In the second part of this series, we bade farewell to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and I promised you a way of determining which parts of the Bible we ought to believe. This now seems to me too ambitious a project for a single week, so instead I will divide it into a series of separate questions: This week, we will try to come to a basic understanding of what the Bible is. Next week, we’ll consider what the Bible (minimally) claims about itself. The following week, we’ll try to think of ways in which the things the Bible claims about itself could be true. This will enable us, in the fourth week, to say something specific about how we ought to go about deciding which parts of the Bible we ought to believe. Finally, in the new year, we will undertake the exciting further project of using the principles we’ve developed to construct a systematic liberal Christian theology.

So let’s get started! What is the Bible?

I. The Bible is a Text

Thinking about the the Bible's authorship can get awfully complicated!

This is absolutely a platitude. The Bible is printed on sheets of paper. It comes between two covers. It is composed, both in translation and in the original, of various orderly arrangements of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. No one will be surprised that the Bible is a text.

But even platitudes can be enlightening: if the Bible is a member of the class of texts, then we can and should ask of the Bible all the questions we ask about other texts. We should ask when it came into existence, who was responsible for its content, why he/they created it, what it communicates, in what manner its content is communicated, and ever so many more literary and historical questions. Just as we wouldn’t a priori accept or rule out particular answers to such questions about any other text, so it would be methodologically illicit, at least at first, to come to the Biblical text with an ideological agenda.

The acute reader will notice that I have glossed over an important issue in the foregoing paragraph – important enough to merit a short digression. Of course we are not justified in treating the Biblical text specially based merely on the fact that it is a text. It does not follow that we are not justified in treating the Biblical text specially on any grounds at all. To this I say: True, but what is the alternative? We have ruled out any a priori commitment to Biblical inerrancy in the previous post. I am aware of no other compelling philosophical reasons to treat the Bible specially. What remains, as far as I can see, is the possibility of an appeal to ecclesiastical tradition or authority. But either move would merely postpone the problem: Tradition is overwhelmingly textual; we are therefore faced with the same old questions about new texts, only now it will be even more difficult to argue a priori that they must be inerrant or authoritative. Ecclesiastical authority, when it is not textual, consists in the considered opinions of other Christians. Again, why would we think it appropriate to receive such opinions uncritically? At some point, we will have to think carefully about the sources we take to be authoritative. And, I claim without further argument, the friend of a priori ecclesiastical authority or inerrancy is in much deeper waters than the friend of a priori Biblical authority or inerrancy. (I feel fairly certain that I’m right on this point, but if I’m overlooking something interesting, I’d love to hear it.)

II. The Bible is not a Text

That is, the Bible is not a text. The Bible is many texts. That this is true is readily apparent in the structure of the Biblical text itself. We are immediately presented with its organization into the Old and New Testaments, and its further subdivision into various ‘books’ that claim to have been authored at vastly different times spanning a range of over two millennia. And this is not all; in addition, many of the books of the Bible are themselves the work of more than one author. Sometimes the fact that such books are redacted is acknowledged in the text (e.g. Luke, Psalms, Proverbs), but more often it is not (e.g. Genesis, Isaiah, Matthew). Opinions differ concerning which books were redacted and how many distinct sources are represented in each, and it would be counterproductive to be carried away by the details. Instead, let us merely note that it is needful and appropriate to treat the contribution of each distinct source in the Bible as a textual unit, and to ask of each all the questions we listed in Section I, and to carry out this project without limiting presuppositions. And we should also keep in mind the time periods, identities, motives, and messages of the books’ redactors.

III. The Bible is a Text

That is, the Bible is a text. The Bible is one text. Its contents were carefully selected from a pool of candidates during the process of its canonization in order to further the purposes of various religious communities. This canonization process was varied and discontinuous; it occurred in one way in one period for the Hebrew Bible and in another way in another period for the New Testament. Nevertheless, in both cases it represented the collection of texts a religious community considered particularly valuable to its theology and practice. We may ask of the Bible as a whole, therefore, what interrelationships between its parts exist, and – a distinct but related question – what relationships between its parts were thought to exist by the communities that canonized it. For this reason, though the Bible comprises a large number of extremely divergent texts spanning numerous genres, we are justified in seeking its ‘central message’, the story that it was redacted to tell.

So the Bible is a complicated document, and people have left their marks on it on at least three distinct levels: first, at the level of primary authorship of Biblical material; second, at the level of redaction of its constituent books; third, at the level of canonization of certain books to the exclusion of others. At each of these levels, it is appropriate to ask questions about time period, message, and motive. Thus an exceedingly intricate picture of the nature of the Biblical text emerges; it will be our task in the rest of the series (and, indeed, in the rest of our lives) to draw from this complexity simple hermeneutical principles and apply them to discover the text’s relevance to the modern world.

Note: I have not mentioned God in my discussion so far, and perhaps the omission has occasioned discomfort in some readers. I have left God out of the picture intentionally, though in fact I think that the Bible is part of God’s authoritative revelation to humanity. The reason is that our understanding of God’s relationship to the Biblical text ought properly to be a result of our study of that text and not an assumption we bring to it. I say that the Bible was written, redacted, and canonized by many people to further their many agendas. That is true, but it should not suggest that the authors, redactors, and canonizers of the Bible were in any way deceitful, manipulative, or uninspired by God. In fact, it shouldn’t suggest anything about them at all: that’s the point! Our opinion of those responsible for the Bible ought to be based entirely on our answers to the questions above, not the other way round, and our opinion regarding the inspiration of the Bible ought to depend, in turn, on some combination of what we think about what the Bible says and what we think of those responsible for it. But – crucially – those issues shouldn’t even be in view at this point of the discussion. If we are to defensibly believe that the Bible is in some sense God’s revelation to the world, it will be because the historical facts point in that direction. And an appeal to historical facts as evidence requires that we take care not to allow our conclusions to infiltrate the foundations of our argument. This is why we have discussed only what is most immediately obvious and uncontroversial about the Bible so far.

Until next week, soli deo gloria.

Death casts a long shadow. (Image: freefoto.com)

Major obstacle: navigating Dunster’s double doors. See, I was following some girl in, and as I approached the doors I turned to see whether there was anyone else nearby for whom to hold them. But I didn’t stop walking, because I’m an ingenious multi-tasking Harvard student, and that’s how I roll. So I hit my head. Embarrassing and painful. I was sure I would have a bruise. I put my hand on my head in shame and made a quick exit. But something wasn’t quite right- my hand felt warm and sticky. I pulled it away and and saw a spot of blood. Curses! I must have gotten a scratch or something.

Bathroom. Mirror. Wow! There’s more blood than I thought. It’s all over my eyebrow and forehead. What’s going on? It was a door– doors aren’t sharp?! Well, I wipe away the blood and find a 1-1/4 inch-long gash starting below my left eyebrow and going all the way through it and up onto my forehead. Fuck, I’m going to be ugly for the rest of my life. (That’s really the thought I had. It was an uncensored moment.)

So I went to the hospital – UHS told me they weren’t good enough at suturing to help me – and, five hours and five stitches later, emerged with a headache, a band-aid, and instructions not to shower for a whole day. It’s going to be a stinky Halloween Friday.

Why do I mention all this? For most of the day, I was exclusively concerned that a) I didn’t have a brain injury and b) they sew me up so I turn out looking rugged rather than Frankensteinian. There were no deep thoughts or personal reflections. As soon as concerns a and b were addressed to my satisfaction, I crawled into bed and fell asleep. Nevertheless, this morning I realized that there’s an important lesson in all of this.

The lesson is that we’re all gonna die.

When normalcy disappears in the blink of an eye (or the edge of a door), we often find ourselves totally unprepared for the situation that emerges. I expected to sit in my room blasting my music and working with MATLAB for six hours. Instead, a woman pushed a steel needle back and forth through my forehead ten times. Somehow, when you’re lying on your back and someone is shooting ice-cold saline solution into your bloody gash (and your eye, and your ear– thank you, Ms. Physician’s Assistant), the life you were living before you came to the hospital seems like a dream. You wonder how you could have been so concerned about whether there was a minus on the letter grade, or whether HUDS forgot the hummus again, or whether so-and-so looked at you thus-and-such. All you want is to be healthy, and to never have to go through something like this again.

I’m not saying the perspective of the sick or injured person is correct. In fact, I think it tends to assign too little importance to the tasks and concerns of everyday life. But I do want to say this: we will never be able to look at life as it is until we become absolutely convinced of the reality of death and the precarious contingency of the things and people we love. People die. I’ve seen it happen. And they get disabled, and they lose their jobs and their homes, and their marriages fall apart. If we do not recognize this, if we find that we are surprised and confused when it happens, we have not fully appreciated the character of our world. And to the same extent, neither have we understood our Christian faith. For Christianity takes for granted, takes as a starting point, takes as a firm foundation, the fact that death is real and sudden and terrible and that sin is everywhere.  There are two ways to fail to live in victory over sin and death. One is, in Paul’s words, to be their slave. But the other, just as fatal to real Christian faith, is to make-believe that they don’t exist.

I’m going to have a scar on my face, just above my eye, right where everyone who looks at me will see it. And some day, I’ll have a medical condition too serious to treat with five stitches, and I’ll die. You’ll die someday, too. Here’s the point: keep that in mind. If we remember death, life will be that much sweeter. If we remember death, Christ will show us how to live. That is the message I found carved into my face this morning.

The Claim

Some people believe that the Bible is inerrant. By this they mean that what the Bible says is invariably true, or that the Bible never goes wrong with respect to what it says, or that the Bible, properly interpreted, is always reliable, or any number of equivalent alternatives. This claim does not usually function as an epistemic primitive; instead, it is generally seen as a consequence of the fact that the Bible is inspired, or is the word of God, or is a divine revelation, or any number of equivalent alternatives.

My aim in this post is to clarify, examine, and ultimately reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  But before I take a single step in that direction, I want to affirm the central intuition that lies behind it: the intuition that the Bible is an inspired and authoritative document, a document that makes true and centrally important claims about the nature of reality and the way we ought to live. This is a constitutive Christian claim; if a person does not affirm it, he or she is in virtue of that very fact not a Christian. So we should be concerned to affirm it. In fact, one of my aims in this series is to show that rejecting the doctrine of inerrancy gives us a much more credible and convincing basis for affirming the centrality of the Biblical witness to Christian faith.

I will begin by proposing a clear and (I hope!) minimally tendentious way of understanding the concept of inerrancy. Then I will present what I take to be the two best arguments for the thesis that the Bible is inerrant, along with the reasons why I think each is unsuccessful. These will be followed by a discussion of the evidence suggesting that the Bible is errant. Finally, two responses open to the friend of inerrancy will be discussed and found unsuccessful.

The Claim Revisited

Galileo presents the external witness to Catholic officials.

The claim is that the Bible is inerrant. But what is meant by ‘inerrant’? Lack of clarity in this area is the source of a great deal of confusion and fallacious argumentation. The believer in errancy has often directed his criticism towards a straw man version of inerrantism representative of the beliefs of few or no actual defenders of that position. Usually, he conflates inerrantism with a form of naive literalism and then argues that the former commits its proponent to some absurd conclusion: “You think the Bible is inerrant? Well, right here it says that the earth is a footstool (Isa 66:1)! You don’t believe that, do you?” Here the errantist has forgotten that his opponent may avail herself of the helpful notion of a proper interpretation. By helping herself to such a notion, she becomes immune to criticisms founded on the more superficial falsehoods and contradictions in the Biblical text.

Indeed, the notion of a proper interpretation allows us to get much clearer about the concept of inerrancy. The science of exegesis is extremely complex and still incomplete. At the same time, we must suppose that we have some handle on the meaning of any text we want to call inerrant. But providing a specification of the numerous rules according to which we decide exactly what our inerrant text is actually saying is not a feasible exercise. Must we complete the project of Biblical exegesis before even starting in on the question of Biblical inerrancy? Certainly we will have to find a way of specifying the set of propositions the inerrantist is concerned with labeling inerrant. This is where the notion of a proper interpretation comes into the picture. Instead of listing the rules for finding the relevant propositions, we can just say that they are the propositions implied by the text as properly interpreted. In fact, to make things even clearer, we can introduce an ideal observer, the Historically Omniscient Perfect Exegete (HOPE), and specify that the relevant set of propositions is just the set our HOPE would identify as being implied by the Biblical text. (Being a perfect exegete, our HOPE takes into consideration factors like genre, cultural context, semantic shifts, etc.) There is still room for disagreement about what our HOPE would include or exclude from the set, but now we have neatly distinguished between two kinds of concerns: concerns about exegesis – in our new way of talking, concerns about which propositions our HOPE would identify – and concerns about inerrancy – concerns about whether the propositions our HOPE would identify are true.

In conclusion, then, let us say that a given text T is inerrant just in case each proposition our HOPE would identify as implied by T is true.

(There will still be some who call themselves inerrantists or something similar but do not believe in the truth of some of the propositions our HOPE would say are implied by the Biblical text. They might, for example, say that they believe the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice, but not generally. Some of these people will call this the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture, to be contrasted with the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture. I think this is a corruption of language– ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’ are properly synonyms; one of them cannot correctly describe a text where the other does not. But there is no deep objection to be found in terminological disagreements. I will prescind from treating the ‘doctrine of infallibility’ at length, stopping only to say 1) that I think it is substantially closer to the truth than the ‘doctrine of inerrancy,’ and 2) that I think the two are susceptible to analogous criticisms. The rest of this post will therefore be directly relevant to ‘infallibility’ as well as bona fide inerrancy.)

The Philosophical Argument

I use the label ‘the philosophical argument’ to denote a set of arguments that seek to derive the inerrancy of the Bible from premises relating to the doctrine of inspiration and God’s character. In the following, I will not be proceeding with reference to any particular author or authors because I have not yet encountered an attempt to formalize the philosophical argument. Instead, I will begin by myself stating the argument I see implicit in much contemporary dialogue about the Bible. It proceeds as follows:

1. The Bible is the inspired word of a perfect God.

2. If God is perfect, then God would not have inspired an errant text.

3. Therefore, the Bible is an inerrant text.

Rejecting premise 1 is not a move open to the Christian, or at least it is a move the Christian should try to avoid if at all possible. If we are to reject the conclusion, then, it will be because premise 2 fails to withstand close scrutiny.

Now, it is not immediately clear why it should be that God’s perfection precludes his inspiring an errant text. Certainly the consequent in the conditional is not found merely by reflecting on the idea of perfection. Rather, it seems to me likely that premise 2 is actually a consequence of some suppressed premise or premises which are not usually brought to the front of debates about the Biblical text. In particular, it seems to me that the truth of premise 2 is supposed to follow from the notion that an errant Bible would make God either a deceiver or a poor communicator; thus in either case an imperfect being. Let us consider each alternative in turn.

Would an errant Bible make God a deceiver? Well, a person is a deceiver just in case he intentionally brings it about that we believe something that is 1) false and 2) harmful. (I include criterion 2 so as to exclude cases in which the falsehood is either irrelevant or necessary for conveying a more important beneficial truth.) Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a deceiver? Not unless we can prove that it contains some harmful falsehoods that God wants us to believe. Now, I do in fact think the Bible contains some harmful falsehoods (some of which Peter van Inwagen has written about in the print journal), but I would by no means say that God wants us to believe them. Why would one believe that if the Bible contains harmful falsehoods, God wants us to believe them? Only if one first believes that the Bible is supposed to convey only truths. In other words, we must presuppose inerrancy in order to make sense of the claim that an errant Bible would make God a deceiver. But then we cannot use our conclusion as evidence for the Bible’s inerrancy; to do so would be begging the question.

Would an errant Bible make God a poor communicator? Well, a person is a poor communicator just in case he sets out to communicate something and then fails, to a greater or lesser extent, to do so. Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a poor communicator? Not unless we can prove that God set out to communicate only truths in the Biblical text. But this is just the inerrancy thesis– once more, we must presuppose inerrancy to make an argument from errancy to God’s being a poor communicator. Again, our argument begs the question.

In general, I think we can say the following: any attempt to deduce Biblical inerrancy from God’s perfection will proceed by calling into question either the virtue or competence of a putative God who inspires an errant Bible. But in order for such an argument to be successful, we must include presuppositions about God’s intentions in inspiring the Bible, which will be based on a prior conviction that the Bible is inerrant. And so all such arguments fail; every one of them begs the question in one way or another.

The Appeal to Scripture

There is a second type of argument for the inerrancy of the Bible that is popular in contemporary circles. It has two varieties, a weak one and a stronger one. The weak variety may be stated and refuted rather quickly:

1) The Bible claims that it is inerrant.

3) Therefore, the Bible is inerrant.

The discerning reader will notice that I have numbered this argument to suggest that there is a suppressed premise. That is because the argument as it stands is quite obviously invalid. Consider the analogue – Skippy claims that he is inerrant; therefore, Skippy is inerrant – which is clearly not sound. In order to fix it up, we need to add:

2) The Bible is inerrant.

But then, of course, our conclusion is one of our premises, and we have failed to provide an argument at all.

Let us move quickly onward. The stronger form of the argument from scripture is similar in that it, too, begins with the Bible’s own claims about its inerrancy. But it proceeds differently, by premising that if the Bible is importantly true, it will be true in its central themes, and that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The conclusion then, is that the Bible is either inerrant or not importantly true. Given that no Christian, even the errantist, will want to say that the Bible is not importantly true, we have a rather stronger case for inerrancy.

Notice that one of the premises in this argument does not admit of prima facie acceptance or rejection. The claim that the Bible’s inerrancy is one of its main themes is a question of exegesis. Our HOPE would know whether to accept or reject this premise, but we, being neither historically omniscient nor exegetically perfect, will have a much harder time of it. But say that we charitably agree that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The stronger argument from scripture still fails because we have no reason to accept the premise that if the Bible is importantly true, it is true in each of its central themes. Indeed, why would someone think this premise true? Only if she is subject to one of the confusions about the implications of God’s perfection that we uncovered in our discussion of the philosophical argument. (I have already granted, of course, that as long as we are Christians we believe that the Bible is importantly true, and this surely implies that at least some good portion of its central themes are true. But there is no magicking an ‘all’ out of a ‘some’, and the argument from scripture needs an ‘all’.) Once again, we find ourselves with no reason to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy.

Evidence Against Inerrancy

So far, we’ve seen the failure of the two most promising classes of arguments for Biblical inerrancy. But why do we need arguments, anyway? Biblical inerrancy seems a natural and congenial position. Even if there’s no knockdown argument for it, is there any reason to let it go?

I say that there is. In fact, I say that there are two related categories of reasons: reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with itself, and reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with things we have independent reason to believe. Call these the internal and external witnesses.

Of course, the very existence of the internal and external witnesses has been hotly debated. Such debate is possible because, given any particular false proposition or pair of contradictory propositions, it will always be open to the inerrantist to deny that the one or the pair is implied by the Biblical text. The fundamental problem is this: we don’t know what our HOPE would think about the Biblical text! There isn’t any such thing as a HOPE, after all, and so we’re left with our own imperfect exegetical skills. Accommodation is unimpeachable as long as it keeps itself within the boundaries of good exegesis, but we aren’t fully equipped to tell where those boundaries lie or when they’ve been transgressed. Thus, for example, we find authors (and teachers of my church membership class) denying any contradiction between the accounts of the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke by positing a linguistic backstory according to which they make no attempt at recording the same information. Similarly, we have John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, in which he attempts to use valid exegetical principles to establish that the Genesis does not, in fact, describe God’s creation of the universe de novo. This method of response to proposed contradictions runs into problems when it strains our exegetical instincts. No single such strain will be a reason to reject inerrancy, but if the internal or external witness forces us to knowingly and systematically set aside our better exegetical impulses, then I say that we have reason to believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, is errant.

I will now present a selection from the internal and external witnesses:

1. The accounts of the events leading up to and immediately following the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

2. The genealogies of Jesus presented in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

3. The dates given for the last supper in John and in the synoptic gospels are contradictory.

4. The chronologies of the calling of the disciples in the four gospels are contradictory.

5. The chronologies of the major events in Jesus’ life presented in the four gospels are contradictory.

6. The accounts of the Israelites’ history in Kings and Chronicles are contradictory.

7. The story presented in the Pentateuch is, in numerous places, internally inconsistent.

8. The stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are incompatible with discoveries of modern biology, geology, and cosmology.

9. The New Testament’s spiritual explanations for psychological disease are incompatible with a modern medical understanding of the same conditions.

10. The genocidal commands of God depicted in the Biblical histories are incompatible with what we now know it means to be a morally perfect being.

The friend of inerrancy may be tempted to begin going down the list, offering rebuttals to each of my claims. But let us take a step back and reflect on the dialectic. We have already defeated the two most promising arguments for Biblical inerrancy. The only reason to believe in inerrancy, at this point, is that it is in some nebulous sense a congenial thing to believe. Strong attachments to the position are not warranted. Now we are presented with a list of prima facie reasons to believe that Biblical inerrancy is false. It is appropriate to descend into the trenches, so to speak, in defense of inerrantism? The best possible outcome would be a thorough defense of one’s nebulous sense that inerrantism is a congenial position. Moreover, it looks (at least from my perspective) like there isn’t much hope for the project of trying to show, through valid exegesis or empirical argument, that every item on the list, and indeed every other item that could possibly be produced as evidence against inerrancy, is a chimera. It is not good enough, after all, to show that there is some interpretation of the text according to which the contradictions do not arise. It must be further demonstrated that each such interpretation accords with the best exegetical standards. And insofar as these clearly include not interpreting the text with the prior aim of ironing out contradictions, it is difficult to see how competent exegesis could favor the inerrantist. To struggle against the internal and external witnesses here would be both purposeless and hopeless, thus irrational.

Accommodation

There remains one further approach the inerrantist might take in defense of his position. Perhaps he disagrees with the assumption that one should only be allowed to resolve contradictions in the text through standard exegesis. Perhaps he thinks we are meant to be clever with the Bible, to make it work, because God has graciously provided us with just enough information to recover the truth. This approach has the benefit of dealing tidily with the list of complaints against the doctrine of inerrancy that I presented in the last section, and indeed nearly any such list I could conceivably present. For one must only be sufficiently creative to see how, for example, it could have been the case that Jesus’ birth was attended by the shepherds and the wise men, and that he both fled to Egypt and received the blessing of Simeon, and so on, and so on…

But to take this approach is to build the walls out of the foundation stones. The reason we were attracted to inerrancy in the first place was that, in some vague way, we thought that God’s perfection implied that he would communicate to us clearly. But the extreme species of accommodation now under discussion takes as its point of departure the premise that the truth is cryptically concealed in the Biblical text. And to accept as a premise that the Bible is cryptic is to deny that God’s perfection entails his communicating clearly, and to deny the latter is to give up the central motivation for the doctrine of inerrancy. So this last avenue of escape for the inerrantist is, like all others, a dead end.

Inerrancy Rejected

There is no good reason to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is true. There are many good reasons to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is false. It is a rational requirement, then, that we reject it. A rational requirement is binding on all rational agents. So we reject the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

I would like to conclude with a personal note to the reader: If you found my argument convincing and are now terribly concerned about where that leaves us as faithful Christian believers, or whether we can even rationally continue as such– to you, as the angel says, “Do not be afraid!” It will turn out that, once we’ve arrived at a proper understanding of Biblical interpretation, everything will fall into place and the central tenets of Christian faith will emerge all the stronger for their new foundations. This promissory note will have to suffice for now. Next time, we will settle on a way of determining which parts of the Bible we ought to believe, and then in subsequent posts we will see how our new method justifies our acceptance of the Apostle’s Creed as a statement of faith.

Until then, soli deo gloria.

Now, readers of this post will fall into three categories. Those in the first category will have already, based on the above, drawn the conclusion that I am among the most awful, sleazy, rotten, perverse pretenders to Christian faith. (Or perhaps, if they happen to be more charitable, only that I need serious pastoral attention.) Those in the second category will treat the things I’ve said as stale news. What could possibly be more obvious? Talk about something more interesting! Some of these will be atheists or agnostics; others will profess Christian faith. And those in the third category, who will perhaps find this series most enriching, will have responded with some mixture of caution and intrigue.

The coelacanth, our fleshy-finned brother from the Devonian.

Two years ago, I was a first-category man. Theological liberals frustrated me to no end. Why didn’t they get it? If orthodoxy meant biting the intellectual bullet and positing demons, mysterious floods, the total moral depravity of certain Near Eastern cultures, etc., you bit the intellectual bullet! Christ is worth any cost! “We walk by faith, not by sight.” The situation wasn’t helped one jot by the fact that the theological liberals I knew all seemed to believe some crazy thing or other; if not that Jesus’ resurrection was a mere emotional phenomenon among his disciples, then that the biblical text has no meaning whatsoever, or that Jesus was an unintelligible or antiheroic character. These seemed (and still seem) awful, unwarranted sorts of things to believe. Their unpleasant odor hovered miasmically around the whole body of liberal thought; I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole!

But now I straddle the line between category two and category three. What happened? Well, that’s the point of this series. I will present, in what may become a rather long sequence of short arguments, my reasons for this intra-religious conversion. But before I do that, I want to make a placatory confession: liberals are awful! If you think we’ve harmed the church is a hundred different ways, you’re right! Liberal theology is a broad umbrella indeed, and there are some pretty skanky things living in its shadow. (Derrida is a good example.) But if you have the charity to consider old arguments anew, I think you’ll find some great insights here in the shade.

Two points bear mentioning before next week: First, I do not purport to discuss any topic exhaustively. There will be many occasions to ask, “But what about X?” Sometimes I may talk about X in a later post, or in a comment. Sometimes I may never talk about X. The most important thing, when considering some X or another, is to ask whether that X is potentially a defeater or serious challenge to the view I present. This will only be the case if X, taken together with what I have said, produces a contradiction or, in the case of arguments from the weight of the evidence, if X tips the balance in the opposite direction. Second, while this first post has been biographical, I consider myself to have arrived at the present point for good reasons. And that means that I conceive my project as more than biography– as philosophy, in fact. And if the reasons are good for me, they’re good for you, too. I aim to convince, not merely relate. So hold me to high standards, and don’t let me get away with any loose business!

In Christ,

Nico

Our finitude is palpable. We see it in the mangled bodies of victims of war and natural disaster; we smell it in the acid-sweet stench of sickness and the stuffiness of declining years. We experience it firsthand in our own foolishness and immorality and in the mistakes of the ones we love. We are born into it, and we die of it. It colors every day of our lives, the dim glass through which we view our world.

Moreover, the horrors we encounter in our finite existences seem indiscriminately distributed. The righteous suffer while the evil slip away unscathed. Wealth wrongfully acquired brings countless advantages, but virtue counts for little to the poor. Not even after years of waiting are we sure to get our just deserts. And yet God, we say, is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.

Thus Job’s lament: Why, God? Why, if you are good, do you permit such horrors? Our theme for this issue is the question — Where is God? How do we reconcile the pervasiveness of evil with the Christian conception of a powerful and benevolent Deity? How do we understand the Bible’s insistence that God has commanded the deaths of entire nations, including civilians? Can a loving God truly be behind such stories? Or do these considerations count as evidence against Christian faith?

We certainly cannot hope to settle these questions within a single issue of The Ichthus. But we are confident that in the pages that follow, we have gathered together a collection of writings that can offer both believers and non-believers an invaluable entrée into the ideas employed and positions defended by Christian thinkers in today’s academy. We are especially pleased to feature contributions by celebrated Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen and Harvard’s own Tyler VanderWeele, a biostatistician and member of the faculty of the School of Public Health. Both offer timely additions to Christian scholarship at Harvard and elsewhere.

I invite you to join us in our corporate reflection and discussion of these important and difficult issues. We sincerely hope that God will reveal to us His truth and character, so that we may see clearly for the sake of the Church and the world. But even if philosophical clarity is not forthcoming, we will still rejoice in the opportunity to proclaim God’s final answer to the evils of this world, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Many blessings now and in months to come,

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini Editor-in-Chief

INSPIRATION: The Bible is, throughout, and in every passage, the inspired Word of God – of a God who is an omniscient and morally perfect being.

entailing, according to van Inwagen,

PART OF THE PLAN: God wants there to be such a thing as the Bible – that is, a set of writings that play the role that the Hebrew and Greek scriptures have played in the history of Israel and the Church; and the wording of the various books of the Bible is (more or less) the way God wants it to be.

Van Inwagen devotes his attention to telling a story according to which part of the plan is true and it is also the case that

SCARY STORIES: At many places in the Bible, God is represented as commanding things that are indisputably morally wrong (genocide, for example).

You’ll have to wait for the issue to come out to read the article’s account of how scary stories can be part of the plan.  It will be worth your time.  At the moment, though, I want to reflect on part of the plan on its own terms.  It is, according to van Inwagen, entailed by inspiration.  I think most Christians at most moments in history would agree with part of the plan.  It is, as an element of Christian theology, relatively uncontroversial.  And I think most of them would agree that part of the plan is entailed by inspiration, whatever they take ‘inspired’ to mean.  But I suspect that not very many of them have a clear idea of why they think these things.  So I want to take some time to provide a reason for thinking that inspiration entails part of the plan.  The answer may have implications for our thinking about everything that inspiration entails.  It might, therefore, have a great deal of theological significance.

Let’s first introduce the (unrefined) concept of creative control.  Creative control is the sort of thing a person can have over a thing that is produced.  We will talk about creative control exclusively in the context of documents.  I have creative control over a document just in case I can knowingly make a choice that affects the final text of the document.  Multiple people can have creative control over the same document, and some people who have creative control over a given document will make more numerous and/or important creative decisions than others.

I claim that when we say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, we are saying that God has exercised creative control over the Bible.  On my view, saying that the Bible is the inspired Word of God is almost exactly like saying that Ronald’s essay is the (Ronald-)inspired word of Ronald – it is saying that God composed the Bible (just as Ronald composed his essay), that he was the one who made the important choices regarding its final text.

Of course, God did not write the individual books of the Bible down, nor did he dictate them verbatim to the people who did write them down.  But the fact that God neither wrote the books of the Bible down nor dictated them to the people who did write them down is by no means incompatible with the claim that God composed the Bible, that God had creative control over the Bible.  Many plausible stories can be told according to which God had creative control over the text of the Bible without either writing it down himself or dictating it to the people who did write it down.  So we lay aside the issue of the means by which God exercised creative control over the text of the Bible.

We are now in a position to see how inspiration entails part of the plan.  If inspiration is true, then the Bible is a product of God’s exercised creative control.  But then it is the product of God’s choices about its content.  So, unless he was somehow forced to compose the Bible (a possibility that merits little discussion), God wants there to be such a thing as the Bible.  Similarly, its wording must be (more or less) the way God wants it to be.  But then we have established the truth of part of the plan.  Note that this argument depends on the extent of God’s exercised creative control over the text of the Bible.  I take it to be uncontroversial that God exercised enough creative control over the Bible for the argument to be valid.  If he did not – if, that is, there are parts of the Bible that he would rather not have included – then we should be tempted to deny inspiration altogether, rather than affirm inspiration while denying part of the plan.

So inspiration entails part of the plan.  We ought to pay attention to the form our argument took: it was constructed in terms of claims about creative control.  A parting thought, hopefully to be explored further in the future – can we make similar arguments to establish the truth of other common claims about the Bible, for example that it is infallible/inerrant?

1.  Christian thought is worship. If we take Christ’s authority seriously, our intellectual pursuits cannot help but be grounded in the reality of God’s burgeoning kingdom and the coming re-creation of all things.  If we take Christ’s sacrifice seriously, our intellectual pursuits cannot help but be shot through with the joy of our new life of freedom in Christ.  And if our thoughts are God-centered expressions of our Christian joy, how can they be anything but our own peculiar form of worship?  Thus I conceive the Ichthus primarily as an organization dedicated to celebrating God and producing in its own unique way objects of beauty to the praise of his glory.

2.  Christian thinkers serve the Church. It is tempting to regard Christian scholarship, especially in its more hermetic moments, as a kind of defective stepchild of evangelism.  In the Western academy, the tedium and spiritual bankruptcy of much academic reflection on religion may even merit the label defective.  But Christian scholarship needn’t be the way it is in the West today.  In fact, Christian scholarship can be – one might say, was designed to be – vital to the function of the Church.  The fiery evangelist accomplishes great things, perhaps greater than any other, but he is a mere snake oil salesman unless his words correspond to a true and developed theology, a theology articulated and defended against warrantless cultural encroachments by Christian scholars.  So the Ichthus must strive to serve Harvard’s Christians by engaging with them concerning important theological, cultural, and political issues.

3.  Christian thinkers are uniquely equipped to spread the gospel. There is, of course, apologetics, which has the capacity to soften even the most rugged barriers to belief.  But any form of Christian expression can be evangelical simply by being invitational. And as those most fully aware of the beauty and power of Christian doctrine and thought, Christian intellectuals are most fully capable of sharing the joy and excitement of their faith.  The invitation does not need to be explicit; it more effective, in fact, when it remains unspoken.  The Lord moves when the reader is caught up in the Christian narrative, when he falls in love with the story of the God-man, of grace and sacrifice and life.  Writing on any subject is missional if it invites the reader to think in a new and exciting and Christian way.  We ought therefore to make the Ichthus a conversation with the Harvard community about every kind of issue, because doing so will make it possible for us to show the campus how Jesus is Lord even of Cambridge.

Missi sumus

I.  For by works of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

So knowledge of sin prevents my justification.  How?

II.  I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”  But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

An example to explain a phenomenon.  The commandment teaches the object of prohibition; sin creates the desire for it.  Thus I see it forbidden, and its forbidden character renders it irresistible.  There is no escape: to increase the prohibition is to increase the desire; to decrease the prohibition is to count lightly the covenant of law.  Therefore-

III.  Apart from the law, sin lies dead.  I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

Though I am alive, yet I am dead because of sin, because of the law.  This is life in the flesh, under the law.  For what reason this dying life?

IV.  It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.

And again-

V.  But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

Thus it was desirable for sin to be shown to be sin, for sin to become utterly sinful.  This was a condition for the possibility of the fulfillment by faith in Jesus Christ of the promise to Abraham.  How then this fulfillment by faith?

VI.  Or do you not know, brothers – for I am speaking to those who know the law – that the law is binding on a person only as long as he live?

If I die, I will be free of the law, the commandment that created for me this living death.  Moreover-

VII.  Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

So by faith I enter into Christ Jesus in fulfillment of the promise, and when I so enter I die and am released from the law.

VIII.  But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.

Having died, we are no longer under the law.  We do not ask, “Is it permissible?”  For to think in terms of permissibility is to return to the very beginning, to the condition of being under the law.

What then?

IX.  The commandments “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does not wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

There are no commandments; all is swallowed up in love; and the law is fulfilled.  So-

X.  “All things are lawful for me.”

Ask not therefore, “Is it permissible?” but rather “Is it love?”  This is the beginning and the end of the New Covenant.

Today At 5:00 p.m., those students who, due to woeful calendrical misfortune, happen to be taking Harvard’s very last final of 2009, will put down their pencils and experience for the first time ever an actual winter break. Not a fake winter break, the kind where you have to study for finals and produce two papers and memorize your vocabulary while you open your Christmas presents – a real, bona fide, winter break. Hallelujah!

But, you wonder with gut-wrenching apprehension, does that mean that the staff of the Ichthus will be off duty for a month? You can hardly bear the thought. Well fear not, wonderful reader! The Fish Tank will continue to bubble merrily all winter long with the effervescent writings of its staff. New content will be appearing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So come by and check it out!

Swimmingly,

In Christ,

Nico Kirk-Giannini

Knoll’s epilogue is part summary, part argument, and part exhortation.  It is a summary in broad strokes of the evolutionary story told in earlier chapters; it is an argument (partly implicit) concerning the history and significance of the relation between science and religion; it is an exhortation on the basis of ecology to steward the earth.  My concern is with Knoll’s argument and his exhortation.  Aside from the emotional appeal of the rhetoric he employs to motivate us toward environmentalism, the worldview Knoll advances (and opposes to the religious worldview) fails to motivate.

Knoll’s story about science and religion is typical of Enlightenment-scientistic thought.  All religions (Knoll mentions Christianity, Hinduism, and Aboriginal mythology) are deprecated attempts to account for natural phenomena, their obsolescence was ushered in by the great Scientific Revolution of the seventeeth century, their emotional appeal has led the irrational masses to reject clear evidence for their falsehood, etc.  Knoll sets down none of this, but (I argue) it is clear from his identification of disparate religious traditions, his suggestion that creation myths be treated as parables (not, in itself, objectionable – but Knoll almost certainly has in mind the kind of parable we would do better relegating to anthropological or ethnographic investigation rather than the kind of parable that teaches important truths about the universe and our place in it), and his strange suggestion that science has allowed us to become like God(s).

Well, the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is one that I have considered and rejected.  There are, I believe, good reasons for doing so.  But my point here doesn’t involve convincing anyone to reject that tradition.  I want merely to reflect on one way in which it differs from religious traditions, and particularly from the religions tradition with which I am most familiar – the Judeo-Christian tradition – and the significance of that difference for Knoll’s argument.  The difference I want to bring out is a difference in the sorts of claims the two traditions have the capacity to make.

Science is descriptive, predictive, and explanatory.  It is not normative.  That is, science can tell us what is and will be and why, but it can’t tell us what ought to be.  In fact, the thoroughgoing Enlightenment-scientist will deny that normative claims have truth values, or try to paraphrase normative language into language about occurrent emotions.  Religious language, on the other hand, abounds with normative claims.  One thinks, for example, of the Levitical law (“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy”) or the teachings of Jesus (“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”), where imperatives are naturally understood to be equivalent to claims about what one ought to do.

So Knoll has a problem.  He feels strongly that the earth ought to be preserved; he would like to communicate his feelings to the reader; but his intellectual tradition gives him no tools with which either to articulate his own conviction or argue for it.  So he turn to emotive appeal: “If we can understand the immensity of our evolutionary inheritance, we may be moved to preserve it.”  It is ecology, Knoll argues, that convinces us to protect the earth.

But why?  Surely humans are ecologically dominant.  Surely we have the power to build and destroy.  Surely we could, if we chose, destroy the world as we know it.  But none of these merely descriptive claims get us any normativity; none of them tell us what we ought to do.  The Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is not permissive of normativity.  Ecology is not enough.

The reason I bring all this up is that I am frustrated by the prevailing misconception that one can be steeped in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment and yet keep the uniquely religious, or at least anti-Enlightentment, aspects of human experience like normativity.  No.  We cannot have our cake and eat it, too.  If we adopt Knoll’s worldview, biological diversity has no intrinsic value.  We should think of a living earth and a desolate earth with the same cool detachment.  We should be untroubled by the desolation of the rainforest or the death of thousands of miles of Carribean coral reef.  If we want to care about the earth at all, we need to step outside the Enlightment-scientistic tradition.  We must believe that some things have value and that there is a way things ought to be.  But if we do that, then we must regard Knoll’s claims and stories with some suspicion.  It is, I think, only when we see what we give away by endorsing the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition that we realize exactly how much is at stake in the dialogue between science and religion and begin to think about the issue with some clarity.