Deep Dish (Chicago) Inerrancy

June 6, 20071:05 pm Honzo Comments

Synopsis: The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy goes too far and does not stand up to scrutiny. A better approach to inerrancy and infallibility is the Fuller model.

Terms:

Inerrancy: without error.
Infallability: incapable of error

Yesterday, I posted an open question about how our authors and readers view scripture. I replied that I did not hold to the doctrine of inerrancy. While this may seem shocking at first to some of our readers, allow me to flesh out my position with this post.

First, I need to give my definition of inerrancy. In this post, I am primarily concerned with the Chicago Statement’s position on inerrancy, hereto referred to as Chicago Inerrancy. According to this view, inerrancy implies that the Bible is completely true and accurate – historically, scientifically, and spiritually. In order for this to be the case, every book, every sentence, and every word must be the literal truth. :”(If this precludes your definition of inerrancy, please let me know in the comments.)”: I don’t think the Chicago position allows for any other definition of inerrancy. Consider the following portion of the Chicago Statement:

Article XII. We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

All it takes to demonstrate the falsehood of the above statement and the Chicago position is to demonstrate a single historical or scientific error. I will provide two.

Example 1: The healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law

Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple? According to Luke 4:38-40, Jesus healed her hand before he called Peter as a disciple in Luke 5:10. However, Matthew gives us a different story. According to Matthew 8:14-15, Peter’s mother-in-law was healed after Peter was called to be a disciple in Mt 4:18. Both cannot be true at the same time. And before someone tries to say that Peter’s mother-in-law was healed twice, consider two additional problems this would bring up. First, Jesus would be healing the same person’s fever twice in a relatively short period. This implies that the first healing did not stick – was Jesus’ first healing ineffective? This is more of a problem than differences in editing bring up. The second issue is literary in nature. If you examine each pericope, one finds that they are really the same pericope, just out of order in each narrative.

Luke 4:38-40

Matthew 8:14-15

And he arose and left the synagogue and entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to him on her behalf. And he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her, and immediately she rose and began to serve them.

Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Christ. (ESV)

And when Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve him.

That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.” (ESV)

Details were changed for the sake of the narrative. The events are not called into question, just the order of events. Peter’s mother-in-law was healed; Peter was called to be a disciple. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the order of events. Both cannot be true; rather, both cannot be historically accurate. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question: “Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple?” Notice that both do give an answer to that question. Both are not accurate down to the littlest detail. Both accounts can be inspired, but not inerrant. :”(At least not inerrant according to the Chicago position.)”:.

Example 2: The Day and Time of Jesus’ Crucifixion

What day and at what time was Jesus crucified? If one goes by the events in Mark 14:12-20, the Last Supper happened on Passover. Jesus was then crucified the next day at 9AM (Mk 14-15). This differs from the account in John, the last gospel to be written. In John 19:14-16 the narrative is explicit that Jesus was crucified on Passover at 12PM, not the day after at 9AM. The last Supper was the day before. John has a very good reason for moving the crucifixion a day up – one of the themes of the gospel of John is that Jesus is the Passover lamb.

Once again, the historical details were changed for the sake of the narrative.:”(Or, they were recorded differently by two different sources. No matter which one is the case, the historical record differs between the two.)”: Just like in the earlier example, there is no question that the events happened. Jesus was crucified; the Last Supper did take place. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the dating of the events. Both cannot be completely historically accurate to the smallest detail. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question, “What day and at what time was Jesus crucified?” Again, but accounts can be inspired, but are not inerrant, at least the way that the Chicago Statement suggests.

Conclusion

The Chicago Statement and a sizable number of Christians hold that the Bible is inerrant in all matters, including its historical claims. This includes all historical claims. I have demonstrated, through two examples, that the Bible is internally conflicted on a historical matters. These examples can be easily explained away by the editing process and the need to argue spiritual points. However, if these explanations are allowed, Chicago’s strict historical inerrancy claim must be abandoned for a more nuanced claim.

What might be such a claim? I think that the Fuller Statement of Faith gives a good view of inerrancy and infallibility. While the statement does not come right out and give their position on this matter, Parableman has summed up their view quite succinctly (emph added).

So what the Fuller view has done is co-opt a term about the nature of inspiration, a term used for describing the impossibility of God’s word containing errors, to use it to apply to a view about the scope of inerrancy or infallibility, i.e. the view that scripture can or does have errors about some matters while not having, or being unable to have, other kinds of errors. A more accurate description of their view, then, would be that the Bible is infallible or inerrant about matters of faith and practice but not infallible or inerrant about matters of history and science. Calling that infallibility as opposed to inerrancy is wildly confused.

Notice that the Chicago Statement explicitly denies this a good way to view scripture.

It should be noted that the Gospels were ancient biographies, not modern histories. As such, they were primarily concerned, not with historical minutia, but with demonstrating the character’s static personality through examples. Because of this, one should not expect there to be a unified narrative time line among the different accounts, for that was not their purpose. Their purpose was to demonstrate who Jesus was and why he was important to their audiences. In this, they are inerrant.

The authors were not trying to write scientific treatises or modern histories, but something else. As such we should not import our modern categories onto them.

The danger with creeds and statements like the Westminster Confession and the Chicago Statement is that they lead to divisions in the body of Christ. Don’t get me wrong, they are useful in clarifying and communicating positions, but we should be wary in judging other believers in light of them.

History, Literature, The Bible, Unity none

Edit in Admin

E. I. Sanchez

I think the first time I read this post I didn't appreciate it. Now, I do.

I've written my own take on Inerrancy.

It is an interesting subject and I just want to make the point that we need to keep it simple. Let's not put the Bible in an Altar. It is not God.

Edgar.

Wayne Shaffer

Perhaps the "exposition" accompanying some presentations of the Chicago Statement might help. Of relevance to the matter at hand:

"We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of His penman's milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed."

Copied from this page: http://ovrlnd.com/Bible/Inerrancy.html

The thinking behind the concise "affirmations and denials," as given by the exposition, is arguably as important as the affirmations and denials themselves.

brad andrews

Here is an intersting article from Talbot School of Theology Philosophy professor on the issue:

The Rationality Of Belief In Inerrancy

It's a bit older, but seems to feel right to me...

Jeremy Pierce

I don't see why you think Article XII and Article XIII are even remotely at odds with each other. Article XIII is in fact intended to clarify what Article XII means when it says there is no falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

What you can take away from those two articles is that when parallel accounts differ in the details or present different perspectives on something, the claim is that those differences ultimately go back to the same events that took place in a way that neither account is false or deceitful. If the accounts are in a different chronological order, then the Chicago Statement is implying that at least one of the two must not have intended to order the account chronologically.

I don't see how it's a get out of jail free card. Inerrantists still have to defend how the two seemingly conflicting accounts might both be presenting information that is true and not deceptive or fraudulent given the literary standards of the method of reporting. The claim is not that it automatically amounts to no error simply because they are different accounts. The claim is that such work can always be done, because there are no errors of that sort.

What I am arguing for is that the gospels are not attempting to be historically 100% accurate according to modern standards

Yes, presuming you mean "precise" when you say accurate. The authors of the Chicago Statement would agree, however. They aren't trying to hold the Bible to the standards of modern scientific of historical writing, and most of the signers have regularly said as much in their own writing.

the Chicago Statement wants to import on the texts.

That's where I think you're importing modern categories into the Chicago Statement when they're trying to do their best to deny that very thing.

On the issue of the day of the crucifixion, I think it's pretty clear in both Mark and John that Jesus had eaten the Passover meal with his disciples the day before he was crucified. The issue isn't with comparing Mark with John. It's what John means when he says it's the Day of Preparation. One might have thought it was the Day of Preparation (i.e. the day before) for Passover itself, except that Jesus has already ate Passover with his disciples. What's much more natural in context is that it's the Day of Preparation for the High Sabbath that happens in Passover week, which isn't an ordinary Sabbath due to the fact that it's a festival week. The term in question never gets used for a day other than a day preceding a Sabbath. Since the term 'Passover' can refer to the meal, the day, or the week of the whole festival, it's not strange to read the expression that way.

There's another reason to take it this way. The point of mentioning its being the day before the Sabbath is to explain why they need to stab Jesus' side. Otherwise he won't die before sundown, and they need to take him off the cross before Sabbath starts, especially such a special Sabbath.

People have come up with various answers for other issues as well. For instance, there's no reason to think Jesus only overturned tables in the temple courtyard just once. John records a much more significant Judean ministry for Jesus, and he would (as every adult male did) be in Jerusalem at feast time several times a year, so why not encounter the priests in the temple doing evil things and get upset at them more than once? It makes much more sense of the very serious opposition Jesus faced from them in the Synoptics that you don't see as good an explanation for in those gospels.

As for Mark getting geography wrong, I don't know which particular instance you're referring to. If it's the Gadarene/Gerasene issue, there have been a couple proposals that deal with that. There's a textual difficulty for one thing, with three variants that contend for possibly being the original reading. If the one that skeptics take to be silly is the correct original reading, it still doesn't necessarily follow that Mark got the geography wrong. Mark several times uses terms fairly vaguely (e.g. 7:31, where he's talking about larger regions). If that's what he's doing here, as R.T. France suggests he is, then he's speaking of the region generally associated with the Gerasenes. It may be that their actual settlement is inland a good bit, but it's clear in the account that we're dealing with a remote location on the lake not that close to a settlement, and Mark may just be indicating what general vicinity of the lakeshore it's in. It's the region in the vicinity of the Gerasenes.

Ultimately, some won't accept the proposals as actually correct, and I think that's fine for those whose presumption is that the Bible isn't infallible. But those who accept it as God's word should presume that it reliably reports what it does report according to the literary standards of its cultural setting. If it seems that there are difficulties in taking particular passages as correct, then either we're interpreting it wrong, or the facts aren't what we think they are. Just as one could say that science is wrong on evolution or say that we're interpreting the early chapters of Genesis wrong (and in either case fully upholding the Chicago Statement), so too can you say that either possibility may be the right one in another case without being sure of which one. Something isn't a disproof of inerrancy unless there's no possible way that what it says can be true according to the level of precision and standards of evaluation of the cultural and literary context. I have never encountered a supposed error in the Bible that I have been convinced is impossible to resolve. I may not have been convinced that a particular solution is correct in some cases, but there have always been possibilities that for all I know could be true.

That's all inerrantists need, provided there's a strong enough reason to believe in inerrancy, and I think there is. I don't see how it's possible to accept the Bible as divine revelation without its being true in everything it reports, even if what it reports has implications for areas that we now call history and science.

Henry

Jeremy,

I think you have good partial objections.

1) I did miss the parallel accounts language in my reading of the Chicago statement - it was not an intentional strawman. However, it now seems like the Chicago statement is internally conflicted. There is significant tension between the article I quote (Article XII) and Article XIII. To me is seems to say that the Bible is accurate in all matters of history and science, except where we can compare it against equally inspired and historical accounts, then we will pull out a "get out of jail free card."

2) First, I am not trying to individually answer all written accounts of the people trying to harmonize the gospels. That would take months. What I am arguing for is that the gospels are not attempting to be historically 100% accurate according to modern standards, something the Chicago Statement wants to import on the texts.

Furthermore, I can grant you the time of day issue, although it still seems a bit ad hoc to me. However, that does not address the difference of days. Without arguing for two Sabbaths that week, which I believe some have done, I am not aware of a way that one can harmonize John and Mark on this issue. Also, there are more than just these two issues. When did Jesus over turn the tables? How many times did he go to Jerusalem? Why does Mark get the geography of Palenstine wrong?

Jeremy Pierce

It's important not to confuse accuracy and precision. Accuracy is about whether it gets it right given some standard of precision. If you're rounding to the nearest 10, then saying it's 20 when it's 22 is accurate but not as precise as saying it's 22. If a gospel writer isn't intending to write a chronological account, then not having all the events in order is thus not inaccurate. It's just not precise when it comes to chronological ordering. That's no denial of inerrancy. I don't see how this example remotely overturns the Chicago Statement since it several times mentions this general category as not violating inerrancy. You're shooting down a straw man.

As for the second issue, you're just wrong. The gospel accounts easily agree on this issue, and evangelicals have put in a lot of work explaining how what to modern ears and eyes sounds like a conflict isn't really one if you understand the ancient methods of reporting. Particularly if something took place in the time period between (say) dawn and noon, putting it closer to one or the other would have been within the vagueness of language at the time. It would thus be an issue of precision and not accuracy, yet again. Furthermore, some of the best scholars on John have been arguing recently that his chronology is the same as that of the synoptics. If you are going to make this criticism, you're going to have to respond to people like Carson, Morris, Blomberg, and Kostenberger and not just make assertions that the people you're criticizing don't accept. That counts as question-begging.

Wonders for Oyarsa

I think part of the key here is to ask the right questions. There is no "error" if the text is being used for a purpose other than its intention, and failing in that purpose. This is the most presumptuous thing about the Chicago statement to me - it imposes a framework of questions on the text and insists that it answer them inerrantly. Granted there is some nuance in the statement, but not nearly enough - especially with regard to "science".

I wrote a while back on what I think a better approach to tensions in scripture.

Henry (Honzo) Imler

I believe the Chicago Statement does. However, I believe that the oldest transcripts that we have so far maintain the same order and the same time lines that our translations have.

What I don't see in the Chicago Statement, or other statements on scripture, is an acknowledgment of these and other problems.

These "errors" are deemed so important that they must provide a hypothesis of an undiscovered document (anyone reminded of Q theory? LOL) that is free from these "errors" so that the doctrine of inerrancy is maintained. Now, if the texts we have are so fundamentally corrupted from the original autographs, then how can we trust them at all? How do we know that the manuscripts we have do not bear more important errors, say, like the nature of Christ's death.

Rather than go down that road, which I think leads to great doubt, I think another approach makes more sense. Take the documents as they were intended back then. This type of literature was not meant to be historically accurate down to the smallest detail - things like order of events were not important. What was important was revealing the nature of the person through the stories. I think the stories did happen, but I am wary about attaching emphasizes that were not there originally.

Oh, and while I might like some of Ehrman's stuff on the time period, I think misquoting Jesus goes way overboard.

Edgar

Thanks for sharing this analysis. I'm afraid that Misquoting Jesus may be my next "must-read" ... just kidding...

I would agree with Hank that most people would say that only the original autographs are thought of as "inerrant". Ravi Zacharias makes the point that the more manuscripts we find, the better. I can't wait for a new gospel, or new letter from Luke, or Timothy...

I like your comments on ecumenism. We need to get our terminology straight so we don't divide over the little things.

henrythomasimler

Doesn't the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy refer only to the original autographs? How does that fit into your arguments?

Theology for the Masses

Deep Dish (Chicago) Inerrancy

Example 1: The healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law

Example 2: The Day and Time of Jesus’ Crucifixion

Conclusion

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