After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 4
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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
This is the fourth entry of a seven-part series, which has been adapted from a Scholarly Essay of the same title. The first entry can be read here.
In his previous post, Sparks outlined some of our Christian forefathers’ thoughts on Biblistic inerrancy, and explained that “hermeneutical flexibility was of utmost importance because the problems were many and serious, and because the witness of the Church was at stake.” In today’s blog, Sparks points out the implications that Christ’s human nature should have on our understanding of Scripture.
The Chalcedonian or Incarnation Principle
Christian orthodoxy embraces the “Chalcedonian Definition,” a formal 5th century creed that maintains that Jesus Christ was (and is) both divine and human and that his two natures did not “mix” but were joined together in a mysterious, hypostatic union. This means that Jesus was in all respects like us, “sin excepted” (Heb 4:15).
Christians long ago realized that in some form or fashion this meant Jesus lived out his human life as a finite person. Athanasius (c. AD 296-373) provides a good example. In his debate with the Arians, Athanasius had occasion not only to defend the divinity of Jesus but also to explain those texts that indicate he was subject to human limitations. Two relevant texts were Lk 2:52 and Mk 13:32, which respectively said that the young Jesus “grew in wisdom and stature” and that he didn’t know when the end would come … “Only the Father knows,” he said. Athanasius argued that in his divine nature Jesus knew these things, but “as a man He is ignorant of it, for ignorance is proper to man, and especially ignorance of these things.”1 One implication of this observation (though not fully appreciated by Athanasius) is that, humanly speaking, Jesus was a finite person who grew up in Palestine, learned Hebrew and Aramaic, and became Jewish.
Though theologians seldom point this out, the fact that Jesus operated mainly within the horizon of his finite human horizon has other implications. If we assume for the sake of discussion that he was a carpenter like his father, did he ever miss the nail with his hammer? Hit his thumb? Did he think that he left his saw on the bench when, because he was distracted, he actually leaned it against the wall? Did Jesus ever look across a crowded town square and think that he saw his brother James only to discover that it was someone else? And did he estimate that the crowd was about 300 when it was really 200?
To confess that Jesus was fully human is to admit that the answer to these questions must be yes. And if yes, then this observation surely has implications for how we think about Scripture. If Jesus as a finite human being erred from time to time, there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error. Rather, we are wise to assume that the biblical authors expressed themselves as human beings writing from the perspectives of their own finite, broken horizons.
Postmodern Practical Realism: What Should We Expect from Human Authors?
“Postmodernism” has a poor reputation in Evangelical circles, but there are in fact two wings of postmodern thought, only one of which might be considered “hostile” to the Christian faith. The other wing of postmodern tradition is not only amenable to the faith but actually provides valuable resources for our theological reflection on Scripture. I will explain these theological benefits through a brief survey of the history of epistemology and hermeneutics is in order.
We could begin our survey at many points in history, but for our purposes the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) provides a good starting point. His “Cartesian” project was to determine how human beings could gain indubitable, incorrigible knowledge of the world … true understandings that simply can’t be wrong. Descartes began with the assumption that all human beings share in the same “universal reason.” Why, then, do human beings ever disagree with each other and get things wrong? Descartes surmised that the problem was human tradition; our rational capacities are unduly clouded and warped by the traditions of our respective families and societies. Hence, fundamental to any search for “the truth” is an effort to “escape” or “rise above” these traditions that blind us to the facts. Scholars commonly refer to this view of epistemology as Modern Realism.
Though Modern Realism developed over a lengthy stretch of history, philosophy’s love affair with it was rather short-lived. Philosophers living in the last days of philosophical Modernism—Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger—gradually revealed that the epistemic project of Modern Realism was doomed all along to fail, for it aspired to the impossible goal of “escaping” tradition. All of us grow up in and are formed by culture and, because of this, we inevitably begin our pursuit of the truth from within a cultural tradition. In our search for the truth, we simply cannot “start from scratch.” We may swim with the current of tradition or against it, but tradition is always the water that we swim in … we are always wet and always pushed here and there by the current in ways that we do not realize. There is no such thing as a “universal reason” that leads to incorrigible truth.
Broadly speaking, this correct observation about the role of tradition in human life has yielded two schools of postmodern epistemic thought. One of these begins by agreeing with Modernism on this basic point: tradition does blind us to the truth. And if tradition inevitably shapes us, and if it also blinds us to the truth, it follows that human beings simply do not know the truth … we do not know reality as it is. What we mistakenly embrace as “reality” is nothing other than invention … and this invention is a product of our tradition. This approach to epistemology is usually called Antirealism or Non-Realism in that it denies any connection between what we think about reality and reality itself. “The truth” is created by human beings.
The other school of postmodern thought is called Practical Realism. Unlike Antirealism, it holds that tradition does not blind us to the truth but rather turns out to be the practical, adequate and useful way that human beings grasp it. But this grasp is not on a toggle switch that is either right or wrong … it lies on a continuum between better and poorer … it can be very good or very bad, but never perfect. In the best cases, human knowledge is wholly adequate for the needs of our situation. But what, precisely, is the nature of this “adequate” correlation between interpretation and fact?
Unlike Modern Realism, which posits an actual one-for-one correspondence between interpretation and fact, Practical Realism accounts for interpretive success in terms of analogy. Our understanding of reality is “right” when our model or concept of reality is “close enough” to the facts to give us success in what we trying to do. The result is never “the brute truth.” It is at best partial and useful, though always warped in some way or other.
Practical Realism dovetails nicely with the Christian tradition, for Christian orthodoxy likewise holds that human beings are finite, fallen creatures who never see the world from a perfect, god’s-eye viewpoint. One thinks here of the biblical story of Job, which teaches that Job saw the truth better than his friends and yet neither he, nor they, saw the world as God sees it. So, though Job was “right” in a comparative sense, even he finally repents because he got it wrong. All human perceptions, even the best, are partial and warped.
This is true for you and for me, but also—and this is a very important point—for the human authors of Scripture. We will tease out some of the implications as we move along, but a fairly obvious implication is that good theology will not be content with any single text of Scripture. It will realize that all of Scripture’s voices, taken together, give us the fullest understanding of God and his voice.
In his next post, Sparks will relate the falleness of Creation with the non-Biblistic inerrancy of Scripture.
Notes
1. See Against the Arians, 3.43 (= NPNF 2.4: 417).
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June 28th 2010
JHM said: we are talking about a perfect God, not my ability to understand that perfect God
I respond: Well, no, we’re talking about God communicating to us so that we can relate to Him. The very fact that scripture uses ordinary human language, with lots of grammatical warts, is in itself astonishing when you think about it. Do you think the persons of the Trinity speak to each other in Koine Greek, using the run-on phraseology of the apostle Paul or the rough grammar of John’s apocalypse? In one sense I agree that we can never “understand” God to the extent that would imply a direct, unmediated knowledge of God. We always speak of God only by analogy. God gives us scripture not so that we can “understand” Him, but so that we can “know” Him as our God and redeemer.
Reply to this commentJune 28th 2010
JHM said: because this involved my eternal destiny and the way I live my life every day I kinda think the “reasonable” part of reasonable doubt is pretty high
I respond: this is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? We demand rational certainty. Rational certainty, however, is not what God gives us in this life. God is free to be God and not to accede to our demands.
On top of that, we think that if we get anything “wrong” God will send us to Hell. God is constantly weighing our thoughts, waiting for us to screw up.
IMHO, all this reflects the fundamental mistakes of Biblicist fundamentalism.
To be clear, I think God cares very much about how we live and how we think, and that scripture is “profitable” for all of this (2 Tim. 3:16). But part of “faith,” apparently, is acting boldly without rational certainty, trusting God that his purposes of redemption will not fail, and that all the gifts He gives—scripture, the Holy Spirit, the community of His people—are adequate to His purposes.
Reply to this commentJune 28th 2010
dopderbeck,
So would you say, in essence, that is doesn’t matter so much if any one method of God’s revelation (Scripture, reason, Tradition, and the Church) is imperfect because they are all working together and are held together as an inerrant (or at least infallible and authoritative) whole through the work of the Holy Spirit?
Reply to this commentJune 28th 2010
JHM—I’m really not totally comfortable with the categories—or with my ability to discuss this really meaty stuff in blog posts! But in short—yes, that’s probably a reasonable summary. The Holy Spirit guides the Church. The norming norm through which the Spirit guides the Church is scripture, which is appropriated by the Church through the instrumentality of the Spirit both in the formation of the canon and the ongoing illumination of the meaning of the text. Word and Spirit function together and are complemented and also appropriated through tradition, reason, and experience. What God has provided to the Church for its guidance is perfect, unfailing, and unerring—it is precisely suited to achieve God’s purposes of redemption—because God is perfect, unfailing, and unerring. But this does not necessarily mean that what God has provided to the Church always conforms to human expectations of rationality, precision, literal facticity, and so on. Indeed, God’s work is in some ways “hidden” to ordinary reason, though it is not anti-reason or unreasonable.
You may gather that I’m driving at a neo-Barthian view here, and basically, that’s where I am—I’m a huge fan of Donald Bloesch, for example.
Reply to this commentJune 28th 2010
I’ve just had the pleasure of another trip into Sparks’ postmodern wonderland. This one is even better than any of his previous efforts. Here’s the argument:
1) Provide a list of assumptions for which there is no evidence, and which can never be verified (“If we assume for the sake of discussion that he was a carpenter like his father… did he estimate that the crowd was about 300 when it was really 200?”)
2) Assert that your assumptions are true (“the answer to these questions must be yes…”)
3) Conclude… whatever you want. (“there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error.”(my emphasis))
C’mon… Biologos is kidding, right?
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
First and foremost, the whole discussion is misguided because it overlooks the basic Biblical distinction between the word of God, the Bible, and the Word of God, Jesus Christ. John begins his gospel with “In the beginning was the Word….” It is clear from the whole text that the Word (Logos) is Jesus the Christ. Jesus is also quoted in John saying, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
If Jesus is God and the Word and the Truth, then certainly He is perfect. The Bible is not God and therefore is not perfect. The Bible is the word of God in so far as it reveals Jesus Christ Who is the Logos and God.
Just as we human beings do NOT need to be perfect, that is God, to know God and have a relationship with God the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Bible does not need to be perfect to reveal God the Son to humanity. If the Bible were perfect, it would be eternal and almost divine, as Muslims believe the Quran to be.
If Jesus is the Word and Truth and Jesus is a person, not an idea or even a system of ideas, then the Truth/Word must be complex/one like person or relational. This is where the Church has an advantage over science and philosophy. God calls us to know Love through community.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
Chip,
We know that Jesus was born as an infant, not as a fully developed adult. Thus Jesus, the infant, had to learn to speak, crawl, walk, to be potty-trained etc—all those tasks take time and involve “errors.”
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
The other point I want to make is concerning the nature of modernism and postmodernism. Modernism is connected with Isaac Newton. He defined gravity is terms of absolute time and space. This is consistent with philosophy which saw Being as absolute and modern theology that sees God as Absolute.
However Einstein’s theory maintains that time and space are related and thus relational, rather than absolute. He saw matter and energy as related, they can be converted to each other, rather than absolute, independent entities that cannot be created or destroyed.
If reality is truly one, then physical reality must be in large part a reflection of intellectual and spiritual reality. Certainly Einstein’s theory signals the failure of philosophical thought to accurately reflect the physical world as was its intent. So with the death of absolutes philosophy died also.
Most people accept the idea that relativism is the only reasonable response to the end of absolutes, but that is untrue because there are many relational invariables in science. Also the Bible does not maintain that God is Absolute. Jesus, the Logos (Purpose/Meaning) of God, came to the world to serve and not to rule. God is Love, ie, Relational.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
“The Bible is not God and therefore is not perfect.”
Perhaps it’d be better to leave “perfect” out of the discussion. The question is whether the Bible is *true*. It doesn’t have to be equivalent to God to be completely true and without error.
“The Bible is the word of God in so far as it reveals Jesus Christ Who is the Logos and God.”
For the sake of argument, if this were true, which parts don’t reveal Jesus?
“the Bible does not need to be perfect to reveal God the Son to humanity.”
But the God the Son whom it reveals believed Scripture was “truth” and could “not be broken”, and he carried on his debates as though the pronouncements of Scripture ended all argument.
If you’re serious about Jesus himself being the truth, you ought to embrace what he himself quite clearly believed about the Scriptures.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
What God has provided to the Church for its guidance is perfect, unfailing, and unerring—it is precisely suited to achieve God’s purposes of redemption—because God is perfect, unfailing, and unerring. But this does not necessarily mean that what God has provided to the Church always conforms to human expectations of rationality, precision, literal facticity, and so on.
Thanks Dave, that’s a particularly good way of putting it, I think.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
The Decalogue says “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Apparently, a few “inerrantists” would add “Never stray in any routine mechanical tasks or physical habits”. Well, that’s fine, I suppose, because Jesus did after all say “Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect”. So- that provides a segue- how exactly is our heavenly Father perfect?
Well, he’s perfect because he LOVES us, folks. I trust my wife because I LOVE her. Not because she has passed a perfection exam administered by me. I trust holy scripture for the same reason—because I LOVE it. And I love it only because it reveals Christ to me, and “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.”
The confession says “forgive us for the things we have done, and those left undone.” The apostle says “anyone who knows the good to do, but fails to do it, sins.” Imperfection is not a platonic category speculating about secondary or insignificant bits of ignorance on the part of some author—it is a willful or lazy moral lapse. To apply any other criteria than this to the evaluation of scripture is a game which represents we honor God with lips but have hearts far from him. GOD IS LOVE.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
“Do you guys really think the Holy Spirit mediated Jesus’ human nature to the point that he never would have hit his thumb with a hammer?”
No—at least I don’t. But certainly you understand that that’s not the point. The issue is not whether Sparks is sufficiently creative to have invented plausible bedtime stories about what might have happened in Jesus’ workshop. I’m sure in his next installment he’ll tell us about the time Jesus blew up his chemistry set as a teenager and caught his brother’s hair on fire….
The issue is are such speculations logically sufficient to support his conclusion that there is “no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error?”
Let’s all say it together: non-sequitur. The logic—if we can even call it that— is so tortured its hard to believe that anyone’s actually defending it.
Reply to this commentJune 29th 2010
Daniel,
I guess that you have not read John 5:17, where Jesus says, “My Father is still working, and I am still working,” which directly contradicts Gen 2:2. Jesus believed in Himself and His mission.
The question is not whether the Bible or in this case the OT is true or not, but how it is true. Jesus did not quote the Hebrew Bible to prove or disprove some scientific law. We do not quote the OT to prove that adulters should be put to death and Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery to death.
If the Bible is inerrant it must not only be true, but without error in any way. The Bible is true because it reveals that Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen One of God. Not all statements in the Bible are true and without error, such as eating pork is a serious sin.
Inerrant means perfect, does it not? Only God is perfect, true or false? The Bible is not perfect because it is not God, yes or no? The Bible does not save people, Jesus Christ is the only Source of our salvation.
Belief in the Bible does not save, only belief in Jesus in Christ. “God so loved the world that He sent His only beloved Son, so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Reply to this commentJuly 1st 2010
The issue is not what was in the ‘mind’ of Jesus—whether He ever forgot where He placed His capenter’s saw. That’s a red herring, for the Bible never invites us to go inside Jesus’ mind. The issue is whether, when Jesus opened His mouth to teach, He ever taught anything that was NOT backed up “to the hilt” with the authority of God the Father. Jesus Himself gives us the answer to that question in John 12:49-50: “For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that His command is eternal life. Therefore, WHATEVER I speak, JUST AS THE FATHER HAS TOLD ME, so I speak.” That’s pretty clear isn’t it? Jesus taught nothing but what His Father told Him to say. He did not teach Jewish “fables,” like the false teachers Paul mentions in 1 Timothy 1:4; we do not have to separate the “wheat from the chaff” among His teachings. So let’s have done with irreverent attempts to ‘enter into the mind of Jesus.’ We are not invited to do that; nore are we invited to indulge in rationalistic speculations about how Jesus’ true humanity requires Him to be subject to error in His teaching. That is rationalism, pure and simple.
Reply to this commentJuly 2nd 2010
I regret missing out on this conversation while on vacation. But I can add, in passing, that the debate continues to rest on whether one things as a foundationalist or in a more postmodern style. Once one takes the postmodern turn, many of the concerns expressed above are no longer on the table ...
Reply to this commentSeptember 20th 2010
I like the distinction Sparks’ proposes for two types of postmodernism, though the second seems more like simply a reasonable conclusion. One hardly needs to be a postmodernist or to have learned anything from postmodernists to conclude that while an intellectual tradition might restrict our grasp of the truth, it can also be the basis on which we learn whatever we do. That’s no more significant than realizing that while my eyes might distort what I see, they are still the way in which I see the world.
More problematic is the introduction concerning the two natures doctrine of Christ. It commits a simple logical fallacy. Sparks assumes that making mistakes is an essential property of being human. But while humans often err, it hardly follows that this is an essential characteristic of being human. Let’s say someone lives therir whole life and never makes a mathematical mistake. Does that mean they fail to be human? Obviously not. In the same way, just because Jesus is fully human, it doesn’t follow that he must have made mistakes (whether he did in fact make mistakes is a separate question). So Sparks’ argument fails at the very beginning.
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