Rev H M Cartwright
The first section of this paper appeared last month. It set out The orthodox view of Biblical inerrancy.
2. The alternative positions being advocated in some professedly Evangelical circles
G K Beale, who is due to become Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2010, has written a useful book entitled The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (2008). In it he controverts the views of Peter Enns, who is described as a Reformed Evangelical Christian and Biblical scholar, and who had been teaching Old Testament for about 15 years at Westminster before he was suspended from his post in 2008.
According to Beale, Enns “is trying to produce a synthesis of the findings of mainline liberal scholarship and an Evangelical view of Scripture”. He says that the Old Testament contains myth, through which God accommodates Himself to communicate truth. Enns appeals to the “incarnational notion, contending that since Christ was fully divine and fully human, then so is Scripture. Accordingly, we need to accept the ‘diversity’ or ‘messiness’ of Scripture, just as we accept all the aspects of Jesus’ humanity.” He warns that “modern interpreters should not impose their modern views of history and scientific precision on the ancient text of the Bible. Such a foreign imposition results in seeing problems in the Bible that are really not there”.
Beale suggests that Enns’ overarching theme in his 2005 book, Inspiration and Incarnation, “is his conception of divine accommodation in the process of scriptural inspiration. For Enns, Scripture is very human, which means that God meets His people in a very human way in His Word.” No wonder Beale says that he questions the viability of Enns’ “attempt to hold to plenary inspiration while at the same time affirming that biblical writers unconsciously imbibed mythical stories and mistakenly thought that they corresponded to past historical reality. . . . Enns says that though such accounts do not convey historical truth, they still have important theological truth to tell us: that we are to worship the God of the Bible and not pagan gods.” Beale also affirms that “Enns does not exempt Jesus from being just as culturally determined as are the apostles in their use of the Old Testament” and he is troubled “by the implications of Enns’ conclusions, which leave us with a Bible written by inspired authors, who at significant points thought they were writing historical accounts but that, indeed, unbeknown to them, were really mythical”.
We are more familiar with Dr McGowan’s position as set out in The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging evangelical perspectives (2007). In this book he sets out to “argue that, in formulating our doctrine of Scripture, we need to review both our vocabulary and our theology, in order to clarify precisely what we mean when we speak about Scripture as the Word of God”. Dr McGowan tells us that he does not “seriously question” that the Bible is “the Word of God and that the voice of God speaking by His Spirit through His Word is the final authority on all matters”, but he has “gradually become concerned that some ways of defining and using Scripture within Evangelicalism are open to serious criticism and could do us more harm than good if we continue to maintain them in their present form”. He contends “that Evangelicals ought to abandon the word ‘inerrancy’ and use language that is more biblically accurate and theologically constructive”.
Dr McGowan argues for the position of those Evangelicals who maintain “that ‘inerrancy’ is not a biblical word, that it is not required by any of the confessions of faith stemming from the Reformation and that it is of relatively recent origin, without the weight of church history behind it. They would also argue that it is mistaken theologically.” Although they “are unhappy with the term ‘inerrancy’”, they “also reject the notion of ‘errancy’, believing that they are being presented with a false dichotomy”.
In passing we might note that the rather strange, and one would say deceptive, position that the Bible is neither “inerrant” nor “errant” is explained by the idea that “what we would call ‘errors’ in the Bible, by our modern definition of error, would not have been viewed as errors by the ancient biblical writers and readers. Consequently, what is not true for us was true for them.” Beale, who gives this explanation of the position he is arguing against, comments that this is “a postmodern view of truth and falsehood. . . . This view really understands that to a significant extent truth is relative.”
What is most alarming about the position adopted by Dr McGowan is that he is not content to allege errant manuscripts and translations but regards it as unjustified and unprofitable to invest so much time and theological capital in maintaining the inerrancy of what he calls “hypothetical” original documents which we do not possess. Dr McGowan states his view thus: “The basic error of the inerrantists is to insist that the inerrancy of the autographa is a direct implication of the biblical doctrine of inspiration (or divine spiration). In order to defend this implication, the inerrantists make an unwarrantable assumption about God. The assumption is that, given the nature and character of God, the only kind of Scripture He could ‘breathe out’ was Scripture that is textually inerrant. If there was even one mistake in the autographa then God cannot have been the author because He is incapable of error.”
He denies that inerrancy is a legitimate implication of inspiration. He describes the assumption that it is legitimate as unbiblical and rationalist. He alleges that it “underestimates God and undermines the human authors. . . . It assumes that God can only act in a way that conforms to our expectations, based on our human assessment of His character. It assumes that whatever God does must conform to the canons of human reason.”
Dr McGowan says that, having chosen “to use human beings rather than the more direct approach (eg writing the words supernaturally on stone without human involvement, as with the Ten Commandments), God did not overrule their humanity. This explains, for example, the discrepancies between the Gospels. Nevertheless, this is not a problem because God, by His Holy Spirit, has ensured that the Scriptures in their final canonical form are as He intended them to be and hence is able to use them to achieve His purpose. . . . The Scriptures are human documents, written by human beings, with all this entails. “At the same time, however, these documents were ‘breathed out’ by God. We must hold these truths in tandem, not emphasising one over against the other. . . . It is surely not necessary to invest them with divine qualities in order that they should fulfil their God-given purposes. Just as God uses preachers, sacraments and other instruments, so He uses Scriptures. . . . He did not give us an inerrant autographical text, because He did not intend to do so. He gave us a text that reflects the humanity of its authors but that, at the same time, clearly evidences its origin in the divine speaking. Through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit, God is perfectly able to use these Scriptures to accomplish His purposes. . . . I am arguing that Scripture is as God intended it to be, in His gracious providential overruling, but reject the implication that thereby the autographa must be inerrant.”
Evangelical critics of inerrancy who do not wish to say that there are errors in the Bible and who hide behind the postmodern concept that what might seem error to us was truth to them, because they operated in a different culture, have no hesitation in regarding as mythological the Biblical account of Creation and much of the historical material of the Old Testament. That there should be discrepancies and contradictions between different Biblical accounts of the same incident would not cause them concern. Some find no problem in the notion that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself as a man was conditioned by His environment to believe things that were not accurate, such as Isaiah’s authorship of the whole book that bears his name.
G K Beale is of the view that “at least two things have contributed significantly” to this development. “First, the onset of postmodernism in Evangelicalism has caused less confidence in the propositional claims of the Bible, since such claims have been understood only by fallible human interpreters. This influence has also resulted in an attempt to downplay the propositional nature of Scripture itself and to overemphasise the relational aspect of biblical revelation, that is, Scripture is not some dry set of impersonal propositions but a living communication from God Himself, whom we meet in Scripture. For this reason, Karl Barth’s relational view of Scripture has seen a revival of interest. . . . “A second factor leading to reassessment of the traditional Evangelical view of the Bible’s inspiration is that over the last twenty-five years there has been an increasing number of conservative students graduating with doctorates in biblical studies from non-Evangelical institutions. A significant percentage of these graduates have assimilated to one degree or another non-Evangelical perspectives, especially with regard to higher-critical views of the authorship, dating and historical claims of the Bible, which have contributed to their discomfort with the traditional Evangelical perspective of the Bible. On the other hand, these same scholars, while significantly qualifying their former view of inerrancy, have not left their basic position about the truth of the gospel and the Bible’s basic authority. Thus, they continue to want to consider themselves ‘Evangelical’ but at the same time reformers of an antiquated Evangelicalism, represented, for example, by the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy.”