Dec, 2013
For most of my life, two presumptions were foundational to my world view: 1) There existed an Objective Reality and Absolute Truth as represented by God, unrelated to my consciousness, and 2) the Holy Bible was inerrant, and offered me a way to understand the nature of God, and by extension, Absolute Truth. As discussed in Part 2, I came to the conclusion that part of my human condition is an inability to ascertain anything with certainty, except that something exists (that I call, most primitively, “consciousness”). So, for me, the idea of both Objective Reality and personal access to Absolute Truth has been negated already on philosophical grounds. But my skepticism towards certainty is not the same as utter skepticism towards the concept of truth (Nihilism). I do believe that Truth exists in the sense that some ideas are more true than others. My inability to know anything with statistical certainty does not prevent me from believing millions of things with practical certainty, or extreme confidence, or even just a little bit of confidence. I expect gravity to pull me back to earth when I jump. I expect my hand to burn if I put it on a hot stove. So on. So I am content to seek Truth as best I am able, to whatever degree of confidence that provides.
My own views regarding the nature of knowledge, along with the determination that I must evaluate every truth claim for myself, liberated me to inspect Christianity with fresh eyes. I had sufficiently proven to myself that to doubt everything – including my belief that the Bible was God’s Word – was appropriate. In the end, I alone am responsible for what I believe, whether I question it for myself or not. I was also motivated to inspect more closely the theological claim that only those who recognized Jesus as savior could commune with God. This assertion struck me as problematic because there are billions of humans who live with a non-Christian concept of God, and many of them claim to experience intimacy with the Divine. Are they all deluded? Is an omniscient and omnipotent God incapable or unwilling to show Himself to those non-Christians who earnestly seek Him and find a mistaken sense of Divine relationship elsewhere? That seems unlikely, given the Christian view that “God is Love” and presumably cares for all of humanity. The historical Christian contention that Jesus is the only way to God is sometimes accompanied by the argument that Jesus is “Either a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God.” However, this contention assumes that the Bible is a factually reliable historical document, that its assertions can be taken at face value, and that the mainstream Christian interpretation of the events and ideas therein is correct. These ideas are worth re-exploring. In this essay, I would like address one of the most basic assertions of fundamentalist Christianity: Biblical “inerrancy.” Most simply, it is the belief that God is responsible – either directly or indirectly – for the content of the Bible, and it is thus without error.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines inerrancy as “exemption from error.” That definition leaves some wiggle room (define “error”). For my purposes, I wish to examine whether the Bible is reliable as a perfect, “inerrant”, account of God’s Word to mankind. Can it be trusted as though it were written by God directly?
Some would hold that the Bible is infallible, that is, incapable of error. I would say that an assertion that can’t be disproven is reciprocally unprovable, and thus unverifiable in any meaningful way. It is the epitome of an unsubstantiatable claim if evidence of falsehood cannot be considered. I don’t want to build my life around a truth that is unverifiable in any meaningful way. I want to be able to test my beliefs and have them hold up under critical skeptical examination. I would add as an aside that I do not believe the Bible claims itself to be inerrant. I would stress that inspired and inerrant are far from the same, and for the Bible to inspire it needn’t be inerrant. Many books inspire without being inerrant. The Qu’ran makes a claim to Divine inspiration and consequential inerrancy, yet most Christians dismiss the claim without ever having read the book or studied the religion. Given competing claims about Divine inspiration, how do we judge which is right? We use our reason and intuition to weigh the arguments and discern what seems true to us. These competing claims are central to why I dismiss any claim of infallibility as counterproductive in a search for Truth. An assertion of untestable infallibility renders the assertion a matter of spiritual pot-luck; one can only pray they were born into the correct geographic area so they are taught to believe the correct untestable claims. Personally, I have faith that a loving God would not take that approach to revealing Truth to the world.
As part of this process, I have read a wide variety of authors, from self-proclaimed Christians of various theological backgrounds, to Agnostics and Atheists. There have been thousands of books written on the subject, and I can’t possibly do justice to the subject of Biblical reliability and interpretation. I have also read extensively from the early Church Fathers, various non-canonical manuscripts, and various historians documenting their views of manuscript consistency and veracity. The way in which we interpret the Bible is based first upon the nature of the truth we believe to be contained therein: Is it literal historical documentation? Is it allegorical spiritual insight? The Christian community in which I was raised generally viewed the Bible as a historically factual document, and believed the central tenets of Christian theology (Original Sin, Atonement, Triune Godhead, etc) to be correct interpretations of Scripture. My essay here is strictly concerned with a concept of inerrancy that considers the Bible to be a reliable historical document, worthy of broad literal or semi-literal interpretation.
After about two years of study, I settled upon four areas where I felt there was sufficient evidence to reject the claim of Biblical inerrancy:
This first area may be dismissed by some as a technicality, but I’d suggest that the written word is only as useful as the words actually written. In our age, Linguistics is often considered the last stand for Philosophy, because language is itself a symbolic means of capturing ideas. When ideas are captured in the symbolic framework of a language, their meaning is left to the vagaries of the reader’s interpretation and, more broadly, the ever-evolving word associations within a language or a given culture. Material needed to be manually transcribed for generations. Oh, and translated, meaning there may or may not be an equivalent word or phrase to convey equivalent meaning. Every error in transcription, every semantic or aesthetic judgement regarding translation, effects and potentially alters the reader’s understanding of the text. The claim of inerrancy relies upon, not only the direct and perfect inspiration and understanding of the initial author, but the preservation, transcription and translation of what was initially written.
Some schools of theology hold that inerrancy only refers to the original authors, though I’d suggest that such a proposal renders the claim of inerrancy irrelevant today. Other proponents of Biblical inerrancy cite the numerous manuscripts that have been found, and compare their consistency and relative abundance (over 15,000) with that of other ancient manuscripts. I would suggest that their argument is missing the essential point: a claim of inerrancy. No one cares if Homer’s “Odyssey” has mistakes. But the Biblical claim of inerrancy asserts no errors, not relatively few errors. And scholars don’t dispute that no two manuscripts are the same, except for in small sample sizes (a total of 200,000-300,000 textual errors are estimated in total across the 15,000 manuscripts). The most optimistic estimates of Biblical transcription accuracy puts it around 95-99% accurate. Theologically conservative scholars note that most of the changes are very minor and involve no theological tenets (Mark 16:9-20 being a glaring exception). The point they overlook, however, is that by admitting any errors whatsoever they have inserted human alteration into Biblical content. This, by definition, removes the possibility of inerrancy. For our purposes in 2000+ CE, even if the original writing was inerrant, what we read today has been through too many hands and has left a trail of documented alterations. My point is not that the Bible is corrupt or roundly “untrue”, simply that I believe it cannot be relied upon as an inerrant historical document.
2. Miraculous events that defy known “laws” of physics or nature
The many miraculous events chronicled in the Bible require no discussion, as most people seem to subscribe to one of two approaches:
1) God engages in the affairs of man, and nothing is impossible for God.
2) The laws of science preclude the possibility of miracles.
It seems people either wholly believe miraculous accounts or they don’t. We see this in formal debates between proponents of science versus young earth creationist (like Ken Ham versus Bill Nye), where neither side is convinced by the other, and both sides have their current beliefs reinforced. The arguments of science against the Bible are self-evident to those who don’t interpret the Bible literally, and irrelevant to those who do. An omnipotent and omniscient God can do what the laws of science refute, because the “laws” of science are our best current understanding based on a finite and incomplete sample size of spacetime. They are not certainties.
The same is true for archeological findings that would seem to expose errors in the Biblical record (cave drawings and Egyptian artifacts that appears to handily precede the Bible’s timeline, for example). Archeology is a highly speculative field and, like science, is prone to a false sense of certainty. An omnipotent God could have supernaturally intervened, or our current scientific understanding may be incorrect or incomplete. For those who dismiss the possibility of supernatural intervention, there is a long list of distinct improbabilities. From an astonishing array of practical problems with Noah’s ark [1], to the proposition that humanity spread out from a single family less than 8000 years ago to cover the entire earth (with the observed disparities of race, culture, language, etc)[2]. From Moses parting the Red Sea [3], to the sun “stopping” for Joshua [4]. Elijah called down fire from heaven and was later carried to heaven in a flaming chariot [6]. So on. When one understands the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, these accounts are remarkable, but believed. For that reason, I view arguments against Biblical inerrancy based on science to be relatively useless when presented to someone already convinced of Biblical inerrancy. An omnipotent God can do anything, so believing every account is perfectly reasonable if the Bible is inerrant.
3. Contradictory historical accounts
The primary reason that I do not consider the Bible to be inerrant is that I find many instances where one Biblical account disagrees irreconcilably with another Biblical account. In cosmological, anthropological, or archaeological scenarios where a scientific “fact” seems to contradict the Bible, there is a possibility that an omnipotent God did something that defies our understanding of the world. However, when two Biblical accounts contradict each other, it creates a far more troublesome dilemma. If the Bible is inerrant, there cannot be a single false account, and there is no more trustworthy account than the Bible itself. So what to think when two Biblical accounts tell contradictory versions of the same story? If this issue were to crop up just once, a wildly unlikely – but conceivable – scenario may be a plausible solution. But as the number of contradictions starts to mount, this solution becomes increasingly far fetched. So what are these contradictions I am talking about? They can be found sprinkled throughout the Bible, both Old and New Testament (the reason for a Sabbath rest in Deuteronomy differs from Exodus [6], accounts of Jesus’ birth and baptism differ, etc). Dozens of books have been written on the topic, but for my purposes here, I will focus exclusively on the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, because a) it is theologically important, b) it involves extensive contradiction, and c) those contradictions seem to go unacknowledged in most mainstream church teaching in my experience.
Central to my dispute of Biblical inerrancy is my presumption that conflicting accounts are not intentionally planted by God to misdirect people. While conflicting observations and/or memories are perfectly normal in human accounts of past events, the claim of inerrancy negates the possibility of “normal” human accounts. “Inerrancy” implies that everything in the Bible is Divinely inspired and approved, to the “jot and tittle”, which would seem to put the onus on God for any errors. I do not believe God misremembers who did what when, or forgets names, or misquotes speakers. If you believe my standards are too rigid, then there is no point in reading further. Our conceptions and expectations for God are incongruent.. With all that said, the accounts I will look at start on Passover weekend, in Mark 14, Matthew 26, Luke 22 and John 18.
Just as some quick background, I would like to note that most scholars consider Mark to be the earliest of the gosels (typically dated around 65 CE), followed by Matthew and Luke (typically dated around 75-80), and then John (typically dated around 90). It is noteworthy because each gospel account has its own character, and the order in which they were written or compiled may be revealing.
We’ll start with Jesus in front of Caiaphas and the council. Mark quotes Jesus as saying “…you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” As is often the case, Matthew renders a version quite close to Mark, as does Luke, though Luke adds a bit of additional dialogue. John seems to have Jesus debating with Caiaphas more stridently, but does not include the keynote claim made in the other two books – which are actually the only words spoken by Jesus in the exchange, according to Mark (and Matthew) [7].
Jesus is then delivered to Pilate. Mark and Matthew have Jesus say just four words: “You have said so,” in response to Pilate asking whether he claimed to be King of the Jews. Both books make a point of his remarkable silence, noting that the governor “was amazed.” Luke recounts the same version of Jesus’s wordless encounter with Pilate, though he is alone in also having Jesus sent to Herrod before returning to Pilate for sentencing. The gospel of John provides a very different account. In John, Jesus engages Pilate in a protracted conversation,wherein he says nearly 100 words, explaining that his “Kingdom is not of this world”, and that he was born for the purpose of bearing “witness to the truth.” As a historical account, John’s loquacious version of Jesus in front of Pilate would seem irreconcilably divergent from the Synoptic version of Jesus that “gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed,” as Matthew relates [8].
In all of the accounts, Pilate finds no wrong in Jesus, though he turns him over to be crucified for different reasons. In all three Synoptic accounts, Pilate offers to release either Jesus or Barabbas, and the crowd chooses Barabbas. However, in what will become a very predictable pattern, John offers a different account. There is no mention of Barabbas at all. Instead, Pilate is apparently compelled by the crowd’s argument that “Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar,” and turns him over to be crucified despite feeling great remorse [9].
Matthew puts the story of Judas hanging himself right after the encounter with Pilate. Luke (generally assumed to be the author of Acts) disagrees, saying Judas “fell headlong” and “burst open” in Acts. Mark and John make no mention of how Judas died [10].
After Jesus is sentenced to death and sent off to be executed, all three Synoptic gospels relate that “Simon of Cyrene” is seemingly coerced into carrying the cross. Matthew relates, “They compelled this man to carry his cross.” Once again, John provides a different account. Simon of Cyrene is never mentioned, and furthermore, it specifies that “They took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.” John’s account leaves little room for misunderstanding. Once again, it would seem that all four accounts cannot be entirely historically factual [11].
John mentions two others who were crucified with Jesus, but offers no further details. Matthew and Mark mention them as well, with both accounts adding that “those who were crucified with him also reviled him” (in Mark 15:32 and Matthew 27:44). It is Luke alone who provides a different account of this situation, and the account that is most commonly remembered wherein one robber repents and is assured by Jesus that “today you will be with me in Paradise.” [12]
On the cross itself, Jesus is silent according to Mark. Only at the very end does Jesus cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He is then offered wine, after which he “uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.” Matthew echoes the account of Mark almost exactly for much of it. However, Matthew adds a spectacular earthquake, wherein “rocks were split. The tombs were also opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.” None of the other gospel accounts mention an earthquake or dead being raised to life and observed by “many”, which would seem to have been a noteworthy event. Luke provides a more uplifting account of Jesus’ final words, wherein he prays “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” [13] Like the other Synoptic accounts, Luke relates that darkness fell from the sixth hour until the ninth (about noon until 3pm), but has the curtain temple tear before Jesus’ more triumphant last words, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” In Luke, a centurion then states that “surely this man was innocent.” Yet again, the gospel of John provides a markedly different account. Whereas in the Synoptic gospels, the only followers mentioned are women who were “watching from afar” (though Matthew does also mention “James and Joseph, sons of Zebedee”), in John, Jesus has emotional support while on the cross [14]. John’s gospel states that “standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary and the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene,” as well as “the disciple whom he loved.” He exchanges words with them while on the cross. After asking his beloved disciple to take in his mother, he asks for wine, then says “It is finished” and “gave up his spirit.” There is no mention of three hours of darkness, no mention of the temple curtain tearing, no mention of an awestruck centurion afterwards, and little evidence of anguish on the part of Jesus. The author of John assures his audience, “He who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth – that you also may believe.” Unfortunately, it seems to me once again that between the four gospels, at least one of the accounts got some of its facts a little mixed up somewhere in there.
The gospels conclude with the resurrection of Jesus, and once again we find differing accounts. In Mark, believed to be the earliest recorded account, the two Mary’s find the tombstone already rolled aside and find a lone “young man” sitting within the tomb. He instructs the women to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. The women “went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Many of the earliest manuscripts end there, after verse 8, without them even telling the disciples what they had seen. Luke is similar to Mark except that in Luke’s account there are “two men in dazzling apparel” (instead of one) who tell them Jesus is risen and will meet the disciples in Galilee. In Matthew, unlike any of the other accounts, there is an earthquake witnessed by the two Mary’s who watch one angel descend from heaven and roll the stone away, compelling the centurions who were standing guard to faint. Mysteriously, Jesus had already risen before this spectacle, and is found to be absent from the tomb even immediately after the stone is rolled away. Jesus meets the women as they are running away and instructs them to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee. No other gospel account mentions an earthquake. John’s account is also quite different. In John, the women find the tombstone already rolled aside, but receive no guidance or instruction from heavenly visitors. The women say, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him,” suggesting they believe the body was stolen or removed, not resurrected. The women later return to the tomb with Peter and “the other disciple”. They find his buried linen strewn on the ground and realize that he had risen. Then the disciples “return to their homes.” Mary stays behind and sees “two angels” and Jesus in the tomb. She fails to recognize them initially, even “supposing him (Jesus) to be a gardener.” Jesus tells her “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Jesus appeared to the disciples in the house they were staying that night. In John’s account, there is no mention of Galilee and the story never leaves Jerusalem [15].
The differences continue until the very end. Mark has Jesus appear to the disciples and give the great commission, instructing with details not included in any of the other accounts, like “these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.” Then concluding, “the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.” The gospel of Matthew includes an account of soldiers being paid off to say that disciples stole the body, and notes that the false account “has been spread among the Jews to this day.” Matthew specifies that “the eleven went to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had directed them,” where Jesus gives a different final commission. Luke is alone in providing the famous assurance that “behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Both Luke and John differ from Matthew by keeping the story in the Jerusalem area. Luke provides no version of the great commission and has Jesus ascending from near Bethany. John makes no mention of an ascension to end Jesus’ ministry [16]. Instead, the final mentioned sighting comes in an appearance to Thomas, eight days after appearing to a large group of disciples. In John, it is Jesus who imparts the Holy Spirit to his followers, saying “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ and when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”
There are other discrepancies that I have not listed, but I believe I have sufficiently conveyed the essence of my contention. I do not doubt that some of these discrepancies can be accounted for in some manner or another. My point is not that every listed problem is utterly irreconcilable (though it’s my view that many are), but rather that the incessant inconsistency adds up a lack of historical reliability in my opinion. If the gospels are the oral accounts of disciples or later followers, then discrepancies are perfectly understandable, inevitable, and even bolster the veracity of the unifying elements. But not if the author is God. I do not believe an omniscient, omnipotent God would struggle to leave a coherent and consistent historical account of the most important events in the history of the world.
4. Conflicting statements and assertions regarding the nature of God
The final area of discrepancy that I will address is the most deeply troubling to me, but also the most dependent upon my personal interpretation. I find it incongruous that almost all of Christian theology holds that God is omnipotent, eternal and unchanging, yet we find no shortage of instances in which that representation of God appears to be incorrect or woefully incomplete. The most glaring examples of this contradiction appear in the Old Testament where God is often viewed as eternal and unchanged, with references like Malachi 1:6 (“I, God, do not change”) and Number 23:19 (“God is not human that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.”). And yet, repeatedly in the Old Testament, God does change his mind: Exodus 32;14 (“And the Lord relented…”), Johah 3:10 (“…and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”), 1 Chronicles 21:15 (“And God sent an angel to destroy Jerusalem. But as the angel was doing so, the Lord saw it and was grieved…”), and most strikingly, Jeremiah 32:35, where God is said to confess “though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.” In Jeremiah 19 that phrase “nor did it come into my mind” appears again, as well as in Jeremiah 7:30-31, where it reads, “For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, declares the Lord. They have set their detestable things in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. …to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.” We see a contradiction between the omniscience and omnipotence ascribed to God, and a finite and incomplete understanding expressed by (or for) God in some verses. [17]
There is also evidence of an evolution of God in terms of how He is perceived or relates to mankind. In Genesis and throughout the early portions of the Old Testament, God seems to be physically present. He walks in the garden with with Adam and Eve, wrestles with Jacob in Genesis 32. Exodus 33 says “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” [18] Later in the Old Testament, God is still involved in the affairs of men, but acts through the prophets, and is no longer seen face to face. By the New Testament, God the Father is almost invisible. I find this progression striking, though not proof of anything directly. It fits neatly with the chronological progression from a primitive, provincial, warlike view of God, to the more ethereal, transcendent, inexpressible understanding of God that Plato, Plotinus, and many Greeks adopted (perhaps from the East, where a single transcendent God was long established in Vedanta Hinduism). This view of “the One” fell under the label Neo-Platonism, and had established a significant influence by the time the New Testament was being written or compiled. The influence of Eastern ideas of the infinitely transcendent can be seen in the writings of Greek philosophers like Plotinus, and even Jewish philosophers like Philo, who is credited with incorporating them into Judaism (including extensive use of the term Logos to describe God’s nature) by the time of Jesus’ birth. It is possible that these ideas also found there way into the New Testament, where God appears to take on a more transcendent nature than seemed to be the case in the Pentateuch.
To me, the most troubling issue regarding the nature of God as described in the Bible, particularly in light of the claim that God never changes, is the collection of actions ascribed to Him as the Israelites conquered Canaan. After the walls of Jericho collapsed in Joshua 6, the Israelites proceeded to kill everyone in the city, including women and children, at the command of God. In Numbers 31, everyone is killed except the virgin girls. There are countless instances in the Old Testament where God either directly kills someone(s) or commands killing, and there are a slew of lists that have by been compiled to that effect, so I won’t both recompiling one here. Explanations can be devised [19], as John Piper has tried. My concern is not whether the acts are morally acceptable, for one can make the case (as John Piper does) that anything God does is by definition moral. I am more troubled by the apparent incongruity of those actions comg from an unchanging God who later appears to propose a very different solution to dealing with enemies in the teachings of Jesus. The God of the Pentateuch and the Jesus of Luke 6 seem utterly irreconcileable to me. Jesus says “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”
In the Old Testament, Yahweh delivers material good fortune to the Israelites. There is no mention of an ethereal Spiritual realm that supercedes the physical. Yet, in the New Testament, Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword because the Kingdom of God is not flesh and blood. An understanding of God that has changed over time is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion, it may be a very good thing. But it brings into view the role that human understanding plays in human understanding.
In conclusion, the above four areas of investigation have led me to conclude that the Bible is not the inerrant Word of God, but rather a book written and compiled by men to reveal their conception of God. Roughly speaking, I believe the Old Testament is a man-made record of the history, beliefs and revelations of the Israelite people as related to their understanding of Yahweh. The New Testament includes four versions of the life of Jesus, and then a variety of letters, likely written by a variety of authors, regarding the application of the teachings, message, and life (and death and resurrection) of Jesus. I think it is very possible that the message that Paul taught is different than that taught by Jesus. I also think it’s quite possible, likely even, that some sayings attributed to Jesus were truly his and others were not. My view of the Bible does not make for clean lines or cut-and-dried theology, but rather a hodge-podge of personal opinion and belief. But I believe personal interpretation is a part of every interpretation; it is just a matter of whether the personal opinion that is inherently part of human consciousness gets acknowledged or overlooked.
As a follow-up to something I mentioned earlier, I find little evidence that the Bible claims itself to be inerrant. Supporters of inerrancy often point to verses like Psalm 119:160, which could well be referring to the Spirit (Word) of God, not the symbols on parchment, or 2 Timothy 3:16, which I would suggest likely refers to what we call the Old Testament when referring to “Scripture”, not New, and regardless, by saying all Scripture is “profitable”, it does not require inerrancy. In Matthew 5:18 Jesus says the “Law” will never pass away, but again, this word could refer to a Spiritual Law. John 10:35 is part of a very interesting exchange wherein Jesus asks rhetorically whether Scripture can broken (and says that “if not”, then “men are gods”, as claimed in “your scripture”).
In some quarters, a rejection of Biblical inerrancy may be seen as a rejection of God. For me, that was indeed an initial impulse. But a short lived one. As my study expanded to include more extensive philosophy, religious diversity, and scientific inquiry, the doors of possibility opened to countless ways in which God may be understood apart from the traditional Christian conception. I found dismissing the doctrine of inerrancy to be spiritually and intellectually freeing. It has allowed for a more exploratory consideration of the complex and often paradoxical messages within the Bible. The cognitive dissonance caused by incongruity and contradiction can be seen as perspective in a diverse and evolving understanding of God on the part of the authors. In hindsight, I ask myself how I never noticed some of the more obvious contradictions. I think noted psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman may have summed it up best with what he calls “theory-induced blindness.” He says, “once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.”
My theory has changed. Perhaps I am now blinded by a different bias. I now view the Bible as a rich and complex tapestry of perspectives compiled over time. Such a view engenders great uncertainty regarding how to best interpret Biblical content. It leaves the process of interpretation and understanding subject to variance. I think that to present it otherwise is a mistake. There is plenty of room for mystery and misunderstanding in the ancient and profound Biblical texts. And I suspect that God is not limited by our imagination, nor our conceptions, much less defined by human words.
APPENDIX - Detailed analysis of some Apologetic responses.
Continue to Page 2 of "Biblical Inerrancy"
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