The discussion arising in response to my recent post Inerrancy and Biblical Authority, both on this blog and on some of the blogs that linked to it, got me thinking a bit more about this topic. I was reminded of an interesting comment made by Alan Rhoda regarding the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Philosophical Society “EPS,”

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the originals. God is a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

In a discussion with Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher on the meaning, Alan Rhoda distinguishes two accounts of inerrancy,

It seems to me that the EPS statement is sufficiently vague to permit a few different readings.

The strongest is what’s known, I think, as verbal plenary inspiration (VPI). This is the view that each and every word used in the Biblical originals is exactly the word that God wanted used. Hence, since God is infallible, the Bible is inerrant. (VPI is the position of the Chicago Statement.)

A weaker, and I think more defensible view, may be called didactic plenary inspiration (DPI). This is the view that whatever the Biblical originals were intended to teach is inerrant. It is not necessary that the particular words of the Bible be chosen by God so long as the particular message that God wants to convey gets across. (VPI entails DPI, but not vice-versa.) If one accepts this view, then the question to be asked with respect to a Biblical text is “what was it intended to teach?” Is Genesis 1, for example, intended to teach that the world was created in six 24-hour days? Or is it, perhaps, a kind of literary framework intended to teach the absolute superiority of Yahweh over all other gods? Or perhaps its purpose isn’t primarily didactic at all, but something primarily evocative like poetry?

My point is that since the EPS inerrancy statement does not specify the primary locus of inerrancy (whether the words, the teachings, or something else) it permits a flexible range of approaches to Biblical interpretation.

Rhoda suggests two different ways of understanding the doctrine of biblical inerrancy; one that follows from affirming verbal inspiration and another that follows from didactic inspiration.

To see how DPI works consider a legal analogy, suppose that I want to write up a last will and testament. I approach a lawyer and tell set out precisely what I want put in my will. The lawyer then drafts a document that contains the provisions I stipulated but expresses them in standard legal terms and in accord with standard legal conventions and phrases e.g. “I, Matthew Flannagan, being of sound mind, hereby decree that…”

The document expresses, in first person, my will regarding my assets and property so I can be said to be its author, a court will call it my will as will my surviving family. However, I did not write it. The form, exact wording, turns of phrase, sequencing, choice of font and paper, etc are the lawyers’. Given that the will was drafted in New Zealand, in 2010 it will be in New Zealand English and drafted in accord with the styles and conventions of the statutes and precedents applicable to New Zealand wills and testaments. Nevertheless, as the content of the document express my wishes, despite my lack of authorship, it is a faithful expression of my will. Something like this picture of inspiration is suggested in Exodus 4:10-16.

Now it is important to note that a DPI model of inerrancy does not mean that people reject the entire biblical text as mythical and figurative stories, which illustrate theological and moral truths and assert nothing about space-time history. If the message is articulated through the literary and rhetorical conventions of human beings then a plausible interpretation, as opposed to a strained one, will take these conventions into account. When this is done, it is implausible to conclude everything in scripture is myth.

Take, for example, the genre of ancient biography, as mentioned in my previous post. This genre does not intend to affirm as true every detail it records but rather seeks to give an accurate picture of the person the biography is about. This still requires that much of what it records is true; no one would interpret biographies about Alexander the Great to read that they did not teach that he was king of Macedon, son of Philip, who conquered Persia, fought in the battle of Gaugamela, etc. Similarly, if Jesus did none of the things recorded in the gospels and said nothing at all remotely resembling what they attribute to him then these accounts do not give an accurate picture of him.  However, the genre of ancient biography does not require that Jesus’ teaching on divorce be presented verbatim, in precisely the same order or using exactly the same words in the various synoptic gospels. Neither does it require that every temporal or geographical detail mentioned within them is taught as correct.

Many historical books intend to teach historical claims. The Old Testament teaches, among other things, that Israel went into exile as a result of disobedience; it also teaches God lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. These texts are, as far as I can tell, historiographies. Admittedly they are ancient near eastern “ANE” historiographies and the fact that the genre of ANE historiography uses hyperbole, lack of precision, a degree of historical reconstruction, etc needs to be taken into account. Nevertheless, as are historiographies they intend to teach us the significance of events that occurred in the past.

Now a person would not take an Egyptian history as entirely figurative. One should take it to teach that a particular event happened. It is true that one should recognise the hyperbole present, the theological/political message the text affirms but this would not be taken to be all that the author teaches. Ramses’ campaigns into Syria are intended to tell us that the campaigns actually happened, that the battles actually occurred even if they use hyperbole, rhetoric and historical reconstruction to articulate a political/theological message over and above the mere reporting of history. Hence, DPI does not necessitate a licence to de-historicise the text or embrace biblical minimalism.

Of course, there are other books and literary forms in scripture, such as the parables or the apocalyptic, which are not intended to be read as history. Then there are the early chapters of Genesis or the books of Job and Jonah, where it is not clear that the text intends to teach that the events actually occurred in history and where it seems more likely that these were stories were meant to convey theological and ethical truths. What is needed when reading these texts is attention to the genre. Conclusions about what a text teaches must be based on defensible claims about the literary style and the context of the text in question.

DPI, therefore, is not the same as the view that scripture is infallible in faith and morals but not in history. It may simply be that at certain junctures scripture intends to teach us something about the past. On the other hand, DPI does allow for certain types of errors that a more verbal account may not allow for. Here are two examples. The first is one I alluded to in my previous post, cases where the form or way the message is articulated presupposes error. Consider Jesus’ comments in Matt 15:18-19, “But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things make a man unclean. For out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Some scholars take, as metaphoric, references to the heart as the seat of the will, emotions, intellect. However, others suggest that ancient cultures literally believed the heart was the seat of psychological states like this and conclude that these texts reflect and presuppose a false and erroneous view of anatomy. I am inclined to think that even if these scholars are correct, little of interest follows.

An analogue here would be a person who reads a 12th century account of a battle that is recorded to have occurred at “sun rise”. We know that 12th century people literally believed that the sun rose, in accord with the accepted pre-Copernican cosmology of the day. Hence, it is plausible to think that the human authors of these texts took the phrase “sun rise” to literally mean that the sun rose. Despite this, I think it would be a mistake to suggest that the phrase “the battle took place at sunrise” is false because of Copernicus’ discoveries. While the text presupposes an erroneous view of cosmology, it clearly does not intend to teach us pre-Copernican cosmology; all it teaches is that a battle occurred at dawn and it uses pre-Copernican cosmology to express this point. What the text teaches is true if the battle occurred and it occurred at dawn. It would be false if the battle occurred at another time of the day or never occurred at all.

I am inclined think that the references to heart, kidneys, etc in the scriptures function in an analogous way to the word “sunrise” in medieval texts. I would say the same thing about references to the “four corners of the earth” or “the waters above and below” even if the original human writers understood these to be literally true. The cosmology in question is presupposed by the text abut is not what the text is trying to teach us. The author uses these phrases them to teach something else and it is what the author taught not the author’s mode of presentation that matters.

A second example of an error that would be allowed under DPI would be where scripture affirms or states something which is unrelated to what is being taught. An example would be Paul’s instruction to Timothy in 2 Tim 4:15, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.” Suppose, for the sake of argument, Paul did not leave his cloak at Troas, perhaps he thought he had but in reality he had left it somewhere else. I am inclined to think this kind of error would make absolutely no difference to whether what Paul teaches in 2 Timothy is true or not. As the point of this letter is not to give an apostolic teaching on whether there is a cloak in Troas.

Paul’s teaching is authoritative because he is an apostle, what he teaches as an apostle is true. It does not follow from this, that every personal conversation, remark, Paul ever made in his life or every memory he had was without error. It’s rather that what he taught in the function of an apostle has divine authority. It seems to me that while the letter to Timothy expounds apostolic teaching and instruction and the whole book letter is therefore authoritative, the specific passage in v 4:13 records a personal aside Paul gives to Timothy regarding some property he left at Troas. To interpret Tim 4:13 as a divine command to collect Paul’s cloak, or a prophetic or apostolic utterance that a cloak existed in Troas seems to me to be excessively pedantic and implausible, hence I myself see nothing about the divine authority of scripture threatened by a discovery that there was no cloak in Troas. All it would show us was that Paul’s memory was not perfect, which we already knew.

So DPI is compatible with certain sorts of errors in the text provided they are not what the text teaches. Of course none of this means that scripture contains these errors. There may well have been a cloak at Troas. References to “the waters above,” “heart,” etc may be phenomenological language, the point is that even if these references do presuppose or  contain errors of a certain sort this does not really make any difference to the claim that whatever scripture intends to teach is true. Other examples could be given but I think you get the point.

I suspect something like what Alan Rhoda calls didactic plenary inspiration is the view I was elaborating in my previous post. It also appears to be the view defended (at least in some places) by William Lane Craig and something like it is the view expounded by Alvin Plantinga. I also suspect that Glenn Peoples holds this view; although Glenn considers himself to not be an inerrantist he would probably, on Rhoda’s classification, be a particular kind of inerrantist, one that rejected VPI and instead asserted DPI.

On the other hand, the sceptics I referred to in my previous post (people like Tooley, Fales, Brink, Loftus, etc) in their critiques, work with a fairly strong VPI view of inerrancy. John Loftus’ speaks of Jesus’ reference to “the heart” and how this reflects a primitive view of anatomy, Fales states that certain books may contain the genre of myth and Tooley suggests that Genesis contains a story in which God wipes out the human race. This suggests that they think that every word, illustration or literary convention used to teach us about God must itself be without error. If I am correct, then what sceptics attack is one particular version of inerrancy. They may or may not be successful in this attack but attacking one version of a doctrine does not show that all versions are false, and in this case many leading defenders of Christianity do not hold the version under attack any way.

RELATED POSTS:
Sunday Study: Inerrancy and Biblical Authority

RELEVANT CONVERSATIONS:
Basic Inerrancy @ First Things (also at Parableman)
Inerrancy again – a blog about a blog about a blog about a blog @ Beretta
The Pitfalls of Literalism & Plantinga on Inerrancy @ The Church of Jesus Christ

Tags:   Alvin Plantinga · Inerrancy · Michael Tooley · William Lane Craig6 Comments