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

 

J. D. Vance at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

The Veep's performance was impressive. The man has excellent public speaking skills, is considerably more articulate than his boss, and displays natural political talent. He will make a fine successor.  On the down side, he, unlike Trump, is a professional politician. I don't have to explain what that means. Trump's astonishing effectiveness is in large part due to the fact that the man does not need the job and can't be bought. The same goes for his right-hand man, Elon Musk. Contrary to the filthy slandering of him by our political enemies, he is not in this for the money.  (As if to mock these moral and intellectual incompetents, Elon has given new life to the Hitler salute by introducing the chainsaw variant. I call it 'blue-baiting.')

Vance was right to point out the blow Trump has struck for religious liberty for all faiths. He didn't mention  Executive Order 14182 of 25 January, but I will. Enforcing the Hyde Amendment is an effective counterpunch against the corrupt and self-serving Joe Biden who, you will recall, reversed himself on his quondam support for the amendment:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1 . Purpose and Policy. For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a longstanding consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice. However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs.

It is the policy of the United States, consistent with the Hyde Amendment, to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.

Now unless you are morally obtuse, or a Democrat (whichever comes first), you should be able to see right away that it is wrong for the federal government to force roughly half  the taxpayers to support what they consider to be a moral outrage. It is wrong even if abortion right up to the moment of birth ought to be legal. I am not saying that it ought to be legal. I am saying that, even if it ought to be legal, and becomes legal, it would be wrong to compel taxpayers to pay for it.  For that compulsion violates their conscience and moral judgment, a judgment that has the support of a battery of powerful arguments. (That the average Joe and Jane lack the intellectual 'chops' to produce these arguments, arguments which, by the way, needn't rely on any specifically religious premises,  is not to the point; some of us can. Do you remember that RINO mediocrity George W. Bush? He would often say, in his flat-footed way, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman." He was right, but that's all he could muster: he lacked the mental equipment to defend his position in an articulate manner. He reminded me of the affable jocks I'd have in my logic classes. In this respect Bush was like too many conservatives. They have sound intuitions but cannot rise to their argumentative defense.) 

In roughly the second half of his speech, Vice President Vance became repetitive, and what is worse, 'squishy' in the style of the 'liberal,' in his positive statements about the current pope.  It is too bad that the man is dying, and perhaps we should pray for the man. But should we pray that his papacy continue? That is not obvious. I'd say it is the exact opposite of obvious.  I don't believe I am very far off if I say that Bergoglio is to the RCC what Biden was to the USA, a disaster.  

It follows that if you pray for the man, you should not pray that he continue to live. For if he continues to live, his destructive papacy will continue. His papacy ought to end, which is not to say that the papacy ought to end.  You should pray that Bergoglio get his spiritual affairs in order, admit the damage he has done, confess his sins of omission and commission, and ask for forgiveness, lest he end up in hell, or in purgatory for a hell of a long time.

Here is the Veep's speech.

Lonergan, Sproul, Bahnsen

A tip of the hat to Tony Flood for supplying me with the following important documents:

Bernard Lonergan, Religion: The Answer is the Question

R. C. Sproul and Greg Bahnsen Debate (full transcript)

I had asked Tony whether he had a copy of Lonergan's Method in Theology he was willing to part with.  Here is his reply:

I don't think you asked, Bill, but the answer is yes. Since, however, he signed it when I visited him at a Jesuit infirmary in 1983 (you might enjoy my account of that meeting here), it is priceless. (You are free to test that claim. (:^D)) Should I sense that the end is near, I'll donate it to the Lonergan Institute as I did so much Lonergania a couple of years ago. The April 20, 1970 issue of Time covered what he was up to in theology; here's a link to the text. It will help contextualize him. (I know where I was that month.) 

Merton on Scripture, Scotus, and Thomas

The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Two, 1941-1952, p. 345, August 5, 1949, Our Lady of the Snows:

If I had only spent the time on Scripture that I wasted on Duns Scotus, but I never really got around to understanding more than a tenth of what I read with so much labor. There is much more nourishment for me in Thomas, after all. 

This but a small part of a very rich entry. Surrounding entries are very informative about Merton's ignorance of Scripture and theology.