Two Different Views of Biblical Authority

I imagine that many of us have wondered over the past several years why we’ve been “treated to” so many study reports over which people with equally high credentials cannot agree. Some say we are giving in to the spirit of the world while others say we are clinging to an outmoded traditionalism. I think that the charge closest to the truth is that we are operating with two quite different views of Biblical authority—one flowing from a concept of inerrant Scriptures and the other from a view of errant Scriptures.

Listen to this short dialogue between a leading inerrantist and some other Christian scholars . . . “Do you hold to the inerrancy of Scripture?” – “No.” “Do you believe the Bible to be inspired by God?” – “Yes.” “Do you think God inspires error?” – “No.” “Is all of the Bible inspired by God.” – “Yes.” “Is the Bible errant?” “ – “No.” “Is the Bible inerrant?” – “No.” That conversation was not contrived but is cited by R. C. Sproul as one which he has had with Biblical scholars on many occasions. If it seems absurd to you then I think you’re normal. Yet the CRC, our own denomination, would have to answer in a like manner because we are in what some call “an official state of ambiguity” on the issue of the inerrancy of Scripture.

Some entire seminary faculties have lined up on either side of the issue and many times we as lay people are confused by this . . . puzzled by the fact that Christians of great learning can look at the same data and come to opposite conclusions. We say to ourselves, “If they can’t figure it out, how can we?” And so we don’t even bother to dig into the issue. I feel this is a serious mistake because one of t he things I’ve learned over the years is that people with several degrees though usually having much more knowledge than the layman may not be as good as a farmer at drawing conclusions. Also, everyone, scholar s included, comes to the data with a host of presuppositions (things they assume before they start their study), and these may or may not be valid. So we as laymen can benefit from their knowledge while still being critical of their conclusions. In order to do this of course we have to read both sides of the issue.

The Bible, Errant or Inerrant?

But before we go any further, let’s define some terms so we know exactly what we’re talking about. In a nutshell, inerrantists say that because God is the ultimate author of the Bible and He cannot teach error, the Scriptures are inerrant throughout even in those areas which bear on history and science and is therefore entirely trustworthy and authoritative. The other position (and I’m trying to express these as black and white for simplicity . . . there are in fact many nuances to both sides) . . . the other position states that though God has inspired the Bible it was written by fallible men capable of and actually guilty of error in their written word especially in the areas of science and history and this is said to be backed up by many conflicting passages in Scripture.

Now how did we get to our present position or non position? The orthodox Christian Church through the ages has believed in the inerrancy of the written Word. They may not have used that word but it was inherent in most of their formulations of inspiration. Some like Jack Rogers of Fuller have tried to soften this conclusion but his attempts don’t hold weight in light of the data. At Vatican II, the Roman Catholic church changed its traditional position of total inerrancy by drafting a statement which says that Scripture teaches without error “the truth which God wanted to put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation” (underline mine). By this somewhat ambiguous phrasing the council effectively made room for the view that there can be error in Scripture in those areas unrelated to “divine salvific intent” . . . whatever that means and whatever those are. In the Protestant church there has been a parallel development with some claiming that we should limit inerrancy or proportion inerrancy to the saving intention spoken of in II Tim. 3:15 “to make men wise unto salvation.” That is, on matters not dealing with salvation there can be and are indeed errors.

     

“Reports 36 and 44”

In our own denomination with reports 36 in 1971 and 44 in 1972 on the nature and extent of Biblical authority there has been much debate. Report 44 (essentially the same as 36) makes many strong points against theological liberalism but several have commented on what they feel is a crucial flaw. It officially opened the door for two views of Biblical authority to coexist in the CRC by relating the nature and extent of that authority to the content and purpose of Scripture as the saving revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That‘s a mouthful . . . now what does it mean? We have always held that the authority of the Bible is related to the person who inspired it and lies “in its source and not in what is said . . . in the who and not in the what . . . in the speaker and not in the speech . . . in the origin and not in the content.” Of course we take into account the concept of progressive revelation and the intention of the author in each individual passage of Scripture which to my mind we can only find out by considering every word significant and the context as well. But the position t hat opens the door to all kinds of subjective interpretations relates the nature and extent of Biblical authority NOT TO ITS SOURCE OR WITH RESPECT TO APPLICATION TO THE INTENTION OF THE SCRIPTURE AS EACH PASSAGE REQUIRES BUT TO A LARGE OVERARCHING PURPOSE OR INTENT – “ITS CONTENT AS THE SAVING REVELATION OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST.”

Of course the Scriptures have an overarching purpose and this can be seen from passages like II Tim. 3:15; Jn. 5:39,40, Lk. 24:27, 44. Butas Pinnock states, “To convert this valid theological principle into a critical scalpel is to misuse it. It was not meant to give us license to limit inerrancy as we please. Jesus and His disciples received all of Scripture—not just the primary intent of a passage but the secondary details as well. They took all of the declarative statements of Scripture as reliable and true. If we take Jesus as our guide, then the only proper way to discover divine truth would be not to sift the Biblical teaching according to a somewhat general principle we call the intention to convey saving truth, but to inquire of each passage what its inerrant teaching is.”

Some truths relate more to salvation than others,  i.e. the atonement vs. the anti–Christ. But both are Biblical truths and we have no right to call one type errant or irrelevant. If we say then, that inspiration guarantees only the truths necessary for salvation and someone is of the opinion that he needs to know very little . . . does that mean that very little is inerrantly taught in Scripture? Some questions we might ask here are: “Doesn’t the Bible have unqualified right to lay hold on our obedience?” “Isn’t it the preacher’s right and duty to say, ‘Thus says the Lord’, in terms of the application of his text?” “Who is going to stand over the text relating it to its role in the history of redemption and revelation and tell us where and when it has divine authority?”

Dr. Boer on the Bible

We move along in our brief history to 1975. Dr. Harry Boer comes out with his book, Above the Battle? the Bible and its Critics in which he plainly calls for our acceptance of an errant Bible. He comes to his conclusions by two main lines of argument. First he marshalls in parallel columns several passages which seem to plainly contradict each other in historical and other details. Then he concludes that since no one is able to explain these apparent discrepancies to his satisfaction, the Bible writers erred.

Two replies can be made here. First, some of the passages have been dealt with satisfactorily in commentaries and books on alleged Bible errors. These facts seem strangely to have been ignored. Secondly, the church has been aware of the passages mentioned for ages, she has not been able to reconcile some of them, and yet the Fathers still held to an inerrant Bible. This leads us to wonder, “Maybe some are now looking at the data through different eyes, i.e. with different presuppositions?” And this is certainly the case here. The author’s major presupposition in this area seems to be that whatever Biblical material cannot be logically assimilated must be seen as errant.

As I read Scripture, our reason is involved in our relationship to God. It is not a god in itself. And so we don’t kiss our brains goodbye . . . we use them. However, we do stand under the text of Scripture, brains and all. The problem of evil, Jesus’ incarnation, the Trinity, election, etc., all bring up apparent contradictions; yet we don’t reject them because our logic can’t assimilate them. Neither should we reject the inerrancy which Scriptures claim on the basis of a lack of logical integration of certain passages.

“Human” Does Not Mean “Errant”

But do the Scriptures in fact claim to be inerrant?

This brings us to the author’s second line of argument. One would think that he would have begun his examination with the question, “What did Jesus say about Scripture?” But Jesus is reserved for the next to last chapter in the book and the Lord and His statements are used in quite a different way than we would expect. Like Karl Barth years ago, Dr. Boer claims that our failure to confess errors and contradictions makes us guilty of docetism. And he draws a strange parallel between Christological docetism and Biblical docetism. What does all this mean? Docetism was a heresy in the early church which allowed Christ’s deity to “eat up” His humanity and leave us with a Christ with only apparent –not real human nature. In like manner the author says that we’ve let the human aspect of the Bible be “eaten up” by the divine because we don’t allow for error on the part of the human writers. Many writers have exposed the fallacious character of this whole argument of Barth; yet Dr. Boer adopts it and still promotes it as valid. Do you see the problem? Christ was sinless; yet He was still a man. Does the fallibility of man mean that He can sin or that He must sin? If it means He must sin (and this is what the author‘s argument rests on) then Jesus was not fully human, and this is not so. As Sproul notes, ifChrist’s sinlessness doesn’t cancel His humanity why should inerrancy cancel the Biblical writers‘ humanity. The issue is not whether human beings can make mistakes but whether or not God inspires error. Our confession rests on the integrity of God. We aren’t saying that the Bible writers were infallible men but that God was able to and did in fact guide them only into truth, as II Pet. 1:21 states.

Jesus Didn’t Teach Errors

Of course, Dr. Boer’s argument would gain validity if Jesus knowingly or unknowingly taught error . . . and this is the focus of the next arguments.

1. Jesus accommodated Himself to popular views which we no longer accept in the then existing form.
2. Jesus was not omniscient and so when He assumed and taught e.g. that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch He was wrong but innocent because, being human, He participated in knowledge gaps and erroneous views of the OT common to His day.
3. We don’t know what Jesus actually said anyway, because His teachings have come to us through a human medium.

On the first point hear this excerpt. “Notable here is Jesus’ accommodation to the popular belief in sheol or hades as the abode of the dead with its two adjoining divisions of gehenna and paradise” (Lk. 16:19–31). On reading the passage, however, we find no evidence of any accommodation whatsoever. Hades here is, as Hendriksen states, “clearly a place of torment. It is hell.” He continues . . . “the condition of the dead and the communication between them is represented here in very literal, earthly terms so that a vivid impression is created. It should be clear, nevertheless, that much of what is here conveyed cannot be interpreted literally. For example, we read about the lifting up of the eyes, of seeing people afar off, of a finger and of a tongue, even though we have been told that the rich man had been buried.” Geldenhuys too says, “It is nowhere taught in the NT that the faithful at their death first go to the realm of the dead (hades).” In light of the passage itself and the above comments I find it impossible to believe that here Jesus is accommodating Himself to a two compartment Hades.

But when we open the door to this type of thinking what do we find?—people then saying that Jesus accommodated Himself to the OT stories, Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, Jonah, etc., though He knew these weren’t actually true because He wanted to avoid “unimportant side issues” of authenticity and accuracy on these secondary levels. He simply went along with public opinion while presenting His doctrinal teaching. Gleason Archer’s analysis is pointed here. He says that this view “is impossible to reconcile with the truthfulness and holiness of God. E.g. if Jesus knew that Jonah’s deliverance through the fish was altogether fictitious, He could never have used it as an historical type of the experience of burial and resurrection that He Himself was shortly to undergo. This kind of accommodation would have bordered on the duplicity employed by unscrupulous politicians in the heat of an election campaign. In contrast to this read Jesus’ claims in Jn. 8:26, 38.” As a further objection Archer comments that Jesus refused to accommodate Himself to certain mistaken views current in His own time and cites Mt. 5; Jn. 8:24, 44; Mt. 19:9; 23:16–22; 15:11–20. “Jesus never stooped to accommodation in order to ingratiate Himself with His public. As Peter affirmed of Him, ‘He committed no sin; no guile was found on His lips.’” I Pet. 2:22.

Accusing Christ of Sin?

Let’s look at the next argument—that Jesus was mistaken in many of His views because of His culturally conditioned humanness. This view like the last casts a shadow over Jesus‘ sinlessness. I quote Sproul again: “Jesus does not have to be omniscient to be infallible. But He must be infallible to be sinless. That is to say, if Jesus, claiming to be sent from God and invoking the authority of God in His teaching errs in that teaching He is guilty of sin. The one who claims to be the truth cannot err and be consistent with that claim. Anyone claiming absolute authority in his teaching must be absolutely trustworthy in what he teaches in order to merit absolute authority. In light of His claims, Jesus cannot plead ‘invincible ignorance’ as an excuse for error.”

Contradicting the Gospels

The third argument is the catch-all. We don’t really know what Jesus actually said because “He left not a single written word to posterity. All that we know of His teaching we know through reports of the four evangelists. His words come to us therefore through the same kind of human medium through which the rest of the Bible comes to us . . . mediated by the Holy Spirit through human authors in ways past finding out.” It‘s interesting that though the ways are “past finding out” the author is sure that one of the ways is not inerrant. Now it is true that we don’t know word for word what Jesus said on certain occasions because the inspired reports are not verbatim accounts . . . but it seems that the author wants to stretch this to say something more. I say this for two basic reasons. First, the author believes that inerrancy is something wrongly added to our concept of infallibility. He sees the essence of infallibility as the “massive idea of the unbreakable, ever-valid revelation of the creation, redemption, and consummation of all things in Christ . . .” As Dr. Alex DeJong says, “It is apparent that the word ‘infallible’ is not applied to the Biblical text but only to the revelational realities which lie beyond, behind, or above the text.” Here a wedge is driven between the Biblical text and infallible truth, which gives rise to all manner of subjectivism.

Boer claims that the inerrantist in trying to escape the dilemma posed by radical Biblical criticism can only resort to “pious self-contradiction,” while his stress on this massive idea of creation, redemption, and consummation presents a responsible answer to their charges. Colin Brown’s criticism of Barth is relevant here. “There have been those who wanted to have revelation in Christ without having to bother about defending the integrity of Scripture, trying to ignore the fact that the only Christ we know of is the Christ who is witnessed to by Scripture and who endorsed the integrity of Scripture. For Barth the Scriptures are true and false at the same time, being the inspired word of God and the erring word of man. It is not a case of some parts being inspired and reliable, whereas others are not, but of the same passage being both.” To me the author’s approach is self-contradictory and mystical. He holds that the Holy Spirit somehow “enables” us to bring to the non-Christians an infallible message through a book that is no more dependable than the fictions of pagan mystics.

More False Charges

Secondly, the author writes, “According to Matthew, Mark, and John, Jesus as we have seen met His disciples in Galilee after the resurrection. According to Luke 24:49, Jesus immediately after His resurrection (underline mine) instructed His disciples to remain in Jerusalem until the coming of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 1:4 this instruction is repeated. This contradiction is hardly reconcilable with the traditional doctrine of inspiration and infallibility.” In other words since Luke reports that Jesus immediately after the resurrection told the disciple~ to remain in Jerusalem but the other three evangelists report that He appeared to them in Galilee, do we really have any idea about what Jesus really said or did here or on other occasions? Hear the author again, “This raises the question of Jesus’ relationship to His own words and teaching . . .”

Take note of the author’s added words, “immediately after the resurrection” and listen to Geldenhuys writing in 1951. “It is quite impermissible to deduce from these words that Luke teaches that the disciples never went to Galilee between the resurrection and ascension and that he thus contradicts Matthew, Mark, John, and I Cor. 15. Luke indeed does not represent vss. 44–49 as having been uttered on the same occasion as vss. 36–43, i.e. immediately after the resurrection. This follows from the fact that the contents of vs. 44 do not at all fit in with those circumstances. The whole portion (vss. 44–49) however bears unmistakable signs of its having been pronounced as a farewell message in which there is a reference to all that is past. And from Acts 1:4 it appears that these words were indeed the Savior’s farewell words to His disciples before His ascension.” This is further supported by Lk. 11:50–53. Also if the author wants to bold that vss. 44-49 were uttered on the same occasion as vss. 36–43 then to be consistent he should hold that the resurrection, appearances, and ascension all took place on the same day in light of vss. 50–53. And this is what others have tried to claim, but Luke is writing a compressed history here and certainly would not introduce a gross contradiction between the end of his gospel and the beginning of Acts. What the author seems to want to do is drive a wedge between what Jesus really said and our reports of His teachings.

Boer Contradicting Jesus

Why does Dr. Boer expend all this effort to claim that Jesus accommodated Himself to popular conceptions that He knew weren’t actually true or that He erred unknowingly or that there’s a big gap between what Jesus actually said and what the NT reports? Because “even a cursory view of Jesus’ use of Scripture in debate, discussion and rebuke of His own disciples, added to an examination of Jesus‘ own submission to the authority of Scripture makes clear that He viewed it as utterly trustworthy and totally authoritative in every area on which it speaks” (Sproul). A split between Biblical-theological and historical-scientific truth is totally foreign to Jesus’ attitude toward and use of the Scriptures. So the reliability of Jesus’ doctrine of Scripture and its authority for us as His followers must be somehow softened . . . in essence disposed of . . . in order to claim we have an errant Bible. Pinnock’s comment bears note here. “The logical consequence of denying e.g. the authenticity of Jesus’ doctrine of Scripture which pervades all our channels of information about Him leads a person to total pessimism regarding any historical knowledge about Jesus of Nazareth, a view completely unacceptable on critical grounds. And furthermore, it is far more likely that Jesus’ understanding and use of the Scriptures conditioned the writers’ understanding and use rather than the reverse. The originality with which the OT is interpreted with respect to the person and work of Jesus is too coherent and impressive to be secondary.”

To set aside the clear teaching of our Lord on the Scriptures is to impugn His integrity and deny the normativity of His teaching as well. However if the author can show that there is accommodation and error on Jesus’ part and finally that we don’t even know what Jesus said anyway then he feels safe from the above criticism. I have tried to show that these arguments against inerrancy do not provide a way of escape. As in the arguments Boer is attacking Christ’s integrity and authority, the consequence of that is devastating to our faith.

Paul Ingeneri is Director of Education and Evangelism for the Seymour Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Mich., and a student at Calvin Seminary. He also wrote in our November, 1978, issue.