How Does God Reveal? Five Christian Reasons to Doubt Biblical Inerrancy

The Patheos website is currently hosting a multi-blog conversation about progressive Christianity and Scripture which has generated numerous engaging and thoughtful contributions--such as this one by James McGrath. Because the relationship between progressive Christian faith and the Bible is one of my enduring interests, the sudden flood of interesting essays on the topic has inspired me to take a few minutes to reflect on the issue myself. 

As a philosopher of religion, the way I approach this topic is in terms of a philosophical question: What theory of revelation fits best with the Christian view of God? Put another way, if there is a God that fits the broadly Christian description, how would we expect such a God to reveal the divine nature and will to the world?

Many conservative Christians take it for granted that God has revealed the divine nature and will in and through a specific book. More precisely (although they aren't usually this precise), they believe that God inspired certain human authors at various times in history to write texts that inerrantly express divine truths--and then inspired other human beings to correctly recognize these texts and include all and only them in the comprehensive collection of Scriptures we call the Bible.

Let's call this the theory of biblical inerrancy.

Does this theory fit well with broader Christian beliefs? Is this a good Christian theory about divine revelation, culminating in a good Christian theory about what the Bible is and what sort of authority we should attach to it? I think there are a number of reasons to be skeptical.

Put more narrowly, I think there are a number of reasons why Christians should be skeptical, given their Christian starting points. Let's consider at least some of these reasons.

1. Christianity holds that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God

Traditional Christian teaching holds that Jesus is the Word made Flesh, the incarnation of God in history. And this means that for Christians, the primary and monumental revelation of God is in the person of Jesus, not in any book (however inspired). It is this fact which motivated George MacDonald to say of the Bible,

It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to him.

Biblical inerrantists might argue that nothing precludes God from both revealing the divine nature primarily in Jesus and authoring an inerrant book as a secondary revelation. This is true as far as it goes. But there are reasons for concern.

First, there's a difference between the kind of revelation that Jesus represents, and the kind that a book represents. A person and a book are different things, and we learn from them in different ways. Consider the difference between having a mentor in the project of becoming a better person, and reading self-help books.

Doesn't Christianity teach that God's preferred way of disclosing the divine nature and will is through personal, living relationship rather than fixed words? The problem with throwing in an inerrant book as a "supplemental" revelation is that it can lead to Bible-worship. Given human psychology, there is something alluring about having a book with all the answers. But if God primarily wants us to find the answers through personal engagement with the living God, as discovered in Jesus, isn't there a real danger that fixation on the Bible will distract the faithful from God's primary mode of self-disclosure?

None of this is to say that human stories--witness accounts of divine revelation in history--aren't important. They can motivate a desire to seek out the one whom the stories are about, and they can offer tools for discerning whether you've found the one you seek or an imposter. But once they are seen as secondary, as valuable as a means to an end, the need for inerrancy dissipates. If what really matters is my friendship with Joe, and if I sought out and formed a friendship with him because lots of people told me stories about him that revealed him as an awesome guy I wanted to meet, do I really need to insist that those storytellers were inerrant? Why?

2. The Jesus of Scripture was not an inerrantist

In John 8:1-11, we have the story of the teachers of the law coming to Jesus with an adulteress, and asking Him whether they ought to stone her to death as the Scriptures prescribe. The passage itself declares that this was a trap: If Jesus came out and directly told them not to stone her, He would be defying a direct scriptural injunction.

He avoided the trap: He didn't directly telling them to act contrary to Scripture. Instead, He told them that the one without sin should cast the first stone.

It is a stunning and powerful story (no wonder someone decided to write it into the Gospel of John, even though it didn't appear in the earliest versions). But notice that Jesus didn't tell them to do what Scripture prescribed. Instead, He found a powerful way to drive home exactly what was wrong with following that scriptural injunction--in a way that avoided their trap.

In short, Jesus disagreed with some of the teachings in the Scriptures of His day. In the Sermon on the Mount, he offered gentle correctives to earlier teachings--teachings which started in a direction but didn't go far enough. The lex talionis command to punish evildoers eye for eye and tooth for tooth may, at the time, have served as a restraint on retributive impulses: don't punish beyond the severity of the crime. But for Jesus, that level of restrain was insufficient. It was a start on a path, perhaps, but only that. Jesus followed the trajectory of that path to its conclusion, and enjoined His listeners to turn the other cheek.

In short, it's clear Jesus didn't have the inerrantist view towards the Scriptures of His day that conservative Christians have towards the Christian Scriptures of today. Conservatives might argue that Jesus would view the modern Bible--or maybe just the New Testament?--in the way they favor, even if the approach to Scripture that He actually modeled is at odds with their approach.

Allow me to treat such a speculative claim with suspicion. If Jesus is the primary revelation of God in history, then it strikes me as appropriate to follow His model for approaching Scripture, and respectfully look beyond the letters on the page to the deeper intentions that finite human authors might have missed, noticing trajectories and exploring where they might lead.

3. In the New Testament, Paul distinguished between his views and the Lord's

 In 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife. To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her...

I've talked about this passage before, so I won't go into details. What interests me is the distinction Paul makes between his own views and those of the Lord. In this passage, it's clear that Paul did not see Himself as taking dictation from God. He made a clear distinction between his own opinions and those of the Lord, and by making the distinction explicit was signaling to his readers that they should treat the injunctions differently--as if he didn't want to claim for himself the kind of authority that he took to accompany Jesus' explicit teachings.

But if inerrantism is true, then Paul's teachings are the inerrant word of God, and so have the same kind of authority as Jesus' words. In other words, if inerrantism is true, then Paul was wrong to make the distinction he made. But that distinction is made by Paul in a letter that's in the Bible. And if inerrantism is true, a distinction made in a letter that's in the Bible has to be accurate. But if it's accurate, inerrantism isn't true. Zounds!

An exercise in creative interpretation might offer the inerrantist the wiggle room to escape this logical trap, but inerrantists are routinely skeptical of such creative interpretation of Scripture. At best, then, this amounts to a difficulty for inerrantism, the sort of difficulty one often sees when trying to force a theory onto subject matter that doesn't quite suit it. Theories can perhaps weather some such difficulties, but if they become too common it is hard to reasonably persist in endorsing the theory.

4. Efforts to overcome apparent contradictions in Scripture lead to a false view of Scripture

Speaking of difficulties of this sort, the Bible isn't a neat, orderly, systematically consistent treatise. The Gospel narratives, for example, aren't identical. They tell the stories of Jesus' life in different ways. Details differ--for example, in accounts of the resurrection. Bart Ehrman does a fine job of cataloguing  many of these in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible.

Mostly, these tensions aren't explicit contradictions but rather what might be called apparent ones: they don't seem as if they can go together, because you'd need to tell a rather convoluted story to make them fit.

Inerrantists have not been remiss in offering such convoluted stories. But if you need to tell enough of them in order to make your theory map onto what it's supposed to explain, the theory becomes increasingly implausible.

And there's another problem, one that should be of concern to Christians who care about the Bible. The convoluted tales that you have to tell in order to make disparate biblical narratives fit together end up leading you away from an honest appreciation of the message of the biblical authors. As Ehrman puts it, "To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story."

When you do this, you care more about preserving your theory about the Bible than you do about understanding and taking in its message. For me, this is one of the greatest tragedies of an inerrantist approach to Scripture: It makes it difficult for readers to engage with the Bible on its own terms. It's like someone who is so devoted to a false image of their spouse that they can't see their spouse for the person they really are. Likewise, the steps that need to be taken in order to preserve the doctrine of inerrancy in the face of the Bible's actual content means that it becomes impossible to have an intimate relationship with the Bible as it really is. This is not taking the Bible seriously. It is taking the doctrine of inerrancy seriously at the expense of the Bible.  

5. God is love

Christianity teaches that God is love. In fact, it is the closest thing Christians have to a scriptural definition of God:  "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4:7-8).

If God is love, then we experience God when we love. If God is love, then the primary way we can encounter God is through loving and being loved--that is, through cultivating loving relationships with persons. This may help to explain the Christian view that a person--Jesus--served in history as God's fundamental revelation, rather than a book. Books can't love you. And you can't love a book in the sense of "love" that Christians (and the author of 1 John) have in mind when we say God is love.

When we feel the profound presence of the divine showering love upon us--or when we feel the joy of being loved by others--we are encountering the divine nature as something coming to us from the outside. But when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are channeling divine love, and experiencing it "from within" (so to speak). The divine nature is moving within us, more intimately connected to us than any mere object of experience. I think this is what the author of 1 John means when he says that whoever does not love does not know God. To love others is to be filled with the spirit of God. It is to let God in.

If any of that is true, then it is by encouraging us to love one another that God makes possible the most profound revelation of the divine nature and will. And while the Bible does encourage us to love one another, the theory about the Bible which takes it to be the inerrant revelation of God may actually be an impediment to love.

We end up focusing more attention on the Bible than on our neighbors. We are more committed to "doing what the Bible says" than we are to loving those around us. Out of a desire to be connected with God, we insist that homosexuality is always and everywhere sinful--and when the gay and lesbian neighbors we are supposed to love cry out in despair, their lives crushed by these teachings, we stifle our compassion, shutting out love in fear that loving them as ourselves might lead us to question the inerrancy of the Bible.

If God is love, then any theory of revelation that tells us to find God by burying our noses in a book is a problematic theory. If God is love, we must look for God in the love we see in the world. The Bible, understood as a flawed and finite human testament to the God of love working in history, can be a deeply meaningful partner in our quest to encounter God and live in the light of divine goodness. But as soon as it is treated as inerrant, it is in danger of becoming a bludgeon used to silence those neighbors who want to share experiences that don't quite fit with this or that verse.

The Bible points away from itself. Respect for it demands that we look up from the page and engage with our neighbors and the creation. God is alive in the world. The Bible tells us that God is alive in the world. In so doing, the book is telling us that if we want to find God, we need to look into our neighbor's face with love, and at the natural world and all its creatures with love.

Because God is there. God is there, revealing Himself in the vibrancy of life and the child's laugh and the mother's tender kiss. God is there, in the gay man who sits by his longtime partner's hospital bedside, gently stroking his brow. God is there, in the joyous wedding vows of the lesbian couple that can finally get a legal marriage after years together.

And any time a too-literal allegiance to the letter of the biblical text causes someone not to see the face of God in that tenderness and joy, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has blocked divine revelation, impeding God's effort to self-disclose to the world.

A Final Thought on Slippery Slopes: Sibling Marriage and Hermann Lotze

My recent posts on slippery slope arguments in the same-sex marriage debate inspired James McGrath, over at Exploring Our Matrix, to take up the topic--and there's been an interesting discussion in the comments section of that post which readers here may want to check out.

One of the commenters, "Straw Man," laid out the following argument, after agreeing that opposition to same-sex marriage is based largely on bigotry:

 Consensual relationships between *adults* who happen to be blood relations are generally condemned, but it's impossible where I sit to see a rational reason for condemning it. You can talk about recessive genes all you want--but the same argument applies to unrelated couples who have recessive genes in common, like sickle cell trait. We don't ban them getting married, even if we do endorse some sort of measure to look out for the potential offspring.

I've seen advocates of gay marriage bristle when consensual adult incest is mentioned, but that makes sense for purely tactical reasons: it does invite other "slippery slope" comparisons; and more importantly, it forces one to confront additional types of bigotry, fighting a two-fronted war. I get that. But "eliminating societal restrictions that are based purely on bigotry" is a kind of slippery slope: if we start confronting our bigotries, there are several others that will inevitably come into the crosshairs as well.

There's a part of this comment that I strongly agree with--and a part that I disagree with.

Here's what I agree with: Any time you argue that a particular social taboo should be set aside because it is based on nothing but prejudice or bigotry, you open the door to the question, "What else is based on nothing but prejudice or bigotry?" Chances are, there are more things than what you've targeted.

In the arena of marriage, forms of intimacy that are currently taboo are numerous, and our social policies on marriage reflect these taboos. As one begins to doubt the legitimacy and defensibility of one taboo, this leads inevitably to the question of whether there are other restrictions on marriage that are rooted in nothing but bigoted taboos.

But questions aren't answers. Questioning the justifiability of taboos against, say, sibling intimacy isn't the same as saying there is no good justification for them.

John Kronen, my friend and co-author of God's Final Victory, encouraged me recently to look at what the 19th Century German philosopher, Hermann Lotze, has to say about marriage in his Outlines of Practical Philosophy. What he says is interesting.

Lotze makes the general point that what the state does, in extending legal standing to an intimate partnership, is to recognize the relationship and "protect the rights of what is recognized." And while the state may withhold such recognition from a particular relationship because the relationship does not reflect "the moral spirit which it wishes to maintain in power in its own midst," he insists that "society has no right to execute punishment upon forms of conduct which merely contract its ways of looking at things, and which have not as yet gone so far as to work positive harm to it."

There's an important distinction here between (a) the state letting relationships form without intervention in individual liberty, and (b) officially recognizing and protecting relationships. Civil marriage is about the latter. Lotze's point is that the state can withhold recognition from relationships for reasons that are more modest than those that would be required in order to prohibit those same relationships.

This seems right to me, and it is important to keep this in mind--but with a crucial qualifier. Withholding recognition is withholding a social good. And any time a social good is made legally available, the decision to withhold it in a given case must reflect a robust respect for the principle of equal treatment under the law. Hence, we need to distinguish between two types of cases: (i) cases in which withholding recognition from a certain kind of relationship entails that a class of individuals are systematically deprived of the opportunity to enjoy the sort of social good that civil marriage confers; (ii) cases in which withholding recognition from a certain kind of relationship does not entail such systematic exclusion. The burden of justification is much heavier in cases of type (i) than it would be in cases of type (ii). In fact, I would be inclined to say that in cases of type (i), the justification for withholding recognition must be comparable in weightiness to what would be required in order to legally prohibit a kind of relationship.

In my two posts on slippery slopes, I've argued in effect that same-sex marriage restrictions are of type (i), and that restrictions against group marriage are of type (ii). But what about sibling marriages? These appear to be of type (ii) as well, since it would be pretty preposterous to presume there was a siblings-only sexual orientation (a sexuality such that one can only sustain sexual and romantic intimacy with siblings and is incapable of working up sexual or romantic feelings for anyone who doesn't share 50% of one's DNA).

This means that the state's burden of justification for withholding legal recognition from siblings is going to be considerably more modest than what would be required for withholding legal recognition from same-sex relationships (which effectively bars all gays and lesbians as a class from access to the social good that civil marriage makes available to others). Social bias alone wouldn't be enough to justify it, but is bias the only reason for the state to withhold civil marriage from siblings?

Lotze actually mentions "marriage between brothers and sisters and very near relatives." He thinks the state has can legitimately withhold recognition of such relationships. Why? Here's what he says:

...not because it contradicts any (not demonstrable) "command of nature," but because a correct moral insight condemns the admixture of different moral relations, each of which can unfold its peculiar beauty and worth only when it does so purely for its own sake.

Lotze does not elaborate or explain what he means, but the passage is a pregnant one. The idea seems to be this: There are different ways for human beings to relate to one another, and each of these different species of relationship has its own "peculiar beauty and worth." The sibling relationship has a potential to be a distinctive kind of beautiful and valuable relationship, but only if it is clearly distinguished from relationships of the sexual/romantic variety. Likewise, the idea seems to be as well that the distinctive good that is realized in the best sexual/romantic relationship may be compromised if it is "admixed" with the form of relatedness distinctive of siblings.

To defend this line of thought, one would need to explore more deeply the kinds of virtues that the best sibling relationships embody...and then examine with care whether adding sexual intimacy to a sibling relationship is in danger of compromising these distinctive virtues. Lotze doesn't do this work, but it's a project worth pursuing...and when I reflect on my relationship with my sister, I find Lotze's claim intuitively right. My sister and I couldn't be for each other what we in fact are for each other were we trying to be for each other what spouses are. And there is something really worthwhile in the former.

Now there's also the matter of whether the state has an interest in "protecting" the sibling species of relatedness against things that might compromise its fullest blossoming; and if so, whether this interest is compelling enough to refrain from officially recognizing incestuous sibling couples in the same way that it recognizes non-incestuous couples when it confers civil marriages on them. It might not be compelling enough if withholding such status resulted in legal discrimination against a class of individuals. But that's not the issue here. It probably would not be compelling enough to justify criminally prosecuting incestuous sibling couples. But that's not at issue here, either.

While I think that Hermann Lotze is probably on to something here, it would take more work to turn his concerns about maintaining the distinct virtues of different relationship types into a sufficient justification for prohibiting sibling marriages (I think his line of argument is immediately stronger when we move from siblings to parent-child relations, by the way). But there is another consideration with respect to siblings that has some connection with what Lotze says, and which I think may provide a more obvious and forceful case for a practice of withholding civil marriage from siblings who defy incest taboos.

Consider the following: Siblings typically grow up with unprecedented access to one another. If we'd prefer that sexual expression be limited before a certain level of maturity is reached, we'd have a reason to try to limit sexual opportunities among adolescents (especially at those times when they are newly awakening to their sexual feelings). But to impose external limits on sexual opportunities among siblings growing up in the same home would require draconian measures, measures that would in the same stroke also seriously undermine the kind of close relationship that, for example, my sister and I always enjoyed while growing up. Internal constraints against pursuing such opportunities--such as what results from the sort of visceral disgust and unthinkability that a strong taboo against sibling sex helps to inspire--offer a more promising approach.

Maintaining a strong, deeply ingrained taboo--sufficient to make siblings balk at the very idea of sexual exploration with one another--may be the best thing a society can do to discourage siblings from sexual exploration before they are emotionally ready for sex and its consequences. Such a taboo may be the only thing that can do this work while at the same time enabling siblings to form the close sibling (non-sexual) intimacy that characterizes the best sibling relationships. But can such a strong taboo be established and maintained if the state extends marriage to adult siblings who defy that taboo? The kind of powerful taboo required to produce self-policing among adolescent siblings may break down if the state treats sibling-marriage as equivalent to marriages among non-relatives.

Given the comparatively modest burden that the state must meet when it comes to withhold recognition from (as opposed to outlawing) relationship forms that don't discriminate against a class of individuals, this concern about the social value of maintaining incest taboos strikes me as more than sufficient.

Parallel arguments can be made, I think, about civil marriage among other kinds of relatives.

Shattered

It is hard to think of other things. It hovered over my journey home--which, because of flight delays upon flight delays, took two exhausting days. As I started to become irate after the fourth gate change in as many hours of delays (this after missing my connection in Detroit and spending a night in a hotel), I thought about my cousin's niece, bleeding from a bullet wound in the leg, surrounded by the corpses of her friends, and listening to the killer stalking around the island, letting out whoops of glee between the crack of firing bullets.

On the phone with my mother, listening to her sympathizing about my travel troubles, I found myself thinking about the profiles I'd been reading of Norway's homegrown terrorist. I felt strangely claustrophobic as I imagined myself into his head, into the ideology and rage and paranoia that defines the violent extremist.

It is hard to feel sorry for yourself, or to feel indignant at flight delays, when there are things so much more terrible pressing in with such vividness.

It is hard to think of other things. And so I think about this, about shattered windows, about a peaceful country's shattered innocence, and the shattered innocence of kids attending summer camp. But to know what to say, how to organize one's thoughts about something so terrible--it almost feels like a kind of exploitation to reflect on the significance of Anders Breivik's crimes. And yet there are things I want to say, things which I think are important--about xenophobia, about mislabeling motivations, misdiagnosing the causes of terrorist violence, about the difference between a spirituality that years for the transcendent and an ideology of division that use religion as the basis for hate.

Thankfully, many of the things I want to say have already been said beautifully by others. Arni Zachariassen offers a powerful reflection on the connections between the recent terrorist act and issues in theology, especially as they relate to Christian-Muslim relations.  Øyvind Strømmen offers an excellent portrait of what motivated Anders Breivik.  Over at Religion Dispatches, while Mark Juergensmeyer offers a striking comparison between Breivik and Timothy McVeigh, his desire to call both "Christian terrorists" is helpfully qualified by Julie Ingersoll, who offers insight into the character of Breivik's idenitity as a Christian--without in any way undermining the force of Juergensmeyer's point that Breivik has as much of a claim on the "Christian terrorist" label as Osama bin Laden has on the "Muslim terrorist" one. James McGrath makes a similar point.

And yet there are still things to be said. Some of these are things I need to say. But not right now.