Inerrancy and Trust

Andy Stanley has taken a fair bit of flack for statements like this one about the inerrancy of scripture:

“When a specific view of inspiration is elevated to the status of doctrine, the Bible becomes an obstacle to faith for some.”

Critics have called Stanley everything from a liberal to a heretic, as Jared Wilson documents here. I can’t speak to the heresy part. I’ve read Stanley’s Irresistible, and you can find the critical commentary it inspired on our Book Reviews page. I think it’s misguided, sometimes gratuitously flippant and outright wrong in places, but I wouldn’t call it heretical in the sense that it would cause me to question Stanley’s devotion to Christ and his people, or his general orthodoxy.

A Stumbling Block

Stanley came back to one of the major themes he drums home in Irresistible this last Sunday in what I consider a pretty useful, if challenging message. The quote above is taken from that sermon, and I think he’s making a fair point. The Bible can indeed become an obstacle to faith for people who misunderstand the teaching of inerrancy, or who think it applies to their English Bibles, or any other translation in existence, for that matter.

Stanley starts his sermon with an anecdote about an atheist who mockingly dismissed the Bible because in his view it is riddled with contradictions and errors. Personally, I don’t believe there are genuine errors in scripture to be found. The Lord Jesus held too high a view of the written word of God for his followers to concede that. If he didn’t, we shouldn’t. What I do believe is that the passage of time, translation issues, transmission issues and the limited ability of even the most accredited experts to fully comprehend ancient Hebrew and Greek culture and language may cause us to see things in scripture that appear to us to be erroneous or contradictory. They will certainly appear that way to atheists, who persistently trot them out as obstacles to faith, sometimes ingenuously and sometimes in the spirit of nasty little trolls who don’t even believe the things they are saying themselves.

A Christian Response

What is the Christian response to the presence of such apparent errors in our Bibles? It should be faith. These issues may appear numerous when catalogued for us by unbelievers, but they actually comprise a microscopic portion of the scripture. If a 2,000+ year-old document is to be considered unreliable because the tiniest fraction of details largely irrelevant to its primary message are alleged to be untrue, then we can know nothing whatsoever about human history from the written word. All secular documentation written prior to our own lifetimes is equally suspect — really, considerably more so — given the number of manuscript sources we have for scripture compared to most ancient documents. That way lies madness, niggling pettiness that guts the foundation of our understanding of ourselves and where we came from.

It shouldn’t take a great deal of faith to say that since over 99% of scripture hangs together perfectly, the remaining fraction of 1% ought to be entitled to the benefit of the doubt. At least it doesn’t for me. That conviction comes easily.

A False Assumption

Stanley’s atheist, as he points out himself, was making a false assumption about the doctrine of inerrancy, and it’s one many Christians make as well; it’s that we are claiming our English Bibles have no mistakes in them, or that the numerous Hebrew and Greek manuscripts in existence are perfect copies of the originals. That’s a ridiculous claim, and I will never make it. The very existence of multiple versions of the English Bible demonstrates its foolishness. Even Norman Geisler, who wrote the massive tome entitled Inerrancy, and whose scholarship chops turn Andy Stanley into a drooling fanboy, would not have made that claim.

When we use the word “inerrancy” or “infallibility” to talk about scripture, that is not what we are saying. Such a view of inspiration may certainly become a stumbling block and an obstacle to faith. It is just plain unrealistic and easily disproved. Faith based on a foundation like that is bound to fail at the first exposure to reality.

A Reliable Starting Point

What most modern translations give us is a reliable starting point in our search for truth. The vast, vast majority of the time, they clearly and faithfully represent the underlying languages. Where questions arise, they enable us to dig into the original text using the many helpful resources available to us. In most instances, this leads to a satisfactory and accurate understanding of the writer’s intended meaning. In some instances, it leaves us with a best guess or a series of possibilities to consider, more than one of which may be spiritually useful. In a very few cases, as with the meaning of the Hebrew word shiggaion, we have to concede we don’t know for sure what it means. But is Psalm 7 lost to us or even obscured in any way because it is called “a shiggaion of David” and we don’t know precisely how to interpret that? Not at all.

My English Bible and yours are not inerrant, but they are trustworthy. The story they tell us is true right to the core, and it will hold us up if we take our stand on it. God breathed it out, and his Holy Spirit is still in us and with us to enable us to understand it. It is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, which is what its critics will never comprehend. It is not some dead letter to be chopped to pieces by those who have no ability to discern its origin and purpose.

Those who insist our Bibles are not reliable because of a few variant numbers in Chronicles or an apparently irreconcilable statement made in one of the gospels are tripping over an obstacle of their own making.