I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer. I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."
This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:
a) God does not contradict himself.
and
b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.
Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC). Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.
Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause. What justifies my "in every case"? It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:
. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)
Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims. From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance. And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)
Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!
Now why don't I accept this?
Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time. So at best it is sempiternal.
What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything. The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.' God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).
If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down. That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.
But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment. This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts, who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.
Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why. The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.
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