After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 1

June 5, 2010
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"Science and the Sacred" is pleased to feature essays from various guest voices in the science-and-religion dialogue. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. For more on what BioLogos believes, click here.

Today's entry was written by Kenton Sparks. Kenton Sparks is professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University and author of several books, including his latest God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship , in which he argues that evangelical biblical scholarship has largely failed in not appropriating critical scholarship as it should.

This is the first entry of a seven-part series, which has been adapted from a Scholarly Essay of the same title. Some footnotes have been removed, but can be found in the full essay.

“We must read this book of books with all human methods. But through the fragile and broken Bible, God meets us in the voice of the Risen One.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Reflections on the Bible

Introduction

I write for Evangelicals who either believe or suspect that our tradition has painted itself into an intellectual corner. The Church has been down this road before. In the 16th and 17th centuries it mistakenly criticized Copernicus and Galileo because their scientific views were clearly “unbiblical.” And just as the evidence finally came crashing down on Church dogma in those days, so in ours, the facts are stacking up quickly against fundamentalistic beliefs in “creation science” and in the kind of “biblical inerrancy” that supports it.

While there was perhaps a period in history when Evangelicals could deny the substance of these new theories because the available evidence seemed thin, it seems to me that we’ve now crossed an evidential threshold that makes it intellectually unsuitable to defend some of the standard dogmas of the conservative Evangelical tradition. Holding fast to these old dogmas merely perpetuates the “intellectual disaster of Fundamentalism” and the “scandal of Evangelical Mind.”¹

The intellectual cul-de-sac in which Evangelicalism finds itself can be traced back to many causes. But it seems clear, at least to me, that a fundamental cause of the scandal is its doctrine of Scripture. Often this doctrine involves a strict adherence to “Biblicism” … to a belief that the Bible provides inerrant access to the truth about everything it touches on … from biology, physics and astronomy to psychology, history and theology. In more progressive Evangelical circles inerrancy is sometimes defined more delicately, in a way that allows the non-biblical evidence to carry more weight in our reflection, but even here the subtle influence of inerrancy often engenders poor, or at least inferior, judgments about science, history, human beings and theology. In the pages that follow I will briefly explain why conventional Evangelical understandings of Scripture simply cannot be right. I will also survey some of the important resources that can help the Church get its bearings in a world without Biblicistic inerrancy.

Dogmatic Assumptions

In all my writing here, I will assume the basic legitimacy and cogency of the traditional Christian orthodoxy. That God exists and is good … that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, both divine and human … that the Bible is the word of God and hence authoritative for Christians … that there are such things as orthodoxy (right religious beliefs) and heresy (wrong religious beliefs) … all of these are matters of dogmatic theology that I will treat as finally settled.

Many Evangelicals would like to include Biblicistic inerrancy in any list of dogmatic assumptions, but Biblicistic inerrancy is neither a standard view among Christians at-large nor is it theologically sensible in light of the strong evidence against it.

The Tensions Within Scripture

Evangelical tradition commonly holds that God, in giving us Scripture, shielded it from the errant influences of its finite, fallen human authors. While this commitment to Scripture’s divinity and veracity is laudable and in many respects traditional, it does not come without an apparent intellectual price. The evidence against this view either is or appears to be very strong.

Let me begin with one brief, clear and fairly innocuous example of the problem that confronts Evangelicals. My example comes from the life of Judas, the man who betrayed Jesus. Consider the two accounts of his death provided below:

It is easy to see the differences in the two accounts. While it’s quite possible that one of these stories is right, or that both are partly right, I don’t see how they can both be historically right in every respect.

The difficulty that I have just cited involves a tension within the Bible between two different texts. Another sort of tension appears when the Biblical text does not square with evidence outside of the Bible, as is the case when biblical and scientific evidence do not cohere.

The Tensions Between Scripture and Observation

A long-known example appears in Genesis ch. 1, where God is said to create a “firmament” or “expanse” in the sky to hold back the waters above it (see Gen 1:6-8). As the great Christian exegete John Calvin said long ago, “it seems impossible and opposed to common sense that there are waters above the heavens.”² Calvin admitted, nevertheless, that this is what the text says. He further concluded that this was not correct and probably reflected how ancient, uneducated Israelites understood the structure of the cosmos. His surmise has turned out to be right, since ancient texts and pictures discovered by modern scholars confirm that all of Israel’s neighbors—even the advanced societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia—believed that there were waters above the heavens … The sky is blue because there is water up there.³

The list of similar “tensions” and “contradictions” in Scripture is very long. A long list of examples is given in this portion of my scholarly article.

In some cases these apparent contradictions and problems can perhaps be “harmonized” in some way or other. For instance, some scholars have suggested that one of the conflicting accounts of Judas’ death (the account in Matthew) was written according to the fictional conventions of Jewish “midrash” rather than the conventions of biography or history.⁴ If this is right, then there is no real historical conflict between the two biblical stories. But it’s very doubtful—in fact, I would say quite impossible—that all of the problems have workable, convincing solutions. If we take the Bible’s explicit content with any seriousness, then it is clear that its authors were not wholly consistent with each other, and it does not appear that they were wholly right about all matters of science and history.

So like any other book, the Bible appears to be a historically and culturally contingent text and, because of that, it reflects the diverse viewpoints of different people who lived in different times and places. In other words, Scripture is tradition. Perhaps authoritative tradition … but tradition, nonetheless.

I realize that for some Christians these observations make the Bible, as the word of God, look all too human. I will address these concerns in future blogs.

In his next post, Sparks will extend the list of Scriptural “tensions” to include ethical matters.

Notes

1. My language is taken from the classic discussion of Evangelical intellectual history by Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

2. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis (trans. John King; 2 vols.; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847-1850), 1.79-80.

3. See Kenton L. Sparks, Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Guide to the Background Literature (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2005), 321, 325, 337.

4. Michael D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974); Robert Gundry, Matthew, a Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).