p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

“Where do I go from here?

Alas, I am stuck in the land of fear.

Wondering as I wait, one minute closer draws near

p

How do I study for this next test

And allow myself to rise above the rest

Where do I lay my pencil to read the best 

p

Oh, how I am disenlightened right now

Oh, the warm embrace of my bed and how

No, I must not give in or soon I might lose my vow

p

Though, sleeping in does sound great

If I soon awake so late, then maybe I will be irate

What then if I walk in, mate

p

Should I sit with the best?

Write with the worst?

or else, perhaps I should let the test triumph over me

p

No, I do not think this way

as only I can obey

My will and that of my great father

that of which I do to him pray

p

To believe in something better when I’m lost

and still, to not falter when I’m tossed

To be still living does not exhaust

as soon I will triumph over and be the boss

p

So, midterms midterms come my way

and I will show you the power of who I am today

But only shall I be backed as long as my great father keeps me on track!”

[C.A.S.H 10/10/11]

“Lies destroy myself

Lies destroy who I am

Taking a swing at the success

that I do have at last

Why tell white lies to proceed?

Do they give me a big lead?

From time to time,

one says they are harmless

But I protest because the guilt

of deceiving does not sit well with the honest

Why need I be so caring?

Why not let life happen?

Because I am one who stands to light the way

I want to rise up from where I am and blaze the trail for a new day

Once the poor become men

then one will realize that everyone can

join the ranks of those who may once again

be what they believe and do what they dream

Honesty will lead me there

Believe in it and it will guide me abroad

and give me a world of laud,

which is to be shared with those who have been sawed

from the highest tree-tops

amongst the canopy of care

Life can proceed with those who believe

in the power of love and in the man above

For when one presents himself honestly,

then one can be free from distraction

and be there to stop the impaction

of evil and where it is today

For today is my day

to be free

and to keep my soul (along with others)

filled with glee”

[C.A.S.H 06/23/11]

Thoughts?  Comments?

“Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart”

–Unknown

Of late, I’ve been (trying) to keep up with a discourse on the voluntary/involuntary nature of faith.There has been an intellectual interplay of arguments, thoughts, and propositions, all aimed to answer whether faith is voluntary or involuntary. I suppose one could accuse me of taking a cop out and choosing to evade the question, though I wonder if the question is the correct question to ask in the first place.

A couple days ago, I tried to clear through some boxes filled with snippets of high school. During my shuffles down memory lane, I came across a sheet of paper from summer 2008. On such a page, there was a quote that particularly struck a chord with me. It relates love to playing the piano (I remember getting the guys who were piano minors at camp that year to agree to have this cheesy quote on our shirts–see above for quote).

In light of the ruminations that take place in one’s time of solitude, such as the summer, I think it’s worth applying this quotation to our faith. In many ways, playing the piano does demand playing by the rules; the correct notes, the correct rhythm, the correct balance, the correct tempo, endless hours of practice, memorization, performance, repetition, and, all too often, it takes only a couple of careless lapses of time for the finesse to slacken. Yet, it is within the confines of these “rules,” that the performer reaches a place to truly flourish and play music. Oddly enough, the rules enable the freedom.

Similarly, rigorously engaging with one’s beliefs is important. Reading the Bible is important. Standing on solid theology is important. Thinking about how to live one’s life as a “light and salt” is important. In a similar, but different way, facts are important, and reason has its place in the world. However, I have noticed within myself a wearing. I can only take certain abstract and often verbose thought trains for so long, before I grow simply exhausted.

Because the truth is, the rules will never get you there. Only Christ will get you there. This may sound even more abstract, but I think that’s the beauty of the Christian faith. There is so precious little that we as humans are capable of before our Creator.

There is a passage in Mark that often resonates with me:

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

-Mark 9:24 (KJV)

Personally, I feel that asking whether faith is voluntary or involuntary seriously misses the point. The question itself implies a non-existence of God; that is, it implies that God is not involved in the faith of a man. I see the question as peripheral, because the answer to the question provides only minimal advancement, and serious detour. If faith is voluntary, it seems to follow that man is in perfect control, whereas very few ever feel completely in control of anything. If faith is involuntary, it seems that something else exercises control over, and I struggle to answer what this “something else” could be. I consider it a detour, because I feel that it strays from the root of the issue: that is, “Does God exist?” After all, what is the fundamental difference between voluntary/involuntary belief? If belief is voluntary, well, voluntary belief is based on something, since belief is very rarely based on nothing. If this belief is involuntary, this “involuntary belief” is still the result of something, namely that which might be the influences in one’s life. Which also comes down to be a sort of voluntary belief, since such influences and their reliability is questionable and inconsistent at best, and at some point there is a leap of faith (not in the religious sense, but even in a practical sense. e.g. a lot of things can go wrong when I choose to sit on a chair that looks sturdy. It may be a mirage, it may be rotten, it may be broken, it may be a number of things–but at some point, I will probably just choose to get over my thoughts and sit in it. One could say that my belief that most chairs that appear to be sturdy are sturdy is “involuntary,” but it seems to me that it is oddly voluntary, just as “voluntary” belief is oddly involuntary) …and the cycle seems to go ’round and ’round…

Returning to the passage from Mark, Charles Spurgeon has interesting insight into this passage:
“What was his discovery? Why his discovery was  that he did not believe—and that is where the real difficulty lay. When did the man make this discovery? When he began to believe! Is it not a very singular thing that as soon as ever he had a little faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, he discovered the great abyss of his unbelief? “Lord,” he said, “I believe, but, oh, I do also disbelieve so much that my unbelief seems to swallow up my belief!” Until a man receives faith, he may think that he has it—but when he has real faith in Jesus Christ, then he shudders as he thinks how long he has lived in unbelief—and realizes how much of unbelief is still mixed with his belief! …While men have no faith—I repeat what I said just now—while men have no faith, they are unconscious of their unbelief, but as soon as they get a little faith, then they begin to be conscious of the greatness of their unbelief! When the blind man gets a little light into his eyes, he perceives something of the blackness of the darkness in which he has been living—and so you must be able to say from your heart, “Lord, I believe,” or else you will never be able to pray, as this man did, “help my unbelief.” Even a small measure of faith is necessary to discover the great measure of the unbelief.”

So at the end of the day, sometimes I have to forget the rules and tune out the arguments. I have to humble myself and come before the Lord. And ask…and believe. And I can do this, not because I’m actually “forgetting the rules” or “choosing to forego reason, logic, and intellect,” but because all of those faculties that God has given me frees me to come before him and just believe.

God gives us age to mark experience on Earth.  As we grow up, the experiences and the lives that we have touched will be numerous, but age forces us to look at the quality of those interactions.  As the sands of time pass, the physical opportunities to carry out God’s Will decrease and so the effort and depth of interactions must increase to counterbalance this change.  Wisdom teaches us that anything worth doing is worth doing well.  Even though society paints the idea of growing older as limiting (at least from the mid 30′s and on), there is no need to buy the idea that society sells.  Have faith in God’s plan for you to carry his message.

Age also opens us to new ailments or growth dependent on how far we are along the road.  For myself, I am still growing, but as more people enter the age of geriatrics, the possibility of newfound energy or muscular growth slows.  When we are young, dreams can grow and seem ever expansive, and we can help others make it to where they need to be, but we lack a great perspective of the world.  However, in the elderly world, dreams may still be just as big and a world perspective seems to be a bit more established, but the elderly lack the mobility to act upon some of their fantasies.  Age helps bring these two parallel paths of youth and senescence together.  Age reminds us of how connected humans are in this world we have inherited from our Lord, for our destinies are bound and dependent on each other and only when we co-operate can we combine the world perspective of our elders and the vigour of the young to move forward as a society.

Lastly, age lets us count our blessings.  As we grow into the world of wisdom and experience, every day allows a new opportunity to praise God.  As we gain experience, new ways of helping others open up.  The world is subject to our creative potential and is only limited by what we perceive and feel for others.  As we age, we grow closer to our fellow man and affect the lives of others in a manner that cannot be reversed.  Every time we see the sunshine of a new day, we are walking into the opportunity to prosper the lives of others and ourselves and as we do, God’s mission is fulfilled.  In this way, age sets our soul free from jealousy and selfishness as we embrace the love of Christ and therefore age can’t be all that bad.  When we allow ourselves to age with dignity and use the facilities that God has provided us with, we move one day closer to eternal life as well as furthering God’s love!  Go on and age with grace now, forever, and always!

Many of these advertisements work to make consumers feel that they are never adequate by being themselves and must buy the products that are advertised to better fit into society. Well, I am here to say don’t believe them.  Be yourself.  Your mama might have always told you not to compare yourself to advertisements, but now, here is the time to hold onto your being.  As we see less and less youth attending church today and more and more emphasis on the over-sexualization of women and to an increasing extent, men, we must consciously realize that this behaviour is not normal.  Sounds simple,  right?

Advertisements are everywhere and we pick them up all over the place (the store, the internet, magazines, and so on).  We even see advertisements for clothing companies in which clothes almost don’t make an appearance (Abercrombie … cough … Hollister … etc).  We shouldn’t blame individual advertising companies though because they are only trying to make a profit, but collectively a lot of the burden falls on them.  As Christians, we should act with restraint and be more self-aware.  For if we know what these ads are trying to do (subvert our morality), then we will be less likely to have their messages sink into our subconscious and this fight is half the battle.  I don’t advocate for the changing of these ads in an ever-increasing secular world, but I do advocate for a Christian viewpoint on these ads, so that we aren’t drawn into immoral places where we don’t really belong.  Over time, suggestive images can seed themselves into our brains and their effects can be magnified albeit not consciously.  When we rely upon our gut instinct, we tend to base our decisions off our subconscious, which if tainted with these advertisements can lead us to make bad decisions or at least promiscuous ones at that in the heat of a moment.

Hopefully, someday this Christian empowered thinking will become mainstream and we will not value ourselves less or think ourselves as not worthy of society’s approval based on these advertisements.  However, Christians must make the decision to consciously face the world and fight the flow of it.  For what Christians do today will influence the decisions of advertisers tomorrow.

As with the student, we don’t have control of the entire format of the future.  We must put our faith in God and in God’s ability to attract the right people to us at the right times.  For long-term plans and guidance are nice, but even more righteous is our ability to confront any adversity that the Devil may bring into our world.  In this case, worry is the main mode of transportation for the devil.

How do we combat the worry that we face in an ever more secular society?  Well, I can offer a few bits of advice that I saw on a t-shirt a little while back.  The t-shirt was on a stranger walking by, and immediately caught my attention so much so, that I asked the person to stand still.  I wanted to write down the message on the back of the shirt.  The shirt had a USB port on the front with a USB cord running along the right backside of the shirt that was attached to the following words:

“Up Grade

your schedule

finances

relationships

faith

thoughts

hope

impact

outlook

peace

influence

diet

mind

health

attitude

adventure

joy

service

communication

perspective

purpose

love

value

time

feelings

beliefs

involvement

self

patience

life”

I thought that this was one of the clearest messages that I had ever seen.  The message was that by becoming more involved in our own lives and solidifying our own values, then we could in turn up-grade our own life.  I think the message that God wanted me to take from this shirt was that I should not worry when I am in his arms; by upgrading my faith, hope, and outlook to a more solid standard, then I shall not be tempted by the doubt that surrounds me in the secular world.

As such, I have been doing the above for a very long time.  I am often asked on a daily basis why I don’t worry so much.  My answer always is that God knows where I’m going, and I do not fear where his shepherd-like hands will take me to as long as I know he is with me.  I hope you also realize that God is with you always as long as you put your faith in yourself, and you accept that whatever may happen will be fine as long is God is alongside you.

If you ever find yourself falling into doubt, remind yourself of how lucky you are by reciting the following passage from Psalm 23:

“The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want;
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for His name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil;
for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of the
Lord forever. “

I hope all of you continue to trust in the power of the lord and continue to be comforted by his guiding force.

However, God often has other plans for us.  He gives us inclement weather to remind us just how fragile our existence really is and how we should cherish every moment we have with those that we love.  Even though we may loathe bad weather, I believe these storms serve to give us time to reflect on how lucky we are in this millennium.  We are able to complete a trip across the country in a mere six hours where a couple hundred years ago, that same trip may have taken a few weeks or even a few months.

Modern technology connects the world in a way that has never been seen before, but this technology is no match for the power of God.  He does not provide us with weather to punish us, but help us remember that we are moving way too fast, and that maybe we need to look at our priorities more.  Just like the travelers who crossed the country hundreds of years ago, we must have faith in God that we will get to our destination.

Life is only worth so much because it is short and unpredictable.  Next time, a storm comes through town and pushes back your travel plans, remember to thank God for everything he has given you.  All He is asking for is a few moments of reflection on what you have been given.  When you are finally re-united with your family, then you will realize the wait was worth it and the time you spend with them will be all the more precious.  Have faith and know that God is not testing you, but is simply asking for your time to help you realize how blessed you really are.  Peace and Love and great wishes for this holiday season!

C. Marshall: I take no issue with one way that you use #1. The rewarding nature of pious life apart from Christ does not strike me as that strange from a Christian point of view. That said, as I’m sure you realize, by admitting the intrinsic, natural reward that you get from living a life of community and service to others, this does mean that you’ll have to build a case for Christianity on more than its fulfilling life of humility and compassion. Your positioning Christ at the center of this “spectrum” of holy living might make sense but that will be a conclusion, I’m assuming, that we’ll reach through other avenues (like Scripture or the Resurrection as you later point out).

You have proposed, but by no means proved, that actively living out the life described by Christ would be the most fulfilling experience one could possess. I don’t think it’s fruitful to try to empirically examine that claim. I’m fine to just point out that there are many very fulfilled Christians and many very fulfilled people of other or not faiths, and leave it at that. So again, as I’m sure you realize, pointing again and again to the fulfilling lives of Christians will not be enough for me. It’s entirely conceivable that Christianity entails false propositions but leads to a life that is fulfilling for entirely naturalistic reasons.

Yet it seems as though Christians often rely on religious experience to motivate conversion. People (including you), when they hear about my spiritual struggles, often ask me if I have ever really lived as a Christian. I’m assuming that means living as the Gospels prescribe—and while it’s no short order to decipher how exactly that is, I’m assuming it means living a life of humility, service, and community. And that in this process I will come to know God personally and directly, aside from all of this tortuous intellectualizing.

Doesn’t this present an epistemological problem? I would imagine that you are not a Protestant because of specific intellectual problems you have with Catholic teaching, because I’m sure you can see that many Catholics are very fulfilled and faithful Christians. But have you ever tried living as a Catholic?

Or ditto with other religions? How many religions should I try living? How many lifetimes would that take? It’s not just an epistemological quandary, but a methodological nightmare. Why should I privilege Christianity?

Jordan Monge: I don’t think Christians should use fulfillment from “living out” Christianity as sufficient epistemological evidence for the authenticity of its metaphysical truth claims. The problem is rather that  most people do not deny Christianity because they have thought long and hard about Christ’s resurrection. Instead, they say something like, “Well, it’s foolish to save sex for marriage, so that’s why I disagree with Christianity” or “I don’t really think lust is that bad; Jesus must be wrong if he makes a big deal about it” or “I just really dislike the idea of hell.”

The problem is that most non-Christians (and even many Christians) live as slaves to sin. We struggle to stay pure or to serve the poor or to obey our parents, so we begin to rationalize our actions even though we know that they are wrong. Once this rationalization has taken place, THEN we say, “well, premarital sex isn’t really that bad, so Jesus must be crazy.” Sometimes it takes living something out in order to appreciate the truth behind it. Once you stop having sex, you realize the true love that can be found in a pure dating relationship. Once you start serving the poor, you appreciate how valuable it really is. But these are ethical notions that you can only truly appreciate once you’ve stopped being a slave to sin.

Obviously, I would recommend that everyone try to follow the commands of Jesus, simply for the reason that I think it’s the best way to live your life. But if someone said, “I wholeheartedly believe that Jesus is right for every ethical statement he makes, but he’s just so wrong about this whole “being the Son of God” business,” my response would be to discuss the “Son of God” business and not the ethical claims. The ethical claims wouldn’t be the issue.

I think I can do the same thing with other religions. I can look at their metaphysical claims about Joseph Smith or Mohammad or the world being on the back of a turtle, and reject their ethical claims on the basis of bad metaphysical claims. For the record, I have read parts of the Qur’an as well as parts of the Book of Mormon, although not the full text of either. Yet I didn’t read the whole Bible before becoming a Christian – I figured which parts of it were important and which metaphysical claims were key, and addressed those. And I never lived as a Catholic, but you’re correct in assuming that I have other doctrinal, theological reasons for rejecting Catholicism.

It's LOGIC!

To put all this another way: if a religion is true, then, if we follow that religion, we will lead a fulfilling life. Logically, we let”R” symbolize “if a religion is true,” “F” symbolize “we follow that religion,” and “L” symbolize “we will lead a fulfilling life” to get the paraphrase R ⊃ ( F ⊃ L). However, this statement is not equivalent to L ⊃ ( F ⊃ R) or “if we live a fulfilling life, then if we followed a religion, that religion must be true.” (My deductive logic professor would be pretty upset with me for changing the wording a bit, but you get the idea.

In order to demonstrate that antecedent “R” is false for a particular religion, we must find the consequent “( F ⊃ L)” false. In order to find “F ⊃ L” false, however, you must have a case in which the antecedent “F” is true and the consequent “L” is false. That is, you have to live out the teachings AND find that it does not lead to a fulfilling life. Most people, however, just say, “well, I don’t think it’s more fulfilling because x claim is silly” even though they haven’t trying to live out what Christianity claims about x. And that’s not a good way to go about criticizing Christianity logically. So if you want to criticize the ethics, go live it out and then you can try disproving the ethics. But if you take issue with other metaphysical claims, let’s have a serious discussion about those. I’d say that about almost any religion, not just Christianity.

If someone tried to assert L ⊃ ( F ⊃ R) – that a fulfilling life demonstrates the truth of a religion – I would strongly disagree. And if a Christian tried to argue this, I’d ask them to reconsider their logic. You could create a new religion, call it Christianiticalism, that held all the same beliefs as Christianity with the addition of the statement “DNA is made with uranium instead of oxygen”, and it would probably lead to an equally fulfilling life for any non-scientist. Yet its ability to offer a fulfilling life would not mean that “DNA is made with uranium instead of oxygen.”

So I don’t think you and I are in too much disagreement here. Note that I would ask you to consider living out Christianity in part because I have found Christianity much more fulfilling than atheism. As your friend, I want you to lead a fulfilling life and I believe that if you follow his teachings, then the truth will set you free. But you cannot simply be looking for comfort, you also have to be looking for Truth. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

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.

This question posed by G.K Chesterton’s well-meaning publisher, served as the premise for Chesterton’s book, Orthodoxy, in which he provides the answer to this query (hint: it involves God!) Indeed, belief in one’s self is a value so ingrained in secular society that when Chesterton dismissed the concept earlier in the conversation, the publisher was completely baffled. His puzzlement is understandable. Instead of being told by the world to humble ourselves before God and each other, we have been told to raise ourselves up and to delight in our latent potential. Since birth, the mantra is repeated: if we believe in ourselves, we can accomplish anything! Taken with a grain of salt, this in some ways is true. Humans are amazing and have done awe-inspiring things because they believed they could do so. However, without God’s redemptive power in the picture, it is all meaningless, as the Teacher repeats over and over in Ecclesiastes.        

Although striving to imitate Christ will bring spiritual growth, we can't guarantee the physical effects shown above

Complete self-reliance is essentially a more noble-sounding form of pride. Evoking the image of the rugged individual, who succeeds through his own know-how and determination, self-reliance is appealing. The irony is that we can only become the person we are meant to be if we submit our will to God instead of “believing in ourselves”.

Deep down I am not a confident person. But like thousands of other people at Harvard and for that matter everywhere in the world, I’ve learned over the years how to establish a façade of sharp self-assurance. This is a tiring thing to do, especially when most of the time, I do not know exactly who I am or what I want to do with my life. It is an especially pain-inducing act to put on when so many people around me are poised, with ambitious dreams that they are likely to achieve.

That is why I was so thankful to come across this passage in Orthodoxy: “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.”

What a relief, to know that I do not have to have my whole future mapped out but instead am required to quietly and steadfastly depend on God!  The ambiguity of my life on earth takes on new meaning as I understand that I am running a different sort of race than the world expects me to. Instead of looking within myself into what appears to be a muddle of ugly contradictions and faults for assurance, I know that I am to look to God. Instead of a blank canvas, calling me to paint my own destiny, I am meant to be a mirror reflecting Christ. Paul reminds us of this beautiful calling in his letter to the church in Ephesus and to all believers everywhere: “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”. Ephesians 5:1-2 (NIV)