Why Isn’t the Bible Inerrant?

Strict inerrantists are always a fun bunch for someone like me. When I was first introduced to the concept of inerrancy, it was a mild, nuanced, well reasoned version. Even at that, my views on inerrancy and the development of scripture have changed a lot over the years. There are still explanations of inerrancy that I could sign, but I don’t personally use the term “inerrancy” to describe my beliefs. “Inerrancy” has such a variety of applied meanings in casual communication that I just don’t find it a useful term most of the time. When someone else applies a definition to the term, I can decide if that definition describes something close to any part of how I interact with Scripture and proceed accordingly.

That makes answering the question “Why isn’t the Bible inerrant?” a little tricky on the general level. The Bible is inerrant, by some definitions of inerrancy. The reality of the history of the scriptures do not live up to the expectations of others that use the term “inerrant,” though. So to get a precise explanation why the Bible isn’t the kind of inerrant that a particular person believes in, I first need to get a fix on what that person means by “inerrant.”

There is a way to generalize and sidestep that problem, though. This is a little out of character for me. Usually, when I write a blog post, I’m just getting my own thoughts out of my head. In simplest possible terms, usually I’m my own target audience. But I’m already done talking to me. From here on, I’m talking to people who have recognized a disconnect between how they understand inerrancy and how they understand and apply scripture, and because of their social or professional circle or because of their past, using a definition of inerrancy more in line with what they have discovered would be impractical for some reason.

One example of understanding the word “inerrancy” that’s common is “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” This logic is used by flat-Earth and young-Earth believers as well as faith healers and health-and-wealth preachers. I’ve always found that particular slogan naive and impractical to the point of being dangerous. When a health-and-wealth preacher challenges me with John 16:23 saying that they are taking that verse more literally than I am, they win. I’m not going to try to redeem the trophy for the one that applies that verse the most literally. If they then say that this means they are holding closer to the idea of inerrancy, I’ll agree: they can have the title of “Better Inerrantist than Shaun.” But I’m holding onto the title of “Holds Closer to the Whole Truth.”

But why isn’t the Bible that particular kind of inerrant? In this example, I’m essentially asking why the Bible isn’t a spell book used to manifest our greatest desires, but the question can be asked for any of dozens of ways to understand “inerrancy” that a particular person may be committed to. They’ll need to substitute in parts of what they believe to the conversation, but trying to trace out every possible thread would take weeks and most of it would be copy and paste followed by a search and replace. The person that needs that can do that themselves for the beliefs they’re working with.

The logic behind thinking that the Bible does this is straightforward. In the particular case I’m exploring here, a possible way to come to this conclusion is to start with the idea that God wants us to be happy, and God can do anything for us. Therefore, God is our personal genie. It follows that God identifies who to grant wishes for by those that call on his son’s name correctly. That leads into a whole layer of theology about how to pronounce the various divine names correctly, with different sects condemning each other on nothing more than how they vocalize various words. One group says that the other has poor and sick people among them because they use the wrong pronunciation of a particular divine name, and the other group says the first has poor and sick people for the same reason. The serious student examines both claims and finds that the pronunciation of most of the divine names is a subject worthy of debate, and in fact both teams have poor and sick people among them. That means they can’t literally call on the name of Christ with a significant level of confidence, and no group has discovered the pronunciation of the divine names that will force God to act. For brevity, we’ll skip over the “crisis of faith” that so many seem to think is necessary at this point. (Mostly because I don’t get that. At any rate, we don’t have three years for them to deconstruct. We can skip ahead to the part where this person has returned to the faith.) Now they are trying to understand how come the scriptures aren’t infallibe in the way they expected them to be. A lot of the basic assumptions are still held to be true: God wants us to be happy, and he can do anything for us. If the basic premises that lead to seeing the Bible as an inerrant spell book are right, and the verses say the things that were taken to mean, how can the conclusion be so far off base?

The answer is simple: being happy in the way that God wants us to be happy doesn’t mean what the person thought it meant, and God being able to do anything he wants doesn’t mean what they thought it meant. Without getting too far into the particulars, there are a lot of ways to be happy that aren’t just having every wish granted. My children are happy children, but that doesn’t mean they get everything they ask for. The subject of omnipotence is similarly a deep subject that theologians and philosophers discuss, but they’ll mostly agree that it doesn’t mean that everything God wants God gets without effort.

Similar logic can be applied to other ways to understand inerrancy. If someone understands inerrancy to mean that the Bible is a collection of absolutely correct history and theology because they see it as God wanting us to know what we need to know in order to be saved, learning that the text is of the same type with the same kind of inaccuracies as other texts from the same period could be very confusing, until they realize that it’s not a collection of theological and historical facts that save us. If they see inerrancy as meaning that the text is a collection of instructions that tell us how to get saved then learning there’s a fair bit of ambiguity in the instruction list could be very confusing, until they realize that we aren’t saved by doing the right thing. And so on and so on for all the other ways to understand inerrancy. Starting from a place where they expect God to be a particular thing and then expect the text of scripture to reveal exactly that thing is what leads to this kind of confusion. 

It’s also why there are some kinds of inerrancy that I can get behind. The Scriptures are the culmination of God revealing himself to people through the course of their lifetime, delivering a message which can be heard through their writings for generations. So long as the message is delivered honestly, it is God revealing himself to us through people. If the message is delivered honestly, it can’t contain error, because it’s what God revealed of himself to that person. That doesn’t mean it’s factually correct, because God isn’t exactly a fact. That doesn’t mean it’s historically correct, because God isn’t exactly history. That doesn’t mean it’s a list of commands, because God isn’t exactly  a thing to do. It isn’t a spell book to get us whatever we want, because God isn’t a genie granting wishes.

God is love. In so far as it is a collection of facts, it’s facts about how to love each other and to avoid not loving each other. In so far as it’s history, it’s a list of examples of how people have loved each other and failed to love each other. In so far as it’s a list of things to do, it’s things that have helped or hurt the ability to love each other. In so far as it’s access to granting wishes, it tells us to be the ones who look to the needs and wants of those around us to demonstrate our love. I don’t have any problem calling that “inerrant.” In fact, that feels like the most natural word for it. While it may not be the first idea that comes to some people’s mind when they hear the word “inerrant,” for me at least I have difficulty imagining any other single word to capture the thought I’ve laid out than “inerrant.”

Of course, there will always be people who see God as something other than what I’ve laid out here, and their concept of the inerrant scriptures will be at odds with this reality. That’s a problem with their definitions, though. What they should do when they see that there’s a conflict is adjust their expectations of God and his scripture to more closely align with reality.