The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is just a little older than my Christian faith. It was relatively new when I first read the Bible in college and when I first asked Jesus to be the Lord and Savior of my life. I have wrestled with the idea of inerrancy from the beginning of my Christian life until now.
It isn’t that I don’t think the Bible is the “word of God”. It isn’t that I don’t have a “high” view of the reliability, integrity, and divine nature of the Bible. It isn’t that I don’t think the Bible was inspired by God and should be relied on as His word to us to follow.
I believe all these things, but I have issues with statements on inerrancy that seem to push what the Bible says about itself beyond what it says.
Finally, I have found some similar thinking in two of the great Christian thinkers of our time: Mike Licona and William Lane Craig. In his blog, Risen Jesus, Licona introduces a paper to the world that he wrote and presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological society.
In the paper, Licona cites Craig in support of a new proposal on inerrancy. First, though, he explains some of what is problematic with the Chicago Statement. I am not going to restate the points he makes here. You can read the paper, CSBI Needs a Facelift, yourself, but I will summarize it for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read the original (though it isn’t long).
Licona starts with the two main verses that provide the inspiration (pun intended) for the doctrine of inerrancy: 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21. At the center of this are the words “God-inspired” or “God-breathed” which are English translations of the Greek word, “theopneustos“.
Licona traces the history of the use of the word, theopneustos, prior to the 3rd Century. The word was not often used, and it was used in very diverse contexts. Licona quotes a commentary on 2 Timothy, stating, “Theopneustos does not have enough precision to go beyond the basic idea that the Scriptures came from God.” and he concludes:
Therefore, 2 Timothy 3:16 does not contribute as much to our discussion as we may have first thought. So we should be cautious not to read more into it than Paul may have intended.
The 2 Peter 1:20-21 text speaks of prophets who were “carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Licona observes that the Greek word translated “carried along”, pherō, is also used by Philo “to describe how prophets received revelation from God, during which time they had ‘no power of apprehension’ while God made ‘full use of their organs of speech.’ Josephus likewise used this word to say that “God’s Spirit put the words in the mouths of the prophets” (quoting Licona, who paraphrased Josephus).
The 2 Timothy passage and the 2 Peter passage express different ideas and give rise to different pictures of how God speaks to/through people who authorized the writings of the Bible. some writings purport to be prophetic and some do not expressly adopt that attitude. The Chicago Statement assumes that both passages mean the same thing, but most biblical scholars disagree with that conclusion.
Licona goes on to summarize some phenomena in the text of the Bible that suggest a “human element in Scripture”. Licona concludes from this, “Although [the human element] does not challenge the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, it does challenge the concept of inspiration imagined by [the Chicago Statement].”
These issues with the ambiguous meaning of the Greek words and the very different images of God working to convey His “Word” through people (God-breathed and carried along by the Spirit), can be reconciled with a “new” paradigm, says Licona. This paradigm was suggested by Craig in 1999.
Licona calls it the “confluence of Scripture” – the “dual authorship” of God and man. Craig emphasizes the sovereignty of God in support of this idea by grounding it in God what Craig would call “God’s middle knowledge”. Licona summarizes it this way:
God, knowing all circumstances that could possibly occur, generated those circumstances whereby the biblical authors would write what they did.
Thus, this view is guided by faith that God guided the circumstances in which the biblical literature was divinely inspired, and God approved the final product. The emphasis of this view is in the message, more than the actual words, form of the words, etc. Craig says,
Perhaps some features of Paul’s letters are a matter of indifference to God: maybe it would not have mattered to God whether Paul greeted Phlegon or not; perhaps God would have been just as pleased had Paul worded some things differently; perhaps the Scripture need not have been just as it is to accomplish God’s purposes. We cannot know.
Systematic Philosophical Theology, Ch. 1, by williams lane craig
Licona goes on to argue that this view on inerrancy accounts better for what the Bible says about itself and for what we see of the human element in the Bible. Licona says,
[I]f the providence of God can guarantee the authority and message of Scripture throughout the preservation of its texts despite the copies having errors, the same could be true throughout the composition of those texts despite the autographs having errors.
[emphasis in the original]
I have often quoted NT Wright, who says, “I believe we have the Bible God wanted us to have.” The ideas are similar: we can trust the God’s sovereignty and ability to convey, through people and texts copied by people, the message He wanted us to have.
Licona highlights a problem I have considered: that New Testament quotations of Old Testament texts often do not follow word for word from those texts. Texts in Greek quote texts translated from Hebrew to Greek. In the case of some chapters in Daniel, those texts are quoted in Hebrew or Greek that were originally written in Aramaic.
If we are being thoughtful, we might wonder what words are the inerrant words? The words spoken in Hebrew? Aramaic? Greek? What about the Latin translations? Or the Coptic or the Syriac translations? What about translations in English, or Swahili, or a rare language in the Amazonian rain forest?
This problem goes away if our view of inerrancy focuses on the message, rather than the exact words, order of the words, etc. This view eliminates the gymnastics we feel we have to employ, sometimes, to harmonize texts that are difficult to reconcile. The message is clear and consistent, though the particular factual details or exact words used in those texts can differ.
I think this view on inerrancy makes more sense of what the Bible actually says and the implications we read in the text. I have wrestled many times in writing on inerrancy to get at the same types of ideas that Licona (and Craig) address. I have not attempted to espouse an alternative view, but the views roughed out in the paper Licona presented to the Evangelical Theological Society seems like a good path forward.
Navigating by Faith 