Month: March 2025

Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Recent discussions with Calvinist friends led to the topic of Biblical inerrancy.  I've always looked askance at it, but one of the friends, Brian, assures me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and nor merely with respect to faith and morals. How is that possible? 

I tend to 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 merely read (and understand) the scriptural texts either in their original form or in translations and transcriptions, but did not write (author)  these texts.  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, add human 'noise' to the divine 'signal.'   It is to be expected that the signal-to-noise ratio 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. 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. For again, 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 at insist that the Bible is [stamp the foot, pound the podium] the Word of God!  You may 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.

Now if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, as my Calvinist friend  Brian says 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 Brian, who tells me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribes 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 Brian's view, then I understand how he could could hold that view that Scripture is inerrant in every particular.  If not, how would he reply to my sketch above of the mechanics of  Scriptural revelation?

Your move, Brian.

Wrong to Believe on Insufficient Evidence? Contra Clifford

Is it wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence? (W. K. Clifford) If so, the young would never be right to believe in the realization of their potentials. But they are right so to believe. If they didn't, none of them would ever have 'made it.' But many of us did.  We made it, but only  by believing in ourselves well beyond the evidence available. Give it your best shot, but don't piss and moan if it comes to nought.  Take another shot, a different one.

For a development of this theme, see Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

On the Death of a Neighbor

My neighbor Ted across the street, 85 years old, died the other day. Last I spoke with him, two weeks ago, he seemed as hale and hearty as ever. Ted and I enjoyed 26 trouble-free years of neighborly, if superficial, acquaintanceship.  In this world of surfaces, relationships kept conventional and superficial are often best. Not one harsh word passed between us.  Nothing was ever said in seriousness or in jest to sully the serenity that made the living easy. I will remember him fondly, with nary a negative thought.

There is a lot to be said for mere acquaintanceship and for cleaving to the conventional.  Go deep with people and you may see things you would like to forget. In a world of seemings, surfaces are safe.  You say conventional usages are phony? They mainly are, but what did you expect in a world fleeting and phenomenal? Grow up, Holden!

Don't look for depth where it cannot be found. But look for depth. Where? First within, and then in a kindred spirit or two.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Quantifiers

Quantifiers are words that indicate logical quantity. 'All,' 'Some,' and 'No' are examples. Here are some songs featuring them from my memory with no reliance on A. I.

Chuck Berry, No Particular Place to Go.  

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo

Rod Stewart, Only a Hobo. But is 'only' functioning as a quantifier in this title? 

Jackson Browne, Somebody's Baby

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You are Down and Out

Louis Armstrong, I Ain't Got Nobody

Byrds, All I Really Want to Do

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Beatles, Something

Beatles, Any Time At All

Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely

Bob Dylan, Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (and I'll Go Mine)

Here are some comments of mine on the video which accompanies this touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.   

A quick shot of a newspaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then colaesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains of the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on never-ending tour.

Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

Well the judge
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.

There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

Well, I can't call it a night without the schmaltzy

Dean Martin, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime

Zelenskyy’s Performance in the Oval: Two Views

We live in times of extreme social and political polarization. (We are so polarized that we are polarized over the nature, extent, and causes of polarization! But I will resist the temptation to meta-level digress.)

Cathy Young, A Shameful, Appalling Spectacle

Philip Wegmann, How Zelensky Miscalculated Trump