Every Sunday evening at 7 PM a group of us from St. James meet at the Vintage Coffee Bistro in Lambertville, MI. If you live in the area feel free to stop by and join us, the Bistro is located in the Kroger Plaza at Sterns and Secor. We call it Coffee Talk and it is a discussion on what God is doing in our lives. We discuss a variety of topics as they come up and there is no agenda, one thing just leads to another. The conversations are very interesting and enlightening. So in Coffee Talk Redux I will use this as an opportunity to share with you some further reflection on a particular topic that came up the previous night.
Well last night we really covered a lot of topics and one in particular that stands out is the belief in inerrancy. Inerrancy is the word that describes the concept in theology that the Bible is free from any errors, not just in areas concerning faith and morals but also in terms of God’s plan and teaching regarding our salvation. Inerrancy is a natural result of the Bible also being the inspired work of God, wherein as stated in 2 Timothy 3:16 we are told that, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Inspiration by God as the author of the Bible is what makes the Bible so unique. In the Bible God has given us something tangible, that is His revelation, His written Word as a Divine Revelation that perfects His natural revelation expressed in the created world for as said by Paul in Romans 1:20, “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and diety, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Now through the Bible, He has made known to everyone His plan for man’s salvation through His Son Jesus Christ. Paul tells us this in Ephesians 1:9 when he says, “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to the purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
Although a work of the Holy Trinity, through the principle of appropriation the Bible is attributed to the Holy Spirit. In trying to capture the essence of inspiration Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissumus Deus says that, “the Holy Spirit employed men as his instruments … by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to write – He so assisted them when writing – that the things which He ordered, and those only, they, first, rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth.” The Bible is therefore a product of both man and God. God uses man as His instrument and man therefore makes a book that he could not make by himself. The Bible is therefore a product of both God and man and yet is the word of God. Although man is God’s instrument man still retains his free will and his intellect is moved by God’s grace to put in words whatever God wants taught. Man’s speculative judgment comprehends those truths that God wants to convey and then man’s practical judgment determines the best way to express these truths recognizing the particular culture and traditions that the sacred author finds himself living in at the time.
However, there are found within the Bible many factual errors, contradictions, and conflicts which raise questions about the inerrancy of the Bible. For example, in the first chapter of Genesis the animals are created by God before man, however in the second chapter the animals are created after man is created. Did the author that placed these two accounts within Genesis consider this to be important? Or was the truth being taught simply that God is the creator? Modern science and historical criticism only add further questions about what is meant by inerrancy. Science today seems to always raise questions about the truth and authority of the Bible. The Bible provides a description of a geocentric universe which was then questioned by Galileo who proposed a heliocentric theory that has now expanded to our current understanding of a universe filled with galaxies much like our own. Clearly the Biblical authors just wrote about what they understood of the world in their own day and their intention was really about God’s Divine Revelation. However, man continues to try and reconcile the Bible with his science and historical findings. Clearly one approach is to simply reject science and history and hold to the literal meaning of the Bible. However this approach is simply naive and ignores a tremendous body of physical and historical evidence that has come to light through man’s ability to reason which we must not forget is in fact a gift from God that just allows man to better understand the mysteries of God’s creation. One could also try to force the Bible to say through interpretation whatever science is saying, this is known as concordism and raises more problems than it attempts to solve. However, after the frustration of all of these activities one must simply realize that the biblical authors were not writing a science book or a book of history. God did not have enough time to tell them all the secrets and mysteries of His universe and His creation and besides no one would have understood it anyways. This is not what God’s inspiration of the Bible was about, it was not about science or history, He left that to others. But He did want to get the message out on His plan for man’s salvation and His plan unfolds within the Bible as salvation history. Hence the inerrancy that is in the Bible is when it is viewed in total as God intended it to be for the sake of man’s salvation. Pope Paul VI in his Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation says that “since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writing for the sake of salvation.” Clearly these words of Pope Paul VI tell us that God inspired the Bible “for the sake of [our] salvation” and that inerrancy is limited to what is taught within the Bible in that regard. This interpretation of inerrancy is easy to understand and is more defensible than simply saying that the Bible is free from error in every field of science, history, or other human endeavors. This focus on our salvation is what Paul is telling us in Romans 15:4, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”
© Ronald L. Fournier – 2008
