I would describe one of my favorite teachers as “quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Many question my teacher, to whom I would wish that they would simply take the time to get to know my teacher…to simply read.

Mark 10

¹⁷And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

What can I do to earn my salvation, good teacher Jesus?

¹⁸And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

Don’t reduce me to a merely “good teacher.” I am God.

¹⁹Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother.

You know what the commandments say—here’s the checklist.

²⁰And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth.

Is that everything? Then, I’m good!

²¹Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.

You’re right. You’re missing something (and I really, really hope you see it, because I love you so much).

Jesus is not merely asking for the man to get rid of his material possessions. Jesus is asking the man to release his dependence on material possessions for security—to depend wholly on Jesus.

²²And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.

This man is not merely demonstrating his unwillingness to part with his great possessions, but making the decision to choose to trust in his possessions rather than Jesus Christ.

Regarding the upcoming verse, there is a relevant article recently posted on Psychology Today (July 14, 2011) by evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber: “Why Atheism Will Replace Religion: New Evidence. With economic security, people abandon religion.” To be frank, I have to hide a smile when there are *new* discoveries that were written in the Bible thousands and hundreds of years ago.

Barber says:
It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion. Hence my finding of belief in God being higher in countries with a heavy load of infectious diseases.

. . .

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

²³And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!

How difficult is it for those who are “rich” to enter into the kingdom of God!

²⁴And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!

More explicitly. How difficult is it for those who trust in their material possessions to protect them from fear and uncertainty to enter into the kingdom of God!

²⁵It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Barber likens the phenomenon to a market where religion is just one of many products available, and those who are in economically developed countries are less likely to even need the product. Perhaps it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, because the rich man often has a hard time just seeing that there is a camel that must go through the eye of the needle.

²⁶And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?

Indeed. Who then can be saved?

²⁷And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

No one can be saved of their own will, their own efforts, their own merit, their own abilities or their own possessions. It is impossible. It is only possible with God. It is only possible through belief in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Only through faith.

But to even get to that we must give up that “one thing you lack.” We must surrender our dependence and “trust in riches.” We must realize our inability and God’s ability. We must face the impossible and declare, “with God all things are possible.”

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.

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.

Just as wearing glasses will alter our vision for the better or worse, viewing the world through a lens will shape our perceptions of reality.

It is so easy to forget how biased our view may really be. J.I. Packer explains:

“We do not start our Christian lives by working out our faith for ourselves; it is mediated to us by Christian tradition, in the form of sermons, books and established patterns of church life and fellowship. We read our Bibles in the light of what we have learned from these sources; we approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world… It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.”

It is uncontroversial that our understanding is shaped by our experience. My own experience within the churches of Christ has made me view attending church services three times a week as normal. While I can recite Acts 2:38 by heart just from having heard it in sermons, other people might have Romans 10:9 roll off their tongues. My perception of what it means to be a Christian has been dramatically shaped not only by scriptures, but also by the behavior of those with whom I fellowship. The small culture of which I am a part gives me a strong lens through which I view the question of what it means to be a Christian. One reason for me specifically to be cognizant of this lens is it is too easy for me to become judgmental when someone falls outside of my perception of the norm by only attending services once a week.

Phoebe definitely would have been carrying this Bible around Rome and Cenchrea.

My general concern is that we often forget the lenses with which we approach the scriptures. A modern day Christian may view reading the Bible on a regular basis as essential for Christian life. Yet when we look at the early church, not every congregation had a copy of 1 Peter or Hebrews. For the vast history of Christianity, most Christians were illiterate and couldn’t read the Bible at all. Did that make them any less Christian? Of course not.

I fear that the availability of the Bible (would you like it NIV, KJV, ESV, or Message? In dark leather for the “real men” or hot pink for those Christian teenage girls?) and the recognition that it contains timeless truths about God has made us forget all of the ways in which it is inaccessible.

The Bible was written by men almost 2,000 years ago, to specific churches with specific needs. Sometimes it says things which seem almost contradictory. For example, where Ephesians 2:8 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” James 2:24 says “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” The word that the NIV translates as “works” in Ephesians is the same word translated as “what he does” in James. This means that one verse tells us that we are not saved by works, while another says we are justified by what we do. (The difference between being “saved” and “justified” is another important question.) Of course, the consistency becomes obvious when you realize that Ephesians was addressed to a congregation plagued by Judaizers who wanted justification through the works of the law, whereas James is addressed to people who reduce faith to intellectual assent without any practice.

I fear that too many people come to the Bible looking for answers to their questions instead of seeking the way the apostles answered the questions of their time. When we take the Bible out of context, we are going to promote confusion and inaccurate answers. Granted, there are verses that are universally applicable and can be read and understood without doing an in-depth study. Galatians 5:19-21, for example, gives a list of sins that is easily understood. But many verses are not as clear-cut or as obviously applicable today and their use tends to lead toward eisegesis instead of exegesis.

In “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative,” NT Wright explains that:

“The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is culturally conditioned.  It is all written in the language of particular times, and evokes the cultures in which it came to birth.  It seems, when we get close up to it, as though, if we grant for a moment that in some sense or other God has indeed inspired this book, he has not wanted to give us an abstract set of truths unrelated to space and time.  He has wanted to give us something rather different, which is not (in our post-enlightenment world) nearly so easy to handle as such a set of truths might seem to be… we have come to the whole Bible, looking for particular answers to particular questions.  And we have thereby made the Bible into something which it basically is not.”

The Bible is not a science textbook; the epistles do not (always) give us a universal law that can be applied and understood in every context. Instead, it is a collection of advice directed at specific people in a specific time. We should not assume that we can understand all of it when we are in a totally different cultural milieu. We ought not pretend that God gave us the Bible to slice and dice into neat little answers to all of our modern questions. Rather, we should ask ourselves, what was Paul trying to convey to the people of his time, and what message should that have for us? Granted, I am not always perfect at this. But in general, I want to strive to take off my glasses of American Protestantism and try to view things through the lens of Paul’s time.

Continuing with the theme of things my high school friends have told me:

Another friend of mine once said to me, “You know, Joe, I’m not very religious.” I remember being slightly surprised by his response – not because I thought he was particularly religious, but because I was not aware that “not very religious” people self-identified as “not very religious.” I was tempted to ask him if he thought he was not very saved as well, but I decided to refrain.

There are plenty of intramural sports, but there is no such thing as intramural Christianity.

Such a retort, of course, would have been in jest: Who in the world thinks that salvation comes in degrees? (Perhaps there will be different rewards in Heaven – Mark 10.29-30 (for instance) suggests as much – but no one thinks that people go halfway to Heaven.) However, genuine questions existed in my mind behind the unmade joke: If you consider yourself “not very religious,” do you think there is a point to being very religious? Are you religious enough?

Indeed, if we ask “average” Americans how to get to Heaven, we will inevitably hear responses like “By being a good person”: by not murdering or stealing, by being a relatively nice person, by (maybe) doing some community service, and by (even less likely) attending church services on a semi-regular basis. Christianity functions typically as a condiment sprinkled onto the American dream; it spices things up, but people who like it too much (like people who like ketchup too much) are weird. And religiosity exists on a spectrum, where different levels of commitment are just as accepted and expected as different levels of commitment to exercise, sports, or music. You should be Christian – but you don’t have to be that Christian.

Such an understanding of Christianity is so completely at odds with Jesus’ teachings that I can only consider the result of sin, willful self-delusion, or self-imposed ignorance – the spiritual equivalent of believing that the Earth is flat. I want to use such strong language not because I am a perfect Christian (I am not), but because such spiritual apathy and half-heartedness compromises the Church’s mission more than anything else.

Jesus spoke some of the most refreshing and invigorating words ever recorded in history. He also called his disciples to take up their crosses daily and follow him. Whatever taking up one’s cross daily means, I am certain it does not mean going to church every other week – or (for that matter) going to church every week! Of America’s millions of Christians, how many can credibly claim that they have given up their lives on Earth for true life in Heaven? (I am not sure I can.) We are instructed to lay up for ourselves treasure in Heaven, not Earth (Matthew 6.19-20): “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (v. 21). Of America’s millions of Christians, how many can honestly claim that they have spent more time thinking about their eternal destinies than about their mortgages or retirement plans (or internships or college applications or grades)?

None of this is to say that I have mastered the art of laying up for myself treasures in Heaven; it is only to say that Christianity is not a half-in, half-out sort of fair. There is no half-Christianity, just as there is no half-salvation, half-forgiveness, or half-grace. There is no middle ground. We are not called to half-faith or half-repentance. We are called to be the light of the world (Matthew 5.14).

I picked two verses out of hundreds that make this point abundantly clear; if you need more convincing, I encourage you to open up a Bible and start reading…pretty much anywhere.

I originally wasn’t planning on writing multiple posts about infant baptism, but Richard Beck’s kindly saying that he was eager to follow my thoughts on the matter made me reconsider. I don’t have anything terribly profound to say about infant baptism on top of what I’ve already said, but I would like to discuss (in a very simplified manner) the nature of God’s covenants with us and how that applies to infant baptism.

A portrayal of Jesus' baptism

Salvation and spiritual rebirth – which occur at baptism (John 3.5) – are, I think, best understood as gifts given to us when we enter into covenants with God. I say “covenants” because my current understanding is that we have not entered into a single collective covenant with God (as could perhaps be said of Israel), but rather into multiple individual covenants with God – all covenants of grace, but different covenants nonetheless.

It could very well be that this understanding of the New Covenant(s) is prejudiced by Western individualism or by my non-pædobaptist upbringing. (In fact, there are many dimensions of our spiritual states which I consider to be fundamentally communal; for example, it seems that we do not suffer because our own sin alone, but rather suffer because the world is drenched with the sin of mankind. If this reminds you of original sin, bear this in mind: The observation that a child of abusive parents suffers for sins that are not her own is empirical, not theological.) Nonetheless, the centrality of faith in the New Testament – something difficult to forget after the Reformation – leads me to conclude that we enter into covenants with God only after volitional, individual responses from us. If that is the case, infant baptism simply cuts across the grain of New Testament theology.

What are the alternatives? Covenants could be not at all contingent upon us – but that runs into all sorts of problems that I won’t bother addressing here. Another option is covenants based on the volitional responses of others (e.g., the parents) – but the main example of such a covenant (circumcision) is also the main example of what the new covenant is replacing. Proponents of infant baptism (or just any opponent of what I’m saying) can appeal to Acts 16.15 and 16.33, as well as 1 Corinthians 1.16 – but the evidence from those passages is inconclusive.

This is all a very roundabout way of getting at the real heart of the matter: Why should baptized infants be afforded any spiritual status different than that of unbaptized infants? Better yet: Why should any infant be afforded any spiritual status different than that of any other infant?

Those are the questions that I have yet to see be successfully answered.

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?

Given all the recent brouhaha about baptism on The Fish Tank (for which I am largely responsible), a friend of mine expressed her concern with the lack of brouhaha about infant baptism – the mode of baptism practiced by the majority of Christians today.

As I thought about infant baptism – in particular, as I thought about why I reject infant baptism – I realized that my beliefs about infant baptism were largely bundled with my beliefs about original sin. Therefore, I thought that the best way to explain my thoughts on infant baptism would be to sketch some of my thoughts on original sin, in anticipation of some productive dialogue on the matter.

Before I advance my argument, I should answer a couple questions. First, what is original sin? Not all proponents of original sin agree about what original sin means. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I will assume (for simplicity’s sake) merely that those who accept original sin believe that we are born guilty, while those who deny original sin believe that we are born innocent. That will be the “litmus test.” (I understand that some people who accept “original sin” probably would not fit into my litmus test; my hope is that we all take the time to figure out exactly what we believe about something like this rather than appealing to ambiguous and unclear labels such as “original sin.”)

Second, why are infant baptism and original sin bundled together in my mind? The reason is that I believe that baptism is for the forgiveness of sins (cf. Acts 2.38, inter alia), so I see no real justification for infant baptism if infants are not yet culpable for any sin.

Why, then, do I reject original sin?

Well: At first glance, original sin strikes me as unfair. Infants strike me as innocent – and they seem to have struck Jesus in the same way. Infants appear to be incapable of doing wrong, and thus incapable of being blamed for anything.

Of course, the doctrines of Christianity are not always intuitive, so a mere prima facie objection to original sin does not constitute a sufficient argument against a particular belief. Fortunately, however, I am far from convinced that the Bible advocates original sin. To me, Ezekiel 18 presents a huge problem for the proponent of original sin: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself” (v. 20). It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

What is there to be said on behalf of original sin? The main passage cited in support of original sin is Romans 5.12ff, which discusses our death in Adam and life in Christ. Notice v. 12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…” (emphasis added). Why say “because all sinned” if Adam’s sin alone is sufficient for us to die (contra Ezekiel 18)? I see no very good reason. This leads me to conclude that Romans 5 concerns a transmission from Adam of a sinful nature – a predisposition toward sin – that does not itself entail guilt at birth. What about vv. 15, 18, and 19 – which suggest, respectively, that we all die, are condemned, and are made sinners by Adam’s sin? I think Adam’s sin is responsible for those things indirectly – because it resulted in our sinful natures, which resulted in our individual sins.

So far, of course, I’ve provided only a brief summary of my thoughts about original sin. But, for the moment, I see no compelling reason to accept either original sin or infant baptism.

I’d like to share a psalm with you that’s particularly struck me recently, Psalm 116. As you read it, remember that we are not alone in the Christian life. We are indeed surrounded by a “great crowd of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). We are part of a spiritual lineage, and, as the psalm itself affirms, we are a part of God’s people in this time. We can rejoice with these fellow-travelers when God has heard our cry, and constantly tell each other what God has done for us. So let us together praise the Lord.

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