For some time now I have wanted to do a second theological analysis of a piece of popular music; the religious thought of Top 40 musicians is so deep, and so little appreciated, that it seems incumbent on me to expose its hidden treasures to the public gaze. Today, I would like to direct my readers to a song that is a joyous exultation in God’s power to sustain all of creation: “Like a G6.”

“Like a G6,” by Far East Movement, is not the easiest piece to understand, because its layers of Biblical reference are so deep. In a way, listening to this song is like reading the richest scholarly writing of the Middle Ages, when the great church fathers assumed such a great familiarity with the Scriptures that they could make faint gestures towards particular verses and still be confident that their readers caught the references. Alas, our own age is not so well-versed in the Word; nevertheless, Far East Movement is doing an admirable job of urging us back to the scholarship of an earlier and wiser day.

The complex layers of reference hinge on the title of the song, “Like a G6.” The popular belief that ‘G6’ refers to a jet plane is, in fact, wrong; rather ‘G6’ clearly means the sixth chapter in the book of Genesis. This is the chapter in which Noah is introduced, and in which God commands Noah to build an ark in which to protect every kind of animal from the judgment on human wickedness that was rapidly approaching. Clearly, then, when the group sings, “Now I’m feeling so fly like a G6,” what they mean is, “My soul is suffused with hope, because I remember that God has made a covenant with me not to destroy me, just as he did with Noah (Genesis 6:18).” The singers rejoice that, despite their sin and weakness, God continues to preserve them, and proclaim that they feel like “a G6” (that is, Noah) who was similarly preserved.

The other key verse that this song refers to is Psalm 104:15: “He makes…wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.” This is the verse that should immediately spring to mind when Far East Movement sings, “Popping bottles in the ice, like a blizzard / When we drink we do it right gettin slizzard.” Far East Movement is reveling in the ‘wine’ of Psalm 104—that is, by extension, the whole creation that the psalm lovingly describes and praises God for making. Psalm 104 is perfectly paired with the story of Noah, because it emphasizes God’s wonderful creation of all things, from the wild donkeys (11) to the great leviathan (26)—just as Genesis 6 emphasizes God’s preservation of all he has made.

The singers do not lightly gloss over the reality of sin, however. Although they can metaphorically “get slizzard”—that is, they can rejoice whole-heartedly in God’s creation—the very next line points us to the problem of setting all the pleasures of creation higher than creation’s Lord. “Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6” points us back to Genesis 3:6, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” Just as Eve ate the apple because she thought that ‘wisdom’ from the tree was preferable to God’s wisdom, the singers confess that sometimes they “sip sizzurp” (i.e. sin) when they think that it could give them more than could obedience. However, the singers refuse to despair; in the next line they remind us, once again, that they “feel so fly like a G6,” saved from the floods of God’s judgment like Noah. Our God is a forgiving God, and he will not hold our sins against us forever.

And it is not simply our creation and salvation that we have to thank God for, Far East Movement reminds us, but also his final victory over all sin and death. The bridge consists of one line, repeated over and over: “It’s that 808 bump, make you put yo hands up.” In this short sentence is an amazingly complex set of concepts. It points to Genesis 8:8, which reads, “Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.” This line calls to mind God’s faithfulness in saving his people, because we know that in the end the dove does find solid ground, and Noah and his family is able to live on dry land once more; but 8:8 is only the first time that Noah sends the dove out. This first time, the dove returns with nothing; it must be sent a second time before it brings an olive branch. This reminds us of the interstitial nature of the Christian life. We know how our story will end: Christ will come back and right all wrongs. However, for now we are still living in patient expectation, waiting for God’s final victory, just as Noah patiently waited on the ark for the waters to recede. To add a further layer of complexity, the image of the dove inevitably reminds us of the Holy Spirit, and the fact that we have been sent a Comforter to be with us until Christ returns. It is all of these ideas, sparked by Genesis 8:8, that cause the singers to “put their hands up” in worship. They cannot help but praise God for his mighty works, and exhort all around them to do the same.

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.

There is a problem with the way in which most Christians think about heaven: namely, it is a completely upbiblical view, one which reinforces the solipsistic focus that we find in other worship practices. I was particularly struck by the following except from Steven Colbert’s interview with Lisa Miller, the Religion editor at Newsweek, who recently published a book on the history of humanity’s ideas of heaven.

Lisa Miller: So here’s the problem, heaven now is this kind of you-can-eat-all-the-ice-cream-you-want-and-not-get-fat…
Steven Colbert: Yes.
Lisa Miller: …you-can-drive-a-big-gold-cadillac down…
Steven Colbert: I can hear out of this ear again…
Lisa Miller: Right, you-have-your-most-perfect-beautiful-body…
Steven Colbert: Ripped abs!
Lisa Miller: Yup, and you get to hang out with your best friends…
Steven Colbert: Right.
Lisa Miller: …And chat all day…
Steven Colbert: Of course!
Lisa Miller: …And see all of the people that you miss from life. I mean, that’s… yeah…
Steven Colbert: Of course, what’s heaven for if it’s not to see our loved ones again? Why be good?
Lisa Miller: Right. That’s a very powerful yearning among people, but I think what’s problematic about contemporary visions of heaven is that God isn’t there. And once God isn’t there, then…
Steven Colbert: Well, He’s there, but He’s like mom and dad upstairs. We’re playing in the basement, we know He’s there and everything is safe because He’s there, but He leaves us alone.

I know that many Christians imagine heaven this way. Although our vision of heaven has retained the pearly gates and streets paved with gold as described in Revelation 21:21, little else remains. In fact, the strongest vision that we have of heaven isn’t even of heaven at all – Revelation 21:21 describes the new Jerusalem, not the new heaven! So what is heaven really like?

There is a description of the throne in Revelation 4, but it looks very different from the notion of heaven that most people have:

“And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,
       ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
       who was and is and is to come!’
And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying,
       ‘Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
       to receive glory and honor and power,
       for you created all things,
       and by your will they existed and were created.’”

This vision of heaven in Revelation is focused not on our bodies or our enjoyment, but on the worship of the Lord. (Note that the music described in Revelation speaks only of God and not how he makes us feel.) So when we think about going to heaven, are we thinking of ourselves or of God? Are we hoping to find a place of eternal rest, or planning on adoring God through the ages? Do we just long to be happy or do we deeply yearn to bring glory to God? Are we focused on ourselves or on Him?

It is a little-known fact that Ke$ha’s song “Tik Tok” is actually an allegory of baptism. The whole song is suffused with an extremely deep understanding of that sacrament. I’d like to walk you through my thoughts in this little exercise in superior literary criticism; by the end I’m sure you’ll see that this song should probably be played during baptisms, as a declaration to the world of how the new Christian intends to live out his or her faith.

The first verse, of course, begins with a recognition of the state of the soul before baptism. Ke$ha wakes up feeling “like P Diddy”—that is, she suddenly realizes that she is in a state of sin. She immediately decides to leave her old life of iniquity forever, and makes a firm commitment to “never come back” once she has left for the “city”—clearly the New Jerusalem that is mentioned in Revelations. Before she leaves, she “brushes her teeth with a bottle of Jack”. This is an allegory of taking Communion, since both Jack Daniels and the wine of the Eucharist are alcoholic. In order to leave her old life of sin, she must wash herself (that is, her teeth) clean in the blood of the Lamb.

The next verse is an amalgam of allusions to the Gospels, all dealing with the purification that Christ offers us. “Getting a pedicure” refers to Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, while the “clothes” that are being tried on are the wedding garments that the guests wear in the parable of the bridegroom. There is some scholarly disagreement on the interpretation of the last line, “trying to get a little bit tipsy”; some respected academics argue that this, too, is a reference to the Eucharist. I myself believe that it is more plausibly a reference to the extreme joy of the wedding banquet of the Lamb described in Revelation.

The chorus has a strong eschatological component. Ke$ha admits that, although she has been purified by baptism, the adventure of Christian life is just beginning. She will not stop her “fight” against the forces of darkness until she sees the “sunlight” of Christ’s return. Although each tick of the clock inevitably brings her closer to Judgment Day and God’s final construction of his Kingdom, she will not for an instant stop working into that kingdom herself through the constant rejoicing and “partying” that new life in God brings us.

In the next verse, Ke$ha joyfully affirms the confidence she has in Christ, even through the hard circumstances of life. She has not a care in the world because she has plenty of “beer”—again, this is an allegory for the Eucharistic wine and the cleansing blood of Christ. She has no money—she has given it to the poor, as Christ commanded—but she’s already in the place where Christ has sent her, and she doesn’t have to be concerned about what she will eat or wear. Although people all around are attracted to the great joy that she has in God, she, like Christ, will focus on helping those who “look like Mick Jagger”—that is, the ugliest souls most in need of the Good News.

The next two verses go into more detail about what kind of obstacles Christians face in their life in this world. Ke$ha continues her delicately layered series of allegories based on alcohol with yet another referent; this time, she refers back to Proverbs and the personification of Folly as a prostitute who throws parties and makes people drunk on iniquity. Ke$ha is admitting that there will be people around her who are not following the path of wisdom—who may, in fact, be engaging in destructive lifestyles. However, she will “smack them” if they get too drunk—that is, she will tell the people around her about the good news of Christ to wake them up to their error. The reference to the “police” is clearly meant to signify the forces of the Enemy who exert their power on the world. Ke$ha will not stop her life of joyful Christian living until she is “kicked out”—that is, she dies—or she is forcibly made to stop by the Devil. However, her irreverent use of the word “po-po” expresses the contempt she feels toward anyone who even thinks he can divide her from her God.

The DJ in the bridge represents God. At this point, the song changes from being a bold, public affirmation of faith into being an intimate moment of worship. Ke$ha recognizes that the most basic fact in her life is God’s complete control over her. It doesn’t matter whether he “builds her up” or “breaks her down”; in either case, he has her, heart and soul, and she will lift her hands up in worship. She invites everyone listening to her to do the same, to sing praises to God. Finally, with a musical wink, she reminds us—the party in heaven, the party when the lost sheep is brought back into the fold and the prodigal son returns, won’t start until she, the lost sheep, walks in.

Appendix: Tik Tok Lyrics

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?

So, why mess with Texas? Because Texas is the largest textbook distributor in the U.S., publishing companies tend to tailor their textbooks to Texas’ standards. Thus, the curriculum decisions made in Texas affect not only the students in that state, but almost all children in American public schools (one educator quoted in the article said that Texas “controlled” up to forty-seven states’ curricula). The biggest issue of contention is the board’s attempt to inject Christian doctrine into large parts of American history textbooks, to the point where one school board member commented, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Led by Don McLeroy, the school board head and the most outspoken Christian activist in that political body, the Texas School Board seems well on its way to putting Christianity back into American textbooks and restructuring the way an entire generation of schoolchildren understands American history.

Jabs at Christianity and political conservatism aside, the New York Times article brings up some challenging questions for American Christians. Though America definitely has a Christian history (the Pilgrims brought Christianity with them from England, the Founding Fathers were Christian, and one spark in the Revolution was tension over English religious oppression), at what point does searching and teaching history become evangelizing? When does the Christian cry for “the truth” actually distort “truth” itself?

Though I think McLeroy’s attempt to put Christianity back in the textbooks is a legitimate and partially well-intentioned one, what I, as a Christian, have a problem with is how far he’s taken it. I wonder how his attempt to rewrite American history (and, yes, a large portion of his amendments blatantly rewrite our history with a historically unfounded religious bent) affects our faith. I can’t help but question how rewriting an entire curriculum will win more people over to the Christian cause. Even if Christianity is written into textbooks, it will become more about fact and less about faith. Won’t the effect of the new curriculum be that an entire generation learn about Christianity as a historical fact rather than a plausible system of beliefs and life guidelines? Is that really what Christians want?

The biggest problem that I have with McLeroy’s form of evangelism is that it doesn’t really educate people about Christianity itself; though the textbook revisions may or may not prove that this country was founded on Christian principles, or that America is a Christian country that exists for the glory of God, changing history books does not further the Christian cause. Telling someone that John Adams was a Christian does not make a convert. Neither does making false references and connections to Mosaic law (even as a Christian, I can’t help but wonder where that proposal came from).  Christians are commanded to actively share their religion, but I doubt that “sharing” means doing so by ignoring scholarly advice and research and manhandling history into a small group’s idea of the Christian universe. Christians have nothing to gain by deceiving people; should the school board turn more politically and religiously liberal in the next few decades, these changes could come back to haunt us. Christianity’s crusade would be powerless, its newfound enemies using the immoral and deceitful acts of a few to falsely characterize Christianity as a corruptive force and a significant source of deceit for an entire generation.

In the end, Shorto did concede that most of the amendments didn’t pass, and that the curriculum in its final form was much more moderate than he expected. However, he remained concerned about what was happening behind closed doors, as he reported that McLeroy and Co. continue to communicate with publishing companies and revise sections of the voted-upon curriculum that they still find “morally objectionable.” What is ironic is how “morally objectionable” has come to describe McLeroy; his zeal for evangelism and his misguided means have led him to the heart of the political and moral corruption that his new curriculum hopes to cure.

You know God must have liked math, because he made it possible for mathematicians to create awesome things like this fractal.

Mathematics – “Be fruitful and multiply” is repeated numerous times in Genesis.  Now, I know it doesn’t say “find the derivative function,” but for the ancients, learning to multiply was a pretty big deal. If they were supposed to do that, there’s no way God doesn’t want you to evaluate differential equations in our modern world.

Economics (Freshwater School) - 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat.’” Clearly, Paul understands perverse incentives. If Paul understood it, there must be room for you to develop greater understanding about incentives and why government intervention can make the situation worse.

Economics (Saltwater School) - Acts 2:45 says, “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” If the early Christians did it, it must be good for the government to do it today! Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security definitely count, and if you want it to be effective, you should study it.

Physics – Judges 7:13 says, “It struck the tent with such force that the tent overturned and collapsed.” See that right there? It’s describing applied force. That gives you the leeway to study at least applied forces, frictional forces, and tensional forces; perhaps even electromagnetic and gravitational ones, too, if you’re lucky.

Biology – Acts 12:17 says, “Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell.” If an infinite number of angels can fit on a pinhead, then they can surely show up in a animal or plant cell. And then what happened? A light shone in the cell! That sure sounds like illumination and enlightenment about what was going on in the cell: mitosis, active and passive transport, transcription, etc.

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself: I’m not really into politics or economics, math or science. Maybe your passion is comedy. This post proves that we need funny folks, too! As Ecclesiastes 3:5 reminds us, there always is “a time to laugh.” So if you’re not sure whether your area of expertise fits with the Ichthus‘ mission, trust us, it does! So start writing!

I was pleasantly surprised to receive the book (even though the text is available online), because it may be one of the most influential works of all time.

But I was also confused. Who has the money to hand out hundreds of nice, glossy books to college students? I checked the back cover and saw that the book had been published by the Bridge Logos Foundation.

Now, I was suspicious. A quick perusal of the “special introduction” by Ray Comfort confirmed my unease; Comfort had “introduced” Darwin by devoting fifty pages (!) to discrediting evolution, disparaging Darwin’s personal character, and asking the reader to pray Jesus into his heart.

I was annoyed.

The Gospel by any other name does not smell as sweet.

Doing some research online, I discovered that my little encounter on Mass Ave. was actually part of a much larger undertaking, a project to deliver these copies of On the Origin of Species to thousands of college students at America’s most prestigious schools. (This video summarizes the plan. And yes, that is that Kirk Cameron.)

Now, I don’t have any problem with the dissemination of creationist materials per se. I am extremely sympathetic to evolution, but it’s a free country, and we definitely need to discuss evolution more and not less.

Then what’s the problem with the project? Well…

1. It’s manipulative.

Comfort’s intention in distributing On the Origin of Species to college students is to convince America’s brightest young minds of creationism and Christianity. His website admits as much: “In one day, 170,000 future doctors, lawyers and politicians will freely get information about Intelligent Design (and the gospel) placed directly into their hands!”

If you want to convince people of creationism and Christianity, be my guest! I’m not in the business of convincing people that evolution isn’t true (I think creationism is based on bad science and – more importantly – bad exegesis), but I’m all for a healthy discussion about religion, philosophy, and science.

But if you want to convince people of creationism and Christianity, be honest and upfront about it. Don’t hide behind Darwin’s beard. Don’t pretend that you want to give me Origin of Species when what you really want to do is to evangelize. It’s true, Harvard students are probably more interested in On the Origin of Species than Why Evolution Is Wrong – but the solution to that is not dressing up the gospel in the very garb which you oppose. Introductions to On the Origin of Species should not end with exhortations to pray Jesus into your heart.

Comfort argues that this approach is not deceptive because his name will be on the cover. That’s a pretty weak excuse in my mind; if he really didn’t want to be deceptive, he could have made himself the author and added On the Origin of Species as an appendix.

To act otherwise is, in my opinion, to act out of sin and cowardice, completely unlike the  apostles. Peter and John claimed that they could not help but speak about what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20); there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about what they were preaching. Similarly, Paul did not invite the Athenians to a symposium on Platonic thought; He preached “Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). We should do the same.

2. It’s ad hominem.

Comfort’s introduction devotes a few pages to Darwin’s (alleged) misogyny and racism, and mentions Adolf Hitler’s reliance on evolutionary theory. The implication is that evolution leads to eugenics and other horrors.

Maybe it does. So what? There have been plenty of Christians who used Christianity to justify racism and murder. Furthermore, evolution could be true even if it led to deteriorating morals.

3. It’s doubly ad hominem.

Comfort writes about atheist reactions to his project on his website:

“When [atheists] found out that I was writing an Introduction to [On the Origin of Species], they threatened lawsuits, tried to organize themselves into gangs with the intent of tearing the Introduction out of the book, and have even talked about book burnings.”

I’m sure there are some atheists who have overreacted to Comfort’s evangelistic means. But not all atheists have reacted in this way. The people from Comfort’s organization handing out books at Harvard yesterday were not disturbed at all by anyone.

Of course, even if atheists have acted so unfairly to creationists, Christians have not always been extremely charitable to non-believers. (In particular, Comfort probably shouldn’t write books entitled You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think.)

4. It undercuts serious discussion about evolution.

There are serious scholars who have qualms with evolution, and not all of them are religious. Ray Comfort, however, is not a scholar, but a preacher. I have nothing against preachers – my parents were missionaries in Brazil – but muddying the waters by conflating scientific criticisms of evolution with Evangelical Christianity is not the way to go.

5. It gets the gospel wrong!

If you’re going to preach the gospel, you should take care to make sure that you are preaching the actual gospel. Comfort’s introduction ends with a plea that the reader receive the forgiveness of sins by saying the following prayer:

“Dear God, today I turn away from all of my sins … and I put my trust in Jesus alone as my Lord and Savior. Please forgive me, change my heart, and grant me Your gift of everlasting life. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

The sentiment expressed in that prayer is exemplary – would that we could all offer prays to God such as that! But the Sinner’s Prayer is not biblical doctrine; it is a modern invention.

The Bible does not say that we are saved by prayer, but by faith, repentance, confession, and baptism for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. John 3:5, 16; Acts 2:38-40, 3:19-20, 22:16; Ephesians 2:8-9 Romans 3:28, 6:3-7, 10:9-10; inter alia).

(If you don’t believe me, just ask the earliest Christians what they thought.)

It is tempting whenever we attempt to draw practical conclusions from the Bible to cite some event in the life of Jesus, abstract from it a universal normative judgment, and then apply that judgment to the practical situations in question.  When the topic of discussion is pacifism, this strategy usually involves indicating some instance of Jesus choosing not to perpetrate violence or commanding another person not to perpetrate violence, concluding that Jesus viewed violence as impermissible in all circumstances, and finally asserting that the Christian may never kill.  The important part of the argument seems to be something like:

1.  If Jesus thought that violent act x was impermissible, then he thought that violent acts are impermissible.

2.  Jesus thought that violent act x was impermissible.

3.  Therefore, Jesus thought that violent acts are impermissible.

The first premise of this argument is false.  It is false because there isn’t the proper logical connection between Jesus’ thoughts about any particular violent act and Jesus’ thoughts about violence in general.  We can imagine that Jesus was not a pacifist and, at the same time, that he regarded certain acts of violence as impermissible.  For example, it is clear that Jesus regarded his nonresistance during the events surrounding his crucifixion as a necessary part of fulfilling God’s plan.  But it is not clear that we can draw any practical conclusions about killing from God’s plan for Jesus.  It is conceivable (and, it seems to me, probable) that Jesus’ absolute pacifism was necessitated by his role as Israel’s messiah.  Since no one else has ever shared that role, it seems unlikely that He would have regarded pacifism as a universal constraint on moral action.

Christian Pacifist Protesters

Reconstructing Jesus’ views concerning issues about which we have no unambiguous scriptural statement is a tremendously complicated project.  Anyone who wants to make a claim about what Jesus thought must be prepared to provide a thorough exegesis of relevant passages in all four gospels.  To jump haphazardly to any conclusion about Jesus’ views on pacifism is essentially to fail to provide an argument concerning pacifism, for once we have decided what Jesus thought about the pacifist thesis the question of what we should think has already been answered (we should think whatever Jesus thought).

I am receptive to the pacifist thesis.  I think pacifists have many compelling intuitions about the value of peace.  But I do not see any good arguments for the pacifist thesis, and I will not accept it until I do.