methodology, etc. I'm not comfortable with what he does with his appeal to religious experience and the testimony of the Holy Spirit.

However, I fail to see how pre-commitment to biblical inerrancy is any worse than pre-commitment to methodological naturalism. If a naturalistically inclined biblical scholar finds it difficult to account for the founding events of Christianity, well, by golly, my hallucination/legend/whatever-else theory may not fit all the facts as we know them, but at least it's better than admitting a miracle. We can't let a divine foot in the door, now can we?

The "special pleading" charge, as in the case of Russell's analysis of Aquinas, carries with it an implicit classical foundationalism that has been rejected in numerous areas of inquiry. We don't come to the data as a blank slate to be written on, nor should we. We are humans, not Vulcans. And pretending to be a Vulcan when you aren't one is just one more way of being irrational.

Now, a methodological naturalist could treat MN as a defeasible working hypothesis, but an inerrantist could do the same.

A critique of inerracy

Anyone care to tackle some of these?

A concession to hard-hearted wickedness

Matthew 19:1-9
After Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went southward to the region of Judea and into the area east of the Jordan River. Vast crowds followed him there, and he healed their sick. Some Pharisees came and tried to trap him with this question: "Should a man be allowed to divorce his wife for any reason?" "Haven't you read the Scriptures?" Jesus replied. "They record that from the beginning `God made them male and female.' And he said, `This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.' Since they are no longer two but one, let no one separate them, for God has joined them together." "Then why did Moses say a man could merely write an official letter of divorce and send her away?" they asked. Jesus replied, "Moses permitted divorce as a concession to your hard-hearted wickedness, but it was not what God had originally intended. And I tell you this, a man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery--unless his wife has been unfaithful."

What sense do you make of this passage from the standpoint of biblical inerrancy? Jesus is claiming that some things which are part of the Jewish law which are not just, but which are nonetheless part of the law as concessions to human hard-hearted wickedness. If this is compatible with inerrancy, then this seems to open up a way for an inerrantist to maintain that slavery is morally wrong.