The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]

One of the arguments often given by Christians - usually to other Christians - in favour of Biblical inerrancy (the idea that the Bible is perfectly accurate in every literal detail), goes something like this:

If you believe there are inaccuracies in the Bible, then you no longer have any way to reliably determine which bits of the Bible are true and which aren't. This means you can't really trust any of it, so maybe none of it is true and therefore your whole faith ends up collapsing. (I am obviously paraphrasing, and there are many versions of and approaches to this, but from my personal experience this more-or-less captures the general gist.)

This argument basically just boils down to scare tactics. It doesn't prove anything of course - it says nothing about whether or not the text is actually reliable - it just gives Christians a very strong reason for not asking too many questions about it! But is this really something Christians need to be worried about? I think there are a number of good responses to this:

First of all, if the Christian faith is basically true, then we have nothing to fear. And if we're really that worried that it might not be, then perhaps we already have a somewhat bigger problem...? We shouldn't be afraid of honest questions and honest answers. We should also be aware though, that our answers will never be perfect and are likely to mislead us at times. Being a Christian is about putting your trust in Someone who is much bigger than all your questions and all your attempts to answer them, and who will lead you gently into truth if you look to Him for guidance. To quote from the Bible itself, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3 verse 5). But note that the author doesn't say, "don't use your understanding", he (probably male!) just says, "don't lean on it". Our intellects are God-given and can be useful and powerful tools, but they're not big enough to understand everything, we certainly can't depend on them absolutely, and they are likely to mislead us badly if we're proud enough to think we don't need God or have it all figured out!

Secondly, the nature and size of the problem is massively over-stated. For example, if we discovered an error in one of our history books, we wouldn't then suddenly decide to throw the whole book away, or conclude that none of the rest of it could be trusted! It might lead us to question other parts of the book and - depending on the nature of the error - to hold parts of it a bit more lightly, but we would probably have to encounter quite a few very serious errors before we would consider abandoning it altogether.

Thirdly, the Bible is not a single book! It is a whole library of different types of books, written by different people, over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Part of the problem when trying to read these books sensibly, is figuring out - in each case - what type of book it is that we're dealing with. Some of these books are obviously meant to be taken literally, others are a bit less clear. There are letters, stories (historical or otherwise), books of poetry, books of prophecy, books of wisdom, and apocalyptic books. None of the Bible is really "history" in the straightforward sense of that word - all of it is written with an agenda. This isn't a bad thing and doesn't necessarily mean it can't be trusted, but it does affect the material it contains and how that material has been presented. The Biblical authors are not just presenting facts, they are telling stories in a way that is intended to make some kind of point. If that wasn't the case then it wouldn't have become the central textbook of the Christian faith!

Given the varied nature and history of the different books that make up the Bible, there is no reason to assume that every book is equally historically reliable. For example, we know quite a bit about the four gospel books in the New Testament. We have good reason to believe they were written within a few decades of the events they describe. We know the early church grew massively under intense persecution, both during and after this period, as a result of the message they contain. We know that those who lead the early movement and spread this message, including the authors of these books, put their lives on the line - and often lost their lives - in order to do so. These are all good reasons for accepting the basic truthfulness of their contents. We know a lot less about the Old Testament books though. Are they reliable historical accounts (at least the ones that present themselves in this way), or are they handed down stories that have been told and retold until the details have become confused? Do they even include fiction presented as fact in a deliberate attempt to deceive? We know that the authors of the New Testament, including Jesus himself - if the words attributed to him are to be believed - held the Old Testament in extremely high regard. We also know that Jesus and his followers understood his whole life and message in the context of - and as a fulfilment of - the bigger story of the Old Testament, which all those different books contribute to. So if we take Jesus seriously, then we have good reason to take the Old Testament seriously as well, but from a historical perspective we may not be able to lean on it quite as heavily as we do on the New.

I think perhaps the strongest appeal of the inerrancy theory - and hence why so many Christians are so wedded to it and so fearful of undermining it - is the claim to "certainty". If the Bible is the perfect and unadulterated words of God, then we have unparalleled access to truth. Nothing in those books can ever be contradicted, so we know exactly where we stand. We (meaning those of us who believe the Bible) have a monopoly on truth. We have a perfect yardstick against which to measure the beliefs and behaviour of ourselves and others. All we have to do is decipher it and we will have everything important that we need to know about life all figured out. In fact a great many of us seem to feel like we've already achieved this, since applying the Bible is (apparently!) simply a matter of believing and/or obeying the "literal meaning" of the text!

Generally speaking though, life is not like this - and even if the Bible were inerrant, understanding the Bible would not be like this either. There are many different English translations of the Bible which all differ slightly from one another over minor details, because it is not straightforward to translate from one language to another (in fact it's usually impossible to do so perfectly), especially as languages evolve and change all the time, and the languages it was written in are thousands of years old. Then there is the issue of culture and context. Spoken and written language is full of idioms and assumptions, and the Bible is no exception. If you're not completely familiar with the world view of the speaker, then you're not going to be able to fully and correctly understand everything they're trying to say. The authors of the Bible are from various long-dead cultures that were very different from ours, and which we now have only very limited access to. Then there's the fact that we have multiple copies of the source texts to work with, and they don't all perfectly agree with each other either! Deciphering which is (or is closest to) the "original" is a significant scholarly exercise, which is often dependent on educated guesswork.

So we are dependent on common sense, best guesses, and the expertise of others - as with so much of life! We cannot completely "know" everything, but we can live our lives on the basis of what we think we know and - in submission to the Holy Spirit and in co-operation with others - what seems to us to make the most sense. This is the kind of obedience I believe God wants from us - an obedience of the heart which pursues truth and attempts to live by it, rather than what might appear to be a more "perfect" kind of obedience, which can only be achieved by those who have perfect knowledge (which none of us do!).

[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part II - Creation

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]

As I started to consider the idea that the Genesis creation account was a myth, I started to notice other things about the story that began to make a lot more sense. For example, God intially places Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden where all their needs are provided for, but as a result of Adam's sin, they are banished to the harsh world outside where he has to "work the ground from which he had been taken". But if the whole world was perfect, how come one bit was less perfect than the other? Had God been planning this "banishment" all along? Or does it make more sense to see the garden as a symbol of the goodness of a perfect relationship with God, which we are then excluded from when it all goes horribly wrong? Also, why is there a river flowing from Eden which separates out into four other major rivers? Rivers usually run into, not out of one another. Unless again, this is making some sort of symbolic point about the potency of this place - representing a perfect relationship with God - which is a source of the goodness of so much of the surrounding area. And where is the garden now, and what happened to the "cherubim" and "flaming sword" that God put there to guard the way back to the tree of life? There have been various speculations about its location, but it seems pretty clear that neither the tree of life, nor the sword, nor the cherubim have ever been found.

And what of the snake? Most Creationists seem to overlook this point, but if you're going to read the story literally, then read it literally! Adam and Eve were not tempted by the devil, they were tempted by a talking snake! And it is consistently referred to as "the snake" (my emphasis), so apparently there was only one of them - it didn't even have a mate! (This bit really does read like something from one of Aesop's fables!) And it seems like it must've had legs (although the text doesn't say so), or else God's subsequent curse - to "crawl on your belly" - wouldn't have counted for very much. Oh and also, as well as crawling on its belly, God told the snake it was going to "eat dust all the days of [its] life". But I don't know of too many snakes that do that...!

Or perhaps you could look at all this a different way...?: It is a common thread in Jewish and Christian literature and thought, that there are unseen and sometimes very powerful, non-human spiritual entities that play an important part in human life and history. The snake represents Satan - the adversary - who stands opposed to all of God's plans and purposes. Most Creationists accept at least this much anyway because even by their standards it makes more sense than the "literal" explanation given by the text for the snake's interference, which is simply that it was "the most clever of all the wild animals"! But when you begin to treat the whole story as more symbolic than literal, it suddenly begins to offer up other new layers of meaning. "Crawl on your belly" might not be much of a curse to a snake, but it is to a proud and powerful spiritual being - and it rings true! There are no depths to which the Adversary will not stoop. He has no honour - he abandoned all that when he decided to oppose God - hence the reason he is depicted as a snake in the first place. As for eating dust - snakes don't do that, but Satan does. There is no pleasure or fulfilment in a life devoted to destroying everything that is good and true. He is driven by jealousy and hatred and will never find satisfaction in anything he does. These are the kinds of important lessons that I think people are prone to miss, if and when they try to take the text too "literally".

There are actually two creation accounts in Genesis - a fact that is also easily missed when attempting to read this book as a straightforward historical narrative. The first account runs from the beginning of chapter 1, through to chapter 2 verse 2 (the chapter and verse divisions were added much later by Christian editors and unfortunately often bear little relation to the structure of the original text). The second account follows on from there. The distinction between the two can easily be seen by noting the different writing styles, the fact that the accounts overlap with one another chronologically, and the fact that they contradict each other in the detail (in the first account God creates plants on day 3 and mankind on day 6, but in the second account God creates Adam before any of the plants have appeared).

The second account (as just discussed) deals with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the story of the temptation, but the first is a beautiful chiastic poem describing the 6-day creation of the world. Chiastic poems represent the subject material in a symmetrical form, and are heavily used throughout the Old Testament. This may be done for effect, or to make a story easier to remember, or possibly both. This could be an indication that a story has been passed down orally for some time before being committed to paper.

The creation poem starts with 3 days of "separating" - the light from the dark, the water from the sky, and the land from the sea (and plants appear on the land). These are followed by 3 corresponding days of "filling" - the day and night are filled with the sun and the moon, the sea and sky are filled with fish and birds, the land is filled with animals and with man (who are given the plants for food). This is the reason for the rather strange order of events, in which light is created before the sun, which is its source! It really isn't necessary (or desirable!) to invoke strange cosmological arguments in order to try to interpret this in a "literal" fashion!

[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

I was brought up as an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian and the Bible has always been a central - indeed crucial - part of my faith. Without the Bible I would probably have a completely different view of God - if I even believed in God at all. Without the Bible I would probably have no idea who Jesus was and I wouldn't be calling myself a Christian. My faith is based on mine (and others') experience, as well as on the Bible, but without the Bible I would have no framework for that faith and would probably not have had the chance to encounter, or respond to God - or Jesus - in the way that I do today.

I was taught from a very young age that the Bible was "The Word of God". Although I didn't know the technical term at the time, I was also taught that it was essentially "inerrant" - i.e. because it was The Word of God, it contained no mistakes, factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies. It was to be believed unequivocally and without question. To disobey anything the Bible told me was to disobey God himself.

As I grew up it gradually became apparent that things were not quite this simple. There were some bits of the Bible for example - mostly in the Old Testament - that didn't apply to me. The old Levitical laws about things like not eating shellfish or not mixing together 2 types of fabric, applied only to those under the old Jewish Covenant and were not rules that I was expected to follow today. OK, so that made sense - so far so good!

I also started to notice that there were some events that were recorded in the Bible more than once, and that the accounts of these didn't always seem to match up. For example, there are some quite big differences in the way the story of Jesus' resurrection is recorded across the 4 different gospels. We did an exercise once in a church youth group that I belonged to, where we attempted to reconcile the 4 accounts by taking them all apart and putting them back together again in a way that made them all fit - in order to demonstrate the fact that they were actually compatible, just told from different angles with different bits missing. To my mind though, we had to work so hard in order to do this, that it was almost as though the accounts weren't really fully compatible with one another at all...

And then there was the whole question of creation and/or evolution. It was probably in my early teens that I first started to become aware of this potential dichotomy. At that time, a popular view on this (and fairly acceptable, in the Christian circles that I moved in) was that the "days" in the Genesis creation account could just as well refer to millions of years. This was justified on the basis that, "with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years" (the Bible, 2 Peter 3:8), and also on the fact that since there was no sun right at the beginning, then who could say how long a day was?! And the order of events in the Genesis creation account more-or-less corresponds to the scientific account anyway, so they're perfectly compatible! - except that when you get right down to it, it actually doesn't...

Then when I went to University I was introduced to a rather radical idea - and because it came from a visiting speaker at our Christian Union, who otherwise seemed to believe in and know the same God that I did, and because he was also quite a high up member of the London Bible College (I think he might've been the president, but I can't remember now), I was able to treat it with a little more credence than I might've done otherwise. The idea was this: What if the Genesis creation account is actually a myth? What if it isn't even intended to be treated as a literal account? What if it's just there to teach us stuff about God and about ourselves and about how we relate to Him and to the world? What if it isn't - and isn't meant to be - a scientifically accurate, historical account?

This idea made quite a lot of sense to me. After all, it seemed very unlikely that there was anyone actually there, that far back, who was able to write - and certainly no-one who was there before Adam and Eve to witness the first 5 days! If the Genesis creation account did come directly from God himself (the only other possibility!), then it had to have been somehow revealed to someone so they could write it down. But how would God explain something like that to someone who had none of the scientific knowledge that we have today? Surely the point of it wasn't to teach science in any case, it was to teach us about our relationship with God and with the world?

This was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that perhaps the Bible wasn't all meant to be taken entirely literally after all (apart from things like Jesus' parables, which were obviously just stories that he told in order to make a point).

[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]