Does Human Language Limit God? CSBI Article IV

"The BioLogos Forum" frequently features essays from The BioLogos Foundation's leaders and Senior Fellows. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what we believe here.

Today's entry was written by Pete Enns. Pete Enns is a former Senior Fellow of Biblical Studies for The BioLogos Foundation and author of several books and commentaries, including the popular Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, which looks at three questions raised by biblical scholars that seem to threaten traditional views of Scripture.

This is part eight in a blog series by Pete Enns (other parts can be found in the sidebar). In order to remove obstacles from the science and faith discussion, Enns carefully examines both the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics (CSBH), two documents that were developed by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The CSBI and CSBH were produced during three-day summits to which approximately 300 pastors from the Evangelical community came in an effort to defend and define biblical inerrancy. Despite their best efforts, there are still hermeneutical and theological shortcomings in the statements that pose road blocks to the progression of the science and faith discussion. Throughout the series, Enns looks at three main problems with the content of these declarations: inadequate genre recognition, a failure to appreciate how the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament complicates various Articles, and a failure to appreciate narrative developments within the Bible.

Article IV

We affirm that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.

We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God’s work of inspiration.

Scripture has a built-in problem that theologians and philosophers have long remarked on. Language is a product of the development of human cultures and so is subject to ambiguities, interpretive difficulties, and various limitations. Yet, the Bible is written in three of those languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. How then does the Bible escape the limitations inherent in all other forms of language-based communication? Can God actually communicate accurately in a written text of any kind?

We can see the depth of the dilemma when we keep in mind that the biblical languages were products of centuries of linguistic development (just as English has evolved from Shakespearian times to today). The biblical langauges were not special languages created by God to bear his revelation. Rather, God used the languages of the times.

There was a time in biblical studies, however, in the nineteenth century, when scholars thought that the Greek of the New Testament was a special language of the Spirit designed specifically to be the vessel of revelation. This was thought because the Greek style of the New Testament (actually, styles, as New Testament Greek students know only too well) was not that of the Greek literature known at the time (e.g., philosophy, great plays and other literary works).

The work of archaeologists beginning in the nineteenth century, however, unearthed various documents from everyday Greek life—e.g., letters, business transactions—that displayed a style like what we find in the New Testament. This Greek style came to be called “koine,” Greek for “common.” For some, these discoveries made the linguistic issue in the Bible more pressing, for the New Testament is written in a common, colloquial, style, not a refined and precise style as of the great Greek philosophers.

Likewise, biblical Hebrew and Aramaic are part of a “tree” of ancient Semitic languages—actually, very small branches on that tree. There is nothing at all special about these languages, and they are beset with all the ambiguities and unknowns that accompany any language.

Beyond the Bible itself, linguists and non-linguists alike can easily attest to the limitations of any sort of verbal/written communication. We do not always understand well what others are saying among our own contemporaries, verbally or in writing. How commonly do we misunderstand the intentions of authors in our own language, time, and place?

This inevitability is multiplied many times over when we introduce ancient languages into the mix. As any Bible translator will tell us, it is sometimes very difficult to understand what the original languages are getting across—we are between two and three millennia removed from the time, and their cultural assumptions are either foreign to us or sometimes utterly unknown. (We have difficulty enough grasping contemporary cultural differences let alone ancient ones.)

So, as seminarians like to quip, “The Bible loses something in the original.” What seems so clear in English translations is sometimes a false clarity due to translators’ needing to make decisions in order to finish their task. (Very often difficulties are decided upon based on a committee vote, wishing to be consistent with other portions of Scripture, theological expectations of the target audience, smoothness of style, and other issues.)

The point of this explanation of language and translations is that CSBI is wise indeed to have it be the subject of an Article early on in the document. The fact that God speaks in human language raises immediate and well-known philosophical, theological, and hermeneutical concerns about the adequacy of any language to bear that responsibility, and this needs to be addressed.

With this in mind, CSBI puts the matter well, in my opinion: human language is adequate for bearing God’s revelation. In other words, language may not be crystal clear, and there will always be interpretive challenges when dealing with the Bible. But Scripture adequately conveys true information about God in human language.

What is not stated here, however, is that the human languages in which God chose to communicate are ancient languages that no doubt reflect ancient ways of thinking. There is no neutral notion of “language” in world history: languages operate in certain ways, according to certain rules, in particular contexts.

I think that the science/faith discussion could have been aided significantly had the framers embraced intentionally the cultural issues concerning language. Specifically, an “incarnational principle” might have helped the discussion along. Ancient languages are most certainly adequate for bearing God’s revelation in the same way that humanity is adequate for bearing the divine image—neither is “perfect” or “flawless” but both are adequate and vessels of God’s choosing. Even in the incarnation, God willingly participates in human drama by accepting human limitations.

Such an approach helps keep us from thinking of the language problem in Scripture as a “problem.” One gathers from Article IV that the framers are making a concession by saying “language is limited but is nevertheless adequate.” Instead, I would suggest that the limitations of human language, just as with the limitation of the human form or the “limitation” of the incarnation, are precisely how God chooses to speak. This is a problem only if we presume it is “beneath” God to take on the forms of human cultures when he speaks.

Let me summarize this way: what the framers seem to recognize well about the language issue should be transferred to other problems of cultural setting that affect the science/faith dialogue, namely the Mesopotamian context of Israel’s creations stories, and a myriad of other issues of a historical nature.

In other words, Scripture is not God’s word despite its cultural limitations—i.e., once we get above and beyond the cultural factors we can see God’s word more purely. Rather, it is precisely through the cultural limitations that God chooses to speak.

The limitations of language is one instance of the general principle of God condescending to human cultures. So just as ancient language is adequate to convey God’s truth, the cultural trappings in which those truths are clothed are likewise adequate. Once this is grasped, some of the obstacles Evangelicals perceive about evolution, how to read Genesis or Paul, and the science/faith discussion will be seen in a new light. (I treat this general issue at greater length here.)