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

I like the implications of this article. In accepting the finite,human reality of all the authors of Scripture, it opens up the freedom to allow for human limitations in knowledge and scope of everything that exists in life. The Bible is Gods Word and as such, is above anf beyond the errors of humand because it is inspired by and ultimately written by the Holy Spirit. This view is what I perceive Professor Sparks to be taking issue with. Is that what others see or if he reads this, as that partially what you are doing Professor Sparks??

This really is not very convincing, and I doubt any one who has published in the area of Christology would take this seriously. Certainly not myself.

Understanding the relation between the two natures has always been tricky for theologians, but in the Reformed tradition John Owen affirmed that the divine essence/nature operates not immediately on the human nature because of the hypostatic union, but mediately by means of the Holy Spirit, thus preserving the integrity of the two natures in the Chalcedonian fashion.

Affirming finitum non capax inifiniti does not necessarily mean that Christ made errors, especially when one considers that Christ received the Holy Spirit without measure for his public ministry. Sparks indulges in pure speculation and makes the jump that ignorance necessarily means error.

But the exegetical evidence shows that the Spirit was the immediate operator of all Christ’s acts as the God-man. If the Holy Spirit can illuminate Christ’s human mind so that he knows about the Samaritan woman’s past husbands (in other words, he knew she had 5 husbands and not 4), then Holy Spirit can illuminate the minds of the biblical writers to know the facts of world history.

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“And if the BioLogos organization had any concern for fairness…”

Mark, that last comment was rude.  It’s fine to criticize, but please do so constructively.

Kent, it is true that “‘Postmodernism’ has a poor reputation in Evangelical circles,” but I also think that some who scoff at it as a misguided enterprise also use some of its tactics.

Saying that others believe that the earth is older than thousands of years old because of their own presuppositions, saying that the pursuit of evolutionary science is just a Trojan horse for introducing euthanasia, genocide, and abortion…  Doesn’t this sound a lot like Postmodernism, with its power plays and crippled epistemology?

I’m really no expert in philosophy.  Please let me know what you think.

Kenton Sparks says that according to Practical Realism: “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.”

I am inclined to think a Wittgensteinian perspective has something to say. As I understand that, it would mean that our concepts (understandings of reality) are partly constitutive of our reality, so it’s not the case that they are closer to or further from the facts. Our concepts are part of how we are going about living our lives. For all that, we don’t arbitrarily adopt whatever concepts we want, and we do have the concept that we bump up against ‘facts’.

Don’t ask me to explicate further, if you want to know more you’‘ll have to explore for yourselves (as I am doing)!

Kenton

Could you give a good reference as to the meaning of “hypostatic”.  Online would be nice but in the fall likely I could go to a nearby RC Seminary and read the article or chapter in a book. 

The real question is what did he say when He “Hit his thumb?”

Dave W

Dave—

He clearly said “Me!”

“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.”

I don’t think this follows at all. First of all, written Scripture is not analogous to Jesus working in his carpenter shop but to him speaking by the Holy Spirit in - for example - the Sermon on the Mount. Of course Paul and Moses could err in their day to day life, and Jesus may have sometimes forgotten to put the tools away or mistook someone in a crowd for his brother, but it doesn’t follow that when under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Paul or Moses or Jesus ever erred. That’s what it means to be speaking by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth.

Second, it doesn’t take account of the fact that Jesus himself, whether he could err in the sense you describe or not, often appealed directly to Scripture as the speech of God which couldn’t be broken. Yes Jesus as man was a finite human, and he accordingly had to live by faith, but a large part of his faith would have been precisely believing in the Scriptures as the word of God which, he says of in John 17:17, “Your word is truth”.

The parallel you’re proposing doesn’t work.

Spot on in your analysis, Daniel.  Nice job.  The author simply has an issue with the inerrancy of Scripture and is trying to “reason” why it simply can’t be so.  He rejects the notion that the Holy Spirit is who actually spoke through the prophets and apostles, which is why it is inerrant.  His approach flows from the whole post-modern mindset that we simply can’t know “truth” with certainty.

It seems like there is maybe two different issues going on.

One is the nature of the inspiration of the Bible, whether it in inerrant or not and what exactly “inerrant” means. In this I think Mark and Daniel have made some good criticisms above. It does not necessarily follow that Jesus was in error in his choices, intentions, propositions, etc. just because he on occasion hit is thumb. It may be that there is internal evidence within the Bible to say Jesus erred in these ways, but it doesn’t seem like this post addresses that or the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ life at all.

The second issue is the certainty with which to hold our understanding of truth and interpretation of the Bible. Here I think Critical Realism is perhaps a better tool than the postmodern Modern Realism or Practical Realism. I can see elements of Practical Realism at work at the edges of science when we’re not sure about the true nature of a phenomenon but we know enough about it to make practical, tentative theories that we can make predictions with and test. But we generally don’t seem to live in this Practical Realism (or whatever we want to call it) forever.

JHM—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?  That would seem to me a ridiculously scholastic, if not heretical, understanding of Chalcedonian Christology, and it further would ignore, IMHO, the kenotic theology of the incarnation.

JHM, you seem to agree that Jesus could have hit his thumb with a hammer, but that this would not have been an “error” with respect to Jesus’ divine nature.  Well, fine.  I sort of agree, because the question is what it means to “err.”  In taking on human nature and limiting himself (kenosis), God the Son did not “err.”  In his divine nature he knew that this would mean he might hit his thumb with a hammer.  He intentionally and unerringly took that nature into his being in order to relate to us as human beings and to make atonement for us.

It seems to me that this can be a very fruitful model for scripture.  We don’t have to invent cud-chewing rabbits in order to say that God doesn’t “err” in scripture.  The phenomena of Jesus’ humanness speak for themselves and we affirm the mystery of their union with his divinity.  The same with scripture, ISTM.

BTW, there is no significant difference between what Sparks is calling “practical realism” and what some call “critical realism.”  A critically realist theology of scripture will look quite different than rationalistic Warfieldian innerancy.  See N.T. Wright’s “The Last Word,” for example.

IMHO, the problem isn’t the notion that scripture does not “err,” or better, that God does not err in His speech in and through scripture.  To the extent that scripture is God’s speech, God’s message, then we ought to affirm that the message God provides is not ever in “error.”  This is why I’m not really comfortable with the title “after inerrancy.” 

The problem is Warfield’s rationalistic approach to what this might mean, coupled with his particular take on “inspiration” through the idea of “concursus.”  The curious thing is that quite a few—dare I even say most?—serious evangelical inerrantist theologians deal in ideas such as speech-act theory, which is a long way from Warfield and even from the Chicago Statement, IMHO.

dopderbeck,

I do assume Jesus would have hit his thumb now an then. When I look at what the Bible says about Jesus’ early life, it strikes me that people were impressed with his knowledge of Scripture, his relationship to God, and his authority, not that he had super-human strength and never made a math or grammar mistake in “school”.

What troubles me is when we start getting into the actual stuff the Bible records Jesus saying. If we say that perhaps Jesus erred now and then theologically, on what basis do we have confidence in any of the stuff he and other NT authors said? Is Jesus inerrent only in things he didn’t err in? This then seems to place the judgment of what is and isn’t error in our lap, and I guess I find that uncomfortable. It seems to me the Christian story has been that Jesus is to have authority in *my* life, not me telling God incarnate where he might have screwed up.

doperbeck,

OK, so you said:

To the extent that scripture is God’s speech, God’s message, then we ought to affirm that the message God provides is not ever in “error.”

So how do we decide what the “extent” is? I suppose that’s the real center of discussion. If it’s not all or nothing, then how are we to arbitrate what is and isn’t God’s speech?

JHM said:  If we say that perhaps Jesus erred now and then theologically, on what basis do we have confidence in any of the stuff he and other NT authors said?

I respond:  I really don’t think this is a persuasive argument at all.  In no other area in which human beings assert knowledge claims do we expect absolute perfection.  In courtrooms, we routinely find people guilty of crimes “beyond a reasonable doubt” even though key witnesses never, never offer “perfect” testimony.

JHM said:  So how do we decide what the “extent” is?

I respond:  First, everyone does this already, even people claiming to be Warfieldian inerrantists.  Do you believe in a literal 6-day creation or a literal Millennium?  Do you believe rabbits chew cud (Lev. 11:6)?  Do you think people should hate their parents (Luke 14:26)?  For all these parts of scripture and a host of others, we all have to interpret, and interpreting requires sifting the communicative content from the medium.  It can’t be avoided, it never is avoided in practice, and we shouldn’t pretend we’re avoiding it.

cont’d:

Second, scripture is not our only norm for theology and truth.  Tradition, reason, and experience all play important roles.  Perhaps one important move is not to interpret scripture in ways that obviously contradict observed facts—a move that, curiously, is at least partly allowed even by the Chicago Statements!  (And this indeed is one of the key points at which the Chicago Statements, IMHO, start to become incoherent, because this move is not allowed in other instances, presumably for predetermined theological reasons that are themselves extra-Biblical….)

Our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters surely will say some important things to us about the value of Tradition here.  We should listen, particularly in that the rule of faith provides the core interpretive principle not only for hermeneutics but also for canon. But even if we heris of the Reformation have to accept the fact that theology is a messy, very human discipline.  We can know quite a bit with a great deal of certainty—the golden thread of the rule of faith, the big ethical themes of love and holiness.  But we shouldn’t pretend that the Bible gives us certainty for all our systems.

“For all these parts of scripture and a host of others, we all have to interpret, and interpreting requires sifting the communicative content from the medium.  It can’t be avoided, it never is avoided in practice, and we shouldn’t pretend we’re avoiding it.”

Shoot, I didn’t mean to post the above yet. I was going to comment on it. Here’s the comment:

Of course we need to interpret, but when you start talking about separating the “communicative content” from the “medium” you are on dangerous ground. What it would lead to is you letting the Bible mean only what you already assume it could mean. It’s conforming the Bible to yourself.

doperbeck (#19288)

I wasn’t really trying to make an argument, I’m just trying to understand the position and figure out how I could move forward with it if it were the way to go. You said: “In no other area in which human beings assert knowledge claims do we expect absolute perfection.” The problem for me is 1) we are talking about a perfect God, not my ability to understand that perfect God. 2) 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 can understand they idea of “sifting the communicative content from the medium” but it would seem to me that if the extent to which the medium is “corruptible” or errs, the communicative content is correspondingly compromised. Another option in which this wouldn’t be the case would be to say that the medium may err but we have faith that the Holy Spirit will ensure inerrant communicative content. Is that what you’re getting at with Tradition, etc. ?

It makes sense, as a scientist, that the World should ultimately be consistent with the Word, but when it comes to theology I’m not sure how we know what’s consistent and inconsistent because it seems primarily revelatory.

Daniel said:  What it would lead to is you letting the Bible mean only what you already assume it could mean. It’s conforming the Bible to yourself.

I respond:  Yes—that is always a danger, I agree.  But no view of inerrancy guards against this danger, because as we all agree, we always have to interpret.  What helps guard against this danger is the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, the community of the Church, the heart of the Tradition, and the reason God gave to us:  in other words, the other key sources of norms for theology, tradition, reason and experience, in addition to the norma normans of scripture.  And even with the quadrilateral—indeed even with the Roman notion of an infallible Magesterium—there is no sure guarantee that we won’t do this, because we’re human, fallible, and sinful.  Ad fontes and semper reformanda.