Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Arguments contra

A representative of the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS) wrote me recently to invite me to rejoin under the impression that I had once been a member. I explained that my background is Roman Catholic, and that although I had published an article* in their high quality journal, Philosophia Christi, I had never been a member of EPS. The representative replied that some of their members are Roman Catholic and sent me a link to the EPS website and doctrinal statement, the first sentence of which reads, “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the original manuscripts.” I responded that the statement excludes me inasmuch as I reject Biblical inerrancy. If you care to know my reasons, here are some of them.

I think about inerrancy and related topics under the umbrella of the following assumptions.

A1) The triune God of the Christian Bible exists.

A2) Said God reveals himself to man.

A3) One of the ways he reveals himself to man is via Scripture.

A4) Scripture exists in the form of different texts written at different times by different ancient human authors.

A5) Scripture does not pre-exist its being written down, but comes into existence in time and over time when the various human authors write down their texts in human languages, Hebrew for example.

A6) These authors write under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit such that the content or gist (spirit) of what they write derives from the Holy Spirit (der Heilige Geist) and is not merely excogitated (thought up or made up) by the authors. (I am not suggesting an etymological connection between the English ‘gist’ and the German ‘Geist’ or the English ‘ghost.’ There is no such connection as far as I know.) Thus these ancient human authors, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, mediate God’s message to man. Without their mediation, no message would get through from God to the rest of us who did not author these texts but merely read (and to varying degrees understand) them either in their original form or in translations and transcriptions. The authors of these texts are conduits of the divine message. They are the receivers of the divine transmission which the rest of us receive at a second remove.

Being finite and fallible mortals, limited by their languages and cultures and tribal affiliations, these ‘receivers,’ despite their operation under the Spirit’s inspiration, inevitably add human ‘noise’ to the divine ‘signal.’ It is to be expected that the signal-to-noise ratio will be non-negligible; that it will vary from author to author and thus from text to text, and that the over-all signal-to-noise ratio in the New Testament will be more favorable than that in the Old.

(A7) Scripture is not the same as the Word (Logos) of God (verbum dei) referred to in the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . .” The Word or Logos is co-eternal with the Father; Scripture is not. They cannot be the same because the former is metaphysically necessary while the latter is metaphysically contingent. Scripture might never have come into existence. And as I said, it came to exist in time over time when finite and fallible mortals wrote down what they took to be divine teaching. Scriptural revelation is revelation to humanity; humanity consists of human creatures; there is no necessity that God, being a se and wholly self-sufficient, create anything; hence there is no necessity that humanity exist and that scriptural revelation exist. God cannot reveal himself to man if there is no man to reveal himself to.

The Bible, therefore, cannot be identical to the Word of God, if ‘Word of God’ refers to the Second Person of the Trinity. And this for two main reasons, one modal, the other temporal. The Second Person is metaphysically necessary whereas the Scripture is metaphysically contingent. And the Second Person is co-eternal with the First Person, but the Bible, i.e., Scripture, is not co-eternal with any of the Persons. It is not eternal at all. It exists in time, but not at every time. Scripture does not eternally exist, nor does it always exist. So we can’t even say that the Scripture is omnitemporal, i.e., sempiternal.

Some will bristle at the above and insist that the Bible is [stamp the foot, pound the podium] the Word of God! You are free to say that but then you are using ‘Word of God’ in an altered sense to refer to the Scripture which, inspired by the Holy Spirit and expressive of the divine Logos, is written down by men who, finite and fallible and culture-bound as they are, not to mention suffering from the noetic consequences of sin, add their ‘noise’ and filtration and limitation to the divine ‘signal,’ so that the end result is at best derivative from, but not identical to, the divine Logos, or Word of God in the original sense.

Finally, would it not be absurd to suppose that He Who Is, He whose name is Being itself, (Exodus 3:14) thinks in Hebrew from all eternity and composed Scripture in Hebrew from all eternity and handed a bit of it to Moses on Mount Sinai? Hebrew is a human language; no Hebrews, no Hebrew language; the existence of the latter presupposes the existence of the former. There is no necessity that humans, or any creatures at all, exist and so no necessity that human languages exist; God, however, is from all eternity noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself, without need of any human language. (Of course, I am not suggesting that the God of the Bible is identical to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.)

Now if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, or “in its entirety” as per the EPS statement quoted above, as some of my Calvinist and other evangelical friends say it is. Why not? Well, the ‘receivers’ are crappy so that, even if the divine Transmitter and his transmission are pure and impeccable, distortion and noise will be introduced by the lousy ‘receivers.’ The ancient authors each received a truly divine message, but then each had to express it in his own way with his own words as he understood the words of his native human tongue. Cultural and tribal biases may be expected to creep in, not to mention distortions and limitations of a syntactic and semantic type: human languages are not equal in their expressive capacities. A Calvinist should have no trouble adding to the mix by chalking up some of the noise and distortion to the “noetic consequences of sin.”

Verbal Plenary Inspiration?

So I am wondering whether those who tell us that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribe to the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Zondervan, 2013:

Verbal plenary inspiration means that the text we have is verbatim the text God inspired, down to the very terminology and syntax. It is not that God gave human authors a general impression or message that they then communicated in their own words and according to their own understanding. Rather God accommodated his message to each author’s style and understanding, even as such did not interfere with the content. (p. 19)

According to Norman Geisler, “ . . . the locus of meaning (and truth) for an evangelical is in the text, not in the mind of the author behind the text. It is the graphai that are inspired, not the author’s intentions behind them.” (18-19)

If that is one’s view, then I understand how one could hold the view that Scripture is inerrant in every particular. I, however, find Geisler’s view incomprehensible, for the reason given above. Protestants trust their own judgment and will not submit to the Roman magisterium. They have their reasons, and I am not saying they should submit. Well, I am doing something similar. I am going by what I take to be the case, after the exercise of protracted and indeed prayerful due diligence. Isn’t that what Luther did? What else can anyone do? You examine the matter seriously and then you live by what you find to be the case. You might even come to the conclusion that you ought to submit to the authority of Rome!

Finally, it seems to me that I have a good explanation of why some are so enamored of Biblical inerrancy: they just cannot tolerate any uncertainty. Hence they enforce it doctrinally and demand it of others. We all have security needs of various sorts, among them, doxastic security needs. We like to be secure in our beliefs, and we don’t like our beliefs to be questioned. Our deepest beliefs are tenets, things we hold onto. And so we insist: we take a stand. Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders! It is no surprise to me that some people are overwhelmed by their doxastic security needs to the detriment of their critical faculties. I take the ability to live with uncertainty to be a mark of mental maturity.

You might think to accuse me of ‘psychologizing,’ but I am doing no such thing. I gave my reasons and they stand (or fall) on their own merits (or demerits). I am not arguing from the mental makeup of inerrantists. Assuming that my reasons against inerrancy are good, it is perfectly reasonable to inquire into why anyone would hold such an untenable view.

Of course, I have no illusions about persuading anyone who has made up his mind on this or any other controversial matter. That would not be a reasonable goal. The goal of respectful, rational discussion is two-fold. To persuade those who have yet to make up their minds, and to achieve mutual clarification of differences between and among those who are already ‘siloed’ into the positions. Even if I can’t convince you, I can come to a better understanding of my position. And there is always the possibility — one to which I must remain open — that you will say something that forces a serious modification of my position or its outright abandonment.

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*William F. Vallicella, “The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being,” Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58.