After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 2

June 10, 2010
Related topics: Literalism |

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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 second entry of a seven-part series, which has been adapted from a Scholarly Essay of the same title. In his previous post, Sparks outlined some of the “tensions” of historical and scientific accuracy in Scripture, and argued that the Bible “reflects the diverse viewpoints of different people who lived in different times and places." In this post, Sparks extends the list of “tensions” to include ethical matters.

The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil. Consider this example:

These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?

The problem and its scope are suggested, I think, by the Bible’s account of the destruction of the Canaanite city of Jericho:

So the people [of Israel] shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. Then they “devoted to destruction” (ḥerem) by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys (Josh 6:20-21).

Here Israel is rewarded by military success because, in the book of Joshua, righteousness amounted to obediently exterminating Canaanite men, women, children and animals. In fact, in the theology of Deuteronomy and Joshua this was a ritual act of ḥerem … a ritual of complete devotion that sacrificed the Canaanites and their belongings to God. In this ritual act, God demands that any natural tendency to “show mercy” in light of the enemy’s humanity must be squelched out (see Deut 7:2).

There is a tendency among more conservative Christians to imagine that the ethical problem referred to here is really an illusion created by misplaced, modern sensibilities … that this is just another case in which “contemporary human ethics” arrogantly presume to be better than “God’s biblical ethics.”¹ While I do not doubt that modern ethics run amuck in many ways and means, I don’t think that in this case the objection carries much weight. Those familiar with early Christian theology know how much it struggled with the Bible’s ethical diversity. Consider these comments from the pen of the great Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nyssa (c. AD 335-395), who was deeply troubled by God’s execution of Egyptian children in the Passover story of Exodus:

The Egyptian [Pharaoh] is unjust, and instead of him, his punishment falls upon his newborn child, who on account of his infant age is unable to discern what is good and what is not good … If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s evil, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries … “The son should not suffer for the sin of the father?” How can history so contradict reason?

Gregory concluded that, ethically speaking, the Passover story simply could not pass as literal history … it was an allegory about sin, that directed us to quickly destroy evil before it grew too troublesome for us.² Now my point is not whether Gregory handled the difficulty as we would, for it seems very doubtful to me, and perhaps to most of my readers, that the author of Exodus intended an allegory. But Gregory’s method aside, his 4^th century comment shows that the ethical problems in Scripture are not the result of modern imagination run amok.

Scripture exhibits all of the telltale signs of having been written by finite, fallen human beings who erred in the ways that human beings usually err. If this is the case, in what sense can we say with a straight face that Scripture is God’s word? Are there any solutions for these problems that are true to the Christian faith and intellectually honest respecting the problems we face? While I don’t believe that humanity can answer all of our questions on this side of heaven, I do believe that we have access to theological resources that are useful for confronting the challenge at hand.

But before we move ahead, it seems to me that one point must be made. Even if conservative Evangelicals can create eccentric scenarios that seem to preserve the doctrine of Biblicistic inerrancy, the straightforward evidence against this doctrine is so palpable that the doctrine should never be granted any kind of fundamental status in the Christian faith. I agree with our venerable Evangelical forefather, James Orr. Although he was a contributor to the classic expression of Evangelical theology in The Fundamentals, he clearly saw the intellectual and theological dangers in Biblicistic inerrancy: “One may plead, indeed, for ‘a supernatural providential guidance’ which has for its aim to exclude all, even the least, error or discrepancy in statement … But this is a violent assumption which there is nothing in the Bible really to support. It is perilous, therefore, to seek to pin down faith to it as a matter of vital importance.”³ Even more in our day than his, it is clear that Biblicistic inerrancy is an intellectual disaster.

In his next post, Sparks will outline some of our Christian forefathers’ thinking on Biblicistic inerrancy.

Notes

1. For a short catalogue of conservative interpretive strategies, see Eric A. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 69-88; cf. S. N. Gundry, ed. Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).

2. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 2.91-93, in Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses (New York: Paulist, 1978), 75-76.

3. James Orr, Revelation and Inspiration (New York: Scribners, 1910), 213-14.