How Much of the Bible is Actually Inspired? CSBI Article VI

"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 ten 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 VI

We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.

As is well known, the modern study of Scripture has challenged some traditional views of Scripture. As a result, non-traditional theories of inspiration have arisen to try to account for these challenges. In Article VI, the framers of CSBI seek to address one such theory they consider threatening to a traditional Evangelical model of inspiration: the Bible is inspired in part, not in whole, and largely on the level of concepts, not words.

To understand what the framers are getting at, we have to take a step back and be reminded of the three general areas of modern biblical studies that have proven difficult for some traditional views of inspiration of Scripture.

The first is textual criticism. The diverse manuscript evidence, as early as two centuries before Christ, has greatly affected the confidence with which we can claim that the Bible we have is the Bible as it was originally written. Article X engages this issue a bit more directly (the “original autographs” of Scripture), so we won’t get into all of that here.

Suffice it to say that textual criticism is driven by the fact that the earliest textual witnesses we have are diverse, not uniform. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the actual wording of what the original biblical text looked like. So, in the mind of many, the existence of textual variants calls into question at least God’s interest in preserving the exact wording of the original. So, if God is not that interested, maybe inspiration on the word level is not something worth getting worked up about. Maybe to God, the ideas carried by the words are the heart of inspiration. Textual criticism drives this question.

Second is biblical criticism in general, which raised questions about how books of the Bible were not written at one time, but over lengthy periods. (The Pentateuch is the parade example of this in biblical scholarship.) As the biblical books grew, earlier portions were edited and adjusted to reflect the concerns of later times. In other words, as the argument goes, the canonical form of the biblical books is the end product that reflects how later communities of faith reshaped the original. If inspired early versions of biblical texts underwent changes, likewise under inspiration, this too suggests that preserving exact wording is not foremost on God’s mind.

The third development in biblical studies is archaeological findings that cast doubt on the historical nature of parts of the Old Testament, the most important of which for us at BioLogos is the creations stories in Genesis 1-3. This raised a different kind of issue concerning inspiration: perhaps those parts of the Bible that have historical or scientific problems are somehow “less inspired” than, say, the Law od Moses or the praises of the Psalms.

So, let’s tie all this in to Article VI. This three-fold pressure from biblical studies gave rise to ways of thinking about inspiration that are not bound to the words as much as to the ideas. To put it another way, perhaps the Spirit’s superintendence of the composition of Scripture was not on the word level, but on level of the ideas behind the words.

Especially with respect to textual criticism, one can see why such a view would be attractive. Textual criticism is not an exact science, and we have no way of knowing for certain when we have reconstructed the original text. In fact, the more evidence that comes to light—this is especially true since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947—the more complicated a picture we have.

It used to be thought that the diverse textual witnesses are late corruptions of an originally uncorrupted text. The Dead Sea Scroll evidence, however, shows that, already in the century or two before Christ, textual diversity was in full swing. So, it is with great relief that some posit that inspiration is not on the level of words, but ideas.

Biblical criticism and archaeology are more the focus of the denial portion of this Article, and the issue is this: many/most biblical scholars interpret portions of Scripture as reflecting erroneous historical or scientific information (again, the creation stories are front and center here). Some also argue that portions of the Bible are morally problematic, e.g., the so-called “genocide” passages, mass human killing in the flood, the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, etc.

These factors contributed a view of inspiration that said, “Maybe not all of the Bible is inspired, just the parts that get it right are.”

These are the general tendencies addressed in Article VI. The framers of CSBI assert that all of the Bible is inspired, not just parts of it, and that inspiration is at the word level, not simply ideas. To put it plainly, despite the challenges of modern biblical criticism, every word of the Bible is superintended by God (though without running roughshod over the personalities of the biblical writers, see Article VIII).

The task before us, however, is how to flesh out—rather than simply assert—God’s detailed superintendence of the words of the Bible in view of the very real textual, compositional, and historical issues glanced at above. Some way forward would need to be found between two extremes: (1) simply dismiss the challenges to maintain one’s theology, and (2) assuming that the challenges mentioned are incompatible with inspiration.

These extremes are not helpful. The first requires us to isolate our Christian convictions from important currents in modern thought. The second presumes that God would never superintend a process that is riddled with such challenges.

Here again, as we have seen elsewhere in this series, the overriding question should not be whether the Bible is inspired in view of these challenges, but how those challenges affect our articulation of how Scripture is inspired.

And, here too, we come back to the science/faith dialogue. Coming to the conclusion, as some Christians do, that the creations stories are minimally historical (if at all), does not in any way imply that they belong to the non-inspired parts of the Bible. Rather, they may be inspired—even down to the last word—to “do something” other than give historical or scientific information.

Everything seems to hinge on what one expects an inspiring God to do and what the resulting inspired text should look like. These are questions that have occupied the great minds of the church since the beginning, and Evangelicals must be careful not to bring that discussion to a premature close.