For the Bible Tells Me So | Biblical Inerrancy

I have been part of many Bible-believing churches that have proudly proclaimed to teach biblical truth. I’ve always felt this was an impressive statement for them to make, it proved that they took the Bible seriously, and when I heard what they had to teach, it also usually meant they weren’t afraid of delivering the difficult messages found in the Bible, things that were counter cultural, or things that might not be politically correct by “worldly” standards, but they were biblical truths, written plain for all to see, in a Bible that was without error.

 

I’ve heard this time and time again, and whilst it might sound good, holy, and well intentioned, it’s also basically saying, “We know the correct truth of the Bible, which is the inerrant word of God, and if you don’t agree with what we are saying, then you are against God, and will probably end up being smited, smote or smitten”. Maybe this is an extreme reading between the lines, and to be fair, it might not be exactly what these people think, but it’s a closed view which is hard to argue with, and it doesn’t really invite any discussion or conversation. 

 

So, what is biblical truth and what does it mean for the Bible to be inerrant?

 

This is a big question and it’s one which we will keep coming back to. It’s an idea which has been dedicated to whole books, and it’s an ongoing conversation which hasn’t yet been resolved, but here is my take on it, in a nutshell.

 

I think for most people, biblical inerrancy means that the Bible is without error or fault in what it teaches. I’m OK with this interpretation for the most part, although there are some points that need to be addressed. I’m happy to agree with this view of inerrancy, because I believe that the Bible does teach truth, but I don’t believe that the truth taught in the Bible is always absolute.

 

Let me put it a slightly different way.

 

We all know that the Bible is not one single book, it’s a collection of books which were written by many different authors over hundreds of years. These individual books were written by people who existed at different points in history, and who experienced the world in a certain way, and who were often speaking out of certain experiences, and into certain experiences. They are eye witness accounts of things that happened and were recorded according to their own perspectives, meaning that someone else could have witnessed the same events, but understood or remembered them differently. We also know that the Bible contains different types of writing. Some of it is stories which people told each other and were passed down from generation to generation, and were then eventually written down, some of it is historical account that was compiled from other records and sources, some of it is law and legislation, some of it is poetry, some of it is prophecy, some of it is personal reports, and some of it is correspondence to specific people. We know all these things, none of this information is particularly enlightening, but often when we come to the Bible, this knowledge ends up going out the window, we end up reading the Bible without thinking about, or knowing what it is we are actually reading, or more commonly, we ignore the different types of literature we find in the Bible, and instead view it as one single document, which has the sole purpose of imparting indisputable truth. We read a poem and instead of seeing what the writer might be saying about God through the subtext, we take it as a historical record, or we read a letter and instead of understanding what its writer was saying to its recipients in the situation and world they found themselves in, we take its contents as timeless divine legislation. We may find truth and meaning in the words that were written, but the truth we discern may have a slightly different meaning now, than from its original context.

 

This is all to say that I don’t think we should take the Bible at face value, because if we do, we not only misrepresent it, but we miss the bigger story which is being told.

 

Take this verse from Jeremiah 29:11

 

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares God, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

 

You might have seen this verse printed on a T-Shirt surrounded by a swarm of butterflies, or on a poster where a child is silhouetted against a sunset sky, sat under a tree, watching TikTok on his iPhone. I have had friends write it to me in letters and cards, and have been grateful for the sentiment in moments when I have needed hope. We can believe that these words are true for us, and they can be true for us. God does know the plans for our lives and wants us to have lives filled with hope. The words speak generally of God’s goodness and promises and we can draw from that, but they are also words which are specific in their meaning. They are words from a letter that was written to the Israelites who had been taken into exile, having consistently turned from God, over a period of hundreds of years. This letter is speaking to a long history and into a certain situation, so the meaning of these words is different. They are saying that despite centuries of disobedience and sin, God still loved his people and had great plans for them, and that they would come out of exile and be restored. You can believe that this verse is God’s way of saying you will be blessed with a private jet, or that you’ll get a better job with a higher salary, or that you’ll meet the person you’re going to marry, or that your life will just be easier and better in some way, and it can be that those things do happen for us, and that God does plan those things for us, but it doesn’t mean that those things will happen for you, because the Bible says so. In the first instance, these words are a specific promise, to specific people, at a specific moment in history, about a specific plan, and through those promises that are given, we simply get a glimpse of God’s goodness and plan to reconcile with humanity.

 

We are all guilty of taking the Bible out of context to fit our own purposes, usually we do it without intending to, because we’re flawed humans with limits to our understanding, and we are just trying our best to make sense of the world we inhabit. There isn’t anything wrong with this, it’s natural that we want to find meaning in our lives, and if we are Christians then it’s understandable that we want the Bible to figure in our lives in a meaningful way. However, if we consistently use the Bible this way, we miss a lot of what is being said.

 

So, there are people who read the Bible with this understanding of inerrancy in mind, that the words of the Bible can be true for us now, but that the truth is also relative to certain people at points throughout history. This means that the Bible is true in what it says, but that its truth isn’t always absolute. However, there are people who do believe that the Bible is absolute in its truth, and who see its inerrancy more literally. They believe that the Bible is completely without error, and that everything the Bible says about history, physics, biology, politics, psychology, and everything else, is undeniably true. For them, the Bible is the literal word of God, which was written through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and is therefore faultless. The people who view the Bible in this way are faced with a problem though, because this is not the case. There are discrepancies in the Bible which don’t match historical evidence, and there are also contradictions between various biblical accounts and records. There are also parts of the Bible which are poetry and legend, which just aren’t meant to be taken literally, and by treating them as fact, we miss the point of the text.

 

A great example of this is the creation account in Genesis. Many Christians take this text as a factual account of how the universe was created, but get tripped up or distracted by trying to justify its truth against scientific evidence. 

 

A few years ago, some Christians doorstepped a friend of mine with the intention of telling him that he needed the truth of the Bible in his life. He told them that he used to believe in God, but that he was now an atheist and believed that scientific facts negated the existence of God, facts such as the earth being billions of years old, and not six thousand years like the Bible said. His visitors said that they also believed this was true, so my friend asked them what they thought God was doing for the 4.5 billion years before he created Adam and Eve. The Christians explained that God was “getting ready” and my friend then made an admittedly sexist joke about the time it takes women to get ready, and the time it takes God to get ready. My friend then asked if they believed in dinosaurs, and to his surprise they said that they did, but they amazed him further by stating that God had created dinosaurs and used them to flattened the ground with their weight, so the earth would habitable for humans.

 

There are many problems with this interaction. Both sides took the Genesis account to be literally true, but in trying to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, the Christians ended up making up the ridiculous idea of God creating dinosaurs to be giant rolling pins. This is an extreme view but many Christians do believe that the world was created in seven literal days. They treat the creation account in Genesis as a factual description of how the earth was created, even though in the opening poem, and it is clearly a poem, God doesn’t create ‘days’ until day four of creation. I have a degree in English and Creative Writing so I know all poetry, I imagine that you will be quite impressed by this, and if you’re not, you should be!

 

We can read this poem as an understanding of how the universe was made, and we can believe that God made the world, and the text helps us understand that mystery in a poetic manner, but we shouldn’t be treating this narrative as factual, inerrant truth.

 

Most scholars believe that Genesis was written in 6 or 5 BCE. Before then it’s texts would have been part of oral tradition that was passed down over hundreds of years. The creation account would have been a story that people told each other, to help them make sense of the creation of the world. If you had tried to correct the scribe who wrote this story down, with a scientific understanding of how the universe was created, they wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about. They would have absolutely no frame of reference. You would have had to explain the history of astrophysics to them, what a telescope was, who Professor Brian Cox is, who the 90s pop group D:Ream were, what a pop group was, what a synthesizer was, and what excellent 90s dance music sounded like. The only thing they would understand is that Professor Brian Cox was a man who studied the stars, and he often got confused with an actor with the same name.

 

In the 1600s, when Galileo published his observations that the earth moved around the sun, the church imprisoned him and branded him a heretic. People living 400 years ago couldn’t even begin to believe that as a scientific possibility, and wrote it off as heretical madness, because it was at odds with the Bible. We might shake our heads at their ignorance now but actually, most people today don’t really understand the scientific explanation of how the universe was created. We accept the idea of a “Big Bang” event but most of us don’t know what that means, or how scientists account for it. Scientists at CERN say that they have proved the Big Bang Theory by using a Large Hadron Collider, which is a big scientific tunnel which is magic in some way. They say they have created a series of mini big bangs by smashing together particles, but I don’t think many people know what that means either. I can’t tell you the size or volume of a mini big bang, or why the small and medium sized Hadron Colliders were unable to prove the Big Bang. Even scientists don’t really know how the universe works or how exactly it sparked into being. They can say they are confident of what happened but so much of what they propose about the universe is theoretical. The universe is barely comprehensible to us, let alone to some flat earther in 5 BCE.

 

Even if you were to believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, you would reasonably expect God to dumb down some of the technicalities when speaking to stupid humans, because how could any human mind comprehend knowledge as God would understand it? It stands to reason that God would explain something extremely complicated in a way a simple human might understand it, just as any father does when explaining things to his children. What they learn from the father isn’t wrong or untruthful, but it is what the children need to hear in order to understand.

 

It’s my belief that the texts in the Bible were written by people from their own understanding of how things were. They were explanations of how they saw things, written in terms which they understood and that they could get their heads around. They were written by and for people at that time, in a society with its own experience, understanding and capacity for knowledge. The things that they wrote weren’t wrong, because it was what they understood as truth, but just because it was true for them then, doesn’t make it true for us now. I believe that if we really want to understand the Bible, then we need to accept that it is complex and can’t be read at face value. We interpret it through the lens of our own understanding, and whilst we can be convicted about our interpretations, we may be wrong. If a literal, seven-day creation is how you make sense of that particular mystery, and it works for you, then great, knock yourself out with it. But just because it is your truth, doesn’t make it an absolute truth, and it doesn’t mean that every other interpretation or understanding is wrong or heretical.

 

If we bear this in mind, then hopefully you will see as we continue, things aren’t as clear cut as they seem. I will warn you though, if you aren’t open to this understanding of the Bible, then you might not like the rest of this book.

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops.