The Bible and slavery

I was looking through some of my books recently, and came across a famous apologetic book that I bought back in my more theologically naïve days, namely the book Is God a Moral Monster? by apologist Paul Copan. When I read this book—I still accepted the doctrine of inerrancy at this point—I felt a relief that at least there were Christians attempting to grapple with the disturbing and seemingly immoral parts of the Bible. At the time I accepted the things that Copan wrote, but it didn’t take long for me to see the problems with his apologetic reasoning.

One of the difficulties that I immediately felt was not properly addressed or defended—and now I see that it cannot be adequately defended—was the issue of slavery in the Old Testament. Now, it’s not as if the Bible only makes short and vague allusions to the institution of slavery, but, rather, it gives explicit and unambiguous commands and laws about how slavery was supposed to be implemented by the Israelites. And this is where Copan’s apologetic comes in.

For Copan, the slavery alluded to in the Old Testament was not slavery as commonly understood in the antebellum South. Rather, Copan claims, slavery was more like indentured servitude: Israelite servitude was induced by poverty, was entered into voluntarily, and was far from optimal. (p. 127) Now this is half true. As critical Old Testament scholar John J. Collins states, “The most common cause of enslavement in the ancient world was debt: people who could not pay their debts were forced to sell their children, or themselves, into slavery.” The problem is that this was not the case with regards to foreign slaves. These slaves were pretty much captured against their will, and were treated much differently than Hebrew slaves, as we’ll see below.

Copan continues his apologetic by arguing that this “servitude” wasn’t all that bad.  Slave owners were not allowed to mistreat their slaves and were required to release these slaves after seven years. Not too bad, right? Wrong. This, again, only applied to male Israelite slaves, and not women, or foreign slaves. Women and foreign slaves were passed down through the slave owner’s family like property. Moreover, there was a loophole that allowed slave owners to keep male Israelite slaves for life. All they had to do was give their slave a wife, and hope that the slave, when freed, wanted to stay with his wife—since his wife was the slave owner’s property.

Then there’s this kicker:

And if a man beats his male or female servant with a rod, so that he dies under his hand, he shall surely be punished. Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two, he shall not be punished; for he is his property. (Exodus 21:20-21 NKJV)

These verses speak for themselves. You could beat a slave nearly to death, and as long as he didn’t die immediately you were free and clear. Not only that but this law applied, once again, only to Hebrew slaves. Who knows what was permitted of foreign slaves? The point is that there simply is no way to spin this apologetically. It is simply not right for one human to possess another, and it is not right for one person to beat another almost to death only to be acquitted of responsibility because he owns him.
Furthermore, even if one could provide a proper apologetic response, I don’t see that it would salvage much. The fact is that it’s quite obvious that these Old Testament laws are simply the product of their primitive and barbaric environment. We find these very same laws in surrounding ancient Near East cultures of the time. Sometimes the Old Testament laws are a bit more sophisticated, and sometimes they are not. But what is completely absent is any trace, or reason to think, that God Almighty actually commanded or ordered such laws to be followed in the first place.

Now, maybe it’s the case that God did command such things and simply accommodated himself to the traditions of the Israelites and met them where they were. Perhaps. However, for me it seems more likely that these were simply the tribal laws promulgated by a primitive culture. This culture was simply so steeped in the traditions of its surrounding nations that it couldn’t help but think just like they did. Hence these slavery laws were simply the norm, unfortunately. Now the interesting thing is that this culture, namely the Israelites, would eventually shed much of this aNE thinking and give us the first-fruits of a novel monotheistic theology that eventually culminated in the theology of the New Testament. But this gives us no warrant for ignoring, and not coming to terms with, these parts of scripture that we can, and should, so vehemently disagree with.

God did not write the Bible

The title of the post should be self-evident if taken in a literal sense, since, to quote the perfect grammar of Russell Brand, “the Holy Spirit ain’t got a pen.” That is, it seems quite obvious, even to fundamentalists, that God didn’t literally take up the task of writing the Bible. So, why did I take up the task of writing a post that asserts the obvious? Because, although many Christians wouldn’t claim that God literally wrote the Bible, they do claim that the Bible is the written Word of God. That is to say, many Christians believe that because of revelation and inspiration, scripture is “wholly and verbally God-given” and that God “caus[ed the] writers to use the very words that He chose.” (See the Chicago statement on Biblical Inerrancy.) Thus stated, such Christians adhere to the claim that God is the author of the Bible, though not in a direct sense.

My claim is that God cannot be said to have authored the Bible in this sense. What better way to demonstrate this, then to survey the Bible itself, and I believe the best way to do this, is to quote passages from the Psalms:

Hear me, Lord, my plea is just; listen to my cry. Hear my prayer-- it does not rise from deceitful lips.--Psalm 17:1

Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked—Psalm 3: 7

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.—Psalm 63:1

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.—Psalm 51:1-2

I chose these Psalms—there are many more like them--for a specific purpose. You see, these Psalms are all prayers and pleas to God himself; they are the pleas of pious hearts and souls crying out for their creator. As such, it seems quite obvious that God did not author these verses in any sense, for then that would imply the absurdity that God is praying and pleading to Himself. So, we see that these verses cannot be preceded by “The Lord says.” Thus stated, we have direct evidence from the Bible that not all of its verses were “wholly and verbally God-given”.

All it takes is simple examples like these to collapse the foundation of inerrancy. For if we can find verses where God clearly did not author them, then we cannot say with any certainty that the rest of the Bible was authored by God. Now this is not to say that the Bible isn’t inspired by God in some sense, but it puts to bed the idea that the inspiration of God somehow controls the words written on the page.

Fundamentalism and a primitive god

Most individuals that have kept up with the current trend of “new” atheism are quite familiar with the names Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens et al. Now, while I vigorously disagree with much—mostly on the philosophical side—that these individuals have published, I do, occasionally, find myself agreeing with a few of their insights. And one of these insights that I believe illuminates a hint of truth is Richard Dawkins’ famous jab at the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Ouch. Now, while I wouldn’t agree with Dawkins that this is the only, or even the dominant, portrait of God painted by the Old Testament, I would agree that this is a version of God that is peppered throughout the Bible. Moreover, this barbaric rendering of God is not restricted to purely moral acts; it reaches to the over-all cultural viewpoint that the ancients had of the divine. The Bible (though, admittedly, mostly the Old Testament) many times paints a picture of God that one finds difficult not to describe as primitive:

We’re told that God had a garden that he used to walk through. That in that garden he planted a tree that literally and intrinsically contained the knowledge of good and evil. That he built a firmament (that is, a solid clear dome) above the earth. That he punished all of humanity for the sins of one couple. That he physically wrestled with a human being. That he was not competent enough to exercise his will for humanity and, therefore, drowned all life he had created to start his divine plan all over again. That he ordered the massacre of hundreds of men, women, children and animals. That he fought a fire-breathing sea dragon with multiple heads. Etc etc.

Now, it seems quite plausible to attribute such predications of God to the primitiveness of the Israelites. All the above descriptions make sense as promulgations of a society surrounded by barbaric ancient Near Eastern cultures. These are the cultures that believed that every single event was caused by its own respective god; the cultures that believed that their own gods could be manifest in inanimate objects (i.e. idols); the cultures that believed that the gods could be manipulated and deceived by the actions and rituals of humans; the cultures that believed that the gods were just like humans except to a higher degree of being; and that’s why they could make mistakes, or feel anger or regret, and even eat.  Thus stated, Why would we expect the Israelites not to mimic and, least of all, be greatly affected by the cultures that influenced them and gave rise to them in the first place!

This is nothing to shy away from. The Israelites wrote Hebrew scripture, and the Israelites were, by all means and even by the Bible’s own standards, far short of sophisticated. Through the Israelites worldview we see the evolution, growth, and the first-fruits of the formulation of orthodox theology; but it should be observed that this process was very long and did not always progress in a straight line. The picture of God that we hold today did not emerge overnight through some sort of once-and-for-all revelation. Rather, it is a picture that took hundreds of years to formulate. A picture that was argued about; a picture that was questioned; a picture that was constantly revised and expanded; a picture that was immature and only progressed towards maturity; a picture that was stunted by our own imaginative shortcomings as human beings; and a picture that, many times, mirrored our own faults rather than Gods.

This picture of God evolved throughout the Bible. It illuminates our struggle as finite human beings to grasp and understand the divine. I maintain that it reflects our own shortcomings, and not God’s.

Now, by the time one closes the Bible they are left with an impression of God that is infinitely greater than the above primitive renderings. One is left with a God that is spirit; a God that is love itself; a God that is forgiving and desires that all reconcile themselves to Him; a God that does not admonish evil and wrong-doing; a God who is a loving father who welcomes all people into His kingdom no matter their past, present, race, ethnicity, or gender. In short: it is the God Jesus served and revealed to the disciples. Now, this is not to say that the Old Testament does not contain many of the aforementioned impressions as well. It surely does. But while these impressions are only scattered in the Old Testament, they are fully culminated in the later writings of scripture—though I would argue that even the later writings of scripture still contain pictures of God that we should regard as adolescent.

So, why should one get so upset at Dawkins’ remark above? His comment is not wholly true, but it does speak with some forceful insight. Why should this trouble us as Christians? Why can we not recognize and take possession of the primitive cultures and beliefs whereby our current picture of God had its genesis? The reason is this: fundamentalist formulations of scripture. To one that holds to the inerrant and one-dimensional truth of scripture, admitting any sort of erroneous pictures of God into the Bible is the worst sin one could commit. For the fundamentalist, all portraits of God in the Bible are valid portraits, and any seemingly contradictory or primitive renderings of God are attributable only to our own finite shortcomings—and yet they hold that these shortcomings could not have influenced the very same human beings who formed such portraits of God in scripture! Their Bible is a static bible; a bible with no room for growth of the understanding of the divine. For them, the God that walks in a garden and drowns the whole human race is the same God that is spirit and admonishes us not to repay evil for evil.

Has any idea ever seemed so contrary to reason? Is it any wonder that Christians by the dozens are losing the faith they grew up with? Is it any wonder why atheists mock and ridicule Christians? These fundamentalists Christians are my brothers and sisters, yes; but, they are making a mockery of the faith that I take so seriously. They have turned the beauty of Christianity into a primitive superstitious Bronze Age fable; and I maintain that as long as their adolescent picture of God is paraded around, Christianity will continue to lose adherents.

The portrait of God that we as humans expound to ourselves will never capture the true majesty of God. Even our modern conception of God must be considered primitive compared to His actual being. Our ideas of God have evolved and will continue to evolve. To turn to any one portrait of God and regard that as the final insight into God’s nature is, simply, spiritual immaturity and intellectual laziness. The Bible might be God’s word, but it is not, by all means, his final word.

Textual Criticism and its implications for inerrancy

As a Christian I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on and pondering the case for inerrancy. The reasons for this are numerous. First, it was probably the doctrine that could have potentially led to the loss of my faith had I chosen to hold to the “inerrancy-or-bust” mentality that plagues fundamentalists. Second, it was after rejecting this doctrine that I truly felt my faith strengthened—I could put my faith solely in God instead of setting up the bible as my spiritual focal point. Third, it seems to me that this doctrine is more of a spiritual crutch to many to be held at all costs instead of a position deduced by pure logical inference.

 With such reasons thus stated, I find myself occasionally running through my mind the reasons why this doctrine is simply unwarranted and untenable. And let me say that the reasons I, personally, have for rejecting this doctrine seem to be miles wide in scope and miles deep in substance. Yet there are a few arguments I have come across (or have come up with myself) that I feel have really put the final nail in the coffin for the doctrine of inerrancy and it is in this post that I would like to expound one of those very arguments.

 This argument begins with the recognition regarding the findings of Textual Criticism. In case the reader is unaware, Textual Criticism is the endeavor of attempting to ascertain the original form of a text. Now, usually appealing to any kind of secular scholarly consensus regarding the bible is something that fundamentalists and inerrantists will not react favorably towards—since in order to affirm the doctrine of inerrancy one would have to reject almost all consenses reached by the academic community. Yet, there is one area where even fundamentalists will (usually) yield to academia and that is in the science of textual criticism. In New Testament textual criticism scholars have reached conclusions that cannot be denied, since these conclusions have concrete evidence to ground them. For instance, it is unanimously agreed that all the (thousands of) New Testament manuscripts we possess have scribal errors. Some of these errors are simple copying mistakes while others are blatant textual additions. These variants reach a mark as high as, and most likely higher than, 400,000.

It’s important to understand that most of these errors are completely insignificant (e.g. spelling mistakes). However, there are many that are quite significant indeed. 1 John 5:7-8 is one of the only places where the doctrine of the trinity is explicitly taught, and yet these verses are not found in a majority of NT manuscripts; the story of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:11) is completely absent from many early manuscripts of John; and the resurrection ending of Mark (Mark 16: 9-20) was not added until two centuries after the Gospel of Mark began to circulate. Let me articulate once more that these conclusions are based on concrete physical evidence of the manuscripts we possess.

 So, what is the significance of the above conclusions, and how do they affect the doctrine of inerrancy? Well, first let me begin by correctly articulating the inerrantist position. The doctrine of inerrancy only states that the original texts of the bible are inerrant, and not that God would keep the editors and scribes, who transmitted the texts, from error. Fair enough. But there is double standard employed here; and I believe presuppositionalist  Greg Bahnsen demonstrated it in his own writings:
 

There is no scriptural warrant for holding that God will perform the perpetual miracle of preserving His written Word from all errors in its being transcribed from one copy to another.

 Notice the problem? Did God ever claim that he would keep the scribes and editors from corrupting his word as it was transmitted textually? No. But, similarly, did God ever claim that he would keep the human writers of scripture from corrupting his word as they wrote scripture? No, he did not. (Let it be known that an appeal to the inspiration of scripture does not save this claim unless one already assumes that inspiration necessitates an inerrant text--which would need to be demonstrated.) So, how can one claim that the original text should be inerrant but not the text after transmission, since both of these assertions rest on the same lack of promulgation of the divine will?
 
Moreover, what makes the bible different after the original text is formed? Is it not still the “Word of God”? Of course it is. So, why would God not allow error to corrupt his Word during the writing of the original text but he would allow error to corrupt his Word during its textual transmission? Surely any answer given in vindication of the former would not also apply to the latter? So, I maintain that we can form a valid dilemma regarding the nature of scripture: Either (1) God desired that no human error intermix with his Word or revelation, or (2) God did not desire such a thing. But we know for a fact, again due to textual criticism, that human error did corrupt God’s Word as it was textually transmitted. So, we have warrant for rejecting (1) and are therefore completely warranted in accepting the conclusion that God allowed human error to intermix with his message—whether it pertains to the original text or not. Thus, we have logical airtight reasons for denying the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Christian Fundamentalist double standards

A while back I was discussing the topic of evolution with my father-in-law. He is a devout Christian of whom I admire and look up to very much. However, he is also what could be labeled a fundamentalist Christian. That is, he is a young-earth creationist, biblical inerrantist, and a Calvinist. Since I adhere to none of these it should be obvious that we rarely agree when we discuss theology. This aforementioned discussion was no different, though I abstained from voicing my objections that I will presently promulgate.

During this discussion regarding evolution, we stumbled upon the topic of animal death. My father-in-law articulated that one reason he cannot believe in evolution is due to the fact God, in Genesis, is said to have looked at his creation and labeled it good. “But, I cannot believe” he said, “that God would have looked upon His creation, whereby the means of survival was death, struggle and suffering, and called it good”. This is, most likely, a common attitude of fundamentalists regarding evolution, and understandably so—understandably even from my perspective. For such an argument rests on our moral intuitions, and most of those intuitions would prefer a means of creation free from death and suffering.

However, my objective in this post is not to stand as an apologist for God creating through the medium of evolution. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the aforementioned objection raised by fundamentalists betrays a fallacious line of reasoning that is employed when viewed in light of the rest of their theology.

Notice that the above objection against evolution is predicated on the following line of reasoning: If I find moral problems with event (a), then God could not have directly been the cause of (a). For the fundamentalist claims that they find the idea that God created through evolution morally suspect, and since God labeled his creation good, and morally suspect events cannot be good, then God must not have done such a thing. Fair enough. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with such reasoning at all.

But, does the fundamentalist apply such reasoning across the board? In short, no. Take the story of Noah’s ark, or the genocides supposedly ordered by God in the OT. Do fundamentalists take these narratives as depicted in the Bible as fully and literally true? If they’re biblical inerrantists they do. So, is drowning the entire human race—including women, children, and the very animals the fundamentalists were so worried over just a moment ago—and subsequently ordering the slaughter of whole nations—including, again, women, children and animals—morally suspect? This would seem self-evident.

Surely the double standard of the fundamentalist is blatantly manifest. Why is one allowed in one instance to utilize their moral intuitions to deny attribution of an event to God, but not in another instance? Either we are allowed to engage in the former or not. But, the fundamentalist knows that if we are allowed this principle across the board, then inerrancy will collapse. Such is the paradox of the fundamentalist.

Who are we to judge the Word of God?

As a Christian who does not hold to inerrancy, I come across a fair amount of negativity from fellow believers concerning my theological convictions. Some have even gone so far as to label me a heretic, or deny that I am indeed a fellow brother in Christ. However, despite some of the fierce attacks wielded towards my beliefs, I do, in fact, many times see where my fellow Christian interlocutor is coming from; and no more so than when they bring forward the present charge: if you are a non-inerrantist then you, by definition, find some error in the bible; therefore you discard what you find to be falsehood in scripture. By doing so you are putting yourself “over” scripture, and therefore God himself. Hence, you are raising your autonomous authority above God’s!

Now, let me admit that I do in fact understand what the inerrantist’s concern is here; and it is, indeed, a very serious accusation—one that should not be taken trivially. Who has the right to raise their authority above that of God? Is God one such that his truth is contingent on the whims of fallen humanity? Surely such a position would be the epitome of a sin against our creator!

Yet I maintain that to submit such a charge is only a wild mischaracterization on the part of the inerrantist.

First, the inerrantist seems to be forgetting a crucial aspect of the non-inerrantist position: we don’t believe the bible is authored by God in any direct sense. That is to say, we don’t believe that the human authors were only puppets or instrumental mediums that perfectly transmitted the “word” of God. This is, obviously, what constitutes the very rejection of inerrancy. So, since we don’t view the bible as authored by God then the whole charge losses tenability. How are we putting ourselves above God if God didn’t author the text to begin with? It would surely be foolish to think our authority supersedes God’s; yet if the bible is not inerrant then no such thought need cross our minds.

Second, I claim that even if the bible were inerrant, the above argument would still constitute a non-sequitur. The reason for this is that no one can avoid putting themselves “over” the text. Written mediums are of the very nature that the reader must exercise his authority over the text in order to interpret and decipher it; and the bible being a written medium necessitates that we do the same regarding it. So even if the bible were inerrant, God would have known that the transmission of his message was being filtered through a channel that necessitates using our own judgment.

However, this isn’t exactly what the inerranist is getting at. It’s not the act of interpreting that troubles him; rather, it’s the act of deciding, using our own arbitrary authority, which parts are valid and which parts contain falsehood.

This point is well received, but I still believe the inerrantist is accusing the non-inerrantist of something he himself cannot escape. While it might seem as if only the non-inerrantist is utilizing his arbitrary judgment –by deciding what he will or won’t accept in scripture as valid—I maintain that the inerrantists (and everyone for that matter) do the same. For a judgment is both positive and negative—that is to say, the inerrantist is still utilizing his own arbitrary judgment by affirming the whole of scripture—especially since the determination of what constitutes scripture is itself a judgment--as valid. It is not only the one who denies aspects of scripture that is putting his authority in place to judge said scripture. For the proposition “scripture is wholly true” is still a conclusion reached through an individual’s logical inference; and as such it constitutes a judgment predicated on the authority of what the inerrantist views as valid or reasonable.

Thus, it seems that, inerrantist or not, we are in the same boat here and the argument above loses weight unless the inerrantist is prepared to predicate it of himself. We were all meant to judge scripture; without the judgment of scripture there would, consequently, be no scripture.

Philosopher Keith Ward on biblical inspiration

"We can speak of the Bible as inspired, in that we can see God at work influencing and guiding the minds of biblical historians, lawyers, priests, poets and prophets, so as to lead them to a cumulative tradition of insights into the nature and purpose of God, the ultimate spiritual reality. For Christians who believe this, the Bible is not the words of God, somehow by-passing the minds of men and women and dictating words direct from the divine mind. It is a unique witness to the gradually percieved purposes of God, which culminate in the prophetic teaching and life of Jesus, seen by Christians as a decisive and normative disclosure of the nature and purposes of supreme spirit."

Taken from The Word of God?.

Biblical inerrancy and the means of inspiration

Upon entering into a discussion regarding the nature of scripture, the topic of the inspiration of the scriptures inevitably comes up. This is, no doubt, an important topic due to the fact that the Bible claims inspiration for itself (or does it?) and because the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy is founded upon such a belief. But what exactly does it mean to say that the Biblical writers and, therefore, the Bible were inspired?

To begin, let it be known that the Bible itself does not settle this dispute. For although it appears as if certain verses in the Bible claim inspiration of the whole—as if the writers already had the Bible canonized during their writing—there is little to no explanation of just what the nature of this inspiration was. I want to make it clear that not even many die-hard inerrantists will claim they know the nature of biblical inspiration—Article VII of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states, “[t]he mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us”. Even if they do claim to know the method of Biblical inspiration, I don’t see how such an assertion can survive a charge of begging the question. But if we cannot deduce the nature of inspiration, then what warrant do we have in claiming that this inspiration produced an error free Bible?

It is in the face of this question that the inerrantist will break from pure scriptural speculation to engage in, nothing more than, theological speculation. The contention brought forth, in instances similar to this, will be something along the lines of the following: God is truth himself and is incapable of lying; if God inspired scripture, then it follows that he inspired no falsehood into scripture; thus, we should expect scripture to be filled with nothing but the truth and, therefore, to contain no falsehood. Now, while this line of argumentation might seem logical from start to finish, I maintain that it is founded upon many assumptions that beg the question.

First, while I maintain it is true that God would not inspire falsehood, I also maintain that inspiration of truth does not necessitate that the medium that receives that truth will not corrupt it. We seem to forget that there are two mediums involved in the transmission of the Bible and one of them—the fallen human writer—is surely capable of falsehood. Now, it is true that simply because the human medium is capable of falsehood this does not necessitate that it did in fact corrupt the scriptures with said falsehood. Just like the fact that my truck is capable of breaking down does not necessitate that it did so this morning. However, if the medium that transmits the Biblical message is indeed capable of error then this possibility cannot be rejected a priori. So, how then can we deduce if human error actually entered into scripture?

Well surely we cannot simply take the witness of scripture as our reference point since to do so would already be to beg the question in favor of the infallibility of scripture—e.g. I know human error hasn’t entered into scripture because the Bible says it hasn’t, and the Bible is fully trustworthy. So, all anyone can do is to submit scripture to their own reasoning capabilities in order to deduce the nature of its witness. And when I, personally, carry out the aforementioned process I find that it is perfectly reasonable and logical to conclude that human sin must have been allowed to enter into scripture (e.g. Psalm 137, 139: 21-22 etc.) Therefore, I find it logical to conclude that, whatever the nature of inspiration, God must have felt it permissible to let human sin color the pages of the Bible. And should we expect anything more? As Cornelius Van Til says, “all is yellow to the jaundiced eye”. Similarly, if humans are fallen and sinful then it seems quite reasonable to deduce that if humans are the mediums whereby a product is produced, then that product can be expected to have signs of that falleness.

Second, we have no reason to believe that God would have to produce an inerrant text, unless we already assume that this is what he wanted to do. I maintain that it is perfectly valid to assert that if God wanted to produce an errorless text then an errorless text would manifest. But how do we know this is what God desired? We, once again, cannot appeal solely to scripture to settle the issue, since to do so would be to beg the question yet again—e.g. I know God desired to produce an inerrant text since his inerrant text says so. We must, once again, appeal to our own determination of scripture to settle the issue. If we see aspects of scripture that strike us to be irreconcilable with an inerrant text then we are perfectly warranted in claiming that scripture is not error free—and, therefore, completely warranted in claiming that it was obviously not God’s desire to produce an inerrant text.

Alas, we must be careful of this line of argumentation—e.g. God would do XYZ. C.S. Lewis articulated it rather well:

But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what it best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mere mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done—especially when we cannot, for the life  of us, see that He has after all done it.

Notice that the inerrantist position already begins the journey with the conclusion established—e.g. the Bible is inerrant and that’s that—while the non-inerrantist can truly ask “is the Bible inerrant? Let’s look at the evidence and see.” The former is a top-down approach and the latter is a bottom-up approach—which I maintain is the only valid approach.

So, whatever the nature of inspiration (will we ever know?) we can safely infer that God did not see it fit to let his inspiration drown out the voice of the human author. And should we expect anything different from the God who Christian theology states came down to earth in the form of a man? Surely God is not above accommodating himself to his beloved children.

My views on the Bible

One aspect of theology that I know will be discussed frequently on this blog is the nature of scripture. I know it will be discussed frequently for two reasons: 1) my views regarding scripture are contrary to the convictions of fundamentalist Christians and are seen, by some, to be controversial and heretical; 2) it is a topic that I believe is crucial regarding one's Christian convictions. Too many Christians are losing their faith because they were taught that the Bible is the inerrant and infallible Word of God ; and they have made this doctrine their spiritual foundation, instead of making God their foundation. Then, once this foundation has been shown to be suspect, the Christian's faith collapses because they have not built their house on the rock. It is this line of theological reasoning that I hope to speak out against.

So, what exactly are my views of scripture? Well, I do not believe the Bible is inerrant nor infallible. It was not authored by God in any relevant sense that we mean the word author. It's as Russell Brand once said, "The Holy Spirit doesn't have a pen." Now, this is not to say that I do not believe the Bible is inspired, but the word inspired needs to be properly defined, and I see no necessary correlation between  inspiration and inerrancy. That is to say, though I believe the Bible to be inspired by God, I do believe it contains errors theologically, morally, historically, and scientifically. Yet, I treasure the Bible in spite of, and because of these shortcomings. The Bible is our interaction with the divine, and such interaction does not necessitate that we will not misinterpret the divine.

I do not expect my views of scripture to resonate with everyone. Yet, my goal is not to get people to see things the way I see them, but, rather, to simply demonstrate that one need not adhere to the adolescent "all or nothing" mentality of fundamentalists (or atheists) in order to be a faithful follower of God.