Inspiration, Infallibility, and Inerrancy

1. Anna Gaiser asked me how I defined words like inspiration and inerrancy. [1] I have sometimes called these "power words" because they have been very important words to say in certain faith communities over the years. A more cynical person might call them "shibboleths" based in Judges 12. Those among Gideon's troops who were not able to say this word properly were killed as the enemy. In that regard, sometimes it has been less important what you mean by those words as to whether you could say them.

I had a professor in seminary who said being able to say the Bible was inerrant was important for him to be hired. Given the way he thought the word was defined, he told his interview committee that he couldn't in good conscience confess it. The response was, "What if we define it in this way..." The person then went on to give a different way of defining it. The candidate said, "Well, if you define it that way I can say it." They were satisfied and he taught there his whole teaching career.

There were great wars over these things in the seventies in evangelical circles. One thing I have noted is that I do not believe that these battles brought anyone to Christ. I would more guess the opposite. I have not found that one's spirituality or depth of faith maps to one's position. Those with a more "restrictive" view (notice I didn't say "higher" view) do not strike me as being more Christ-like than those with a more complicated view, nor do they strike me as more faithful to God.

When I was at Asbury Seminary, then president David McKenna told the faculty that Asbury simply wouldn't get into those debates, and I think rightly so. People like to argue. People like to define boundaries so they can say who is in and out. These debates don't really bring anyone closer to God. They represent a "bounded set" mentality rather than a "centered-set" one. I'm told that for a while there it seemed like the main item on the Evangelical Theological Society's agenda was to decide who they would try to kick out each year.

A key mistake in these debates is thinking that spirituality or salvation is primarily a matter of belief and the mind. This is neither biblical nor informed. The Bible repeatedly indicates that it is the orientation of one's heart that is the basis for one's virtue and relationship with God. David was not a man after God's own mind. It is not out of the mind that murder proceeds. Sound doctrine is not a fruit of the Spirit. Renewing of the mind in Romans 12 is primarily about our dispositions, as is seen in Romans 12-15.

What's more is that this sort of cognitive approach doesn't fit reality. People act from a deeper place than their intellect. In fact their intellect is usually just a puppet of deeper desires. Nor does intellect correlate with virtue. Don't get me wrong, I love intellect. I love learning. I love the life of the mind. I love ideas. But this is not where virtue or faith lies.

2. Well, I didn't plan on that preface. This was going to be a quick set of definitions. Here goes.

Inspiration evokes the image of breathing. God "breathed" the biblical text. And of course God continues to breathe through the biblical text.

The key verse here is 2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is God-breathed and is beneficial for teaching, for correction, for redirection, for training in righteousness."

However, this verse has been used to say things it doesn't say. Paul of course did not always feel God's breath in the literal meaning of the Old Testament texts. This verse thus can't be used to police a literal interpretation of biblical passages, for example.

Since the books of the Bible have different literary styles, inspiration probably doesn't mean that the minds of the biblical authors went blank and that we are getting a divine writing style. Even those who hold to a "dictation" view of inspiration usually accept that the personalities and styles of individual authors were involved.

And they could use sources. Inspiration doesn't mean that Mark couldn't have been a source for Matthew and Luke. After all, the book of Joshua tells us it used the book of Jashar as a source.

Another verse often connected to inspiration is in 2 Peter 1:20-21 -- "No prophecy of Scripture comes into existence by one's own unloosing, for prophecy was not brought at some time by the will of a person but, being brought by the Holy Spirit, people spoke from God."

So when Amos spoke to the people at market in the northern kingdom, he was speaking for God. It does get complicated when the New Testament authors hear meanings that a prophet like Isaiah would not have understood--"fuller senses" of the same words (sensus plenior). Many of the words the New Testament applies to Christ are such spiritual readings that go beyond what the original speaker understood.

And of course Amos spoke oral oracles. Likely someone else put his words into a book form. Then that book form was passed down and translated. There were likely multiple, slightly different versions of Old Testament passages in circulation in the centuries before Christ.

All that is to say that it gets messy when you get into the details. God breathed words through prophets and priests and scribes. God breathed new meanings through those same words to various New Testament authors. God breathes through Scripture to people doing lectio divina today.

Yes, Scripture was, is, and will be inspired.

The hermeneutical dimension that may not be foreseen by everyone is that words take on their precise meanings in a specific context. Accordingly, the same words can mean significantly different things to different people. The meaning of the words of the Bible can change in the eyes of the reader. This is both a tool the Holy Spirit uses to keep Scripture a living word and also a reason why there is so much disagreement over what the Bible actually means. It had a first "breathed" meaning. It has arguably had many other "breathed" meanings since.

3. Scripture is authoritative. Authority implies that a posture of submission is implied. Submission pertains especially to commands and instruction. One can have a reverence for things that aren't commands, but of course we are not called to worship the Bible.

With regard to obedience, I must first make sure that I am understanding the nature of biblical instruction appropriately. After all, I am not the direct Y-O-U of any passage in the Bible. The Old Testament was written to ancient Israel, and I personally am not even Jewish. The New Testament says it was written to Romans, Thessalonians, Corinthians, seven churches in Asia Minor. None of those are me.

2 Thessalonians 2:5 captures this truth well--"Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?" Obviously he was not talking to me or anyone alive today.

So I must process the instruction of Scripture with a view to who its original audience was and how that instruction connects to me and us as a whole today. This is simply the hermeneutical situation. It may mean that God expects more restrictive behavior for us today (for example, I am not supposed to be polygamous like Abraham). In other cases it may imply less restriction (for example, a woman can have short hair today).

The process of discerning the way the authority of Scripture plays out for me/us can be complicated. For one, there is instruction in the Old Testament that the New Testament appropriates differently (e.g., eating pork). There are commands that were culture-specific (e.g., we should not start up slavery again). There were commands that were situation-specific (God probably doesn't expect everyone to sell all they have and give to the poor).

There is a lot of discernment involved in figuring out what God instructs us today. It is best done in a community of faith where you "work out y'alls salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12). We take into account the flow of revelation in the Bible, since the understanding of some things becomes more precise as we move through its pages (e.g., on Satan, on the afterlife, on individual culpability...). We take into account what the kingdom of God will be like (e.g., there will be no subordination of wives to husbands in the kingdom). We take into account the character of God (which keeps us from using Scripture as a weapon in the manner of the biblical Pharisees).

Yes, the Bible is authoritative for believers.

The hermeneutical complication is the realization that the Bible was written to ancient audiences and that the meaning both of the words and the significance of the instruction was a function of what words and actions meant in those contexts. Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't mean the same thing.

4. Scripture is infallible. That is to say, Scripture never fails to accomplish what God wants it to accomplish. The key verse here is Isaiah 55:11 -- "My word will not return to me empty but will accomplish what I intent and succeed in the purpose for which I sent it."

Of course "word" here is not limited to Scripture. In context this verse is referring as much to God's command, his will, as to any written word. Here is an example of the principle mentioned above, namely, that we tend to define the words of the Bible from our "dictionaries" rather than read them for what they actually meant originally.

The word infallible was anathema in some circles in the culture wars of the 70s. It was viewed as a second rate view of Scripture. The reason was that people used it to say that the Bible was only expected to be correct in matters of faith and practice, not in matters like history or science.

Such an approach seems to miss the point made above that all the language of Scripture was "incarnated" in the flesh of the categories of those to whom it was first written. Otherwise they wouldn't have understood it. The Bible operates with a geocentric view of the universe. Why wouldn't it? So the way matters of faith and practice are presented came in the language and paradigms of the original audiences.

Kevin Vanhoozer has suggested a much more profound and appropriate way to approach the notion of infallibility. First, there was a profoundly puzzling sense of some previous thinkers that the purpose of language was merely informative. This perspective is so wide of the obvious diverse uses of language it is dumbfounding. A work like J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words now seems so basic as to boggle the mind that anyone would even question its basic premise.

That premise is that words do things. Yes, they can inform. But they also promise, command, reassure, express emotion, etc. When you say, "I do" at a wedding, you are doing something much more than informing your spouse of your belief!

So God had and has many purposes with Scripture. God makes promises (which, by the way, are often conditional on our response). God makes commands (but he gives us the freedom to disobey). The psalms express praise, thanksgiving, anger, lament. It's not that we cannot learn things from the psalms, but this is not their primary purpose. It makes little sense to say that the purpose of God in Psalm 137:9 is to inform the Babylonians or Jews of something!

Scripture does not fail to accomplish God's purposes for it.

What is hermeneutically profound is to realize how varying these purposes are. Words do far more than merely inform.

5. Finally, Scripture is inerrant. In the words of one seminary, "It is without error in all that it affirms."

In the light of what it means for Scripture to be infallible, we can now put this more precisely, following Kevin Vanhoozer. When the purpose of Scripture is to convey information, that information is without error.

There are three important considerations here. The first is simply to reiterate what we said about infallibility. Not every word of Scripture is meant to affirm something. For example, Psalm 137:9 is not informing or commanding the Jews to kill Babylonian babies. Its function is expressive, expressing a combination of despair and anger. The word inerrant is a mismatch to this verse. To use it of this verse is to miss the point of the verse.

A second consideration is that a biblical point sometimes comes in ancient clothing. When Paul says he visited the third heaven, his point is not cosmological. He is saying that he was in the very presence of God. He is not making a point about the structure of the universe, as if the universe was simply a matter of going up through two layers of sky until you reached God in the highest sky.

Discerning the point can be a slippery thing, which is why again the Bible is best appropriated in communities of faith. One can say, "That isn't the point" to try to get away with things you shouldn't be able to justify. But the potential abuse of a truth does not negate the truth. The literal understanding of Genesis 1 is not necessarily the picture some are going for. Genesis 1 seems to picture the stars in a dome with the waters that came down in the Flood above it.

Genre also comes into play here. You would not fault a parable for not being historical. A parable is "fictional" in genre. So we must consider the parameters of ancient history when we interpret biblical histories. If in fact it should turn out that Esther or Job were meant to be read as novellas, that would not be in any way a statement that they were untrue.

Here is an important point. These modern shibboleths were probably in part meant to restrain interpretations of the Bible. The idea was, "If we force a person to say Genesis 1 is inerrant, then we can stop belief in evolution." But the shibboleths really don't pull it off. If you are saying some aspect of the biblical text was a matter of the intended genre, you are not accusing that text of an error. You are implying that the interpretation of the person who disagrees with you is in error, not the Bible.

A third consideration involves locating an individual passage within the flow of revelation. The idea of God sending an evil spirit on Saul is a less precise sense of temptation than 1 Chronicles 21:1's sense that it was more precisely Satan that tempted David or James 1:13 sense that God doesn't tempt people to do evil. We should never apply a verse directly to ourselves today without first locating it within the whole counsel of God in Scripture.

The Bible is without error in all that it affirms.

Now, let us pray and work together to discern what it affirms and how God would have us appropriate it in our contexts today as communities of faith.

[1] See my earlier post on Wesleyans and inerrancy.

11.4 Scripture as Revelation 2

Previously in this chapter:

• 11.1-3 Overview, Natural Revelation, and the Word

11.4 Scripture as Revelation
11.4.1 God-breathed

• 2 Timothy 3:16 - "All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for instruction, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness."
• Note that the NT did not always find this God breathing in the literal meaning of OT passages (cf. Matt. 2:15 and Hos. 11:1-2). In Galatians 4:24 finds God breathing through Genesis by way of allegory.
• Also note that 2 Timothy would have referred to the Old Testament, since the New Testament was not yet collected at that time.
• 2 Peter 1:20-21 - "No prophecy comes into existence of one's own loosing, for prophecy was not brought by the will of a mortal but, being brought by the Holy Spirit, people spoke from God."
• 2 Peter is particularly concerned with its audience's belief in prophecies relating to Jesus and his second coming (2 Pet. 3). That is to say, it is not only the Scriptures but the prophecies of prophets in the early church that are likely in view. He is assuring them that prophecy is not a matter of opinion but comes from the Holy Spirit.
• In short, special revelation is much bigger than the Bible itself. The Bible is a subset of special revelation in general.
• 1 Peter 1:10-12 - Contextual study makes it clear that most of the words of the prophets were about the time of the prophets, although there are some ambiguous texts (e.g., Isaiah 53). An incarnational sense of revelation suggests that 1 Peter's understanding of revelation is itself incarnated revelation.
• So a "translation" of 1 Peter 1:10-12 might go like the following: "The Holy Spirit inspired the early Christians to see anticipations of Jesus' sufferings in the Scriptures. God thus planted such potential meanings into the words of the prophets, although the prophets themselves probably only saw the first meanings to their audiences rather than these "fuller senses."

11.4.2 Infallible

• Isaiah 55:11 - "My word will not return to myself empty but accomplishes everything it sets out to do."
• Again, this statement is in no way limited to the books of the Old Testament that were in use at the time of writing. The point is that God's will--here personified as his word--is unfailing. Scripture reveals to us a subset of his overall will. 
• What is God's will in Scripture (cf. Vanhoozer)? Sometimes it is to give its audiences and us commands (in this respect it is authoritative). Sometimes it is to give us promises and anticipations of what is to come (in this respect it is unfailing). Sometimes its purposes were to express the joy, anger, sadness, and feelings of God's people (e.g., in the imprecatory psalms, psalms of lament, thanksgiving psalms, etc). Sometimes its purpose was to inform (in this regard it was inerrant within the level of precision that accorded with God's will).

11.4.3 Authoritative

• All of God's commands are summed up in the Great Commandment: Love God and Love neighbor (see section on Christian ethics). Matthew 22:34-40
• The authority of Scripture relates specifically to its commands upon us. All of these are filtered through the love command. As the ethics section sets out, this is an authority of the whole of Scripture rather than a direct authority of its individual parts.

11.4.4 Means of Transformation

• The Bible has often been treated as a source of information or beliefs, but this is its most elementary function, not its deepest one.
• We know this because "God looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7) and spiritual identity is a function of the heart more than the head (Mark 7:20-23).
• The inspired instruction of 2 Timothy 3:16 has to do with the discipleship of the person, not the mere informing of the mind--correction, training in righteousness.
• The Bible thus uses Scripture to change people--to bring them into relationship with him, to mold them into Christ-likeness, to make them more loving. 
• The Bible is thus at its heart a sacrament of transformation.

11.4.5 Synthesis

• There were original moments of inspiration--the individual books of the Bible were inspired to speak to their original contexts largely within the conceptual frameworks of their original audiences. 
• We do not hereby preclude the possibility of stages in the generation of these books. As Christians, we focus on the canonical form of these texts but don't preclude the possibility of inspiration in relation to "pre-forms" of the canonical text.
• Over the course of the testaments, we can plot an overall, increasing precision in the revelation. In general, the New Testament conceptualizes revelation more precisely than the Old Testament. This dynamic is sometimes called "progressive revelation."
• The Holy Spirit continues to inspire individuals as they read Scripture, never in contradiction of God's revealed character, but to "improvise" for specific contexts (which is essential for the appropriation of Scripture to specific circumstances). We find this dynamic in the sensus plenior of the New Testament use of the old.
• The final revelation, the "last Word" (cf. N. T. Wright) was Christ. All the rest is anticipation, witness to, and unfolding of the witness.

Previous "chapters"
Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation
Chapter 4: Sin and Atonement
Interlude: A Theology of Israel
Chapter 5: Jesus the Christ
Chapter 6: Salvation
Chapter 7: The Holy Spirit
Chapter 8: The Church
Chapter 9: Eschatology
Chapter 10: Christian Ethics

SA8. The Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.

This is the eighth post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
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The Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.

1. In the previous article we discussed some of the variations among Christians with regard to their conceptions of the Bible and some of the terms currently used to describe the Bible. That article focused especially on some possible missteps and extremes in relation to those terms and conceptions. In this article, we want to lay out a more coherent way of thinking about those terms in relation to the Bible.

2. When a person thinks of meaning as static and as something that inheres "in" a text, it is natural to think it sufficent to say that, "the Bible is inspired" as a sufficient encapsulation of its origins in God. But since a text is subject to multiple interpretations, we must ask "which interpretation" of the Bible is the inspired one.

It had an original meaning, so we can say that the original meaning was inspired. We might go further to say that the Holy Spirit continues to inspire meanings in dialog with the text as individuals read with the eyes of the Spirit. The first centuries of Christendom also developed traditional readings of certain key texts, and certain Christian traditions also have traditional readings of certain key texts.

Not all of these readings are or were inspired, but perhaps many are. When we say that the original meanings were inspired, we must mean that they were inspired within their original contexts, because meaning is always contextual. These books were inspired to speak to a certain time and place within whatever their original parameters were. At times those meanings were situational or for a particular time. At other times something more universal was meant

What was God thinking as far as "all time"? Even more, what was God thinking for my time and context? This is where we must often work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). [1] Many want certainty and absolute clarity, but this is the road to making the Bible into an idol. Surely we might consider many of the common Christian understandings of key verses to be inspired understandings (creation out of nothing, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity).

Meanwhile, the interpretations of some traditions may be God speaking to those traditions, giving them an emphasis for a particular place and time. And some of the meanings I as an individual see could be God speaking to me. The problem of course is telling when God is speaking and when he is not. Any meaning we see that falls outside the law of love or rule of faith is immediately to be ruled out. And there is good reason for us to read the Bible in community so that the Spirit can correct us if we are on the wrong track. [2]

3. God's word never fails. It is infallible, unfailing. God's word does many different things. It commands. It promises. It informs. Sometimes it gives us an opportunity to express our anger, sadness, or thanksgiving.

God's word, as we have said, is bigger than written words. The words of the Bible give us the most important of God's words for his creation, the final Word of which is Jesus Christ (John 1:14). God's words are, in the first place, his will in action, his commands to the creation, the instruments through which he acts in the world. [3] They include words of hope and words of truth.

4. When God's word commands us to do something, that word is authoritative. When we speak of the authority of Scripture, we are most naturally referring to those words in Scripture through which God gives us his commands. It is not the purpose of every passage to give commands, and some of God's commands were for specific times and places. When God speaks a command to us, his command holds absolute authority over us. [4]

Much of Scripture is narrative. It describes things. Sometimes the narratives of Scripture do imply God's will. [5] In other cases they describe events that happened. Description is not prescription. Just because Gideon used a fleece to find God's will does not necessarily mean that we should.

The commands of God to Israel were commands of God to Israel. The New Testament tells us that Gentile believers are not bound by circumcision (Gal. 5:2-4), the food laws (Mark 7:19), or the Sabbath law of Israel (Col. 2:16). There is a drive among some to find some universal principle behind these commands to apply still to today and perhaps we can find some, but this drive is more our obsession than God's. Paul feels no need to find some universal principle behind the law regarding the Jewish Sabbath or Jesus behind the food laws.

Some commands in Scripture had to do with the context or situation in which it was commanded. Do women today need to have authority on their heads because of the angels (1 Cor. 11:10)? Do we need to be careful about wearing clothing of mixed thread (Lev. 19:19)? We have difficulty even understanding the original purpose of these instructions. To require them today would simply be to follow a rule for its own sake with little sense of purpose. Most likely, these commands had everything to do with their original cultural contexts.

So while God's commands hold absolute authority over us, the Church must work out salvation with fear and trembling. God said it to them and that settled it for them. But we need the Spirit and the Church to wrestle with how to apply some commands to today.

5. Some of God's purpose in Scripture is to give us hope. He has made promises to us, promises to come again. Promises to save us from judgment, from Satan, and from the world. He has promised us his love and his justice within the context of his love.

Some of his promises in Scripture were conditional. He sent Jonah to preach coming judgment on Nineveh, but that promise was not absolute. There was the possibility of forgiveness and repentance. In the same way he has promised the world judgment, but he has given us a way out.

In the same way, his promises to Israel at any one time were contingent on their obedience. His election of Israel is "without repentance" (Rom. 11:29), but it is contingent on their obedience. So God's promises are unfailing, infallible, but some of them are conditional.

6. When God's word tells us truths, those truths are inerrant. As we mentioned in the previous post, many American Christians in the twentieth century were preoccupied with the Bible as a source of propositional truths. There was not a little cultural blindness here, for the unexamined assumption here is that the Bible is mostly about ideas and beliefs.

When we read the narratives of the Bible in context, however, their purpose was not primarily to tell us places, dates, and people. Ancient histories and biographies were much more about good and bad examples of character, as well as identifying who God is and who we are, than about historical precision in the way we demand it today. The stories of the Bible give us good and bad examples of character. They tell us who God is and how we are to be as his people. These were the primary purposes of ancient stories.

God also revealed himself in the categories of the people to whom he was speaking. This is the principle of incarnation--God is a God who takes on our flesh (John 1:14). He is a God who meets us where we are. He does not make us come up to his level, which is impossible. He speaks our language. He uses anthropomorphisms. He met them in their categories.

So the picture of Genesis one has two layers of water with the sky in between them (Gen. 1:7-8), and the stars, sun, and moon placed in the sky (Gen. 1:14-17). Paul thinks of himself taken into the third sky (2 Cor. 12:2). Adam is a living soul made up of dust and breath (Gen. 2:7), and the Thessalonians are body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess. 5:23).

The pictures here were not the point of the revelation, they were the flesh in which the incarnated message was clothed. God created the world and has given us light to find our way during the day and the night. Paul was taken into the very presence of God. God has given us life and expects our whole person to be his.

God's word never fails. His words have different purposes. When his purpose in Scripture is to reveal a truth, then that truth will most certainly be without error. [6]

7. Some of God's words are meant to give us hope or to give us a mechanism by which we may express our thanks, joys, sadness, and even anger. God's word always accomplishes what it sets out to do (Isa. 55:11), so in these instances, as in all instances, his word is infallible, unfailing. We might certainly learn something from a psalm of thanksgiving, a psalm of lament, or an imprecatory psalm (one expressing anger toward enemies). But the primary purpose of these psalms was not to inform. The primary purpose of these psalms was to express something.

So we can rejoice and give thanks as we read thanksgiving psalms. We can identify with the sorrows of the psalmist as we read a psalm of lament. And we can vent our anger as we read an imprecatory psalm.

Even here we must be careful. The authority of Jesus demands that we love our enemies. So if we would dwell on an imprecatory psalm while thinking of our enemies, we would be using Scripture to sin. Similarly, God does not want us to lament forever. At some point we must move on, for there is work to do for the kingdom.

8. Inspiration thus speaks to the source of God's word in God. God has breathed words to his people in Scripture. Infallibility is the overarching category for the unfailing nature of those words. God's words never fail to accomplish what he set them out to do. They are authoritative when they command. They guarantee hope in promise. They are without error when they inform. They are a means of catharsis when we are joyful, sad, or angry.

Yet the most important way in which God uses Scripture is to change us. To make us, both individually and corporately, into a holy people. He makes us Christlike. He makes us like him. Ultimately, Scripture is God's word. He can do with it whatever he wants.

Next Sunday: SA9: God uses all sorts of instruments of grace to transform his people.

[1] The books of the Bible do not say, "And for those of you reading in a specific context in the twenty-first century, here's how these principles or these contextual instructions would play out."

[2] We might apply something like Wesley's quadrilateral to "impressions" we think we are receiving from the Holy Spirit. First, does my impression fit with the accepted principles of Scripture--the law of love and the rule of faith? Second, does it fit with what the Church in general has believed and taught, realizing that individual Christian traditions can get things wrong. Thirdly, what do other wise individuals have to say, given their experience--have I sought the counsel of others? Finally, what does common sense seem to say--is it reasonable?

God has sometimes done "unreasonable" things in the past, but most crazy impressions just that--crazy. The more "unreasonable" the impression, the greater the certainty you should expect to have. But if it is unloving and harmful, it is not God speaking.

[3] This is the Hellenistic Jewish background for the word logos as it is used in the Gospel of John and perhaps implicitly elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., Colossians 1:15; Heb. 4:12-13).

[4] There is a sense in which the word infallible does not fit neatly with God's commands, because God often gives us the freedom to disobey. But God has not failed in any respect in this case, because God in his sovereignty gave us the choice. So Romans 3:3 denies that our faithlessness in any way nullifies the faithfulness of God.

[5] This is the so called "evaluative" point of view of a story, God's point of view.

[6] I have been influenced significantly by Kevin Vanhoozer in formulating the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture in this way. **

Inspiration, Authority, Infallibility, Inerrancy

Here is a summary of my current thoughts on the words inspiration, authority, infallibility, and inerrancy as they relate to Scripture. I submit them to the body of Christ as part of the ongoing dialog of the church.

1. It seems to me that there are two approaches to the Bible in relation to these "power" words. The first is that we need to get the words straight and then we can read the Bible. Perhaps I am unable to see the cultural glasses I am wearing but I resist this approach because, to me, it suggests that I can't let the Bible say what it says. I have to construct an elaborate system of electric fences and barbed wire before I try to interpret the biblical text.

In our modern context, I see debates over these sorts of words as a defensive mechanism against modernism or, to be more precise, against the rise of the historical-contextual method of reading the Bible. In other words, these words set up boundaries for how you can and cannot interpret the Bible in its historical context. Again, this is my opinion and one that should be weighed carefully. To me, the text meant what it meant. If the original authors and audiences understood it, then those meanings were a function of the language and contexts of that time.

2. So what is inspiration then? For me it becomes, first, a contextual inspiration, inspiration to speak to a specific time and place. It is a mysterious cooperation of the human and divine. The vocabulary and thought patterns are both those of the human author and yet guided by the Holy Spirit. At times I think the Spirit wanted specific wording; at times I suspect he was content for a number of different possible wordings.

The first inspiration was an "incarnated" inspiration. That is to say, it came largely within the worldview categories of the original audiences (heaven is up, the world is flat, the dead are "under the earth").

But I believe God had more in mind than just the initial audiences. He knew everyone who would read those words for the centuries to come. He planted meanings that would jump out at the earliest Christians as they scoured the Bible for truths about Jesus. Who knows, perhaps he even planted specific wordings with you and me specifically in mind. Again, these are my perspectives, to be weighed.

3. Scripture is authoritative because God is authoritative. IMO, a premodern reader reads the text as God's direct commands to him or her. In context, these were commands in specific contexts and so, to be true to their actual meaning, we have to understand the principles behind the precepts to apply them appropriately. Just doing what they did may not be truly doing what they did in a different context.

Authority relates most specifically to biblical material that is in the form of command. A narrative can have some authoritative implications but it is more indirect. Again, it can get complicated, IMO. The authority of the commands to sacrifice in Leviticus has to be processed through the fact that Christ died for our sins as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. So the authority of Leviticus is the need for me to trust on Jesus for the atonement of my sins.

4. Infallibility relates to the fact that God's word never fails (Isaiah 55:11). It always accomplishes what it sets out to do. So when God makes a promise in Scripture, it will not fail within the parameters he has set for it (sometimes his promises and threats of judgment are conditional on our response, as with the threat of destruction on Nineveh in Jonah).

5. Similarly, when the purpose of God's word is to relate truth or information, it is without error. I believe these truths, as I said, come in incarnated form. In other words, we have to distinguish the truth from the clothing in which it comes. We need to know the parameters of what is being said. Is the statement that a mustard seed is the smallest of seeds really a comment about botany? I don't think that's the point.

6. Finally, when 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all Scripture is inspired and profitable for instruction, correction, reproof, and training in righteousness, I don't think we should assume that Paul or the biblical authors always saw this truth on a literal level. That is to say, many of the truths of Scripture were on a spiritual level. IMO, there is a good deal of circularity in the way some authors use this text as an endorsement of a particular modernist hermeneutic. In the case of "don't muzzle the ox," the biggest inspired truth Paul saw for the Corinthians had to do with supporting your ministers materially--a spiritual rather than literal meaning of the text (1 Cor. 9:9-10).

So those are a few of my thoughts at this point on the journey...

Sunday Theology: The Final Revelation

Here is my perhaps weekly series on theology in video form.  This continues my posts on revelation.

This one is on the "final revelation," which as you might guess is Jesus Christ.