Handling Scripture - Part 2
Inerrant & Infallible
This series of articles is born from considering what it means that Jesus is God, and that God is only ever like Jesus - specifically, what does this mean for our handling of Scripture? In part one, we considered two primary things. We read with a crucicentric hermeneutic, and we place Jesus’ voice and revelation as supreme, and even corrective, to all others, including the Law and the Prophets - the pre-Jesus Scriptures. Part 1 can be read here:
Crucicentric reading in practice
In theory, a crucicentric reading sounds great, but what does this look like in practice?
Initially, to understand it, we have only to look at Jesus’ example of Scripture handling.
Continuing to pull from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ example begins on the Sermon on the Mount:
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also…”
New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Mt 5:38–39.
Jesus brings up the First Testament Law of Moses regarding equal justice - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - and tells his followers that unequal mercy is the overriding rule of the kingdom, rather than equivalent payback (justice).
I was initially taught that Jesus is not contradicting the Mosaic Law, he is revealing the heart of what people were intended to get from the Mosaic Law.
In other words, the claim to me was that Jesus’ teaching is what people should have been able to conclude from the Mosaic Law.
I was taught this because the Western Church needs this to be true as they have set up a reading that parallels Peter’s mistake at the Mount of Transfiguration. The Western Church places Jesus on equal footing with the First Testament.
However, what I was initially taught failed to hold up against a close reading of the material.
This rule of equal justice is first spoken of in the book of Exodus:
23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Ex 21:23–25.
The premise of this law is great for the foundational problem it seeks to head off. It seeks to head off a cycle of ever-worsening retribution. Each side ups the ante with the idea that one side killed one of ours, so in payback, we will kill 10 of theirs, and then they pay that back with killing 100.
The vicious Hatfield-and-McCoy cycle becomes endless.
Mercy - the suspension of someone’s claim to justice - is not clear here. The words of Jesus are not the “obvious” lesson behind this law. Rather, we read that the retribution of equal justice “shall/will” be carried out with no room for suspending it with mercy.
This becomes more obvious as we read a bit further and arrive at Leviticus:
19 Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.
New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Le 24:19–20.
Mercy is not being prescribed or even considered. There is no room given for mercy. The law is demanding the payback that Jesus’ law calls for us to suspend.
To make this clear, multiple translations of this Leviticus passage translate into English that the equal punishment must be dealt out.
We finally read it most clearly in Deuteronomy, where mercy is forbidden:
21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Dt 19:21.
Running counter to the words of Jesus, Moses mandates that pity shall not be given; there will be no mercy; the punishment must be carried out.
The words of Moses and the words of Jesus cannot be made simultaneously truthful. One cannot be made responsible for missing the law of mercy from a law that outlaws mercy.
Jesus corrects the error of Moses’ law. And in the law of Jesus, we discover the true heart of God that Moses missed.
So, are we to say that the Scripture holds error?
The purpose of Scripture
To tackle that question, we must consider the three modern terms by which Scripture is often described: inspired, infallible, and inerrant.
In this post, we will deal with the last two: infallibility and inerrancy.
These two terms have been greatly conflated over the years so that many do not understand how they differ. Let me attempt to meet in between the near-synonymous, modern-evangelical usage and holding some level distinction between the two words.
Infallibility: the understanding that the Scriptures will not fail us in what it is intended to do - paraphrase of Beth Felker Jones.
Inerrancy: the belief that, not only will Scripture not fail in its intent, but the original works (which we no longer have) of Scripture are free from all untruth, trickery, or deception - paraphrased from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
“Wait a minute!” we can respond.
“Jesus shows that Scripture has error! One case was just described from the Gospel of Matthew.”
“Jesus’ correction of Scripture shows us that Scripture is not infallible! The First Testament attempts to tell us of God’s morality, but it fails, because Jesus has to correct it.”
“We can’t trust Scripture now!”
Well… not necessarily.
First, let’s consider what we can trust. All other Christian debate over the years, the Church is in agreement on what we can absolutely trust, and that “what” is a “who,” that is Jesus - God enfleshed into history to fully reveal himself.
But, can we trust Scripture?
What we can, and what if Scripture is not suspect and untrustworthy, but the demands we have placed upon it are demands that it was never meant to meet?
To expect something to function in a way it was never meant to function means that the thing upon which we place our incorrect expectations will fail our expectations on some level. This is not the thing’s fault. It can remain perfect to its purpose. The fault is in one attempting to use a screwdriver as a hammer, or a golf club as a baseball bat, and then finding that the wrong instruments are not up to unintended purposes.
Here is an example that popped into my head years ago to speak of how infallibility and inerrancy rest upon purpose.
A school student may encounter the exam question: “What is the difference between 1939 and 1945?”
Someone could answer that the difference = 6.
There is no error in that answer. And for Carl Gauss - considered by many to be the greatest mathematician - as he writes the answer, it might be considered infallible. That is, his answer will not fail in its purpose to give us the difference between 1939 and 1945.
However, it changes things if one realizes that the subject matter of the exam is world history. In that case, the difference between the two numbers is a move from a world greatly influenced by Europe to a world led by the superpowers of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The difference expands to a world of limited technology to a world of rapid technological advancement that trickles down to the civilian sector, but is driven by the military-industrial complex. The difference continues in changed gender roles, a world facing the problem of modern-day Israel, increased globalization, greater human rights, and a world living in post-atomic bomb horror. The list of differences could go on.
If the purpose of the answer is to tell of historical events, now the answer “6” is simultaneously in error, and it fails us.
The arrow of Scripture (and its fulfillment)
In returning our thoughts back to Scripture, to understand if and how Scripture might be without error, and does not fail in its purpose, we need to understand what Scripture is meant to do. Or, as the Assemblies of God position paper on Scripture says, infallibility and inerrancy claims apply to what “Scripture affirms and asserts,” not the accuracy of everything reported.
If Scripture is failing us and appears to have errors. Either:
Modern evangelicals are correct in understanding the intended purpose of Scripture, and it ends up proving untrustworthy and cannot do what it was meant to do - such is the case of many who are or have deconstructed upon the inability to make Scripture fit the modern evangelical purpose.
Or the modern evangelical church is incorrect regarding the purpose of Scripture - so that if we discover the true purpose of Scripture, we will find it to prove unfailing and without error.
Thus, our consideration is rooted in:
What if we evangelicals have, in our Western literalism, misunderstood the purpose of Scripture?
What is Scripture’s purpose?
Well, according to Jesus, Scripture was meant to point to him. Jesus held a Christocentric view of Scripture that we realized in the last post is also a crucicentric view of Scripture.
In one case, a couple of his bewildered disciples are noted to only, finally, recognize Jesus when Jesus breaks bread with them (communion/crucicentricity). And then they remark upon reflection that their hearts were lighting up within themselves as Jesus opened “the Scriptures” to them, to show how Moses and the Prophets - “all the Scriptures” - were all about him (Christocentricity/Luke 24:27, 30-32), and that he had to suffer death (crucicentricity/Luke 24:26).
To speak in terms of the transfiguration event that we considered in part 1: the Scriptures (Moses and Elijah) sought to direct the attention of others to the object of their own attention, the one with whom Peter discovered they were conversing or engaging.
Here is Scripture’s mission: to point us to Jesus, the Christ, and Christ crucified. Since Christ is only the Christ by the crucifixion.
The Scriptures predating Jesus point forward to him, and the post-Jesus Scriptures point backward to him.
Scripture will fail people and Scripture will be proven untrue if there is an attempt to make Scripture do anything other than its intended purpose.
However, the Church has proven that a screwdriver can still be used to pound in a nail if one is willing to endure many problems, much frustration, and not a little bit of suffering for attempting to use something outside of its purpose.
The Church declared the idea of a heliocentric creation to be heresy because they wanted the Scriptures to be infallible and inerrant outside of its purpose. They wanted a science book.
The Apostle Paul killed people due to holding the Scriptures as infallible and inerrant outside of its purpose. He wanted a systematic theology book.
People in our modern era continue to seek to make the Scriptures infallible and inerrant outside of its purpose. We want a modern history book, a literal telling in Western style, an easy list of dos and don’ts, and the list goes on.
Scripture does not fail and is not untrue to what it is intended to do: point to Jesus!
But the back-end of the shaft of an arrow that points to something must start further away from that thing - the back-end of an arrow is actually closer to what is “other” than the thing it is pointing towards - and then the line of the arrow moves towards the thing its purpose is to guide others to.
Thus, if the Scripture leading up to Jesus was pointing to him, we should see a “line” being drawn through Scripture that gets ever closer to Jesus until the point hands us off from the arrow to the real thing.
And the back-end of the arrow is not so close to Jesus.
Sure enough, when we view Scripture as the Jesus-oriented arrow that Jesus defines it as, the arrow comes into focus.
Up to Jesus, many had taken the line of the arrow and distorted it into a circle. A circle of absolute inclusion and exclusion.
Jesus reorients the arrow that Israel had distorted. Jesus straightens it back out to point to him.
Returning to the eye-for-an-eye matter, we find that Jesus’ exercising of authority over the Mosaic law as he corrects the rule from no mercy to mercy leaves the people astonished because it marks Jesus as special from all their own experts in the Scriptures.
The people are shocked at the authority Jesus takes over the Scripture, compared to all of their experts who studied “under” the authority of the Scripture.
Scripture serves Jesus, and in its subservience to Jesus, Scripture continues to prove its place as an arrow pointing to him alone.
As the arrow of Scripture straightens out under Jesus’ authority, a line emerges that originates from humanity’s reactive, unequal response that goes beyond balancing justice. The arrow’s origination is exemplified in Lamech who claims the right to 70x vengeance.
(The disproportionate vengeance of Lamech begins when he kills a man who only cut him. The disproportion grows when Lamech says that he even killed a boy who only bruised him.)
From there, the arrow pointing to Jesus moves us closer to him, as it moves away from the disproportion of Lamech. The line is drawn out of disproportion to the equal justice of only doing to others what they have done to you. Exodus 21:25 repeats the injuries Lamech incurred and declares that you can only return cut for cut and bruise for bruise.
But the line of Scripture’s arrow continues through equal justice. It keeps going, to lead us from repaying wrong with greater wrongs, through repaying wrong for wrong, to where Jesus declares - and lives out - repaying wrong with forgiveness and mercy.
The course of Scripture is its arrow.
Jesus fulfills the Mosaic Law
Jesus fulfills the Mosaic Law by coming as the thing towards which it helped to orient the arrow. To hold a sign in my hand with an arrow, but to not know its intended orientation, is to have a worthless arrow - unfulfilled in its purpose to point at its object.
An arrow is fulfilled by its correct orientation that is proven by bringing someone to its intended destination.
One might say that an arrow whose orientation and object cannot be determined is an imperfect arrow. Jesus perfects the arrow of the Mosaic Law by clarifying its orientation and becoming the object of it.
There is much more to explore, clarify, and nuance that cannot fit here, but let us end with a brief consideration of Scripture pointing to Jesus:
Scripture opens with a God who creates all things good and gets down in the dirt with life, to create more life (Genesis 1:31; 2:18-32). Humanity runs behind the tree of division, and Jesus dies upon the tree of division to speak words of forgiveness.
Scripture points to a God who meets people through sacrifice they desire when they cannot bear to meet him directly (Exodus 20:18-25; Leviticus 1:1ff). But God does not leave them there, as he eases people out of that belief. The full understanding of sacrifice moves from Abraham believing God would want child sacrifice like the other gods, to solidifying the belief hundreds of years later that God does not want child sacrifice, but nonhuman sacrifice remains, to another hundreds of years later having the realization break through that God doesn’t want any of the sacrifice (Psalm 40:6-8; Jeremiah 7:21-22). And God eventually comes in the flesh to end sacrifices completely.
Scripture points us to a God who we thought punished generations of people for their ancestors’ sins (Exodus 34:7; Deuteronomy 5:9; 2 Samuel 12:14). And God endures the character assassination that he is like Lamech with disproportionate responses. Yet, while enduring, God works, as he moves people towards what he is really like. Over hundreds of years, people begin to realize that kids are not punished for their ancestors’ sins (Ezekiel 18:20), and God finally comes in the flesh to embrace the children and declare children to be the greatest in the Kingdom.
Scripture is realized to be the story of a God who suffers greatly while lovingly, patiently moving us, bit by bit, towards himself. This points us to Jesus, God in the flesh, who suffers greatly while lovingly, patiently says that in his suffering, as he is placed upon the cross, he will draw all humanity, bit by bit, to himself (John 12:32).
The infallible and inerrant arrow of Scripture
When we realize that Scripture’s purpose is to point people to Jesus, God in the flesh, we realize that it is first, infallible.
Now, having the clear revelation of God in Jesus, we realize that through the First Testament, we see God acting like Jesus. We see a God who endures slander, abuse, and character assassination as his people make him out to be very un-Christlike. Although they get closer and closer, as they draw an arrow to Jesus.
Just as Jesus did with his own followers, those around him, and even those who killed him, we find a God through Scripture who endures being misunderstood and mischaracterized.
The story running through Scripture of a co-suffering God who suffers with us and due to us is the unfailing arrow pointing to God in the flesh being told to his face that he could not be that good. And to his death, God endured slander while returning love and forgiveness.
The arrow of Scripture points unfailingly to Jesus - the enfleshed, co-suffering God.
Also, in realizing Scripture’s purpose, we realize that its often unflinching and embarrassing record does not err.
Scripture does not lie, trick, or deceive about who God really is.
In its opening passages, God is plainly the one who pursues us, and has no problem with us. And when we come to Jesus, he demonstrates the God who is still pursuing us, and even when we kill him, he only holds loving forgiveness for his murderers.
Scripture also does not lie, trick, or deceive about what humanity really is.
It spills out the graphic truth of humanity on page after page. Humanity’s simultaneous weakness and pride is exposed against each other and over and against God as they attribute things to God that Jesus reveals were never of God.
Modern Christianity often attempts to sweep things under the rug: sexual abuse, violence, greed, and all the other sins of humanity.
Yet, the Bible offers the dark truth of God’s people. They take on his name while they claim glory for God as they brag of the genocidal killing of babies, they rape women as they take them for Taliban-style war brides, and they place themselves above the rest of humanity that God has created.
Over the thousands of years before Jesus, ancient Hebrews and their ancestors make claims of holding close standing and special intimacy with God, but Jesus will show they got God so wrong. They got God, up to when the supposed experts in God missed God when he rejoined them in the literal dirt - right back where he started with humanity.
And Jesus says that many people of God will go on getting him wrong and missing him, while he simply remains where he has always been, with humanity in the dirt, among the poor, the sick, and the oppressed.
The unerring Scripture is an interweaving of truth about God and truth about humanity that forms an honest, and often embarrassing arrow, that points to Jesus.
Conclusion
The Bible is infallible and inerrant to its purpose - its purpose being to draw a line that points to Jesus.
The drawing of a line necessarily begins further away from what it will point to and tracks towards the thing it wishes to point to.
It is to Scripture’s inspiration that we will turn in part three of the Handling Scripture series.