Biblical inerrancy is a concept that is at best meaningless and at worst dishonest. The full version of statements on this subject normally affirm the inerrancy of the original autographs – i.e. the versions that the authors of the Biblical writings penned or dictated. To accept this, one must take a leap of faith, since none of us has ever seen one of these original manuscripts. But on what basis can one do so? It cannot be on the basis of the Bible: On what basis could one take the word of our divergent manuscripts that they stem from an inerrant original? The Bible, at any rate, nowhere affirms its own inerrancy. Indeed, from the perspective of many theologians, such an affirmation is idolatry, attributing to writings that are clearly human creations attributes that are prerogatives of God alone. But at any rate, many of us who have needed to do so have signed statements that use the term ‘inerrancy’, knowing we could do so without ever being in danger of being proven wrong, or of it having implications for how one views the manuscripts we actually have.
Hopefully it will be clear from the proposed amendment to the Evangelical Theological Society’s doctrinal statement what many of us already knew: adherence to a concept of Biblical inerrancy does not lead people to interpret that infallible Bible in the same ways. I was particularly interested to see Terry Mortenson’s name on the list of proponents of the amendment, since Mortenson, when he spoke at Butler University, showed himself to not actually know the Biblical languages. It is those who are least aware of the realities and complexities of Biblical studies who most strongly desire affirmations of the clear-cut nature of their faith.
I have an alternative to suggest for ETS: Why not be honest and acknowledge that, rather than being an organization committed to the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, this will be an organization committed to historic Christian orthodoxy? After all, if Protestants are honest, the Bible did not come pre-packaged, and so one cannot talk about the authority of Scripture without raising the question of the authority of the church, which decided on the contents of the canon. Otherwise, accept that principles of Protestant faith do not guarantee agreement on doctrinal matters. If one cuts off doctrinal authority at the Bible, one is pretty much guaranteeing that one will repeat the debates that followed in the centuries thereafter, since it was the diversity of information in the Bible, combined with the questions the Biblical writings leave unanswered, that led to those debates and the church councils that sought to address them.
The irony of Biblical inerrancy is that it attributes to the Biblical authors what Protestants refuse to attribute to popes: the ability to be genuinely fallible human beings who nonetheless can speak or write at times in an inerrant fashion when God wills it for them to produce Scripture or authoritative ecclesial pronouncements. It is not only much simpler to affirm that the Bible is the work of human authors whose humanity in all its aspects and limitations has left its mark on what they produced, it is also what the evidence of the Bible itself most naturally would lead us to conclude, if we are talking about the evidence we actually have, and not some perfect autographs that no one has seen. Evangelicals mock Mormons when they claim that their additional Scriptures existed on golden tablets that can no longer be located. Are fundamentalist affirmations about inerrant original autographs really that different?
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