Questioning Biblical Inerrancy and Literacy

The Fundamentalists put a lot of stock into the idea that the Bible is "inerrant" and "literally true." This brings up a number of significant philosophical dilemmas.

1. The Big One: How do I know it's really from God?

God did not hand me the Bible directly. People handed me the Bible and said it was from God. People printed the Bible, people packed it into boxes, shipped it to stores, loaded it onto bookstore shelves. People translated the Bible from ancient languages into modern ones. People copied the Bible from manuscripts handed to them. At some point, there were people who sat down and wrote the very first Biblical manuscripts.

But what does it mean to say that someone wrote down the very first Biblical manuscripts? What were their purposes? What were their inspirations? What views of "truth" did their culture have that may differ from -- or be the same as -- ours? Did these people know that their scribblings would be handled as sacred for thousands of years?

I am not sure what it means to say that God's commandments are captured in scripture. Does that mean God dictated it word for word? Did God provide wordless inspiration and allowed the scribes to express God's thoughts "in their own words"? Did God "phone it in" and allow the scribes liberal leeway? Was God a kind of vague presence by which the scribes wrote stuff they thought was good and holy?

2. Okay, suppose that I accept that the Bible is from God. What precisely is it that one has to believe in order to be "saved"?

When I've asked this question, I've gotten what seems at first a straightforward answer: "The only thing you really have to believe is that Jesus was the Son of God and that he died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day, and if you accept his sacrifice as atonement for your sins, you're saved."

But in practice, it's never that simple. Many people who believe those same things are not accepted as Christians by the Fundamentalists: Mormons, for example, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or people in "liberal" denominations, and sometimes even Catholics. They believe in a "different" Jesus, the "wrong" Jesus.

So what it comes down to is, it isn't really enough just to believe what they tell you it is enough to believe. There is a whole lot of fine print. "Believing in Jesus" doesn't mean having faith, it means agreeing to believe in a long string of concepts, from the literal 6-day creation to the Rapture and many things in between.

Concept-based salvation is really tricky, because there is ambiguity in the Bible and it's nearly impossible to find any two Christians who believe exactly the same thing on every single matter. The way the Fundamentalists approach it, in order to achieve salvation by accepting the right set of concepts, you have to have the right concept, and you have to understand it perfectly, which means you have to know exactly what the words that state the concept mean perfectly.

Words change in meaning over time, because cultures change, economic situations change, political theories change, and so on. Words acquire new meanings and shed old meanings. The words that make up a statement made 100 years ago could mean something different today. To reconstruct the original meaning of an antiquated statement means adding footnotes explaining what the words meant or may have meant to a listener at the time the statement was made.

When it comes to Biblical statements, the volume of footnotes necessary to explain what the words meant to a listener of 2000+ years ago rivals in size the Biblical text itself! (If you think I’m kidding, take a look at the HarperCollins Study Bible, of which 40% of the text consists of footnotes and essays placing things in context.)

On top of that, there are many problems with translation. Translation is not an exact science; much of the nuance of a text is lost. The Fundamentalists attempt to address this by claiming that the King James Version is an inspired translation, but even the Hebrew-Greek text on which the KJV is based has shortcomings when compared with older manuscripts discovered more recently.

There's also a lot of ambiguity on the matter of what Christians are supposed to do. The Fundamentalists will reject a person from their fold for sexual sins, a matter which received relatively little space in the New Testament. On the other hand, since the Fundamentalists have ascended to influence in the United States, issues like feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and so on -- which was the kind of thing Jesus went on about quite a bit -- have received little public attention. Since 1980, the gap between rich and poor in the US has increased, and millions more are without access to healthcare. So it's unclear what the Fundamentalists really expect people to do, and these expectations seem to be based more on politics than on the Bible.

In short, on examination Fundamentalism seems to have less to do with the Bible than it does with conforming to a particular brand of political and social thought.

3. When faced with a theological debate, how can we be sure we've got the right answer?

The Fundamentalist response is to say that the Bible gives us all the right answers. But the problem is, that the Bible is so vague that Christians have disagreed on what it means for millennia.

Over the years there have been literally hundreds of theological disputes and numerous schisms between branches of the faith. Some of these were, in their day, matters of life and death, and yet they highlight the difficulty created by ambiguities within the Biblical text.

One major debate centered on the relationship between Christ and the Father. One camp argued that Christ and the Father are made out of the same "stuff" (homoousia, Greek for “same nature”) while another held that they are similar in nature, both being divine, but not exactly the same, in that they are somewhat distinct (homoiousia, Greek for “similar nature”). Believe it or not, this led to a major division within the early church; and the thing is, both sides could point to scripture to support their views.

Other debates have raged over issues like: Is baptism required or not? Are Christians to baptize "in the name of Jesus Christ," or "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?" And so on. These, also, have been the subject of furious debates, resulting in splits, excommunications, and disfellowships.

How do we distinguish between competing claims, if both sides of a debate have scripture on their side, and each side demands that their way is essential for salvation? Good question.

4. What else is there?

There is a form of Christianity which bases salvation not on having the right concepts, but suggests instead that salvation is to be found in togetherness, compassion and unity. That view focuses on bringing people together, finding commonality, whereas emphasizing concepts becomes in the end only a way to divide and exclude.

5. But is that Biblical?

What does it mean to say that an idea is “Biblical”? Does that mean that we can look in the Bible and see it spelled out word-for-word? This is certainly the impression that the Fundamentalists want us to have, but on many issues there is no such easy answer. Judging something to be Biblical is not as simple as pulling quotes out of the Bible to prove your point; just about any point can be proven with an appropriate selection of Bible verses. Then there’s all the ambiguity mentioned above. If we relied on the Bible to spell things out precisely and unambiguously, we’d be up the creek without a paddle.

Suppose instead that the Bible is the record of an ancient culture’s examination of religious questions. These questions would be asked, and answered, in terms that made sense to people at the time it was written. Its intent would be to solve the problems faced by people of that day and time, since they could not necessarily foresee what the future would hold.

If that’s the case, then an idea is “Biblical” if it shows some consistency of thought with the answers given by Biblical writers. The Bible was actually written over a span of 1400 years, and different parts of the Bible reflect different ideas about God and the universe. Some theologians speak of a Biblical ‘trajectory,’ a path by which religious thought evolved over the course of 1400 years. Judging something to be Biblical might then mean examining that trajectory and seeing where it points today.

The earliest parts of the book describe a God who is judgmental and given to wrath; the later parts of the book describe a God who is much more interested in compassion and mercy. Then, as now, there were those who spoke of God in wrathful terms, and those who spoke of God as merciful. The latter group included Jesus, and his views on the mercy of God, and the high importance of compassion and human dignity, are the centerpiece of Christian doctrine.

So, an ecumenical, merciful, open and accepting approach to Christian fellowship is demonstrably in line with the trajectory shown in scripture – and can therefore be called Biblical.

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