Through a Glass Darkly

There has been some good conversation on Jesus Creed recently about scripture. Here is a post I contributed, including some additional material I put into the comments.

Our recent conversation about inerrancy generated lots of discussion. Although the conversation about this question often becomes heated and difficult, there is one positive note: everyone on this blog is concerned about truth, the authority of the Word of God, the welfare of the Church, and the quality of the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a perspective that seems helpful to me: “dynamic infallibilism.” I came across this term in a wonderful essay by Bruce McCormack in a volume titled “Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics” – a volume I highly recommend, if nothing else for the excellent and well-balanced introduction by the editors.

In order to introduce my thoughts, let me start with a question: is William Shakespeare’s play Henry V inerrant? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes the famous “Crispin’s Day” speech, one of my favorite blood-stirring dramatic passages (played in the clip above by Kenneth Branaugh):

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother

It also includes glorious nuggets such as these: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more / Or close the wall up with our English dead!” and “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”

The play is one of Shakespeare’s “Histories,” a number of which dramatize the life of “Prince Hal.” Henry V, of course, was a historical person, who really did defeat the French at Agincourt on Crispin’s Day in 1415. But did the real Henry V actually give the famous Shakespearian speeches? No — at least not in the words attributed to him by Shakespeare. And there are a number of historical problems with the plot as a whole.

Is Shakespeare’s play, then, “in error?” At least concerning the great speeches, I think we would agree that Shakespeare properly employed genre conventions. The play Henry V is designed as an entertaining drama rooted in historical events, not as a detailed “scientific” account of what happened. One could suggest, therefore, that Shakespeare’s play is not “errant,” despite its questionable facticity and embellishments at many points.

Many conservative evangelicals make the same sort of move with Biblical texts such as the histories in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, the overlapping histories of Kings and Chronicles cannot be “harmonized” in detail, but this is not necessarily a problem because they reflect a particular type or genre of history that is properly told from a particular perspective for religious and polemical purposes.

This sort of genre criticism can be very helpful. At some point, however, genre criticism seems like a wax nose. As the Shakespeare illustration suggests, almost any text can be called “inerrant” if we allow that the author’s genre permits imprecision or literary license. The only exceptions might be the genres of scientific and technical academic literature and factual news reporting, which are among the very few literary genres in which no imprecision or license are supposed to be tolerated.

Certainly, we cannot claim that any part of scripture is a type of literature akin to scientific and technical academic literature or simple news reporting. No capable inerrantist scholar would make any such claim. But if the flexibility of genre conventions means that Shakespeare’s plays could be “inerrant” in the same sense as scripture, does the concept of “inerrancy” retain any useful content?

This comparison suggests to me that we need a “higher” view of scripture than inerrancy as typically formulated. We need to be clear that scripture is like no other text in all of literature, because scripture is the only literary text through which God reveals Himself to us in a way that is finally authoritative for the Church. God does not speak to us through Shakespearian plays, at least not in the sense that He speaks through scripture.

How, then, is scripture different? The difference, I think, comes through the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit speaking in and through the text of scripture as the Spirit’s instrument for the instruction of the Church. Without the Spirit, the Bible is only a human book. It may contain “inspiring” bits akin to Shakespeare’s Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V, and it may provide remarkable historical, religious and moral insights, but could not be considered truly theopneustos, breathed-out by God. As Karl Barth put it:

We can even hear Holy Scripture and simply hear words, human words, which we either understand or do not understand but along with which there is for us no corresponding event. But if so, then neither in proclamation nor Holy Scripture has it been the Word of God that we have heard. (Church Dogmatics 5.3).

Scripture does not “err” because it is uniquely used by the Holy Spirit to reveal to us who God is, what God is done, and how we are to live in response to God’s glory and grace. Scripture unfailingly – infallibly – directs us to faith in Jesus Christ and to living conformity with the image of Christ. However, this is a dynamic event that occurs only as we listen prayerfully to what the Spirit is saying in and through scripture. It is a theological mistake, I believe, to try to locate the “inerrancy” or “infallibility” of scripture in the organic quality of the words on the page. Rather, scripture is unerring and unfailing in its application to the believer and to the Church through the instrumentality of the Spirit.

This does not mean – as some interpreters (or perhaps mis-interpreters) of Barth suggest – that the organic nature of scripture is irrelevant. No – we carefully study the organic qualities of scripture, including its genres, cultural settings, languages, historical construction, and so on, because all of this is essential and preparatory to sitting under the teaching and revelation of scripture. God has chosen to communicate in the creaturely medium of scripture, and therefore God has limited His freedom in this regard and has tied Himself to the organic qualities of this particular set of texts. If we think we hear the Spirit saying something that is dramatically different than an organic reading of the text would suggest, we are most likely not listening to what God is saying.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is a mistake to tie the text’s infallible function as the rule of faith and practice completely to its organic qualities. This is the mistake – in my judgment – made by B.B. Warfield in his notion of “concursus,” a mistake grafted into the conservative evangelical view of organic inerrancy. Scripture is not “inerrant” like a Shakespearian history could be “inerrant,” merely as a function of its genre conventions. Rather, scripture is unerring, never failing, and always true, as and because it is the Spirit’s instrument and as and because we hear and obey the Spirit speaking through it.

What does this concept of “dynamic infallibility” mean for the hotly disputed historical-critical questions that arise in most discussions of the doctrine of inspiration? It does not “solve” the problem of scripture’s historical content. The organic content matters. But it does mean that we should not expect the organic content to take on a super-human quality in its own right. If we investigate the Biblical texts as human documents and find them to be thoroughly human, that is not a problem – it is expected, and even helpful. We are in trouble, however, when the Bible remains for us only human, when we do not allow the Spirit to wield it as an instrument that cleanses, clarifies, challenges and comforts. The Holy Spirit is our infallible tutor, and the instrument of the Spirit’s teaching is the Holy Scriptures, such that the Bible’s character as unique, unfailing and true derives from the ongoing action of the Spirit.

There’s an important nuance here for me: the Bible is not infallible in an ontological sense as it sits on the shelf, as though we could open it to any random page and select from it some scattered propositions, all of which would correspond to everyday empirical observations in any and all fields of human rational inquiry. That is the view of scholasticism.

Rather, the Bible is infallible as it is employed by the Spirit in the economy of God’s salvation to teach us. “Word” and “Spirit” cannot be separated in God’s action of “revelation,” and the proper “location” of scripture is Church proclamation. This nuance on the one hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in “scientific” exegesis — which rules any Divine agency in connection with the text out of court — and on the other hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in very conservative evangelical approaches ala the Chicago Statement.  (For a great example of the rationalism of “scientific” exegesis, check out this article in the current edition of Biblical Archeology Review, in which any belief in divine agency with respect to the Biblical text is branded as fundamentally irrational.)

I should note that the view I’m trying to explore here isn’t that scripture only becomes God-breathed as it is read. It’s more subtle than that, and has to do with what McCormack calls the “ontology” of scripture. Probably better to let McCormack speak for himself here (pp. 62-64 of the essay):

For Warfield . . . once the last of the writings found in the New Testament canon was finished . . . revelation was complete. As complete, it was — from that point on — the secure ‘possession’ of men. . . . For Barth, by contrast, what completes the circle of revelation is the creation of the human subject who hears and receives the word of God in faith and obedience, which means that the work of the Spirit in revelation is not complete once the Scriptures have been written. To use the traditional language, illumination is just as decisive a moment in the process of revelation as inspiration.

McCormack further explains how Barth’s prioritizing of Christology facilitates an ontology of scripture that incorporates both its human and divine elements:

As the Word of God in the sign of this prophetic-apostolic word of man, Holy Scripture is like the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ. It is nether divine only nor human only. Nor is it a mixture of the two nor a tertium quid between them. But in its own way and degree, it is very God and very man, that is, a witness of revelation which itself belongs to revelation. Now, to be sure, the “union” of the divine and the human in Scripture (of God’s Word and human word) does not result in the divinization of the human element any more than it does in the case of Christ’s humanity.

McCormack notes — and I agree — that there is not a huge gulf between the view he is proposing and the conservative evangelical view. However, he goes on to distinguish the “essentialism” inherent in Warfield’s view from the “actualism” underlying Barth’s, and suggests that Barth’s insight about prioritizing Christology in the doctrine of revelation was correct — and that seems right to me as well.

Folks who lean more towards Warfield on this point usually express a concern about the Bible as a fixed standard of reference. It is a fair concern and indeed was one of the basic theological issues implicated in the Reformation. Without the Church’s Magesterium, the Reformation emphasized the primacy of scripture (sola scriptura). All of us who are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, it seems to me, need to have some similar kind of understanding.

But, the Magesterial Reformers also were clear about the need for “illumination” by the Spirit in order to fully understand what the text is teaching. So, at least for the Magesterial Reformers, “sola scriptura” was never divorced from the ongoing action of the Spirit in illuminating the reader as to the text’s meaning. For them, scripture was fixed, but the human understanding of the text was not fixed, because understanding came not through human reason but through the illumination of the Spirit.

I think it’s difficult for us to put ourselves back into the Magesterial Reformer’s shoes to imagine why they had to make these moves. Their break from the Roman Church was monumental — far more traumatic than, say, some theologian today losing a job at a fundamentalist school because his doctrine of scripture smells fishy to them. The religious power, wealth and authority of the Roman Church from the time of Augustine to the time of the Reformers was truly universal in the West (though of course the Papacy had endured various crises mostly relating to relations with secular rulers). They had to explain why the institution was heir to the line of Bishops going back to Peter, that was extolled by all the great Patristic minds including Augustine, that produced the ecumenical councils, was no longer authoritative.

Their views, which we protestants today take for granted, were shockingly radical: the Bible, read by ordinary people aided by the Holy Spirit, was the final word. But if that was so, how could they explain centuries of the Roman Church getting it wrong and reading the Bible incorrectly? They had to argue that in more recent times, the Papacy and the Church had become corrupt, to the extent that the Spirit was now leading the invisible Church — a new concept — in a radically different direction. They could not neatly separate Word and Spirit because otherwise they’d be left to contend with the Roman Church’s magesterial interpretation of the Word.

By the 19th Century, Warfield and others like him were dealing with a different problem: the discoveries of science and the rise of higher criticism in protestantism. One could argue, in fact, that Warfield’s view reflects a later scholasticism that downplayed (but even then, didn’t eliminate) the Magesterial Reformer’s emphasis on the Spirit.

In this regard, we have to bring in the notion of the “perpiscuity” of scripture. For scripture to function as a final authority without a Church Magesterium, scripture must be clear or “perpiscuous.” The Magesterial Reformers held that scripture was sufficiently clear that anyone could learn by reading it the basics of salvation. This did not mean, however, that all parts of scripture were equally clear or easy to understand — indeed, many parts of scripture remained opaque without lots of study and the Spirit’s illumination.

The later scholastic Reformed divines, and the 19th Century Princetonians, including Warfield, agreed with this notion of perpiscuity, but arguably they expanded it somewhat by tying it to the prevalent “common sense realist” epistemology of their day. They assumed that the meaning of scripture would be evident to anyone with common sense once the necessary background information was understood. This assumption also carried with it a certain view of language and authorship that presumed essentially a one-to-one correpsondence between the “meaning” of a text and the “author’s” “intentions.” And this in turn reflected an assumption about the “authorship” of the various Biblical texts — that for the most part we can identify an individual human “author” of the various parts of the Bible (e.g., Moses as author of the Pentatuech). In effect, they tried to combat the higher critics on their own turf, using the tools of common sense realism.

It’s debateable whether the Princetonian Divines’ views were fully consistent with the Magesterial Reformers. From my reading of Luther, at least, I don’t think so. Luther was, in my view, quite pre-modern in his understanding of divine action and language. Calvin perhaps was more essentialist, but when you start reading the Institutes for the first time (at least for me) Calvin’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit is substantial.

None of this is to suggest that Barth’s “actualism” simply recovers the ground of the Magesterial Reformers. Barth is taking a different tack than Warfield in response to 19th and 20th century liberal protestantism, and is also working from a different, European intellectual milieu. As I’ve begun reading Barth, however, I’ve been struck by his continual references to Luther and by the extent to which Luther and Barth’s thought are consonant.

All of this backround is to say that, yes, the stability of revelation is an important concern. Yet, at the same time, the ongoing work of the Spirit in relation to scripture has always been an important Reformational theme. (Actually it’s always been an important theme in Catholic and Eastern theology as well….)

So why would the nuanced view of Barth that McCormack offers and that I’m exploring here matter? I think it matters if you are trying to deal with the scholarship about the Bible’s human construction and sources with integrity.

Take as just one example the debates about the “days” of creation. If you are a Warfieldian and not a YEC, eventually you’ll have to argue that “the author” of Genesis 1 “intended to communicate” a non-literal message about the “days.” That’s a tough row to hoe, not the least because we have no certain idea about the origins and authorship even of the canonical form of the text (though there are good, but debated, reasons to believe it was redacted by a “Priestly” community later in Israel’s history). (If you want to assert that Moses is basically the sole author of the Pentateuch, then you really have to reject essentially all contemporary scholarship about those texts and retreat into an intellectual bunker, which in my mind is not an option).

If you’re more of a Barthian, you’ll probably be more comfortable acknowledging that there is no single identifiable “author” of the Gen. 1 narrative, and that the many people and communities responsible for the construction and transmission of the story — in its earlier oral forms and then eventually, probably much later, in its final redacted canonical form — may have had very different ideas about the meaning of the “days.” We understand this text as “non-literal” not necessarily because we know for sure what some “original author” intended, but because the Spirit has been working in the Church to supply more information about the text, its relation to other ANE creation stories, and about the natural world, and is leading the Church to develop an understanding of what God reveals about Himself through this text.

You could look at this under the rubric of “illumination,” but it seems to me this requires the kinds of untenable assumptions about authorship that I mentioned above. But either way, the organic text remains central and the Spirit’s action is essential. McCormack’s approach seems to me much more honest, and more true, than Warfield’s.