“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen could not in 1813 have foreseen the dramatic social changes that have led, in our day, to cohabitation, prenuptial agreements, and female CEOs. Despite its grand claim, therefore, the contemporary reader is hard-pressed to say that the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, though justly famous, is also an inerrant statement, which we can provisionally define as a proposition that is unfailingly true.1 Austen writes prose divinely, but we must not confuse her words with God’s. What is the literary meaning, literal truth, and literate interpretation of this first line? What is Austen doing with her words? Is she affirming the truth “that a single man …,” or is she speaking ironically? When we take context (that is, the rest of the novel) into consideration, what she really means is that a single woman must be in want of a rich husband—a quite different proposition.
Scripture nowhere says of anything, “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” though its wisdom literature comes close. The book of Proverbs contains parental advice to a son, and many commentators suppose that the son in question—a man born to be king—is indeed in possession of a fortune, in want and in search of a wife. Is there an overarching “message” in Proverbs—”The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7), or perhaps a moral variation on Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is a happy or unhappy consequence”—or is each single proverb an individual pearl on a proverbial necklace? Is it a truth universally acknowledged that “those who work their land will have abundant food” (Prov. 12:11)—even during droughts?
Jesus spoke in proverbs too, though his favorite mode of teaching was the parable. What happens in Jesus’ stories, unlike in Austen’s novels, is anything but truth universally acknowledged. Jesus’ stories contain shocking subversive developments that go against the status quo. Is it a truth, universally acknowledged or not, that a father will always welcome home a son who has squandered his inheritance (Luke 15:11–32)? What kind of truth is Jesus teaching (that is, about what and in what way is he communicating truth)? How is Jesus able to teach truth about the kingdom of God by means of metaphors and stories? Is Jesus teaching a single proposition in each parable or several? Similar questions pertain to the Gospels—which Martin Kähler famously calls “passion narratives with long introductions.” Is Jesus’ passion narrative true in the same way that proverbs, parables, and Pride and Prejudice are true, or is biblical truth always and everywhere a matter of historical fact?
The doctrine of inerrancy must be well-versed because the textual truth of Scripture is comprised of language and literature. Well-versed inerrancy is alert to the importance of rhetoric as well as logic. Poorly versed accounts of inerrancy—accounts that fail to address the nature of language, literature, and literacy—do not ultimately help the cause of biblical authority, and may in fact constrict it.2
Evangelicalism, as a renewal movement at the heart of Protestant Christianity, affirms Scripture’s supreme authority over belief and life. Such “biblicism” has long been thought to be a distinguishing feature of evangelicalism.3 However, evangelicals have come to understand biblical authority in two contrasting ways, with some emphasizing Scripture’s authority for faith and practice alone (“infallibilists”), others its authority over all domains it addresses, including history and science (“inerrantists”). Does the Bible tell us how the heavens go as well as how to go to heaven? Calvin says that if you want to learn about astronomy, you should ask the astronomers, not Moses, since his purpose was not to deliver supernatural information about the movement of planets.4 Evangelicals disagree about the extent of the Bible’s authoritative domain, with infallibilists limiting it to “religious” matters, and inerrantists expanding it indefinitely.5 The critical question at present is whether inerrancy is a divisive distraction or an essential feature, perhaps even the rallying cry, of evangelical biblicism.6
Inerrancy is not the issue that separates the sheep from the goats; inerrantists are not necessarily “truthier than thou.” The doctrine of inerrancy is not a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon people who are unable in good conscience to subscribe to the notion. Nor is inerrancy a means of eliminating all biblical difficulties or of ensuring particular biblical interpretations or of proving the Bible to be true. Nor should we use inerrancy to determine in advance what kind of truths we will find in Scripture or to stipulate that what matters most in the Bible is the information it conveys. Inerrancy is neither a hermeneutical shortcut nor a substitute for good exegesis. What, then, is inerrancy good for?
God’s Word will accomplish the purpose for which it has been sent (Isa. 55:11). It follows that the Bible is authoritative over any domain God addresses. Inerrancy points out how the efficacy of God’s Word works out with regard to assertions in light of divine omiscience. To anticipate: inerrancy means that God’s authoritative Word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. While inerrancy is not a full-orbed hermeneutic, it does give believers confidence that Scripture’s teaching is ultimately unified and coherent. God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19). If exegesis without presuppositions is not possible, then inerrancy is one of the right presuppositions, enabling us to name what some see as errors for what they are: not errors but difficulties.
The Bible contains difficulties—this is a truth universally acknowledged. Honesty compels us to acknowledge it; integrity compels us not to skim over it. Some of these difficulties may be quickly dispatched; others require prayer and fasting. In any case, difficulty is the operative concept, and George Steiner helpfully distinguishes three kinds.7 Looking things up can resolve contingent difficulties. Modal difficulties have to do not with surface infelicities (that is, there is nothing to look up) but with the reader’s inability to relate to the text’s overall style and subject matter. Tactical difficulties arise from the author’s willful intention to be ambiguous or obscure, perhaps to spur the reader to think further and read again.
Many contingent difficulties in Scripture have now been resolved thanks to discoveries in archaeology. Nevertheless, there are still some difficulties that we do not yet know how to resolve. Steiner’s modal difficulties are often moral or spiritual difficulties, offenses not merely to reason but to the hardened human heart. And, of course, a poet’s tactics are child’s play in comparison with those of the divine rhetor. Inerrancy does not make the difficulties go away. Rather it expresses faith’s conviction that, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, “the truth will out,”8 and this gives us a reason to endure critical questioning, to continue trusting each and every part of God’s Word, and humbly yet boldly to read again. The purpose of inerrancy is to cultivate readers who confront biblical difficulties as did Augustine: “And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand.”9 Difficulties are not necessarily indications of the dark side of Scripture’s moon, only spots in its sun.10 Is inerrancy a uniter or a divider with respect to the evangelical movement? There seem to be three possibilities: (1) inerrancy is essential for the unity and integrity of evangelicalism; (2) inerrancy is inimical to the unity and integrity of evangelicalism; (3) inerrancy is incidental to the unity and integrity of evangelicalism, a matter of indifference.
Stephen Holmes concedes that it is technically correct to say that church tradition affirmed the truth of Scripture’s propositions, but “this is not an especially interesting or important claim.”11 Even Warfield would not say that inerrancy is the essence of Christianity. In other words, inerrancy is not a doctrine of first dogmatic rank—a doctrine on which the gospel stands or falls—as is the doctrine of the Trinity. On the other hand, a high view of biblical authority that affirms its entire trustworthiness is necessary to preserve the integrity of the gospel, and other candidate terms (for example, infallibility) that have sought to capture this notion have become diluted over time. So while inerrancy is clearly not part of the substance of the gospel (union and communion with Christ), it is connected to the proclamation of the gospel: “Specifically, it is an outworking of the trustworthiness of Scripture.”12 Still, inerrancy pertains directly to assertions only, not to the biblical commands, promises, warnings, and so on. We would therefore be unwise to collapse everything we want to say about biblical authority into the nutshell of inerrancy. The term infallible—in the sense of “not liable to fail” —remains useful as the broader term for biblical authority, with inerrancy a vital subset (that is, not liable to fail in its assertions).13
Inerrancy is neither inimical nor incidental to the present and future of evangelicalism. To say it is essential is to go too far, though it is a natural outworking of what is essential (authority), and thus a mark of a person who is consistently evangelical. I agree with Packer: inerrancy “ought always to be held as an article of faith not capable of demonstrative proof but entailed by dominical and apostolic teaching about the nature of Scripture.”14 Perhaps, in order to be at peace with as many evangelicals as possible, we could agree that inerrancy, if not essential, is nevertheless expedient (there was a fourth possibility after all!). Even the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary, which dropped the phrase “free from error in the whole and in the part” from their doctrinal statement in 1971 in favor of “infallible rule of faith and practice,” appears ready to use the term again if properly defined: “Where inerrancy refers to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches through the biblical writers, we support its use.”15 The problem, however, is that there are various definitions, and caricatures, in circulation. What the evangelical world needs now is an account of “well-versed” inerrancy.
Accounts of inerrancy are well-versed, first, when they understand “the way the words go.”16 Well-versed inerrancy acknowledges that biblical truth involves form as well as content. Well-versed inerrancy thus takes account of the importance of rhetoric as well as logic for “rightly handling [orthotomeo] the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15 ESV). To be well-versed is to have a literate understanding of the literal sense. The early Christians had “an addiction to literacy.”17 My primary concern about inerrancy today is that too many contemporary readers lack the literacy needed for understanding the way the words go, or for rightly handling the word of truth. Biblical inerrancy in the context of biblical illiteracy makes for a dangerous proposition.
Second, and more important, a well-versed doctrine of inerrancy gives priority to the Bible’s own teaching about God, language, and truth. “Well-versed” thus stands in for “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27 ESV)—the overarching story line of the Bible that features the economic Trinity (that is, the words and acts of God in history). My primary intent is not to react to immediate challenges (many others are doing this, often quite effectively) but rather to probe further into the deep theological roots of the idea of inerrancy, which involves the truthfulness of God and God’s relationship to Scripture—the economy of truth and triune rhetoric.
Inerrancy is not a speculative postulate but an inference from God’s self-communication in word and deed. It is always a temptation to assume that we know what God is like simply by unpacking the concept of “infinitely perfect being.” Elsewhere I have cautioned against “perfect being” theology, not least because God’s revelation in Christ has confounded the wisdom of this world.18 We must make every effort to avoid identifying God with our ideas of Perfect Being, and inerrancy with our ideas of what a Perfect Book must be. I want to distinguish, following Luther, an “inerrancy of glory” (that is, a natural theology of inerrancy derived from our culturally conditioned concept of perfection) from an “inerrancy of the cross” (that is, a revealed theology of inerrancy derived from the canonically conditioned concept of perfection). A well-versed doctrine of inerrancy that takes its bearings from Scripture understands truth not merely in terms of the philosopher’s idea of correspondence but, biblically first and theologically foremost, in terms of covenantal faithfulness and testimonial endurance. God’s truth endures and hence proves itself over time, but not without opposition from critics or suffering on the part of its witnesses.
Scripture’s truth does not depend on interpreters acknowledging it as such. The reality of God, the world, and ourselves is what it is independently of our thoughts and words about it. Nevertheless, only readers born from above, by the Holy Spirit, can be “well-versed” in the dual sense in which I am using the term: grammatical-rhetorical and biblical-theological. A well-versed approach to inerrancy is Augustinian (“faith seeking understanding”) and sapiential in orientation, for it sees truth not simply as information to be processed but as life-giving wisdom: “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was agreed upon in 1978 by a coalition of some three hundred evangelical scholars and leaders representing a variety of constituencies. Can anything good come out of the 1970s?
It is unfair to hold the statement itself responsible for the less than edifying use that others have made of it. The preface alone belies the objection that inerrancy is a distraction from more important Christian concerns, by emphasizing, in a spirit of humble conviction, the importance of biblical authority for Christian faith and discipleship and by acknowledging that those who deny inerrancy may still be evangelical (albeit less consistently so). As to the short statement, it does a fine job in locating the doctrine of Scripture in the doctrine of the triune God, thereby keeping it theological.19
In asking whether the Chicago statement is well-versed, I have four major concerns: (1) whether its definition of inerrancy is clear; (2) whether it gives primacy to a biblical-theological rather than a philosophical understanding of truth; (3) whether it is sufficiently attentive to the nature and function of language and literature; (4) whether it produced a theological novelty.
“People surely accept or reject the word [inerrancy] without agreeing or even knowing what someone else means by it.”20 This is a shrewd insight. I regularly refuse to say whether I hold to inerrancy until my interlocutor defines the term (or allows me to do so).
Everything hinges on a clear and careful definition, and once this is in hand, many objections will be seen to be attacking either a caricature or a false implication of the doctrine.
The statement’s first eleven articles treat biblical inspiration. It is clear that inerrancy is an entailment of divine authorship and that the peculiarities and particularities of human authorship do not call Scripture’s truth into question. However, we do not get an explicit definition of inerrancy in any one article, though we are told that Scripture is “true and reliable in all the matters it addresses” (article 11) and “free from falsehood, fraud, or deceit” (article 12). Is the Bible inerrant because it happens not to have erred or because, as God’s Word, it could not have erred?
Paul Feinberg’s celebrated definition gathers up the various threads of the Chicago statement into a conceptual coat of many colors (that is, qualifications): “When all facts are known, the Scripture in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.”21 The Chicago statement is also compatible with David Dockery’s briefer formula: “The Bible in its original autographs, properly interpreted, will be found to be truthful and faithful in all that it affirms concerning all areas of life, faith, and practice.”22 This definition is attractive because (1) it is a positive statement, (2) it says that the Bible has to be properly interpreted, and (3) it argues that the Bible is true not in everything it mentions but in what it affirms (Dockery calls this critical rather than naive inerrancy).23
I propose the following definition: to say that Scripture is inerrant is to confess faith that the authors speak the truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly).24 I shall unpack this definition further below.
One of the most common objections to the idea of inerrancy is that it is essentially modern, unequally yoking biblical authority to a particular theory of meaning (that is, referential), knowledge (that is, foundational), and truth (that is, correspondence). It is therefore incumbent on the inerrantist to set forth a theological account of meaning and truth. Does the Chicago statement deliver?
The short statement opens powerfully with declarations that God “is Himself Truth and speaks truth only” and that biblical authority is “inescapably impaired” if inerrancy is “made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own.” The terms true, truth, and truthfulness appear again in articles 9, 11, 13, 14, and 17. The CSBI never explicitly defines them but would seem to presuppose a correspondence view of truth. This alone is hardly modernist, for some kind of correspondence is implied in Aristotle’s celebrated definition: “To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”25 It is perhaps better to think of correspondence as an intuition about the way in which language accords with reality rather than as a full-blown theory, since theories, even about truth, come and go. Whether the correspondence view makes sense of the CSBI’s claim that “God … is himself Truth” or of Jesus’ own claim to be “the truth” (John 14:6) is a point to which we shall return in the next section.
Curiously, the CSBI does not explicitly identify what in Scripture are the bearers of truth (for example, words, sentences, statements, propositions, or texts). The lack of any mention of “propositions” is, however, a surprising and conspicuous absence, especially given its prominence in subsequent material on inerrancy.
The statement is at its best when it situates its discussion in terms of the Bible and theology, as it does in article 4, which reminds us that God uses language, and neither human finitude nor fallenness render language “inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation.”26 Article 8 similarly affirms the appropriateness of the “distinctive personalities and literary styles” of the human authors as vehicles of revelation, and article 13 stipulates that truthful language need not be technically precise (that way lies modernity) but can include figurative language. And article 18 helpfully reminds us that Scripture employs various literary forms to speak the truth.
We can identify two areas of concern: (1) whether inerrancy pertains to those portions in Scripture (and there are large swaths of them) that are not affirmations, and (2) how language and literature “correspond” to reality. As to the first point, J. L. Austin criticized the philosophers of his day (the mid-twentieth century) for their tendency to think that the purpose of language is to “state facts” or to describe “states of affairs.” The notion of a speech act is now well established in the literature; we know now that authors do many things with words besides asserting.27 Language can be used to describe the world and report history, and that it is able to do so is vital to Christian faith, where the main message is indeed historical: “He is risen!” But not all sentences in the Bible state facts. To be sure, we have to assume certain things to be true in order to make sense of other speech acts. Jesus commanded his disciples to fetch a donkey from a nearby village (Matt. 21:2) and in doing so tacitly assumed certain truth conditions (that is, that there was a village with a donkey in it). Yet what Jesus did with words was command, not assert.28
As to assertions themselves, my opening example of Pride and Prejudice reminds us that the relationship of language to reality is not always simple or linear, as if we could draw a straight line between words and things in the world. While the Chicago statement does not officially subscribe to the idea that meaning is reference, it may inadvertently encourage it. Some of its most enthusiastic and vociferous supporters have appealed to the statement as warrant for reading all biblical narrative as if it were a species of the genus Modern Historiography. The main problem, with the statement and with much twentieth-century philosophy of language, is that it appears to take individual sentences (for example, “The cat is on the mat,” “Jesus wept”) as paradigmatic illustrations of how words refer to or picture the world. To insist that true statements are always exact representations of extralinguistic reality leads to overly literalistic interpretations.29 A picture of “literality” holds us (moderns) captive.30 To say, “I believe in the literal truth of the Bible” may mean something quite different when uttered in the modern world than it did in the time of Augustine.
Truth is indeed about reality, but there is more than one way to render reality in language.31 We have truth “when what is said is that this is how things are.” The map of the Paris métro is about the Paris métro—it says, “This is how the Paris métro is”—but “the way the words go” (if maps could speak!) is not like the way a picture corresponds. The tracks that take tourists to the Eiffel Tower are not really orange, as they are on the map, nor are they only a centimeter wide. Most users understand the convention. Truth is the “fit” between text and reality, between what is written and what is written about, but one can speak about (map) the same terrain in many ways. Some maps highlight topography, others points of scenic interest, and still others buried treasure. A road map need not contradict one that points out historical landmarks or topography. Each type of map reflects a certain interest and highlights what it wants its readers to know. There is no such thing as a universal, all-purpose map. The metaphor of the map reminds us that there is more than one kind of fit.32 I worry that some theories of inerrancy imply that there is only one way to map the world correctly.33
Biblical inerrancy requires biblical literacy. The literate interpreter understands the language and the literary form. The biblical books are like different kinds of maps. To read a biblical map correctly requires a certain familiarity with its conventions: one needs to know its scale, key, and legend. The biblical books speak of how things are, and thus correspond to the eternal reality of God, God’s mighty acts, the world of nature and of human beings, but not always in the same way. The literate reader needs to follow the way the biblical words go, especially when they speak of the reality of the past. Go is the key term because biblical revelation is indeed progressing, moving with increasing speed to their ultimate referent: what God has done, is doing, and will do in Jesus Christ. The Chicago statement does well to highlight both the progressive nature of the Bible’s teaching (article 5) as well as the importance of reading the parts in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts (article 6).
In recognizing the importance of reading Scripture according to its own standards of truth, figures of speech, and literary forms, the Chicago statement largely succeeds in following an “inerrancy of the cross” and avoiding an “inerrancy of glory.” I resonate with the way the exposition of the statement puts it: “Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.” If inerrancy has acquired a bad name, it is less the fault of the Chicago statement than of the way its proponents deploy the notion in defense of certain literalistic interpretations.34 I agree with Mark Thompson: “[Inerrancy] should not be judged by the abuse of it or by inadequate explanations.”35 Nor ought we to expect too much of it. Inerrancy alone does not a hermeneutic make: “Inerrancy does not set down any principle that requires certain sections of Scripture to be treated as intended to be either largely historical or largely metaphorical.”36 Stated differently: inerrancy tells you that what is said is true, but it cannot tell you what is said. Nor, alas, is professing inerrancy sufficient to keep a person orthodox. No such necessary correlation exists between having the right doctrine of Scripture and getting the right doctrine out of Scripture.37 We must be careful neither to inflate nor deflate inerrancy’s role in interpretation.
Article 16 states “that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history.” It also denies that inerrancy is “a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.” To refute the claim that the doctrine of inerrancy was “invented” by nineteenth-century Princeton is also to rebut the objection that inerrancy, along with the Chicago statement, is a provincial and parochial concern. Can it be done?
A full-orbed demonstration of inerrancy’s historical pedigree is beyond the scope of the present essay. Others have been there, done that.38 I propose instead to compare and contrast the Chicago statement to the creedal statement on the Trinity of the Council of Nicaea. To be sure, the framers of the Chicago statement explicitly say in the preface that they do not propose to give the statement “creedal weight,” but this is not the salient feature of my comparison. I propose to focus instead on a certain parallel between inerrancy and homoousios.
Chicago is not Nicaea: the gospel itself is not directly at stake in inerrancy, nor is it clear whether there was in Chicago a counterpart to Athanasius. I am nevertheless struck by four similarities: (1) the notions of homoousios and inerrancy both arose at a time when the truths they express—in the one case, the full deity of the Son, in the other, the divine truth of the Scriptures—were being challenged; (2) both homoousios and inerrancy are technical terms that have proven to be stumbling blocks to many; (3) neither term is biblical, in the sense of occurring in Scripture; yet (4) both terms reflect underlying biblical convictions or judgments.
My thesis, in brief, is this: while the term inerrant or the concept of inerrancy may be new, the underlying judgment is not.39 I owe the concept/judgment distinction to David Yeago, who in a seminal article developed it in connection to Nicaea. Yeago thinks that Paul’s language in Philippians 2:6, about the Son’s isos theos (“equality with God”), is saying the same thing as Nicaea’s very different concept homoousios (“of the same substance”). It is essential “to distinguish between judgments and the conceptual terms in which those judgments are rendered” so that “the same judgment can be rendered in a variety of conceptual terms.”40 Similarly, I submit that inerrancy is saying (nearly) the same thing as John’s language in Revelation 21:5 about the Word of God being pistoi kai alethinoi (“trustworthy and true”).
The doctrine of inerrancy expresses a nonidentical equivalence to what Scripture teaches about itself. The problem with concepts, however, is that they gradually acquire a medley of associations, each of which affects the core meaning. Although it expresses a biblical judgment, the concept of inerrancy also shows signs of its cultural and historical locatedness. The challenge, then, is to affirm the underlying judgment together with the concept of inerrancy, provided that we can free the latter from unhelpful cultural accretions in order to free it for ministering the whole counsel of God.41
Augustine is the patron saint of well-versed inerrancy because (1) his thinking was thoroughly theological and he judged Scripture to be entirely true and trustworthy, and (2) he was not only familiar with but also proficient in the liberal arts, writing on the nature and interpretation of language, concerned for what he called the literal meaning of Genesis, but also alert and attentive to biblical figures of speech. Augustine would surely agree with the judgment expressed by my definition of inerrancy: the authors speak the truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly). In this section, I want to frame my definition in biblical and theological terms, attending in particular to divine authorship, the nature of truth, the meaning of the literal sense, and the role of the reader in the economy of interpreting Scripture’s divine communication.42
Augustine defines truth as “what is”43 or “that which shows what is.”44 Scripture clearly affirms that God speaks the truth: “Your words are true [emeth]” (2 Sam. 7:28 ESV); “Thy word is truth [aletheia]” (John 17:17 KJV); “Let God be proved true [alethes] [and every man a liar] [pseustes]” (Rom. 3:4 NRSV). What kind of truth is in view here? Does the Bible subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth?
Before we answer that (and we will), we must pause to consider, and marvel at, inerrancy’s most important presupposition: God speaks. Better: God is a communicative agent who employs human language and literature as means of communicative action. Moreover, because the works of the Trinity are undivided [opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt], we must ultimately identify God’s speaking as triune discourse, in which discourse is “something someone says to someone about something in some way for some purpose.”45
What is language for? Carl Henry was right to protest against the neoorthodox attempt to avoid the cognitive nature of divine revelation. Yet he goes too far in saying of language that “its basic function is cognitive,”46 that “the minimal unit of meaningful expression is a proposition,”47 that only propositions can be true or false,48 and that most of the sentences in Scripture “are historical assertions or explanations of such assertions.”49 Given his view of the nature of language and truth, it is not surprising that he concludes that the Bible is propositional revelation, that is, that the Scriptures “contain a body of divinely given information actually expressed or capable of being expressed in propositions.”50
In linking biblical authority with propositional revelation, Henry carries on a venerable theological tradition. I do not wish to be heard as affirming anything less, though I do want to say something more. While Henry is right to emphasize the cognitive nature of biblical revelation (that is, that it conveys content that can be thought about and assented to), he tends to treat declarative sentences as “the privileged class” of biblical discourse.51 By way of contrast, the words of Truth incarnate privilege “the poor” (that is, forms of discourse that traditional philosophers and theologians typically neglect): the bulk of Jesus’ earthly teaching consists of figures of speech, enigmatic sayings, and parables. To be sure, these forms too are cognitive, though it is harder to draw a straight line between individual sentences and the propositions they convey.
Whereas Henry thinks that the basic function of language is to transfer information, I believe that God gives us language to communicate, which is a broader category: “Language never exists simply to state propositions: its primary role is a means by which one person acts in relation to others.”52 If we attend to all that the Bible depicts God as doing to engage human persons by means of language—if we give a well-versed account—we will see that both God and Scripture do more with propositions than teach or impart information.
Among the various divine speech acts we could consider, the oath is particularly important. God makes solemn promises out of words (that is, God commits himself to doing things for others) and seals his commitments with an oath.53 God covenants. A covenant is a communicative act that establishes or ratifies a personal relationship and aims at communion: “A berit is a relationship involving an oath-bound commitment.”54 All discourse, to the extent that it is a medium of social interaction, has a quasi-covenantal dimension.55 Language is a divinely ordained institution, a rich and supple medium of communicative action oriented to communion. Of course, as with everything else God created, language too can be corrupted, and the peculiar corruption of language is the lie, leading not to communion but to alienation.
“Let God be proved true” (Rom. 3:4 NRSV). Throughout the Scriptures, God proves himself true by keeping his word. He fulfills his promises; he does what he says. There is thus a covenantal correspondence, a faithful fit, between God’s words and God’s deeds. The Hebrew term that signifies this covenantal correspondence is emeth: “to be reliable, trustworthy, true.” Emeth is paired with hesed (“steadfast love”) in five of its eleven occurrences in the Pentateuch (for example, Ex. 34:6). “Truth” here is a quality not simply of statements but of a person: faithfulness.56 We hear an echo of this in medieval marriage ceremonies, in which a person pledges or swears by his or her troth (cf. “betrothed”). The idea is that true words are words that can be relied on, words that provide firm ground on which to stand. Five other instances of emeth in the Pentateuch are in the context of a “trial” of truth, that is, determining whether something is the case (for example, Deut. 13:14). Indeed, the criterion for recognizing false prophecy is that the false prophet’s words do not come to pass (Deut. 18:22). There is in this case “a fissure between thought and utterance,” 57 a lack of correspondence between what is said and what is, a breaking of the bond that binds true words to the world, and a damnable disruption in the covenant of discourse.58
Both the prophets and apostles are divinely commissioned spokesmen charged with putting the word of God into words. God speaks through human authors who nevertheless remain fully human. They speak on Christ’s behalf, about Christ, through Christ’s Spirit, who guides them in the truth (John 16:13–14). In addition to the other things they do with words, the prophets and apostles are testifying to Christ (Luke 24:27). Testifying is a speech act that reports, and thus relates to others, the truth about something. Inerrancy is ultimately a matter of claiming that the biblical testimony is entirely trustworthy and true, and of trusting that it will eventually be seen to be true through enduring the process of critical testing and cross-examination.59
Jesus is the truth (John 14:6), God’s own Word expressed in time and space in the form of a human being. Jesus is God’s own truth claim—but what is it about? Augustine compares the incarnation with the way in which we humans “beget” our thoughts in words. I submit that Jesus is the truth because he is God’s true and trustworthy Word and because as God’s Word, he corresponds to God himself. The Son is the visible “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), the “exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb. 1:3 NRSV). The Son corresponds to deity in every way except that he is the Son rather than the Father. Jesus is God’s promise made good. Jesus is the truth because he is the Word that covenantally corresponds to, faithfully fits, and measures up to the reality of God. Jesus is the truth because he communicates what God is.60 From this particular truth, I derive the following about truth in general: true words communicate what is. Words that purport to communicate what is yet fail to do so are false—unreliable, untrustworthy, perhaps even lies. Correspondence is covenantal because “our word is our bond.”61 The lie is a breach of the bond that ties word and world together. It is a sundering of what God originally put together. God cannot lie, and hence neither does Scripture.62 It remains to be seen, however, just what kind of testimony Scripture gives.
Truth presupposes meaning. To understand what truth a given discourse communicates, we must first understand the type of discourse with which we have to do. A poem harbors truth in a different way than does a physics manual, a narrative history, or a theology textbook. In William Alston’s words: “It is only after the proposition has been assigned that the question of truth value can be raised.”63 Truth is always about what is, but there are many kinds of reality and many ways of talking about it (for example, to what do metaphors refer?). We must first discern what a passage or a text is about, and then ask how it is about it. As Aristotle commented, “being may be said in many ways.” The same goes for history. The issues are complex, but the following distinctions may help clarify matters.
Critics and commentators only confuse matters when they suggest that inerrantists believe in the literal truth of every word of the Bible. Individual words are neither true nor false, for they do not assert anything. To assert something—to say what is the case—is a thing people do by using words. There is a difference between “sentence meaning” and “speaker meaning.” It is therefore not enough to speak about the semantics of biblical literature (its propositional content, sentence meaning); we must also account for the pragmatics (kinds of communicative action, speech act meaning). This distinction is particularly important when we try to determine what precisely the authors are affirming (when they are affirming).64 Well-versed inerrancy here comes into its own by calling attention to Scripture as composed of various kinds of discourse and to the necessity of asking, what is the author doing in his discourse, and what is the discourse about? For the proposition on the page (sentence content) may not be the proposition the author is affirming (speech act content).
Proponents of inerrancy must take great care to distinguish the notion of literal truth from a literalism that runs roughshod over the intent of the author and the literary form of the text. Was Jesus affirming botanic truth when he called the mustard seed “the smallest of all the seeds” (Mark 4:31 ESV), or was he drawing an analogy that his hearers would have understood, in order to communicate a nonbotanical truth? Here we may recall the Chicago statement’s call to take account of Scripture’s literary forms and to avoid evaluating Scripture with standards of truth “that are alien to its usage or purpose” (articles 18 and 13, respectively).
For the sake of clarification, let us define literalism as the view that equates what is said (that is, meaning) with semantic content (that is, the proposition semantically expressed by the sentence regardless of context).65 At the limit, literalism runs roughshod over figures of speech and forms of discourse such as irony, in which what one says is often the opposite of what one means.66 Irony is an especially interesting case study for inerrancy: is the proposition it puts forward as truth the text or the subtext, the sentence meaning or the speaker’s meaning? To appreciate the irony in the book of Job or John’s gospel, we must do more than read for the semantic content or literalistic sense.67 We must specify the author’s communicative intent in order rightly to say what he is doing with his words. Inerrantists read for the literal sense, that is, for the speech act content of an author’s discourse (in other words, the proposition pragmatically expressed by the sentence in its particular context). We need to know something about both the sentence (semantics) and the speaker’s intention (pragmatics) in order rightly to discern the literal sense (that is, what the author is saying in tending to his words in just this way).68 Only in the context of its particular use can we determine what is said.
A well-versed approach to biblical discourse acknowledges that what is said is not always an affirmation. Authors can do many things with words and can affirm things in many ways. Well-versed inerrancy thus takes special care with the qualification “in all things they affirm.” Is every passing mention of something an affirmation? According to Alston, an author asserts p when he takes responsibility for explicitly presenting p in his discourse (that is, by saying in so many words, “that p”). Alston too wants to combine semantics and pragmatics, sentence and speaker meaning, and does so by defining sentence meaning as “illocutionary act potential.”69 An illocution refers to what a speaker does in speaking (for example, promise, command, assert, and so on). The sentence provides the propositional content that the author then uses to mean something, that is, “to perform acts of a certain sort.”70 I propose that we identify the literal sense with the illocutionary act an author is performing.71 In sum: the literal sense of what we say is not the sentence content (the words considered apart from the context of their use) but the speech act content.
“In all things they affirm.” These words represent an important qualification—or rather specification—of my definition of inerrancy. The “they” refers not to sentences but to authors. Consider again Jesus’ claim about the mustard seed. The proposition semantically expressed—the claim taken out of the context of Jesus’ (and Matthew’s) use—is false, prompting this response from the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry: “No, the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds. Jesus was speaking proverbially. That is, he wasn’t making a statement of absolute fact but using a proverbial style of communication.”72 In the terms of the present essay, Jesus was not affirming as scientific fact the proposition semantically expressed by his sentence. The subject matter of Jesus’ authoritative teaching was not mustard seeds but the kingdom of God, and he was communicating truth about the kingdom in terms his audience could understand. Jesus was not making a literalistic truth claim (about mustard seeds), but he was speaking the literal truth (about the kingdom).73 This is no game of semantic smoke and mirrors; it is the way linguistic communication works.
What is true of Jesus’ teaching applies to all the other forms of biblical discourse as well. In order to know what the biblical authors are affirming, we need to determine the nature of their discourse: what are they talking about and in what way are they talking about it? Warfield puts it well: “No objection is valid which overlooks the prime question: what was the professed or implied purpose of the writer in making this statement?”74 What complicates matters is that, with a few exceptions, the biblical authors typically write in longer forms of poetry and prose, and to determine what is said in, say, a narrative, we have to do more than consider isolated sentences. For the proposition(s) an author expresses may be a function not of one sentence only but of a whole paragraph, many paragraphs, or perhaps the whole story. That to which we ascribe truth may not be the propositions semantically expressed in serial sentential form but the proposition(s) expressed by the discourse taken as a whole.75
The moral of this story is that we have first to discern the literal sense before saying “true or false.” And it helps to discern what is being affirmed (“what someone says about something”) when we attend to the form of the discourse and literary genre (“in some way”). Moisés Silva identifies a problem with unversed approaches to inerrancy when he notes that traditionally, “grammar books have stopped at the sentence level when describing syntax.”76 The best way to discover what sentences are being used for is to determine the literary form of which they are a part. Stated differently: the literary form is part of the context of use and thus stands at what we could view as the intersection of the semantics and pragmatics of meaning and truth. Interpreters need literary sensibility in order to determine which proposition(s) a discourse explicitly expresses or affirms.
The best biblical examples of sentences that correspond to propositions in a one-to-one relationship are probably the aphorisms in Proverbs and certain doctrinal one-liners from the Epistles and elsewhere (for example, “God is light” [1 John 1:5]). Yet even the book of Proverbs has a distinctive literary form that affects the way we take its propositions: “The biblical books were meant to be read as wholes and that is the way we should read them.”77 “Strong propositionalists” are tone-deaf to everything in Scripture but the truth content conveyed and seem not to feel the difficulty of extracting propositions from complex forms of discourse. Gordon Clark’s comment is representative: “Aside from imperative sentences and a few exclamations in the Psalms, the Bible is composed of propositions.”78 Such a view is simply unable to appreciate the significance of, say, the narrative form as anything other than packaging for a series of propositions (“and then, and then, and then”). Tone-deaf may be too harsh: strong propositionalists hear the music, but only the melody. They therefore think they have assimilated Beethoven’s truth when they can whistle the tune of the Fifth Symphony. Strong propositionalists resemble C. S. Lewis’s “unliterary reader,” who looks only for the Event: “[Such a reader] ignores nearly all that the words before him are doing; he wants to know what happened next.”79
Well-versed inerrancy puts a premium on the responsibility of the interpreter to understand the text correctly. The reader is part of the economy of biblical discourse. Is the Bible’s truth somehow dependent on the activity of interpreters? Hardly. The Bible teaches truth whether or not its students learn their lesson. Nevertheless, a certain degree of biblical literacy is required for Scripture’s truth to be appreciated for what it is rather than something else. Scripture ultimately tests us, revealing how “true” (that is, sound) our eyes, ears, and hearts are. Are we the kind of right-minded and right-hearted people who can recognize and receive the truth, not simply bits of information but truth’s “robust presence”—the collective testimony of the Scriptures to Jesus Christ?80
God’s Word can be relied upon to accomplish the purpose for which it has been sent, and when this purpose is making affirmations, it does so inerrantly. As we have seen, however, texts can be “about” reality in different ways (there is more than one kind of map), and they can focus on different aspects of reality—from the smallest details to the big picture. To interpret Scripture rightly means recognizing what kinds of things the biblical authors are doing with their words. Are we reading history, story, apocalyptic, wisdom, science, or something else? We must not underestimate the importance of rightly determining the literary genre, or the challenge of rightly discerning the proposition(s) a narrative or parable or psalm explicitly presents.
In sum: God’s words are wholly reliable; their human interpreters, not so much. God’s words do many things, and while their affirmations are critical to Christian faith (“He is risen!”), we must also remember that God uses language to communicate for other purposes than to transmit information. Finally, we must be realistic about how far inerrancy takes us as interpreters. While inerrantists believe that biblical discourse ultimately coheres, inerrancy itself “does not set down any principle that requires certain sections of Scripture to be treated as intended to be either largely historical or largely metaphorical.”81 Inerrancy is compatible “with widely varying views about what (if any) propositional messages are asserted or conveyed by biblical texts.”82 Truth may be said in many ways, by story and history, direct and indirect teaching, maxims and metaphors. What the authors are doing with their words must be discerned through right biblical interpretation. Inerrancy alone does not a hermeneutic make, as the following case studies will no doubt show.
We turn now to an examination of three challenging case studies, each of which represents, in its own way, a “hard saying” of Scripture, and hence a test for well-versed inerrancy.
How can we hold to the inerrancy of the Bible if the archaeological data contradicts what the text says actually happened? Joshua 6 depicts a key moment in the outworking of God’s plan of salvation and is thus an excellent proving ground for would-be biblical interpreters, presenting a number of challenges on the literary, historical, and theological levels. Our primary focus is on the historical level, but as we shall see, this cannot be neatly separated from the other two.
Was there, in fact, a historical fall of Jericho? Many, though not all, scholars believe that the archaeological record is at odds with Joshua’s account. One colleague refers to the problem of Israel’s entry into Canaan as the “mother of all current debates” in biblical archaeology.83 That the issues are complex is no reason not to engage them. Stephen Williams rightly observes, “The historical facticity of the grant of land to an exodus people is a foundational piece of history and grounds the claim of both Testaments to be speaking truly of the God who acts.”84 One proposition that Joshua 6 explicitly affirms, then, is that it is God who gives Jericho into Israel’s hand (Josh. 6:2). The truth not only of Joshua but also of the divine promise therefore hinges on this being historically the case.
The underlying question concerns the nature of Israel’s emergence in Canaan. Archaeologists have gone back and forth on this issue. W. F. Albright proposes a “conquest model” that correlates the Joshua narrative with archaeological evidence for the thirteenth-century destruction of various Canaanite cities. 85 Score one for the inerrantists. The problem, however, is that most contemporary scholars reject Albright’s model, not only because new archaeological evidence has come to light but also “because of its literal, simplistic reading of Joshua.”86 Albright’s reading was poorly versed; like other literalists, he was too concerned with establishing what happened (the “Event”). There is good textual reason to question his conquest model. In order to do justice to Joshua 6, we need to attend not only to the story (what happened, the chronology of events) but also to the discourse (how the story is told, what it is about).87
Archaeology, like science, can neither confirm nor deny whether God acts, though it can lend credence to whether space-time events happened the way they were reported to have happened. The past leaves material “traces” that, like texts, call for interpretation. Archaeology deals with solid objects, yet it is not a hard but a hermeneutical science, and there is a conflict of interpretation over how to read the evidence. There is evidence at Jericho of collapsed city walls, but the dates do not seem right. There is evidence of grain amidst the burned-out city, which suggests to some that the city fell because of something other than a lengthy siege. Some of the fiercest debate concerns the dating of pottery. The long and short of it is that the evidence, taken on its own material terms, is inconclusive.88 Given the complexity of the evidence, scholars should use extreme caution before pronouncing the text to be in error.89 It is also debatable how wise it is to engage in archaeological apologetics given the underdetermined nature of the data. There is no need to ask, as one scholar does tongue-in-cheek, “If Jericho was not razed, is our faith in vain?”90
The prior question for a well-versed approach to inerrancy must rather be, what is the author of Joshua saying/doing with his words? Specifically, is the main thrust of Joshua to give the kind of factual reporting that Americans have come to expect of newspapers such as the New York Times? We might expect this, but if we do, it says more about us than about the biblical authors, who could hardly be considered journalists. Rather what we have in Joshua is historical testimony, presented in an artful narrative way (that is, as a story-shaped history) and intended to highlight certain theological themes, all for the purpose of shaping the identity of the believing community and of encouraging them (us!) to walk faithfully before God.
A well-versed approach to inerrancy thinks, “Literary understanding is a necessary condition of historical understanding.”91 We should not oppose literature to history; in many cases, narrative is “true history artfully presented.”92 Narrative histories do more than convey pictures that correspond exactly to what actually happened; there is a poetics and rhetoric proper to historical narrative which help us appreciate what they do and how they work.93 Just as we must first determine the meaning of a text before we assess its truth, so we must first appreciate Joshua 6 as narrative before we judge its historical truth or falsity.
Some philosophers of history think that all sources are fallible because of “their inherent inability to provide anything but a partial, incomplete, and necessarily biased view of the events they ostensibly report.”94 But to judge a text to be in error simply because it does not give us a complete and unbiased account of events is to work with an inordinately high, somewhat arbitrary, and quintessentially modern standard. As with witnesses in court, textual testimony can tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if it is not the whole truth but rather a particular angle on the truth. Incompleteness is not necessarily a defect, especially when an author is narrating history with a particular purpose, as is John’s gospel, which admits that Jesus did “many other things” (John 21:25) but contents itself with recording the events it does in order to inculcate belief in Jesus as the Christ (John 20:30–31).
Well-versed inerrancy insists on reading Joshua 6 in canonical context while taking into account the literary conventions its authors employ. This involves recognizing “an intermingling of the texts’ figurative and ideological aspects” typical of other ancient Near Eastern histories.95 For example, the claim in Joshua 10:40 that Joshua utterly destroyed southern Palestine and “left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed” (NRSV) is likely hyperbolic and “should not be read in a flat, literalistic way, as if hard statistical information were intended.”96 Jericho’s fall as depicted by the text owes less to a battle than to a liturgical act that ends with a shout of jubilee.97 Moreover, the conquest of Canaan may not have been as complete as a literalistic reading of the text might initially suggest, not least because later in Joshua the inhabitants of the land are still present. A careful reading of the whole of Joshua will perceive an intended tension between the initial subjugation of the land (a gift from God) and the later occupation of the land (Israel’s responsibility). The main proposition that Joshua 6 sets forth—what the text affirms—is that God has indeed made good on his promise to give Israel the land and that the people on their part must respond to God’s faithfulness in like manner.
Biblical narrative marches to the beat of a different drummer than does the company of historians to which modern readers are accustomed. Indeed, reading Joshua simply to discover “what actually happened” is to miss the main point of the discourse, which is to communicate a theological interpretation of what happened (that is, God gave Israel the land) and to call for right participation in the covenant. It does not follow, however, that the accounts in Joshua are myths, or even legends. On the contrary, Joshua 6 is artful narrative testimony to an event that happened in Israel’s past, an event that reveals both who God is (faithful to his promise) and who Israel is to be in response (obedient to the covenant). Readers, especially those who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, are within their epistemic rights to trust this testimony until shown otherwise.
There are three accounts of Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus in Acts (9:1–19; 22:6–11; 26:12–18), but we are concerned with the first two only and, in particular, with the apparent contradiction in the description of the experience of Paul’s companions. In Acts 9:7, the narrator says they were speechless, “hearing the voice but seeing no one” (ESV), while in Acts 22:9 Paul himself reports that his companions “saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (NRSV). According to the law of noncontradiction, it cannot be true both that A and non-A (that is, “they heard” and “they did not hear”). And this is not the only discrepancy (for example, in 9:7, Paul’s companions saw no one, but in 22:9, they saw the light). As Fetherstone’s sixteenth-century translation of Calvin’s commentary on Acts 9:7 quaintly notes, “it seemeth that this narration doth not in all points agree with that of Paul [in Acts 22:9].”98 A more recent commentator goes further, asserting that these two passages “contain a formal contradiction.”99
Modern biblical critics are willing to live with this contradiction, chalking it up to the possibility that Luke used two conflicting sources. The typical inerrantist reflex, when one is confronted with intratextual wrinkles like this one, is to iron them out—to harmonize. (Thankfully, we have been spared the suggestion that Paul met Christ two times on the Damascus road). Sure enough, the most popular “solution” to this contradiction is to point out that the Greek verb in question (akouein) means “to hear the sound” with a genitive and “to understand” with an accusative. Calvin anticipated this solution, suggesting that Paul’s companions heard the sound of the voice but could not understand what was said (or who was speaking). J. H. Moulton says that this distinction “saved the author [Luke] from a patent self-contradiction.”100 A. T. Robertson agrees, and in his Greek grammar takes issue with the translators of the RSV, who accentuate the contradiction by repeating hear instead of substituting understand for the second instance: “That is lack of good will or even respect for the Word of God. And it falsifies Luke’s witness.”101 If only grammar books today were as feisty!
There are two problems with this solution. First, many scholars question whether the evidence supports the distinction.102 But second, resolving the difficulty this quickly, and grammatically, short-circuits our attempt to plumb the depth of Luke’s communicative intent and literary artistry.
A biblically literate reader will note parallels between the story of Paul’s conversion and other incidents in which the Lord appears to select individuals or groups in ways that stretch human auditory and visual sensibilities. Consider, for example, how Moses reminds Israel of God’s appearing with thunder and lightning at Mount Horeb: “You heard the sound of words but saw no form” (Deut. 4:12). Phos (light) and phōnē (voice) are standard features of biblical theophanies. In Acts 9, Paul’s companions do not see the light; in Acts 22, they do not hear the voice. If the intent is to show that only Paul truly experienced the appearance of Christ, then the two accounts express essentially the same proposition: “Paul’s companions had no share in his christophanic encounter.” In one commentator’s words, “It is only the means of expression which are changed, not the sense of the statement.”103
The way forward, once again, is to ask not only what words Luke used but also what Luke was doing with them in the context of his overall narrative. Acts is a narrative history that recounts the history of the early church (“story”) in a theologically significant manner (“discourse”). Repetition with slight variations was one of the rhetorical tools ancient authors had in their arsenal to reinforce their message or to highlight certain themes. I have already noted the allusion to Israel’s encounter with God at Mount Horeb. Moses came away from that theophany with a shining face; Paul comes away blind. That Paul’s companions heard the voice (Acts 9:7) underscores the objectivity of the encounter.
Commentators agree that Luke hints at the structure and theme of his book—the expanding scope of Christ’s witnesses from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth—in Acts 1:8. A case can be made that the three accounts of Paul’s encounter on the road to Damascus serve the purpose of enhancing Paul’s stature as a witness to the gospel “to the ends of the earth.”104 The change in wording (“they heard,” “they did not hear”) serves Luke’s purpose by progressively reducing the role of the companions, eventually excluding them altogether from the revelatory event, which turns out to be not merely a theophany but a commissioning service.105 Paul alone is a witness to this christophany; Paul alone will serve as Christ’s witness. This literary repetition with a difference is Luke’s way of ensuring that Paul’s companions decrease so that Paul’s stature as a witness to the Lord will increase.106 In sum: the companions’ hearing in Acts 9 confirms the reality of the christophany; their not hearing in Acts 22 shows that the divine commissioning is intended for Paul alone.
A college student once told me that her professor often mentions the Bible, but never without the qualification “that handbook of racism, genocide, and oppression.” Deuteronomy 20:16–17 implicates God in what strikes many as evil, and is a good example of what Kenton Sparks calls the “dark side” of Scripture.107 It also seems to fly in the face of the ethic that Jesus taught his disciples: “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44). There are two problems: first, that the Old Testament here depicts God as a “moral monster”; second, that Jesus teaches a different view of God.
This is not the place to undertake a doctrine of God; our topic is inerrancy, not theodicy. Nevertheless, the topics are related, as Wesley Morriston makes clear in an essay that argues that the “genocide passages” in the Old Testament provide us with a strong prima facie reason to reject biblical inerrancy. Why? In short, because “that is not what a perfectly good God would do.”108 The longer argument is that the explanation Deuteronomy gives for God’s commanding Israel to exterminate the various nations in Canaan does not constitute a morally sufficient reason for obeying.109
The challenge for the inerrantist is to resolve the apparent contradiction between what God commands Israel and what Jesus commands his disciples. This is a real difficulty, and there is a distinct temptation to want to make it go away. For example, Randall Rauser “solves” the problem by insisting that a morally perfect God would never order a human being to kill a human baby, and thus concludes that God did not command genocide. The cost of giving in to temptation here, however, is the loss of biblical inerrancy.110
It was the Gnostics who first pitted the loving God of the New Testament against the “wrathful” God of the Old. This will not do: first, because the Old Testament affirms the love and mercy of God (Ex. 34:6–7); second, because the New Testament affirms the wrath and judgment of God; and third, because Jesus never distances himself from the way in which the Old Testament depicts God.111 This latter point is the most important, and the clue to the way forward. Why did Jesus himself not find Deuteronomy’s depiction of God abhorrent? Probably because he was not working with the concept of “morally perfect being.” I find it interesting that Rauser and Morriston treat their own moral intuitions about what a perfect being must do as more reliable (dare I say inerrant?) than the biblical text. As Christians, they should know that the wisdom of the world is the foolishness of God.112
Our task, again, is not (in this context) to justify the ways of God but rather to explain how Jesus could have promulgated his law of love and not felt a tension with the Old Testament depictions of God as Divine Warrior. I submit that it was because Jesus saw himself as fully a part of the same story of what happens when holy love meets unholy rejection, or when the Creator-Redeemer engages the forces of chaos. Stated differently: Jesus read the Old Testament not literalistically (as do some of its critics) but in a literal-typological manner that keeps the overarching plot (that is, salvation history) in view at all times. I can here only provide a brief sketch of the redemptive-historical hermeneutical framework that Christians need to bring to such difficult passages.
If we view Scripture with the widest of wide-angle lenses, we see that God finally succeeds in forming a fit habitation in which to dwell: a cosmic temple. A number of commentators have pointed out that ancient Near Eastern kings typically built temples to commemorate victory in battle, and Yahweh does something similar, creating a garden temple in Eden after subduing chaos.113 That garden temple becomes corrupt, however, and so begins a long restoration project that concludes only with the establishment of new heavens and a new earth: the cosmic temple. This may seem miles away from our immediate textual issue, but it is not.
Israel’s entry into the Promised Land hearkens back to the exodus from Egypt: in both cases, God enables Israel to pass through the waters (symbolic of chaos) and to anticipate the consummation of his drama of redemption at the final judgment, when the last battle will be fought by the Divine Warrior, and Satan and his minions will be defeated forever. This is the overarching framework that puts God’s command in Deuteronomy 20 into right perspective: it’s all about cleansing a temple space for God to dwell with his people (that is, not ethnic but ethic cleansing). The herem—the requirement to “dedicate” the Canaanites to destruction—ultimately pertains to holiness, not hostility: “It was not driven by genocidal or military considerations, but the need to eradicate evil and prevent evil from spreading to the new population.”114 It is noteworthy that the divine command strictly circumscribed the herem in space and time, that God threatened Israel with the same fate in case of disobedience (and made good his threat—see Jer. 25:9), and that it is a type of the ultimate destiny of people who oppose God.115 The reason why Jesus can say “Love your enemies” without condemning the Old Testament is because the conquest of Canaan was a unique and limited event—a single scene, now past—in the drama of redemption. Wright is correct when he says that the conquest of Canaan “was never meant to become a model for how all future generations were to behave towards their contemporary enemies.”116
The violence we see in the Old Testament, though real, is also typological, an anticipation of the bloody violence (the herem?) directed to Jesus on the cross, and thence of peace for all the nations. A biblically literate interpreter ought to hear overtones of the conquest narrative in the passion narrative as well; here too God spares nothing that breathes. The definitive battle over evil is indeed accomplished on the cross, where Jesus “breathed his last” (Matt. 27:50 NRSV, my emphasis). Jesus worked some violence himself when he “cleansed” the temple, driving out people who profaned it with their money (Mark 11:15–16). In other words, Jesus himself displayed the same jealous zeal for the house of God that Yahweh had earlier for his land and people. What is God’s must be consecrated to God, and to him alone. I believe that the difficulty we moderns have with the herem stems from an anemic sense of holiness and an underestimation of the scandal of idolatry, but that is a matter for another time.
The divine command (to a specific generation of Israelites) to kill the Canaanites, when properly interpreted in its redemptive historical context and viewed in the shadow of the cross, no more contradicts Jesus’ teaching (to his disciples, playing a different scene in the drama of redemption) than God’s holiness contradicts God’s love. The “answer” is simplicity itself: divine simplicity, namely, the idea that the divine attributes do not name “parts” of God but offer a perspective on the whole of God’s being. The two passages under consideration threaten inerrancy only if they contradict one another theologically, but they no more cancel each other out than does the holy love God displayed on the cross.
“Prefer the more difficult reading” is tried-and-true advice in the realm of text criticism, where the aim is to discern the most reliable manuscripts. The reasoning is straightforward: scribes and copyists are more likely to smooth out textual wrinkles than to introduce them.
The three case studies above are indeed difficult and, in each case, what generates the difficulty is the doctrine of inerrancy. If it were not for inerrancy, we could simply remove the difficulty by pronouncing the text to be in error: there was no historical fall of Jericho; Luke corrected himself and got his account of Paul’s conversion right the second time; God did not command Israel to exterminate the Canaanites. To be sure, inerrantists too sometimes seek to alleviate the difficulty by adducing historical “proofs” or resolving theological tensions. By contrast, a well-versed inerrancy, while it does not take pleasure in textual difficulties, is nevertheless willing to engage and, if need be, endure them.
We must beware of “cheap inerrancy” that merely professes belief in biblical truth but stops short of doing or enduring it. To insist that the doctrine of inerrancy is all that matters is but a half-truth. Implicit in my definition of inerrancy is that we be not only literate readers who rightly see what proposition an author is proposing (the literal sense) and what kind of attention to this proposition is required (literary sensibility) but also right-minded and right-hearted readers who respond rightly to each and every communicative act in Scripture (Spirit-given literacy). Ultimately, a well-versed approach to inerrancy constitutes nothing less than a standing requirement that the community of Scripture’s interpreters become persons capable of understanding, loving, and participating in the truth (Eph. 4). To know the truth, in the deep biblical and covenantal sense, is not merely to comprehend intellectually that to which the language corresponds but to respond in such a way that our lives correspond or conform to the truth. We must be passionate truth-seekers, truth-tellers, truth-doers, and truth-sufferers: interpreters who bear truthful witness to the truth of Scripture, not least by enduring its difficulties.
The last word in a well-versed, Augustinian approach to inerrancy belongs to Augustine: “And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand.”117 Indeed.118
I can only imagine that the experience of reading Kevin Vanhoozer’s essay must be something like the experience of sitting in his classroom. He is a keen thinker and a careful teacher, precise and measured in his arguments and expansive in the range of his intellectual engagements. I appreciate his scholarship and consider him a gift to evangelicalism.
His affirmation of inerrancy is strong—perhaps even stronger than he realizes. He tells us that when asked if he affirms the inerrancy of the Bible, he regularly refuses until “my interlocutor defines the term (or allows me to do so)” (p. 206). After reading his essay, I think evangelicalism might be better served if Vanhoozer would first affirm inerrancy and then use his gift of teaching to present what he calls a “well-versed” understanding of inerrancy.
Vanhoozer is concerned to avoid association with less than “well-versed” understandings of inerrancy. That is understandable and commendable. What he calls “poorly versed accounts of inerrancy” can do great harm, he argues, and “do not ultimately help the cause of biblical authority” (p. 200). That is true, of course, but it must also be stated, with even greater forthrightness, that denials of biblical inerrancy have often caused far greater damage—in some cases leading to a repudiation of essential doctrines of the Christian faith.
Vanhoozer’s essay contains a specific, clear, and sophisticated defense of biblical inerrancy as a truth claim and as a theological principle. He proposes that inerrancy, properly defined, means that the biblical authors “speak truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly)” (p. 213).
Before getting to his definition, Vanhoozer considers the utility and importance of inerrancy as an evangelical conviction. He suggests that there are three possibilities: inerrancy is either essential to evangelicalism, inimical to evangelical unity, or incidental “to the unity and integrity of evangelicalism” (p. 203). But before working through them, he rightly asserts that inerrancy is not “the essence of Christianity”—it is not a doctrine of “first dogmatic rank” (p. 203). I agree and would add that inerrancy, in itself, is not a doctrine that Martin Luther, for example, would have classified as articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae (an article by which the church stands or falls).
On the other hand, Luther did insist that the material principles of the faith (including justification by faith alone) rest upon the foundation of the formal principle, which is the authority of Holy Scripture. Vanhoozer is certainly right to argue that inerrancy is not a universal mark of the church in the same way that the doctrine of the Trinity is “a doctrine on which the gospel stands or falls” (p. 203). And yet, inerrancy is important, he asserts, because “a high view of biblical authority that affirms its entire trustworthiness is necessary to preserve the integrity of the gospel, and other candidate terms (for example, infallibility) that have sought to capture this notion have been diluted over time” (p. 203). So inerrancy is very important because it preserves something that must be said of Scripture and it says it better than any other term. Still, I agree with Vanhoozer that it would be unwise “to collapse everything we want to say about biblical authority into the nutshell of inerrancy” (p. 203).
In Vanhoozer’s final analysis, inerrancy is “neither inimical nor incidental to the present and future of evangelicalism” (p. 204). But nor is it essential. Vanhoozer settles for expedient as perhaps the best understanding of inerrancy’s utility and importance to evangelicalism. So, perhaps Vanhoozer’s approach should be considered an argument for the expediency of a well-versed understanding of biblical inerrancy for the present and future of evangelicalism.
But this raises an interesting point about Vanhoozer’s essay. He strongly affirms inerrancy. But his essay reveals more of a concern with misconstruals of inerrancy than with the very real concessions made by so many who claim to be evangelicals while not just misconstruing inerrancy but outright rejecting it. After reading his essay, it appears to me that Vanhoozer is far more concerned to prevent evangelicals from claiming too much than claiming too little about the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Bible.
Vanhoozer does affirm the need to define inerrancy carefully. (That was, of course, the very challenge undertaken by the framers of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.) Curiously, however, Vanhoozer explains that after Fuller Theological Seminary’s 1971 removal of language from its doctrinal statement affirming that the Bible is “free from all error in the whole and in the part,” the faculty is now apparently ready to use inerrancy again if they can define it in their own terms. Vanhoozer cites a recent statement from Fuller that offers a definition of inerrancy in these terms: “‘Where inerrancy refers to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches through the biblical writers, we support its use’” (p. 204). But that is precisely the sort of minimalistic definition of inerrancy that the Chicago statement framers sought to oppose and to expose as sub-evangelical. Tellingly, it is hard to imagine that Rudolf Bultmann would oppose such a definition of inerrancy.
So, to follow Vanhoozer’s presentation to this point, inerrancy is not exactly essential, though it is expedient—so expedient, in fact, that no other word accomplishes what inerrancy accomplishes. But what is needed is a “well-versed” understanding of inerrancy that avoids making the wrong kind of claims about the truthfulness of the Bible, while preserving every sense in which the Bible is true.
For Vanhoozer, a well-versed understanding of inerrancy is informed by an understanding of language and literary forms. What he then offers is a far more detailed and (arguably) sophisticated understanding of language than what is found in the Chicago statement. A well-versed concept of inerrancy “acknowledges that biblical truth involves form as well as content” and “takes account of the importance of rhetoric as well as logic” for understanding the Bible (p. 204). A well-versed understanding of inerrancy “gives priority to the Bible’s own teaching about God, language, and truth” and is not based on a philosophical pre-understanding of perfection. Vanhoozer argues for a “canonically conditioned concept of perfection” for a proper understanding of both God and his Word (p. 205).
In this regard, Vanhoozer’s argument for an “inerrancy of the cross” rather than an “inerrancy of glory” (pace tua Luther) is helpful—as is his excellent argument for an Augustinian approach based on faith seeking understanding.
So, what about the Chicago statement? Vanhoozer says many more good things about it than bad. Although he suggests that the statement would be strengthened by more attention to several points of definition (such as a definition of propositions), Vanhoozer seems to register basic agreement with the statement as a whole, understanding the intellectual conditions of the late 1970s and the historical context of the times. He even defends the statement against charges that the concern for inerrancy is basically modern, arguing that even Aristotle affirmed a form of the correspondence view of truth.
And yet, Vanhoozer makes two very interesting moves as his argument unfolds. First, he argues that inerrancy, properly speaking, refers only to affirmations found within the Bible. He asserts that “large swaths” of the Bible are passages that are not affirmations (p. 209). He explains that affirmations are assertions of fact and that “not all sentences in the Bible state facts” (p. 209).
Second, he seems very clearly to assert that inerrancy pertains to propositions, and to propositions only. He is certainly correct to point out that many sentences in the Bible are not, properly speaking, propositional statements at all. But the framers of the Chicago statement acknowledged the fact that much of the Bible contains non-propositional sentences. The statement itself acknowledges many different forms of biblical literature and argues for no comprehensive hermeneutical system, other than an affirmation of historical-grammatical interpretation.
I am concerned that Vanhoozer’s constriction of inerrancy is based on his own limitation of its domain to propositional sentences, or what he calls affirmations. This is inconsistent with his own sophisticated affirmation of the pluriform richness of the literary forms in the Bible. Surely he would agree, at least to some degree, that every text of Scripture, understood in its proper literary form, is making some form of affirmation. He criticizes some evangelicals (fairly I think) for claiming too much in terms of the propositional character of all biblical texts. I fear Vanhoozer claims too little in terms of the affirmations found within every text of Scripture—whatever its literary form.
After all, one of the problems directly addressed by the Chicago statement is the subversion of the biblical text by those who simply dehistoricize a text that clearly and irreducibly makes an historical claim.
Vanhoozer’s use of speech-act theory is always informative (as in his discussion of divine speech acts such as oaths and covenants), though it leaves me wondering exactly where we are to locate the inspiration of the biblical text. After reading Vanhoozer’s substantial corpus of writings, the question remains—and it is a question that hangs over his essay.
He says so many good and important things about the Bible, its truthfulness, and its proper interpretation. His emphasis on “right-hearted and right-minded readers” is brilliant and altogether healthy (p. 235). His argument for inerrancy with reference to the Council of Nicaea and homoousios is exceedingly helpful, affirming that “while the term inerrant or the concept of inerrancy may be new, the underlying judgment is not” (p. 213). His warning about excessive literalism is cogent, as is his reference to the importance of irony in the Bible. The careful reader of the Bible will pay close attention to the literary form of every text and a well-versed understanding of inerrancy “puts a premium on the responsibility of the reader to understand the text correctly (p. 223).
When approaching the three specific texts we were all asked to consider, Vanhoozer does not linger. He argues that archaeological findings are not sufficient to overcome the truthfulness of Joshua 6 and concludes that the chapter is “artful narrative testimony to an event that happened in Israel’s past” (p. 228). But he does not claim historical accuracy for the passage as a whole. Vanhoozer is right to argue that reading Joshua “simply to discover ‘what actually happened’” is to miss the larger point and purpose of the passage (p. 228). And yet, the text certainly does claim to record, in rather specific (though “artful”) detail, “what actually happened.”
Vanhoozer’s oddest statement comes at the end of his consideration of this passage: “Readers, especially those who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, are within their epistemic rights to trust this testimony until shown otherwise” (p. 228). What, I must ask, could show us otherwise? Vanhoozer’s words here seem incongruous with the entire thrust of his argument.
The accounts of Paul’s conversion are explained as serving a theological purpose through literary art. But, when Vanhoozer writes of the “revelatory event,” is he limiting that to the theophany? What about Luke’s writing of Acts? I’m left wondering how Vanhoozer would propose that we determine when Luke intends to make a clearly historical claim and when he is using literary devices to serve a theological purpose.
Vanhoozer’s consideration of the conquest of Canaan and the Sermon on the Mount is based on his own argument for a redemptive-historical hermeneutical framework. His argument is very brief, and leaves many questions unresolved. But he rightly calls readers to read Deuteronomy 20 “in the shadow of the cross” (p. 234).
Vanhoozer concludes that the three problematic biblical texts “are indeed difficult and, in each case, what generates the difficulty is the doctrine of inerrancy” (p. 234). If not for inerrancy, he says, “we could simply remove the difficulty by pronouncing the text to be in error” (p. 234). While he makes a cogent point, he also points to what a rejection of inerrancy would then allow: a wholesale reconceptualization of the Christian faith. Vanhoozer’s much needed and welcomed advice: a well-versed inerrancy will take no pleasure in textual difficulties, but will both engage and endure them (p. 234).
Kevin Vanhoozer is certainly correct to warn against “cheap inerrancy” that affirms the truthfulness of the Bible without doing or enduring the Word of God (p. 234). And he is equally correct, and even more urgent, when he calls evangelicals to a well-versed inerrancy that “constitutes nothing less than a standing requirement that the community of Scripture’s interpreters become persons capable of understanding, loving, and participating in the truth (Eph. 4)” (p. 235).
I join Kevin Vanhoozer in praying that evangelicals will show themselves to be that community of interpreters who rightly read the Scriptures. I believe that inerrancy is more than expedient to that end; it is essential to our full and well-versed affirmation of the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture.
Here, as always, I appreciate Vanhoozer’s efforts in laying out a constructive theological landscape. I also value the perspective Vanhoozer brings to the discussion, that of a theologian engaging philosophical hermeneutics and the history of Christian thought, and bringing this to bear on the nature of contemporary biblical interpretation. There is always a wider spectrum of Christian thought and church tradition to be considered as we engage Scripture in our unique moment, and I resonate with much of Vanhoozer’s thinking.
Vanhoozer poses the question of whether inerrancy is a distraction (with infallible being a better term) or evangelicalism’s rallying cry. His essay is in essence a defense of retaining inerrancy, when properly defined; there are good (well versed) and bad (poorly versed) articulations of inerrancy. While the latter fixes on what I might call “brute propositions,” the former understands the truth of Scripture as a theological articulation that accounts for how Scripture works, i.e., as literature and as speech-act communication. In my opinion, this leitmotif in Vanhoozer’s body of work is a genuine contribution to evangelical theology.
With that generally supportive posture in mind, and seeing myself very much in conversation with Vanhoozer, I want to restrict my comments here to those aspects of his essay that either raise some questions for me or that I feel do not adequately address the problem before us. For example, Vanhoozer states early on that “inerrancy” entails only that “the Bible is authoritative over any domain God addresses” (p. 202) This type of assertion is common among inerrantists, intended (wisely) to keep one from pressing inerrancy too far (as, I imagine, Vanhoozer would contend Mohler has done). Of course, Vanhoozer’s essay expands this definition, but at the end I was still not sure what a “domain” is, what it means for God to address one, or what factors help determine when that is happening. I sensed already here that this language could be used to deflect the matter of Canaanite extermination or the fall of Jericho artificially away from the troubling historical issues by relegating these narratives to some other “proper” theological domain. This suspicion seemed to be confirmed later in Vanhoozer’s handling of these issues.
Elsewhere Vanhoozer notes that, though historical problems of Scripture still remain, archaeology has resolved “many” of them. My initial reaction to this seemingly incidental comment was confirmed when I got to Vanhoozer’s handling of the fall of Jericho and Canaanite extermination. I do not wish to be unnecessarily repetitive of my similar comments in responding to Mohler and Bird, but, as innocent as this comment may seem, “many” unwittingly underrepresents the problem before us. Archaeology is not an enemy to Christian faith as sometimes caricatured, but to say “many” issues have been resolved is misleading. In fact, one of the very troubling aspects of archaeological study is the serious challenges it has posed to the overall plot of Israel’s historical narrative—a discreet people group that was enslaved in Egypt, delivered en masse, and then invaded and conquered Canaan as an outside force. The issue is not entirely dismal, of course, as some elements of the biblical story have generally been confirmed or at least found to be consistent with the archaeological record, but Vanhoozer’s casual comment suggests a more positive picture than is warranted, which inhibits the kind of conversations needed concerning inerrancy.
Vanhoozer’s apparently unqualified endorsement of Augustine’s handling of interpretive challenges raised some questions for me too: “The purpose of inerrancy is to cultivate readers who confront biblical difficulties as did Augustine: ‘And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand.’ Difficulties are not necessarily indications of the dark side of Scripture’s moon, only spots in its sun” (p. 203). Taken without qualification, this suggests there are in fact no genuine challenges to inerrancy, only our interpretation of an inerrant text. I am not exactly sure how, practically speaking, this claim differs substantively from some of Mohler’s. But more important, as Bird points out in his essay, Augustine’s comment pertains to the careless production of Latin texts and should not be applied to an evangelical defense of inerrancy, and will certainly not serve to guide us in handling our three passages. It is counterproductive to “cultivate readers” who would approach archaeological problems, for example, by applying Augustine’s mindset here.
Several other assertions concerning what inerrancy necessarily entails were more distracting to me than helpful, and could potentially obstruct careful consideration of our three passages, if taken at face value. For example, inerrancy is not essential to the Gospel per se but is essential to its proclamation; inerrancy pertains only to what Scripture asserts, not to “biblical commands, promises, warnings, and so on” (p. 203; I don’t know what “asserts” means or on what basis that distinction is made); inerrancy is a mark of those who are “consistently evangelical” (p. 204); inerrancy cannot be proven but is “entailed by dominical and apostolic teaching about the nature of Scripture” (p. 204; citing J. I. Packer). These are some of the very issues that need to be brought to the table and evaluated by observing how the Bible “behaves,” rather than introducing them as a priori commitments. For example, on the last point, the midrashic handling of the Old Testament by Jesus and the apostles—an observation that results from historical study—should temper any appeal to their “teaching about the nature of Scripture” that does not bring front and center the manner in which the New Testament writers actually handle Scripture.
Similarly, when defining “well-versed inerrancy,” Vanhoozer counsels to give “priority to the Bible’s own teaching about God, language, and truth” (p. 205), by which he means keeping in view the “overarching story line of the Bible that features the economic Trinity (that is, the words and acts of God in history)” (p. 205). Vanhoozer is saying, in essence, that well-versed inerrancy keeps in mind everything the Bible says about “God, language, and truth” by means of a canonical and Trinitarian reading. I think Vanhoozer’s thinking is vastly more nuanced than others, but is not the entire issue before us what it means to adhere to the Bible’s teaching on “God, language, and truth?” I don’t think any of the contributors of this volume would disagree, yet the final products diverge significantly.
What I like most in Vanhoozer’s model of well-versed inerrancy is his “inerrancy of the cross,” which “understands truth not merely in terms of the philosopher’s idea of correspondence but, biblically first and theologically foremost, in terms of covenantal faithfulness and testimonial endurance” (p. 205). This seems a theologically wise orientation in general, though I would be more overt in including the notion of the humiliation of the cross as a way of informing our expectations of the nature of Scripture. He picks up this train of thought later by tying the matter of inerrancy to the person of Christ, in that both Christ and Scripture communicate truth about “what God is” (p. 205). I find the summation promising, though, again, I wonder how this will be applied to the thorny challenges we face. What alerts me to a potential problem is Vanhoozer’s following sentence: “Words that purport to communicate what is yet fail to do so are false—unreliable, untrustworthy, perhaps even lies” (p. 000). But again, the entire question before us is the manner in which the words of Scripture “purport to communicate what is.” As stated, and trying to integrate Vanhoozer’s discussion thus far, I am still unclear how a statement like this can handle conflicting historical assessments in Scripture. How does Vanhoozer’s theory work itself out when handling the particulars of the biblical texts? I am not yet certain where this is going.
Vanhoozer’s assessment of the Chicago statement is more positive than I feel is warranted. Vanhoozer seems convinced that, when all the facts are in, the inerrancy of the autographs, when properly interpreted, are faithful and true guides to faith and practice (citing David Dockery). I align myself more with Bird’s criticisms on this matter specifically and the CSBI in general, that autographs neither exist nor would they help if they did. I also find unhelpful Vanhoozer’s summative definition of inerrancy: “the authors speak the truth in all things they affirm (when they make affirmations), and will eventually be seen to have spoken truly (when right readers read rightly)” (p. 207, my emphasis). This is common evangelical language, echoing the CSBI, and I am never quite sure what to do with it when I see it. For one thing, we have the perennial problem of what “affirm” actually means, and Vanhoozer’s subsequent thoughts did not clear this up for me. Further, “eventually” raises flags. Though on one level a wise call to patience in interpretation, it can be (and is regularly) used as a means of forestalling serious objections to inerrancy (what I outline in my essay as the “be patient” and “not impossible” apologetic).
I am sympathetic to Vanhoozer’s caution that “to insist that true statements are always exact representations of extralinguistic reality leads to overly literalistic interpretations” (p. 210). Still, as I commented in my response to Bird, allowing for inexact representations of extralinguistic reality in Scripture is not the main challenge confronting inerrancy. Far more pressing is the perennial inerrantist problem, pervasive in Scripture, of the relationship between text and event, which our three passages touch on. I am left wondering how Vanhoozer will deal with the difficulties of the three passages, i.e., to what extent he would see them as truly challenging to inerrancy, or simply challenging to a poorly versed version of inerrancy. I contend they are challenges to Vanhoozer’s well-versed definition as well.
Related is Vanhoozer’s view that “we must first discern what a passage or a text is about, and then ask how it is about it” (p. 218). Yet discerning what a text is about—by which I take it Vanhoozer means the author’s intention for writing it—is the very thing that so quickly eludes us. He illustrates his principle by referring to the often-cited comment by Jesus that the mustard seed is the smallest of all. Vanhoozer resolves this difficulty by telling us that Jesus did not intend to “affirm a botanical truth” but merely intended to draw an analogy that his hearers would understand. I am sympathetic to Vanhoozer’s speech-act theory of inerrancy that lies behind this comment, but at the end of the day, I am not sure how Vanhoozer knows what Jesus’ illocutionary intention is for referring to the mustard seed. A simpler and more convincing solution for me is that Jesus’ claim about the kingdom was illustrated by an assumed “truth claim” for that time about mustard seeds. I do not see what is lost by affirming that Jesus was a first-century man and thought like one. That is one of the implications of the “irreverent doctrine” of the incarnation, as C. S. Lewis put it.
Concerning the fall of Jericho, I am not entirely sure where Vanhoozer lands. On the one hand, it is clear that “what happened” matters to Vanhoozer, in that he contends that the accounts in Joshua are not “myths, or even legends” (p. 228). On the other hand, asking “what happened” is a misreading of the text, for it fails to do justice to the “main point of the discourse, which is to communicate a theological interpretation of what happened” (p. 228). Despite Vanhoozer’s arguments, I am still left feeling he is sidestepping the historical problems. Along the way, Vanhoozer contends that the archaeological data are ambiguous and “inconclusive,” and he repeats his opinion that modern precision or “factual reporting” was never the author’s intention anyway. But as I mentioned in my previous responses, (1) outside of inerrantists, archaeologists don’t see the ambiguity, and (2) modern precision is not the issue but whether the basic plot of the biblical story reflects historical events. Vanhoozer seems to remain noncommittal on the specific matter of whether the walls of Jericho actually fell. The text says they did. So did they? Must they? Does Vanhoozer’s focus on discourse have space for an interpretation of the story where its main historical element—the sacking of Jericho—did not happen but was, perhaps, only recalled to have happened by the writers for theological reasons? But if, on the other hand, it is necessary for Vanhoozer that Jericho’s fall is genuinely historical, on what basis does he make that claim, other than the doctrinal requirement of inerrancy?
I appreciate Vanhoozer’s handling of Acts 9 and 22. He accurately depicts the problem as one of hearing (not seeing), and explores exegetical issues concerning the Greek texts. He and I are in substantive agreement that Luke’s depiction of Paul is analogous to Old Testament call narratives (he mentions Moses’ call), and that the details of Acts 22 suggest that Luke was portraying Paul alone as God’s messenger to the “ends of the world.”
Vanhoozer’s handling of Canaanite extermination is less agreeable to me. He cautions against judging God on the basis of our own moral code, and I agree in principle, though his reason for this caution is the preservation of inerrancy, which is the cart pulling the horse. Also, I feel Vanhoozer is shortchanging his opponents, since the moral code that raises such trouble for Christian readers is not entirely their own but from Jesus’ own words. Further, a key factor in handling this issue, routinely marginalized or missed entirely in evangelical discussions, is how Yahweh’s behavior toward the Canaanites is utterly at home in ancient tribal ways of thinking. The truly pressing questions are not abstract philosophical ones, like, “How can a good and loving God order the extermination of the Canaanites?” but questions informed by Israel’s historical context, like, “How is it that Yahweh is acting so much like the gods of other nations and not like what Jesus says about him?”
It will also not do to ameliorate Canaanite extermination by appealing to passages where God shows mercy, since that mercy is shown to the Israelites, his own people, not to the nations. One day, as the biblical story goes, the nations will come around and submit to Yahweh, but for now they pose a threat to the chosen people of God (and the story of Jonah is the exception that does not cancel out this dominant theme). Neither is it useful to understand herem as an issue of holiness and not hostility. In brief, concerning Canaanite extermination, I see Vanhoozer repeating common but erroneous arguments. If one can look past his indelicate style of engagement, Thom Stark’s responses, in my judgment, put these common defenses to rest.119
Kevin Vanhoozer begins his essay with a quote from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In turn, I reply with a quote from Shakespeare’s Othello—specifically, the words of the arch villain, Iago, who said, “I’d rather have this tongue cut from my mouth than it should do offence to Michael Cassio.” Although Iago very much intends both to speak and do great offense to Michael Cassio, I’d rather be forced to listen to several hours of Al Gore speeches than to give offence to Kevin Vanhoozer. Vanhoozer is my favorite American theologian, who has provided me with much succor. During my doctoral studies, I was routinely chastised by postmodern professors at postgraduate seminars for my presumption of authorial intent and belief in textual realism. As such, Vanhoozer’s book Is There a Meaning in This Text? was my sword and shield, enabling me to intelligently articulate the view that authors are not dead, texts are not just mirrors, and communities are not corporate papacies who can make stuff up ex nihilo.120 Furthermore, Vanhoozer’s work on theological prolegomena has significantly shaped my own formulation as to how to make the triune God’s self-communication fundamental to evangelical theology.121
There are several commendable features of Vanhoozer’s “Augustinian Inerrancy,” including (1) his placement of inerrancy in the domain of divine affirmations given in Scripture; (2) his definition of inerrancy: “God’s authoritative Word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything it claims about what was, what is, and what will be” (p. 202), which is satisfactory for both a biblical scholar and a global evangelical; (3) his claim that inerrancy is not “essential” but “expedient,” which is worthy of consideration; (4) his rejection of inerrancy based on abstract notions of a Perfect Being with a Perfect Book, and his replacing it with a version of inerrancy based on the triune God’s self-disclosure in his canonical-linguistic speech-acts, which is indeed preferable for its nuanced linguistics, of which the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is lacking; (5) his equally admirable recognition that while the precise concept of inerrancy is actually new and culturally located, nonetheless the underlying value and concern of inerrancy is universal and valid in the church’s historic faith; (6) his giving a reasonable amount of weight to Scripture’s textual phenomena and how it constrains the claims we can make about what the text affirms and its overall veracity; and (7) finally, his Yoda-like aphorism that “Inerrancy alone does not a hermeneutic make” (p. 224). Indeed, Vanhoozer brings the hermeneutical sophistication, literary sensitivity, and theological depth that the American inerrancy tradition so desperately needs if it is to be more than a shibboleth in North American evangelical tribalism.
Those are the positive aspects, but now, alas, it is time to get my Iago on and get all Shakespearean villain on Vanhoozer.
First, Vanhoozer relies initially on a rather superficial approach to hard textual questions. Vanhoozer’s preliminary comments on inerrancy set out the doctrine within the context of the efficacy of God’s Word within the domain of God’s knowledge and the purpose for which the Word is given. This guarantees from the outset that God’s Word is unified, coherent, and noncontradictory. He then recognizes the Bible’s many textual “difficulties,” but he resorts to addressing them in standard yet simplistic ways: wait for an explanation to emerge, rethink your interpretation, or else the manuscript you are using must be faulty (p. 202). The problem here is twofold: (1) Several of the “difficulties” are not simply interpretive problems, like a Gordian’s knot sitting there idly waiting for some wise exegetical knight on an archaeological steed to break it with the sword of a new interpretation, a new artifact, or a new manuscript find. Many of these “difficulties” are contradictions particularly when one presupposes the type of precision that the CSBI attributes to Scripture.122 Vanhoozer’s Augustinian inerrancy needs to wrestle with some up-close and personal Origenesque exegesis to see how hard it is to solve these problems with stock-standard explanations. (2) The opening précis on inerrancy was all the more odd since Vanhoozer goes on to develop a more compelling approach to inerrancy that is consistent with how literary intentions, artistic license, and ancient writing conventions explain that these “difficulties” are completely congruent with the truth claims made in Scripture. Thus, I wonder if Vanhoozer’s Augustinian Inerrancy really needs Augustine’s explanation that all “difficulties” are just a matter of figuring out what went wrong with my interpretation, translation, or manuscript.
Second, I am not sure that Vanhoozer has completely demonstrated a necessary link between the Bible’s historical referentiality and its theological coherence. Vanhoozer claims that inerrancy functions to give believers confidence that Scripture’s teaching is “ultimately unified and coherent” (p. 202), and he marries that to an Aristotlean and Augustinian correspondence theory of truth (pp. 218, 214). This provides the grounds for his notion of “covenantal correspondence,” with a faithful fit between God’s words and God’s deeds (p. 216). In terms of how that plays out, with reference to the destruction of Jericho, Vanhoozer states that what is at stake is not simply the veracity of Joshua’s account but that the entire divine promise hinges on the conquest being a historical reality (p. 225). I believe that Vanhoozer is right that the biblical account of the conquest is true history artfully presented, not literalistic, somewhat hyperbolic even, and the main point of the story is that God has made good on his promise to give Israel the land. However, I’m left with several questions, such as, Does the fulfillment of the divine promise require a historical event behind it approximate to what is recorded in Joshua’s account of Jericho? Could the promise still be made good if in fact several thousand Hebrew slaves from Egypt spasmodically drifted into Canaan over a generation? How much hyperbole or artistry would disqualify the account from being historical? At the end of the day, I believe with Vanhoozer that the God who raised Jesus from the dead can and does work in history. Even so, I want to know what prevents Vanhoozer from being an ahistorical coherentist (i.e., what actually happened does not matter as long as the biblical claims are coherent at a theological level). I still want from Vanhoozer a thicker account of God’s revelation in history and its relationship to his notion of “covenantal correspondence.”
Third, Vanhoozer’s engagement with the CSBI was critical and yet constructive. In terms of his opening question (“Can anything good come out of the 1970s?”), I would have to reply, “Yes, the movie Star Wars and the musical Evita.” But before I sing, “Don’t cry for me Chewbacca,” I have to protest that Vanhoozer has not addressed one of my concerns about the CSBI, namely its lack of catholicity and its deficient interest in global perspectives. That said, I think Vanhoozer’s Augustinian model is one of the better ways to infuse some creedal theology and to retrieve some patristic voices to shape future discussions of inerrancy.
Let me finish by saying that Kevin James Vanhoozer’s approach is praiseworthy; it assuages many concerns about inerrancy; it retains a strong affirmation of biblical veracity; and my hope is that any revision to popular and official statements of inerrancy should give the KJV perspective, despite some contested points, strong consideration.
The work of Kevin Vanhoozer is on the cutting edge of evangelical theology. In numerous works he has sought to enlarge the evangelical theological project and bring it into conversation with intellectual currents beyond its standard profile. In doing this work, he employs the label postconservative to describe some elements of his work, while at the same time resists association with the postconservative movement. As one who is quite happy with the contours of the postconservative approach to evangelical theology, I confess that I often feel as though Vanhoozer is trying to have his theological cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he pushes the envelope of evangelical theology, while on the other hand he often seems, from my perspective, to shrink back from the logical conclusion of his positions. I appreciate this first tendency, but I find the second puzzling. Of course, I have little doubt that he would respond that I have misunderstood him or failed to grasp the nuances of his views and that, if I did, I would see why the conclusion I draw from his work pushes matters too far.
I mention this because his essay in this volume is one with which I resonate at many levels, perhaps more than any of the others. Vanhoozer has articulated my concerns about the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy better than I have and, at many points in his essay, I found myself thinking, “Well said. I wish I had thought to put it that way.” Of course, no one is able to match Vanhoozer’s rhetorical flourish, although I confess that I sometimes find it a bit wearisome and feel that, with a good editor, he could say the same things with more brevity and, hence, more clarity. Nevertheless, he has a marvelous way of challenging many aspects of the evangelical status quo, while remaining in good standing with most of the evangelical community. That is a gift.
I particularly appreciated his use of the metaphor of the biblical canon as a collection of different kinds of maps, coupled with the assertion that maps reflect certain interests and points of view that are specific to their particular concerns. He concludes that there is in fact “no such thing as a universal all-purpose map. The metaphor of the map reminds us that there is more than one kind of fit” and worries that “some theories of inerrancy imply that there is only one way to map the world correctly” (p. 210). In his book, The Drama of Doctrine, he puts the matter quite well: “strictly speaking, the diverse canonical parts neither contradict nor cohere with one another, for both these notions presuppose either the presence or absence of conceptual consistency. But this is to assume that the various books of the canon are playing the same language game. They are not. Two notions that occupy different conceptual systems are nevertheless compatible if neither negates the other.”123 Here I am in general agreement with Vanhoozer, as is evident in my own approach to inerrancy. Where we differ concerns the implications of this approach for the discipline of theology. It is on this question that I will focus my response.
In my essay, I assert the following: “A single, normative systematic interpretation of the whole Bible is neither attainable nor desirable. Like the problematic notion of a cultural melting pot in which numerous distinct cultures come together and form one new universal culture made up of all the others, something of value is always left out or excluded. When we attempt to ease the difficulties of the multiple perspectives in Scripture to make matters more compact, clear, and manageable, we suffer the loss of plurality and diversity that is woven into the very fabric of Scripture, and by extension, the divine design of God” (p. 277). This seems to me to be the clear implication of the diverse plurality of Scripture. Based on my reading of his essay in this volume as well as his other works, my assumption is that Vanhoozer would generally agree with this statement, especially given his assertions that there is no such thing as a universal all-purpose map and that while the diverse parts of the biblical canon do not contradict or negate each other, neither do they cohere.
However, a recent exchange between us covering similar territory in the Southeastern Theological Review indicates that Vanhoozer does not share my conclusions about the implications of biblical plurality.124 He does agree that Scripture is characterized by plurality: “What we have in Scripture, a plurality of human perspectives, is the divinely inspired refraction of this light—a canonical coat of many colors. Each of these canonical perspectives gives us access to a particular aspect of God’s truth and reality. Franke will shout ‘Huzzah!’ when I say that it takes a plurality of canonical perspectives fully to render theological truth. This is my working assumption: that systematic theologians need to attend to the variety of authorial voices, forms of biblical discourse, and theological perspectives in Scripture.”125 While I am in substantial agreement with this statement, an important difference between us is worth noting. For Vanhoozer, it is a plurality of canonical perspectives that are required to fully render theological truth. I believe that while the canon norms theological discourse, it does not exhaust it. Put another way, theological truth cannot be fully rendered only with reference to the canon. As a paradigmatic as well as normative witness to truth, the Bible invites greater plurality, both practical and theological, than that contained in its pages in order that the mission of God might be continually expanded and incarnated among all people. I hold this conviction based on the shape and content of the canon. While I agree with my critics that this perspective will lead to a very different approach to theology, I see no reason whatsoever why this position is inconsistent with inerrancy. In fact, I believe that inerrancy pushes us in precisely this direction.
A second concern I have with Vanhoozer is a fear that what he grants with one hand, the plurality of Scripture and the necessity for multiple maps, he takes away with the other through an insistence on a universal ontology. Space does not permit full citation or full discussion here, and I urge readers to examine the full text of his remarks in the Southeastern Theological Review. While acknowledging Aristotle’s assertion that being may be spoken of in many ways, Vanhoozer admits that he does not think that there can be numerous (a plurality?) of ontologies of God. He says that it seems to him that there can only be one right answer to certain ontological questions and worries that I have inadvertently “short-circuited the move from exegesis to theology, and hence faith’s search for understanding, by exaggerating the inadequacy of second-order theological discourse to its subject matter.”126 I do not believe I have questioned the adequacy of theological language for the purpose of establishing right relations with God. Rather, I have asserted its limitations for the task constructing a universal theology. Perhaps in my zeal to deconstruct the pretensions of systematic theology, ontology, and metaphysics and the damage they have done to the witness of the gospel I have sometimes overstated matters, in which case I am open to some course correction.
Nevertheless, I continue to believe that the limitations of human language present serious challenges to the optimism of Vanhoozer concerning the ability of systematic theologians to ascertain the supposedly deeper and underlying unities of the text. He states, “I do not concede the point that the exegete is more biblical than the systematic theologian simply because the latter works with abstract constructions. On the contrary: theologians too clarify the grammar of the text, though on a deeper level … Implied in what we say about things is what we think these things are. I believe that our grammatical analysis of biblical discourse is theologically incomplete until we have spelled out its ontological implications.”127 The challenge of course is that ontology is just as contextual and situated as any other human intellectual undertaking. It is reflective of particular situations and circumstances. Yet to my ear it seems that Vanhoozer might be resistant to this notion. His assertion that ontology probes the deeper order of reality sounds like yet another enterprise in getting behind the text of Scripture to its deeper and more unifying substructure.
Interestingly, Vanhoozer acknowledges this concern while suggesting that his own approach will avoid these pitfalls: “I agree with Franke about the pretension of metaphysics if by ‘metaphysics’ we mean a ready-made set of categories that we impose on Scripture. There are numerous examples of theologians doing this. It is all too tempting to ride the categorical coattails of whatever metaphysic happens to be the most fashionable. The aim of remythologizing, however, is the countercultural way of deep exegesis and theo-ontology.”128 I fear that in spite of his awareness of the dangers of metaphysical pretension, the assumption of ontological universality will produce the very difficulties he is seeking to correct.
Alternatively, I suggest that the inerrant plurality of Scripture points us away from the traditional assumptions of systematic theology. In its place I propose a missional approach to theology that takes issues of location, culture, and context far more seriously. It is shaped by a commitment to missiology at its center. Missional theology takes into account the plurality that is contained in the biblical canon and does not proceed on the assumption that various genres and strands of the canon can be arranged into a uniform system of teaching. As such, it resists the danger of sectarianism inherent a systematic approach to theology. This occurs when different expressions of the church conclude that they have arrived at the one true system of doctrine. Inevitably such communities find themselves in conflict with other traditions that have come to different conclusions. The resulting fragmentation and divisiveness in the church is in clear contrast to the work of the Spirit in promoting the unity of the church. More important than this practical concern for the relationship between Christian communities is the failure of systematic theology to bear proper witness to the infinite qualitative distinction between God and ourselves. Much more needs to be said about this, but for the time being, I will leave the last word about systematization in theology to Karl Barth:
In this work—it cannot be otherwise in view of its object—we have to do with the question of truth. It is, therefore, inevitable that as a whole and in detail the aim must be definiteness and coherence, and it is to be hoped that the definiteness and sequence of the truth will actually be disclosed. But this being the case, is it not also inevitable that “something like a system” will assert itself more or less spontaneously in dogmatic work? Why, then, should a “system” be so utterly abhorrent? If it asserts itself spontaneously in this way, can it not be forgiven? And if so, why should we be frightened away by a law forbidding systems? May it be that a “system” which asserts itself spontaneously (not as a system, but as a striving for definiteness and coherence) signifies obedience and is therefore a shadow of the truth? It may well be so. But even in this case the danger is still there. The fact that unauthorised systematisation may be forgiven does not mean that the tendency to systematisation is authorised. Nor does the fact that even in the fatal form of an intrinsically unauthorised systematisation true obedience may finally be demonstrated and a shadow of the truth disclosed.129
1. A proposition is the content of a communicative act. Coming to appreciate both the distinction and the relation between sentences and propositions will prove crucial to my account.
2. John Stott says that one reason why inerrancy makes him uncomfortable is because God’s revelation in Scripture is so rich “that it cannot be reduced to a string of propositions which invites the label truth or error” (Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity, and Faithfulness, rev. ed. [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2003], 61). He also worries that inerrancy seems “to make us excessively defensive in relation to apparent discrepancies” instead of encouraging us to search the Scriptures to grow in grace and knowledge of God (Ibid.).
3. See David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 3–19.
4. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1981), 1:86.
5. Michael Rea suggests that Scripture has authority over “the domain defined by the text itself” (“Authority and Truth,” in D. A. Carson, ed., The Scripture Project, 2 vols. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, forthcoming]).
6. See John D. Woodbridge, “Evangelical Self-Identity and the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy,” in Andreas J. Köstenberger and Robert W. Yarbrough, eds., Understanding the Times: New Testament Studies in the 21st Century (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2011), 104–38.
7. George Steiner, “On Difficulty,” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 18–47.
8. Merchant of Venice, act 2, scene 2.
9. Augustine, Letter to Jerome, 82.3.
10. Contra Kenton L. Sparks, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012).
11. Stephen R. Holmes, “Evangelical Doctrines of Scripture in Transatlantic Perspective,” Evangelical Quarterly 81.1 (2009), 62.
12. Timothy Ward, Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2009), 130.
13. Ward views inerrancy as a true description of the Bible, but not in the top rank of attributes inasmuch as it derives from inspiration (Ibid.).
14. J. I. Packer, “Upholding the Unity of Scripture Today,” in Honouring the Written Word of God, Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, vol. 3 (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 141.
15. Fuller Theological Seminary, “What We Believe and Teach,” http://documents.fuller.edu/provost/aboutfuller/believe_teach.asp (April 12, 2013).
16. Eugene Rogers’s paraphrase of Thomas Aquinas’s description of the literal sense (“How the Virtues of the Interpreter Presuppose and Perfect Hermeneutics,” Journal of Religion 76 1996., 64–81).
17. William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 123.
18. See my Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 94–98.
19. For a further elaboration of this point, see Robert W. Yarbrough, “Inerrancy’s Complexities: Grounds for Grace in the Debate,” Presbyterion 37, no. 2 (2011), 85–100.
20. Paul Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Norman L. Geisler, ed., Inerrancy (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1980), 293.
21. Ibid., 294.
22. David Dockery, “Can Baptists Affirm the Reliability and Authority of the Bible?” SBC Today (March 1985), 16.
23. David Dockery, “Variations on Inerrancy,” SBC Today (May 1986), 10–11.
24. By “right readers,” I mean right-hearted and right-minded readers: those who read in faith and humility, not to mention the general prerequisites for literary competence. Strictly speaking, I should also say “as originally given” to specify that I am not claiming that any particular copy or translation is inerrant (and thus I am acknowledging the importance of textual criticism). However, because this qualification does not distinguish my position from others, and because I have nothing else to add to standard evangelical explanations of why it is important, I have seen fit to consign it, not to the margins of my discourse, but to this footnote.
25. Metaphysics, 1011b25.
26. Some evangelicals radicalize Calvin’s notion of accommodation, arguing that God adopts not only the raw communicative materials at hand but also the fallen and therefore errant human perspectives as well. It is not clear, however, why everything humans say should be somehow mistaken or faulty. If the incarnation is the paradigmatic divine accommodation, and if the man Jesus is impeccable (incapable of sinning), then we may say that God assumes the createdness but not the fallenness of humanity, in which case inerrancy is the textual counterpart of impeccability.
27. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975).
28. Jesus also predicted that the disciples would find a donkey, and they did (Matt. 21:6), so strictly speaking, we should say that he commanded and asserted. Speakers and authors can do more than one thing at once with their words.
29. See the helpful critique of the “mental-picture theory” of truth and reference in Vern S. Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels: A God-Centered Approach to the Challenges of Harmonization (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2012), chap. 7.
30. See James Barr, “Literality,” Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989), 412–28.
31. Cf. C. S. Lewis: “Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.” (Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1960], 66.)
32. See my Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster, 2005), 295–97.
33. Something counts as an “error” only if it fails to make good on its own claim. It is wrong to say that a map (or a text) is an error for not doing something it does not set out to do. Readers should judge a text by its own standards of correctness and precision only. Error is a context-dependent notion. What might count as an error in the context of scientific historiography (or the natural sciences) might not count as an error in the context of less exacting, “ordinary” forms of discourse.
34. Unfortunately, I am not as enthusiastic about the 1982 Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, which to my mind is a retrograde effort because of an overemphasis on historical reference (that is, factuality) and a subsequent lack of emphasis on the literary sense (that is, form).
35. Mark D. Thompson, “Toward a Theological Account of Biblical Inerrancy,” in James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary, eds., Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2012), 72.
36. Ward, Words of Life, 134.
37. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, “What Does ‘Inerrancy’ Mean?” Concordia Theological Monthly
36, no. 8 (1965), 591.
38. See John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1982).
39. Augustine believed that the Bible is “without error” [sine errore], but he also interpreted the Bible in ways that go beyond grammatical-historical exegesis.
40. David Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” in Stephen Fowl, ed., The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 93.
41. See the helpful survey by Jason S. Sexton, “How Far beyond Chicago? Assessing Recent Attempts to Reframe the Inerrancy Debate,” Themelios 34, no. 1 (2009), 26–49.
42. In terms of David Dockery’s categories, my well-versed approach is a combination of his third and sixth types, hence a “critically nuanced” inerrancy (see Dockery, “Variations on Inerrancy,” 10–11).
43. Soliloquies, 2.5.8.
44. On True Religion, 36.66.
45. On the various elements of discourse, see my “Apostolic Discourse and Its Developments,” in Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance, eds., Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2008), 191–207.
46. Carl F. H. Henry, God Who Speaks and Shows, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 3 (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1979), 401.
47. Ibid., 453.
48. Ibid., 456.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 457.
51. For views on propositions in medieval and modern logic and rhetoric, see Gabriel Nuchelmans, Late-Scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980).
52. Ward, Words of Life, 136. See also William Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000), 277–80.
53. See Paul R. Williamson, Sealed with an Oath: Covenant in God’s Unfolding Purpose (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2007).
54. Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2012), 132.
55. See further my “From Speech Acts to Scripture Acts: The Covenant of Discourse and the Discourse of the Covenant,” in First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2002), 127–58.
56. 56. See Dennis T. Olson, “Truth and the Torah: Reflections on Rationality and the Pentateuch,” in Alan G. Padgett and Patrick R. Keifert, eds., But Is It True? The Bible and the Question of Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006), 16–33, and Roger Nicole, “The Biblical Concept of Truth,” in D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., Scripture and Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983), 287–98.
57. Paul Griffiths, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2004), 25.
58. See George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1989). My own view corresponds (!) most closely to minimalist accounts of truth as correspondence as found in William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 22–26, and David Clark, To Know and Love God: Method in Theology (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 380–82.
59. Testimony features in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not bear false witness” (Ex. 20:16 ESV). Moses’s law also requires the testimony of at least two witnesses in trials involving capital punishment (Deut. 17:6; 19:15). John the Baptist “came for testimony [martyrion], to bear witness to the light” (John 1:7 RSV). Jesus’ works, the Scriptures, and the voice from heaven all bear witness to who he is (John 5:30–39). The author of the fourth Gospel, who claims to be an eyewitness, explicitly says he is giving testimony about the things that took place in fulfillment of Scripture (John 19:35–36) so that his readers may believe the best of all propositions: that Jesus is the Christ (John 20:31). See my “Trials of Truth: Mission, Martyrdom and the Epistemology of the Cross,” in First Theology, 337–73.
60. If time and space permitted, I would reflect on 1 John 5:6–10 to expand on the Spirit’s role in the triune economy of testimony.
61. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 10.
62. Mark Thompson rightly identifies God’s personal veracity as a pillar of the doctrine of inerrancy (“Toward a Theological Account of Biblical Inerrancy,” 83–86).
63. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 260 (italics his).
64. “Every statement accurately corresponds to truth just as far forth as affirmed” (A. A. Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, Inspiration [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1979], 29, my emphasis).
65. For a spirited defense of what I am calling literalism, see Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lapore, “A Tall Tale in Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism,” in Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter, eds., Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 197–219.
66. See further François Recanti, “Literal and Contextualism: Some Varieties,” in Preyer and Peter, Contextualism in Philosophy, 171–96.
67. E. M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1981); Paul Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1985).
68. Strictly speaking, semantics (the dictionary meaning of words) depends on pragmatics (how speakers use words in various contexts). The meaning of a word or a sentence is its capacity to be used to do certain things in communication (Alston, Illocutionary Acts, 154).
69. Alston, Illocutionary Acts, 160.
70. Ibid., 162.
71. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, who defines the literal sense as “that which the author intends, and the author of Holy Scripture is God” (Summa theologiae I.1.10). See Adina Miriam Yoffie, “Biblical Literalism and Scholarship in Protestant Northern Europe, 1630–1700” (unpublished PhD dissertation in history at Harvard University, 2009), chap. 1.
72. http://carm.org/is-mustard-seed-smallest-of-all-seeds.
73. Hodge and Warfield helpfully distinguish “exactness of statement,” which they equate with absolute literalness (my “literalistic”), from accuracy (my “literal”), which is a measure of authorial intent (Inspiration, 28–29). Similarly, Reformation commentators trained in the humanist tradition distinguished between scriptum and voluntas: what was written and what was intended (Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997], 6–8).
74. Hodge and Warfield, Inspiration, 42.
75. I say proposition(s) to leave open the possibility that narratives may convey neither a single macroproposition nor a series of one-per-sentence micropropositions but rather several propositions “nested” at different levels of the discourse (a clarification I owe to Daniel Treier).
76. Moisés Silva, God, Language and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1990), 118.
77. Ibid., 125.
78. Gordon H. Clark, Karl Barth’s Theological Method (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1963), 150.
79. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961), 30, my emphasis.
80. I take the phrase “robust presence” from Kurt Pritzl’s “Aristotle’s Door,” in Pritzl, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2010), 15–39.
81. Ward, Words of Life, 134.
82. Rea, “Authority and Truth.”
83. John M. Monson, “Enter Joshua: The ‘Mother of Current Debates’ in Biblical Archaeology,” in Hoffmeier and Magary, Do Historical Matters Matter, 427–57.
84. J. Gordon McConville and Stephen N. Williams, Joshua, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010), 209.
85. W. F. Albright, “The Israelite Conquest of Canaan in the Light of Archaeology,” BASOR 74 (1939), 11–23.
86. K. Lawson Younger, “Early Israel in Recent Biblical Scholarship,” in D. Baker and B. T. Arnold, eds., The Face of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999), 179.
87. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).
88. See Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville: Westminster, 2003),174–76.
89. See Bernard Ramm, “The Relation of Science, Factual Statements and the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 21 (1969), 98–104.
90. George W. Ramsey, The Quest for the Historical Israel (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 107.
91. Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History of Israel, 81.
92. Ibid., 88.
93. Ibid., 91–3. See further Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985).
94. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001), 2.
95. K. L. Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing, JSOTS 98 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 265.
96. Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History of Israel, 153.
97. McConville and Williams, Joshua, 32–33.
98. Calvin, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 375.
99. Horst R. Moehring, “The Verb akouein in Acts IX 7 and XXII 9,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959), 80.
100. J. H. Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek (Edinburgh: Clark, 1882), 249.
101. A. T. Robertson, Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), 448–49.
102. See in particular Moehring, “The Verb akouein in Acts IX 7 and XXII 9” and Robert G. Bratcher, “Akouo in Acts 9:7 and 22:9,” Expository Times 71, no. 8 (1960), 243–45.
103. Ernst Haenchen, Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 322.
104. See Ronald D. Witherup, “Functional Redundancy in the Acts of the Apostles: A Case Study,” JSNT 48 (1992), 67–86.
105. Charles W. Hedrick, “Paul’s Conversion/Call: A Comparative Analysis of the Three Reports in Acts,” Journal of Biblical Literature 100, no. 3 (1981), 424.
106. Witherup notes that Acts 26 does not say whether the companions saw or heard anything; they simply fell to the ground (Acts 26:14).
107. Kenton L. Sparks, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012).
108. Wesley Morriston, “Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist,” Philosophia Christi 11, no. 1 (2009), 8.
109. See Paul Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and OT Ethics,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008), 7–37.
110. “‘Let Nothing That Breathes Remain Alive’: On the Problem of Divinely Commanded Genocide,” Philosophia Christi 11 (2009), 27–41.
111. Christopher J. H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008), 77.
112. The concept of “perfect being” carries a heavy theological load. Whence its authority? Moral intuitions are fickle, as we are learning from the national debate about same-sex marriage. My worry is that “perfect being” foists culturally conditioned notions of perfection onto God.
113. See, for example, G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004).
114. Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2012), 483.
115. Ibid., 476–86.
116. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, 90.
117. Augustine, Letter to Jerome, 82.3.
118. My thanks to Dan Treier, Ike Miller, James Gordon, David Moser, the members of the Deerfield Dinner Discussion Group, and the editors for their comments on a previous draft.
119. Thom Stark, “Is God a Moral Compromiser? A Critical Review of Paul Copan’s ‘Is God a Moral Monster?’” thomstark.net/copan/stark_copan-review.pdf, and The Human Faces of God (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2010), esp. 83–124.
120. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998).
121. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2002); Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2005).
122. How many demoniacs did Jesus heal in the Decapolis? One or two? Was it in Gedara, Gerasa, or Gergesa? See Matt. 8:28–34; Mark 5:1–20; and Luke 8:26–39.
123. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 275.
124. See John R. Franke, “God, Plurality, and Theological Method: A Response to Kevin Vanhoozer’s Remythologizing Theology,” and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Vanhoozer Responds to the Four Horsemen of an Apocalyptic Panel Discussion on Remythologizing Theology,” Southeastern Theological Review 4, no. 1 (2013): 41–51, 67–82.
125. Ibid., 72.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid., 73.
128. Ibid.
129. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1, 869.