Category: Biblical Inerrancy

Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer

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.

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.