After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 4

June 26, 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 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).