What do we do when the Bible is ‘wrong’?
There's a quotation that did the rounds earlier in the year from a Peter LaRuffa, who is 1 of the staff at Grace Fellowship Church building which is in northern Kentucky:
If, somewhere inside the Bible, I were to notice a passage that said 2+2=5, I would believe information technology, take it equally true and and then do my best to piece of work it out and understand it.
His comments came in the context of an HBO documentaryQuestioning Darwin which interviewed 'seven-day creationists' and was broadcast concluding Feb. At that place is no dubiety that, amidst Peter's theological peers, his comment would get a round of adulation, since it expresses an unwavering delivery to the authority of Scripture as the sole arbiter of truth.
The striking thing, though, is that the saying (attached to a dopy screenshot picture of Peter—he actually does non look that dopy on the website!) was circulated by humanist atheists to illustrate how apparently stupid Christians are. How could anyone with a brain say such a thing? If the Bible is wrong (and it often is) then surely the most honest affair to do is admit it—especially on the subject of creation versus evolution? The annotate has also received short shrift from a good number of Christian commentators, particularly those from a 'progressive' perspective, as it illustrates the problem with a view of the 'unfalsifiable inerrancy' of the Bible. James McGrath comments on his blog:
It is less obvious for some people to see the problem when fundamentalist Christians dismiss evidence from history or science that contradicts the Bible. But it is much clearer when it is math that is at issue. Assuming we concur on a detail number system, then we tin say what the correct answer is to a mathematical equation.
If the Bible is wrong nearly the reply, and so it is wrong – there is simply no way around it…
No Christian should retrieve that this horrific way of thinking about the Bible, math, scientific discipline, history, and rationality is anything just a discrace, one that brings shame on Christianity by being associated with it.
It is rather unfortunate that LaRuffa chose this particular mathematical example, since it is one used past George Orwell in 1984 to illustrate the suppressing of thinking and dissent that happens in totalitarian regimes.
Orwell'southward protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare "two plus two equals v" as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes it, does that make information technology true? The Inner Party interrogator of idea-criminals, O'Brien, says of the mathematically false statement that control over physical reality is unimportant; so long as one controls their ain perceptions to what the Party wills, and so any corporeal act is possible, in accordance with the principles of doublethink ("Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at in one case").
In effect, it makes Creationism look very much like a totalitarian system, controlled by a powerful social conformism to the consensus inside that grouping.
But information technology is worth staying with this a lilliputian longer. Is it the case that 'If the Bible is wrong most the answer, then it is wrong – at that place is merely no way effectually it'? Allow's do a thought experiment where do nosotros come up across this (manifestly false) mathematical statement. Would we simply dismiss it as being apparently incorrect? There are in fact a number of other possibilities:
It could be an approximation. two.4 + two.iv = 4.8, which when rounded to whole numbers make 2 + ii = 5. This is exactly what is going on in the measurements for Solomon'south temple, where (for example) the statuary 'sea' in front end of the temple is 'ten cubits from rim to rim and…took a line of thirty cubits to measure round information technology' (1 Kings 7.23). That makes the value of pi equal 30/x = three.0 instead of 3.14159. So information technology is 'clearly wrong'. Or is it giving theinternal diameter of the bowl, and theexternal circumference? Or is it just approximate?
Secondly, it could class a function of poetry. When the Beatles sang 'Viii days a week/I lo-ooo-ove you' no-1 complained that they had their diaries wrong.
Or it could exist a joke. Or in fact it could be any number of things—because we use linguistic communication, including plainly mathematical language, in all sorts of ways, not just the mathematical.
In other words, if the Bible says something that looks 'wrong', nosotros would be unwise to immediately say 'information technology is wrong – there is simply no way around it' also quickly without some careful thought. This is the mistake that is writ large in Liberal Protestantism. Rudolph Bultmann's plan to 'demythologise' the New Testament sprung from his confidence that 'You cannot believe in a world of demons and angels and at the same time believe in electricity.' Bultmann only needed to meet some of my parishioners (or even read a newspaper) to meet how mistaken that view is.
This small instance is touching on a much bigger question: how practise we know the Bible is true? In what sense is that the case? In the stop, I don't concur with LaRuffa'southward position. Perhaps he is trying to put his view of the Bible beyond any reasonable questioning, as James McGrath suggests. But perhaps he is doing something even worse—setting up another set of criteria by which the Bible's truth is to be judged. This is the problem with all 'apologetic' approaches to the question of whether the Bible is true and trustworthy: we fix upward criteria that information technology must satisfy, then demonstrate that it satisfies these criteria. In doing so, we havecauseless that our own criteria are themselves the measure of truth, and in doing so we readapt the Bible's very authority. This, broadly speaking, is the statement of Hans Frei'sThe Eclipse of Biblical Narrative—the effect of modernism was to set up an alternative set of criteria for truth, which the Bible must at present satisfy. For conservatives, it must and does laissez passer the exam; for progressives and liberals, information technology clearly fails. And the answer to this test is both shaped by and shapes our assumptions regarding what the Bible is and how it functions.
Frei's solution is to remove the Bible from such criteria, and call for the Bible to be accepted in its own terms. Simply I call up this only replaces one set of problems with another one, and make the truth of the Bible just every bit untestable equally Peter LaRuffa does. Instead, nosotros need to recognise (using Anthony Thiselton'south terms) that in reading a text from some other culture and another fourth dimension, we are seeking to discover a 'meeting of horizons', the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader.
Responding to the 'errors' in the Bible is currently at the centre of the battle for the soul of evangelicalism. 'Progressives' turn down the kind of inerrancy expressed in a higher place because they can see the contradictions in the Bible, and on the footing of information technology make a plea to recognise that the Bible is non the kind of book it is ofttimes assumed to be—an 'instruction manual for life' or a list of propositional doctrines (which, unfortunately, is wrapped up in a lot of awkward narrative from which we demand to retrieve it). Peter Enns is a adept example of this position, kickoff because he lost his job at Westminster Theological Seminary as a outcome of this event, second because he is in chat with Brian McLaren and cited agreeably by Rachel Held Evans, 2 notable 'progressives', and third considering he has wrestled with these questions as an Erstwhile Attestation scholar.
Peter has run a series of blog posts where a number of scholars write about their 'aha' moment, when they realised that the onetime epitome of proposition/inerrancy would not piece of work for the Bible, and how they came to meet things differently. In response, Michael Kruger has invited some bourgeois scholars to reply to each of these. One in detail defenseless my attention: John Byron'south discussion of Mark two.25–26.
He answered, "Take you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in demand? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful merely for priests to swallow. And he also gave some to his companions."
Byron points out what is commonly noticed: that in i Samuel 21, David claims he is lone when request for the bread, and Jesus seems to think his men are with him; and Jesus names the wrong high priest, Abiathar, when in fact information technology was Ahimelek. Byron is clear that these errors imply something significant:
The trouble, however, equally I pointed out to my instructor, is that Jesus got it wrong …Over time numerous passages forced me to conclude eventually that the Bible wasn't a history book , pregnant the authors were non trying to give me a blow-past-accident account from cosmos to the stop of the beginning century.
Instead I came to realize that the Bible was beginning and foremost a theological book that contains history and uses history to straight me towards God .
In response, Craig Blomberg points out that Byron is mistaken about the mistakes. Yes, David claims he is alone—only he is clearly lying. And the phrase Jesus uses does not mean 'in the days of', simply 'In the section which mentions' (the Greek word isepi). It is the same phrase Jesus uses in Mark 12.26 when he refers to the 'passage most the burning bush-league.' He concludes:
I can empathize why some scholars may non be convinced by this solution. Only I am consistently amazed at how few always even admit knowing virtually it, much less interacting with it. I have cited it in several of my books equally have other leading evangelical commentators, who have found it completely satisfactory. It's unfortunate that Ehrman, Byron and Enns never once disclose if they are familiar with it and, if they are, what objections (if any) they have to it. Until they exercise, it really is inappropriate for them to claim with such confidence that they know Jesus or Mark got it wrong!
I know both John and Craig, and respect them both. I also share Peter Enns' frustration when people care for the Bible similar a car maintenance manual. But on this issue, I am with Craig; I think John has ended too quickly that the text is incorrect, and the Bible unreliable hither.
We need to take the humanity of the Bible seriously. But this implies not that information technology is fallible and mistaken, simply that information technology is expressed in terms item to the man context of the time—a context where information technology is fine to speak briefly, approximately and in shorthand terms which would accept been understood then, simply (at to the lowest degree on a superficial reading) do not make sense to us—unless we think difficult, read carefully, and take advice from others who take washed their homework.
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