Authority Without Inerrancy? Part III: A Fuller Explication of the Progressive Christian View of the Bible

As I was preparing my discussion of the third objection to the progressive Christian view of the Bible ("The Argument from Human Hubris"), I found that I needed to offer a more careful and complete account of exactly what I have in mind when I speak about "the progressive Christian view." That account started out as a section of a blog post discussing the Argument from Human Hubris, but it became so lengthy in its own right that I have now decided to make it a post of its own.

Most of what I say in what follows should be familiar, since it elaborates on points I’ve already made. But I think it will be helpful to put all the points together, and explain them a bit more fully, so as to offer a more perspicuous picture. It is not my intention here to defend the progressive Christian view, but simply to describe it and contrast it with the dominant alternative.

According to the progressive Christian understanding, the Bible is an important authority in the Christian’s life but not an inerrant one. The progressive Christian does not accept the Doctrine of Plenary Verbal Inspiration (the doctrine which holds that the Bible says exactly what God wants it to say from cover to cover). Rather than viewing the Bible as the very Word of God, the progressive Christian views the Bible as a seminal human testament to divine revelation.

The idea, roughly, is this: God has revealed Himself to humanity in a number of ways through history: in profound mystical encounters, in providential events, and through our relationships with one another (especially insofar as those relationships operate as channels through which divine love can flow in the world). For Christians, however, the most significant revelation of God is that which occurred some two thousand years ago in the person and life of Jesus.

On the progressive Christian view of things, the Bible collects the writings of people who have experienced divine revelation in these various ways, and who have sought to express their understanding of those revelatory experiences through poetry, words of wisdom, stories, theological ruminations, etc. The Bible also collects and redacts other things—such as transmitted oral histories, religious myths, and folk tales, as well as records of the laws and holiness codes of earlier peoples. In many of these cases, the actual writers were probably not striving to express their own experience of divine revelation so much as striving to faithfully put to writing stories that expressed the religious experiences of earlier generations.

Put more simply, the Bible collects both first-hand and second-hand (and sometimes third- or fourth-hand) human testaments to divine revelation. On this progressive Christian view, the testaments themselves do not bear the stamp of divine inerrancy, since they are human testaments and as such are subject to the fallibility of their human authors. And this means that approached on a verse-by-verse basis, one cannot confidently say, simply because the passage appears in the Bible, that it truly expresses the will of God or offers us an accurate understanding God’s nature.

Instead, it is the collection, viewed and read holistically, that has the greatest value. On this point, two issues are of particular significance. First, a collection of fallible testimonials can, when read holistically, offer a clearer and more accurate picture of the truth than any of the testimonials can offer in isolation.

Although I’ve used the following analogy before, it bears repeating here: If a police officer arrives at the scene of an accident and has the good fortune of having multiple witnesses to interview, he is more likely to arrive at a reliable understanding of what transpired than if he had only a single witness. While each witness will have seen the events from only one perspective (in some cases through the filters of their own biases), and while each witness may misremember this detail or that fact, the officer can still get a good sense of what really happened by putting together the various perspectival stories, accounting for the influence of discernible prejudice (which may require some investigation into the characteristics of the various witnesses and the biases that might have influenced them), and identifying common themes and recurring observations.

The second point has to do with trajectories or trends. When belief systems are seen to evolve over time and across generations, there is at least some reason to suppose that what we are observing is the outcome of an ongoing collision between culturally inherited worldviews and a reality that transcends culture, one which imposes itself on the experience of people within a culture in ways that force them to revisit their inherited presumptions.

Such change is often going to be piecemeal, especially given the extent to which the possibilities of experience are shaped by cultural inheritance. In effect, our culturally inherited belief systems effect both how we experience reality and how much of reality we are able to experience. And so a deeply imperfect belief system will produce a deeply imperfect (both incomplete and error-riddled) experience of reality. But even as this happens, the collision between the belief system and reality will expose flaws in the belief system and will force revisions. The revised belief system, while still imperfect, will be more attuned to reality than its predecessor, and so may offer a fuller and truer access to the reality that lies beyond and behind experience.

But the process is ongoing and, in philosophical terms, "dialectical." As more of the reality "out there" is allowed in by our belief system, there is more opportunity for reality to correct that belief system. And so a belief system that is closer to the truth may in some cases encounter more flaws, more "contradictions," as more of reality breaks through to enlighten us. This leads us to revise our belief system yet again, and experience the world through yet another set of intepretive lenses. And the process continues.

Put briefly, it isn’t until our cultural inheritance has been modified by a deeply imperfect experiential encounter with reality that it becomes possible to have a somewhat more accurate experiential encounter, which in turn forces a further modification, etc.

The result is the development of our belief systems through fits and starts, with cultural conventions warring against experiences that don’t fit naturally with those conventions. Often, when we step back and look at a history of change within a culture’s worldviews, we can see a trajectory, one which may actually tell us something about the character of the reality that is impressing itself persistently upon a resistant human psyche.

The progressive Christian tends to look at the Bible as just such a record of evolving ideas about God within a broad cultural tradition. On such an interpretation, an inerrantist approach is going to be viewed as an impediment to getting at the lessons of the text. If every claim about God is taken to be a perfectly accurate description of the divine, then the reader will suppose there is no trajectory of development to look for. In the resultant picture of God, every culturally inherited prejudice will have to be accommodated along with the insights derived from God’s efforts at self-disclosure. Instead of seeing earlier biblical images of God as stages in a process of fuller and truer understandings of the divine, the biblical inerrantist has to adopt a picture of God in which these earlier ideas about God are fully accommodated along with the later ones, resulting (perhaps) in an absurd mishmash of opposing characteristics.

It would be as if a student of science found a collection of historically important science writings from the seventeenth century on, and decided that the writings of the earliest scientists had the same authority as later ones, and so insisted that our view of nature must fully accommodate everything said by every scientist in the book.

More significantly, if we follow the progressive Christian view here, seeing the Bible as recording a rich assortment of evolving ideas about the divine over time, we are likely to be led to the following conclusion: the process of refining our understanding of God probably didn't end in biblical times. The journey is an ongoing one, a journey in which each succeeding generation participates.

If so, we need to ask how we can make the most progress in this ongoing journey of discovery. It seems clear, with respect to this question, that we do not make the most progress by disdaining what we inherit and throwing it out, nor by treating what we inherit as an infallible treasure to be protected from all criticism. We make the most progress when we revere the progress made by generations past, receive what they pass on to us with respect, and then honor their legacy by building off of that inheritance—by critiquing it fairly and honestly in the light of our own experiences (recognizing all the while that those experiences are fallible).

The progressive Christian view of the Bible, in short, treats the Bible as a resource of seminal writings in an evolving tradition through which God is still revealing Himself. As such, progressive Christians obviously approach the Bible very differently than do inerrantist; but they also approach it very differently than do secular scholars, insofar as they treat the Bible as offering a seminal testimony to a divine reality that transcends our finite human understanding. Reading the Bible is thus not primarily about learning about what ancient peoples believed. It's primarily about participating in a journey in which the aim is a deeper connection with God.

Progressive Christian are, however, also characterized by their allegiance to Christ. And that makes the Biblical witness especially important. Insofar as Christians believe that God effected His most profound revelatory act in history through Jesus of Nazareth, the earliest stories about that revelation (the Gospels), and the earliest theological reflections on its significance (the epistles), have a profound kind of significance. There is reason to suppose that it is still in and through our encounter with this central revelation that the greatest progress in our understanding of God will come. But for the progressive Christian, the questions, "What precisely happened?" and "What does it mean?" are questions that were not necessarily answered perfectly by the biblical writers.

But this is not to say that what the biblical writers had to say was so much chopped liver. A source can be authoritative without being inerrant--as is the case with our senses, a point I made in the first post in this series. But there's another point to be made here: in a way, the progressive Christian's willingness to question the perfect accuracy of the biblical account of Jesus' story reflects the seriousness with which they take the resurrection story.

Above all else, the resurrection means that Jesus is someone with whom we can have an experiential relationship now, today. We, today, can become His disciples every bit as much as those who followed Him two thousand years ago--not just in the sense of following His recorded teachings, but in the sense of sitting at His feet and experiencing His love. And so our understanding of Christ is not wholly dependent on the mediated reports of the biblical writers. Those reports--themselves mostly second-hand reports by those who had become Jesus' disciples after His death--are important for orienting us, by introducing us to the seminal story around which Christianity was born.

But the empty tomb (the dramatic ending to Mark's Gospel) tells us that the story isn't finished. We can become a part of it, with our own experiences to share. And as a community of would-be disciples, we can learn from each other as well as from the disciples who lived long ago.