Is Inerrancy Pointless?
I’ve been seeing a lot of this recently: The insinuation, or outright assertion, that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is basically pointless because we don’t have the original manuscripts or (as in the screenshot below) we don’t have an inerrant interpreter.
Instead of simply rejecting the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the charge is made that it’s a pointless doctrine. What good is an ostensibly inerrant text if we don’t have it, or if we can’t inerrantly interpret it?1
This will be a short post, but I just wanted to list of what I think are some important points to keep in mind about biblical inerrancy when we hear this kind of criticism.
1) Objectively, inerrancy is simply a logical consequence of the beliefs that the whole Bible is a) God-breathed, and b) God does not bear false witness. Those two propositions demand inerrancy as a logical conclusion, whatever else we might say about it and before any practical value that we assign it or derive from it.
2) Properly understood, inerrancy does indeed apply technically only to the original manuscripts, which we don’t have, not all subsequent copies where divergences have crept in. But, the vast majority of these divergences are a) trivial, and b) detectable, traceable, and correctable through textual criticism. We shouldn’t make overmuch of the distinction between original manuscripts and the text we have today. Our level of textual uncertainty or translational ambiguity isn’t enough, to my mind anyway, to sap inerrancy of all meaning and value.
3) If we have an inerrant text but no inerrant or infallible interpreter, does that make holding to inerrancy pointless? No. It means that the text retains its position in principle as the highest judge. It means we are bound to take a posture of humility toward it and place ourselves under it rather than above it. It means that we give it the benefit of the doubt rather than ourselves. It means that in interpreting it we assume it won’t ultimately contradict itself and that helps keep our interpretations in check, and much else. This to me is a point of vital importance: Despite not having an infallible interpreter, inerrancy demands a certain posture of us that is essential.
4) With point #1 in mind, it’s important to remember that inerrancy is only one thing to say about the Bible, and probably not really even the most important or primary thing to say. You can look at something like the Westminster Confession, for example, in its opening chapter on Scripture, and inerrancy is implied but is not really a central focus. After all, “inerrancy” as a category doesn’t really have much relevance to a lot of the actual biblical content. What does it mean to say that a command is “inerrant”? That at least is a strange category to apply to something like a command. Or, that Paul’s greetings to his coworkers are “inerrant”? That a Psalm of petition and despair is inerrant? That the parable of the prodigal son is inerrant? You can say all those things are inerrant, and fine, I don’t disagree, but there are genres of Scripture for which emphasizing their inerrancy is just uninteresting, and doesn’t carry much relevance as a category toward helping us actually understand it.
I hold to biblical inerrancy. But its importance lies mainly in that it’s a logical conclusion of two other vital confessions: plenary inspiration (the whole Bible is inspired) and God’s complete faithfulness, and foundationally for our posture and attitude in handling it.
The Roman Catholic Church may get around this by declaring a text like the Latin Vulgate to be divinely authoritative, or by claiming infallible teaching and interpretive authority for the magisterium. I don’t go that route, not being Roman Catholic, and because I don’t see how this doesn’t simply push the same problem back a step: Wouldn’t we need infallible/inerrant interpreters for the Church’s decrees?