Is the Bible the inerrant words of God?
Recently, the Chairman of the Gafcon Primates’ Council declared the creation of a “Global Anglican Communion” separate from the Anglicanism which is in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his statement, he went beyond the foundational Jerusalem Declaration and declared that the Bible is “inerrant”.
I was reminded of this when, recently, I again came across people who are convinced that the King James Bible is inerrant.
Let me say from the outset: I do not think the Bible is inerrant.
The concept of a “Bible” may need addressing for some. If you simply read, as was originally the case, from separate scrolls, then you can visualise one community having a different collection of scrolls (from which they read) to that of another community. Don’t project today’s church structures back into the early church – there wasn’t an agreed, centralised decision-making body for which scrolls were “in” and which were “out”. Just as different forms of church structure and leadership were trialled in the early church, so there are different lists of “in” and “out” scrolls.
From early on, however, Christians had a growing preference for codices – a stack of pages bound at one side. What we now generally refer to as “a book”. If you were binding all your scrolls together into a codex, yes – you had to be clearer which would be “in” and which would be “out”. [Also, if in periods of persecution there was a demand to hand over your sacred texts, you would need to be clear if you were going to hand over The Gospel of Thomas or that of John]. So lists of sacred scrolls (“books”) developed. Nowadays, different churches – although essentially agreeing on the content of the New Testament – have “Bibles” which vary from having 66 to 88 books.
So, when people point to 2 Timothy 3:16
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
“All scripture” does not refer to the Bible as we now know it. As a (not unimportant) aside, it can equally be translated as
All scripture inspired by God is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
This latter translation completely undermines the street-preacher approach (with its circularity!) that the Bible says that all of the Bible is inspired!
In fact, “inspired” in this text may not mean what people often take it to mean. The Greek is:
πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος καὶ ὠφέλιμος πρὸς διδασκαλίαν, πρὸς ἐλεγμόν, πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν, πρὸς παιδείαν τὴν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ,
And “inspired by God” is θεόπνευστος (theopneustos) – “God breathed”. This is an obvious allusion back to Genesis 2:7, the story where God gives life to the first human by God’s breath. That the scriptures are “God breathed” means that the scriptures are life giving, not about them being inerrant. And the decision which are “inspired” and which are not was about a consensus of recognition: these texts were recognised as being life-giving.
Treating the Bible as a science or as a history textbook, in the sense in which we understand science and history after the Enlightenment, abuses the nature of this collection of ancient texts. Taking these texts literally is not taking these documents seriously. Truth is mediated to us in ways other than science and history. Metaphor and story are powerful mediums of truth. The Bible is true, and some of it happened. The deeper the human truth, generally the more we resort to metaphor, generally the only way to communicate is metaphorically.
Atheists and agnostics – basing their beliefs and promulgating them based on conflicts they locate both within and between biblical texts, or between them and science or history – are tiresome. And just as tiresome are people of faith bending over backwards in their claims that no such contradictions and conflicts exist, and twisting things into a pretzel to demonstrate some sort of “consistency”.
I was recently part of an online discussion which is parallel to this one: people contending that Jesus could not have made any mistakes. I think this is docetism – the heresy that Jesus wasn’t fully human; he was simply pretending to be human, like Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter with all the powers of Superman all the time! Of course Jesus made mistakes as he learnt to toddle, talk, and master his trade. Making mistakes is not a sin.
People talk about the Bible as “the Word of God”. Let’s highlight that the Bible does not call the Bible “the Word of God” – this is a metaphor we apply to the collection of scrolls/books bound together as “the Bible”. It is common at the end of a reading in Church for the reader to say, “The Word of the Lord”. This is in parallel to what is said at communion: “The Body of Christ”. Just as the flaws and imperfections in bread are present, so the flaws and imperfections of ancient literature are present in the texts.
It is very significant that, of a reading from the Bible, we do not say, “the WORDS of God”. We do not refer to the Bible as “the WORDS of God”. Individual words, phrases, and so forth may have flaws, imperfections, they may have contradictions and errors, but God’s Word addresses us through these human words.
The New Zealand Anglican response at the end of the readings picks this up well in using a statement drawn from the Bible: “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.”
The Bible, then, in some ways, is sacramental – God’s Word to us, God’s communication with us, in human words.
I stand, then, by the declaration I made at my ordination:
| Bishop | Do you believe that the Bible contains all that is essential for our salvation, and reveals God’s living word in Jesus Christ? |
| Candidate | Yes, I do. God give me understanding in studying the Scriptures. May they reveal to me the mind and heart of Christ, and shape my ministry. |
Allowing God to address us through the scriptures when we approach them open to contemporary scholarship is a second naïveté we have to discover, just as an artist or musician needs to find a second naïveté after studying structure, etc. It is the second naïveté a doctor or surgeon needs to discover in encountering living humans after studying the organs that separately make up the human body.
We need to bring questions to the text like:
- What sort of genre is this scroll/book; and what sort of genre is this piece within this book?
- What might this text have meant to the original author? To the original hearers? Why was this story told or text proclaimed to its original hearers? And why was it told in this particular way?
- What does this text reveal about God, about being human, about me?
- How might this text challenge and encourage growth and new life?
What do you think?
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