Doubt, Deconstruction, & Jesus (Part 2): WHEN THE BIBLE BREAKS
So what triggers most deconstructing that happens today? Over the next two sections, we'll cover some of these topics...
Part 2: BIBLE REASONS
Bible Teaching - violence, slavery, sexism, anti-science, anti-gay, miracles
Bible Difficulties - mistakes, contradictions, transmission trustworthiness (manuscript differences)
Part 3: CHURCH REASONS
Church Policies & Positions - Bibliolatry, Christian Nationalism, Just War Theory, and Anti-Gay Marriage
Church Hurt - Personal experiences of disappointment and pain, including the moral failure and hypocrisy of church leaders and other Christians
PART 2: WHEN THE BIBLE BREAKS
(Some Reasons People Deconstruct Today)
Deconstruction - critically examining, questioning, and possibly dismantling one's own accepted religious beliefs - is growing increasingly common today. And yet, critical self-examination and faith-examination has been a part of following Jesus since the beginning. In fact, the biblical writers encourage it.
In the first century, there were already different Christian sects often originating out of specific charismatic prophets who claimed to have special revelation. So the early Church leaders encouraged critical examination - both to recognize and avoid false teaching and also to recognize if readers had mistakenly already embraced false teaching.
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.~ The apostle John (1 John 4:1)
Test everything.~ The apostle Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:21)
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.~ Luke the historian (Acts 17:11)
That last verse says a lot. The Bereans were commended for NOT blindly trusting the apostle Paul. Let's be Bereans.
The Bereans tested the apostle Paul's teaching by examining the Scriptures. But here's the thing - one of the most common reasons today's deconstructionists give for giving up on Christianity is because of doing what the Bereans did... reading the Bible.
Yes, many believers end up dismantling their own faith against their own desires, because of the Bible. When they read their Bibles, their own conscience - a conscience supposedly implanted by God, informed by Jesus, and nurtured by the Holy Spirit - cannot align with what they read there.
So let's look at what many deconstructing ex-Christians found between the pages of the Bible that was so discouraging to their faith. We'll look at three areas of influence toward deconstruction connected to the Bible:
Bible Content (What the Bible says)
Bible Transmission and Translation (How the Bible is preserved)
Bible Difficulties (Textual problems, apparent contradictions, etc)
God-ordained violence, sexism, and slavery
Starting in the Old Testament, the first thing that more than bogs down Bible readers is the God-ordained violence. Nothing gives believers a faith-ectomy faster than reading the Bible without Jesus at the centre of it all.
Of course, this raises the appropriate question: If Jesus is who God really is, what are we to make of all the God-approved, God-ordained, God-done violence in the Bible? This question is so important I have dedicated an entire YouTube video to presenting five different ways Christians approach this topic. See it here:
By way of brief summary, here are two slides from that video:
#1. What are some examples of biblical violence that are most objectionable?
#2. What are the ways theologians respond?
Again, do watch the video for a full development of these five options. For now, let me elaborate on one idea:
The Principle of Accommodation.
First, the Principle of Accommodation applies with the way God communicates, accommodating our current beliefs while introducing us to new ways of thinking. For instance, Jesus says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world (Mark 4:31), which people believed at that time and place, but it is not.
John Calvin famously said that God has to use baby-talk in order to reach us with his truth.
But the Principle of Accommodation goes beyond this. We notice a pattern throughout the Bible - God accommodates his way of working in this world to our human patterns, preferences, and perceptions. God makes concessions. God adapts. These ways of God working in the world are not his ideal; they are his "plan B" - God's provision modified to include humankind's needs or wants. We might call this the Principle of Adaptation.
Why does God do this? Because of his risky, consequence-laden decision back at the beginning. The first chapter of the Bible tells us that God created humankind in his image and his likeness (Genesis 1:26-28). We are not pets, we are persons. We are not God, but we are God-like, his representatives to one another and to all of creation. And ever since God created us, he has related to us in ways that both holds us accountable and honours his own image in us. There are no strings attached to God's love; we are not marionettes.
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it is enough to see the pattern...
GOD'S PLAN A | GOD'S PLAN B |
| Clothing as provision and protection |
| Meat to eat in this harsh world |
| God works through mediators |
| Kings are granted, against God's desire |
| A temple is granted, though not asked for (2 Samuel 7:5-7/Acts 7:47-50) |
| God hates it, but divorce is allowed |
| Patriarchy is not God's original design, but he works through it |
| Slavery is not God's will, but he still works through and among enslaving societies |
| As Jesus makes clear, God would prefer to die for his enemies than kill them, but he still works through nations that go to war (He worked through Rome to bring us salvation by Christ's sacrifice.) |
| God works through all kinds of financial systems and structures |
| God allows it, and blesses science & medicine to fight it |
| God brings justice through Government and mercy through the Church |
Rather than fight against all of our sinful systems, God works through them with the promise that one day every system and every cultural norm will be transformed and God's will and God's way will hold sway in our lives. This is called "The Kingdom of Heaven" come to earth. And it is the Good News message Jesus preached.
The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is in some ways a return to God's Plan A. And at the same time, it is a progression into something even better. We might think of it as God's Plan C, until we will realize: this was God's Plan A all along.
The apostle Paul says:
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.~ The apostle Paul (Romans 8:28)
All things means all things. God can use the good, the bad, and the ugly bits of our world and our lives to bring about good things. That doesn't make the bad things good things, but it does give us hope to keep our eyes open to the ways God is always at work around us, in us, and through us.
The Principle of Accommodation/Adaptation is evidenced throughout the Bible, including in the New Testament. For instance, in Acts 15 we see the full embrace of Gentiles into the Christian community while accommodating Jewish sensitivities to reduce unecessary offences. Depending on your church tribe, you might consider New Testament teaching about male-only Elders/Overseers/Pastors as an example of temporary accommodation to that time and place - one that God would gladly overturn in a different time and place. Jesus teaches that human marriage is an intentional but temporary accommodation, and the apostle Paul likewise sees marriage as a concession but not God's ideal for the current era. (And today, some argue that gay marriage is a contemporary accommodation by God to human sexuality.)
Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.~ JESUS (Matthew 19:8)
Rightly applying the Principle of Accommodation takes wisdom and compassion. But we can all agree that accommodation, concession, and adaptation is a biblical pattern we should pay attention to.
Understanding this doesn't make biblical violence any easier to take in. Just because we can understand something intellectually, doesn't mean it is or should be easy emotionally. The parent who understands how cancer operates does not feel grief over their child's diagnosis any less.
It's fair to admit that, once we grow up, the story of Noah's ark (aka, the worldwide flood and destruction of almost all people) doesn't read the same way as it did when we were children. And that emotional shift can cause a spiral of questioning.
As I recently heard a deconstructed former Christian say:
"I just came to realize that my morality was not aligned
with the God of the Bible."
~ A recently deconverted Exvangelical
I get that. And yet, at the same time, we should acknowledge that this person's morality has been shaped by the New Testament ethics of Jesus - and so has yours. Jesus, more than any other religious figure, philosopher, or political leader has profoundly shaped the Western moral imagination - especially in three ways:
How Jesus Still Influences Our Minds & Culture
Compassion for strangers, because of their value.
Forgiveness for failure, as peacemakers and healers.
Weakness without shame, rather than an evil to be dominated.
Jesus has shaped our instinct that compassion should extend beyond family, tribe, nationality, and even include kindness to strangers and other hurting people that we don’t know and aren’t connected with – because of their value.
The universality of human value is accepted today, but it wasn’t always that way.
In Christopher Nolan’s recent rendering of The Odyssey, the characters talk about “Zeus’ Law” (easier to pronounce than its original name, Theoxenia). And for many viewers, this was their first introduction to an ancient Greek idea that, at first glance, seems a lot like Jesus’ Golden Rule. Nolan even has one of his characters, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, describe Zeus’ Law in the familiar words: “Treat others as you’d be treated.” For many viewers, the implication was misunderstood to be that Jesus’ morality was not unique but merely his own rendition of an ancient Greek principle. But that would be a mistake.
Zeus’ Law taught that hosts and guests should treat each other well because they might be encountering gods in disguise who would punish us or reward us depending on how we treat them. Later in the movie Telemachus (played by Tom Holland) makes it more clear when he explains Zeus’ Law as: “Turn away a beggar, and you may be turning away a god.” And that’s the distinction. Zeus’s Law is transactional. In essence it says: “I will treat you well, not because you are a precious human made in God’s image and likeness, but because you might not be human.” Thankfully, Jesus and not Zeus has influenced our thinking on the topic of human dignity and worth.
And our modern acknowledgement that forgiveness is the road to healing, both for the giver and the receiver and even for society as a whole to heal – that’s all Jesus.
And before Jesus and his ideals took over the Roman empire, their view of weakness was that it was a human deficiency that deserved to be eradicated. The idea that the weak deserve respect and care? That’s all Jesus.
For the record, this isn't just my theory. It is the conclusion reached by scholars who are at different places along the spectrum from atheist to Christian, like the historians Bart Ehrman and Tom Holland.
The influence of Jesus and the early Christian movement is so pervaisive that, as Tom Holland argues, it the cultural air we breathe, or the water we swim in as fish. Even secular humanists derive their humanism – the belief that human beings hold distinct value among all creation – from Jesus and his influence on western thought.
And there are others who support this view.
One of the most brilliant minds to write about the role of forgiveness in society was the political theorist Hannah Arendt. She argued that without forgiveness, human relationships, and eventually all society, would collapse under the weight of past wrongdoing. And then after making this point that our society can only heal from the crushing weight of past collective trauma through the healilng power of forgiveness, she adds:
“The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense.”
~ Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958)
Even though Arendt says Jesus was the "discoverer" and not the originator of his mercy-saturated ethics, this is still a striking statement coming from a Jewish political philosopher, not a Christian theologian.
Friedrich Nietzsche is a fascinating "hostile witness" who affirms this same idea. Nietzsche despised Christianity because it overtook Rome's "master morality" - the celebration of power, violence, dominance, and crushing the weak. Most ancient societies, including the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, saw weakness as, well, weakness, and weakness deserved to be ended, stamped out, crushed. Strength, then, was actually viewed as morally superior, blessed by the gods, and worthy of conquering by eradicating weakness.
Survival of the fittest was assumed to be the right way to be in this world, long before Darwin coined the phrase. Social Darwinism was the dominant value of ancient civilizations.
Plato and other philosophers, Greek and Roman, advocated for killing infirm or deforemed babies. Aristotle believed this should be a law for the good for the good of the State. People existed to serve the State or the Empire, so a weak or infirm child was a burden and not a blessing. Kill them. That's what Rome believed, until the Jesus ethic spread.
And in warfare, the idea of not conquering weaker nations seemed unnatural to ancient civilizations. In the Peloponesian War, when a weaker Island nation, Melos, asked the Athenians for mercy, the response of their envoy summed up this philosophy:
"Right (or justice), as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer (or submit to) what they must."~ Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War, 5th Century BC)
Interesting that many of today's fears around the dominating inteligence of A.I. eradicating or forcing into subservience us weak humans sounds a lot like the social darwinism of ancient societies. In the words of King Solomon the wise:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.~ King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
While Rome promoted a "master morality", Nietzsche argued that Jesus promoted a "slave morality" - the tolerance of weakness and the encouragement of compassion and caring for the marginalized. Nietzsche claimed that Christianity had essentially ruined the Roman world by infecting it with empathy and other-centred love.
Well, he's right. And we are the offspring of that influence.
So let's be clear about this: Multiple academic, historical, and philosophical sources agree - if it weren't for Jesus, Western society might still be celebrating strength as virtue, weakness as vice, and violence as the right of the strong to dominate, enslave, and even eradicate the weak. So catch this:
Our repulsion to biblical violence, sexism, and slavery is strong evidence that our minds, even our society as a whole, have a Jesus-haunted conscience.
If our collective moral compass was not formed by the love ethic of Jesus, we might not have a philosophical conundrum with biblical violence. The problem just wouldn't factor into our thinking. As a whole, Western society would reason "Violence is what gods do, and violence is what God did, and that just makes sense. Good for God." Or, if we didn't believe in God, we would similarly say, "Violence is what the strong do, and that just makes sense. So the myths of the Bible sound good to me."
Jesus is the one who creates the problem! Whether we are Christian or not, we look at Old Testament through Jesus-influenced eyes. And I for one am so grateful for his influence.
So when I heard that exvangelical deconvert that I mentioned above say "my morality was not aligned with the God of the Bible" I had two reactions: The first, as I've already covered, was to understand and affirm the feeling. My second gut response was to say, "You don’t align with the God of the Bible? Have you thought about why? Why don't you align with enemy love, washing feet, serving the marginalized, being merciful to sinners and a peacemaker to antagonists, as well as confronting oppressive powers? Because that's the morality of the God that Jesus shows us."
This response shows my hand: my understanding of God has been fully formed by Jesus, start to finish. I take seriously John's remarks that, until we see Jesus, we really haven't seen God, as well as Jesus' remarks that seeing him is how we see God:
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.~ The apostle John (John 1:18)
The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me.~ JESUS (John 12:45)
And through Jesus I see a God who:
loves everyone, including his enemies (Matthew 5:43-48).
heals the untouchables by touching them, overriding purity laws with compassionate love (Matthew 8:3).
washes the feet of others, including the one he knew would betray him (John 13).
would prefer to lay down his own life to save his enemies rather than smite them (Romans 5:8-10).
Of course, this view of God creates a secondary problem. We switch questions from "Why does God promote and perform all that violence?" to "Why does the Bible record so much violence when we know God actually looks and acts like Jesus?"
That shift in questioning means everything to me. The second question is still a huge puzzle to ponder, but I can do that work while I walk with Jesus.
Because this is the uncompromising truth: the Bible concludes that Jesus - his life, his teaching, his death, and his resurrection - is the clearest view of God we have available to us. Any view of biblical violence must be understood through this foundational fact: God looks like Jesus.
When Jesus' disciples want to follow scriptural precedent and call fire down from heaven on their enemies, Jesus turns and rebukes them (Luke 9:51-56). His will and his way will hold sway, and nonviolent enemy-love is what "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done" leads us all toward.
And when Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue service in Nazareth, he practices some selective editing. He reads only the encouraging words of promise in the first couple of verses of Isaiah 61 and ends mid-sentence, just before "and the day of our God's vengeance" (compare Isaiah 61:1-2 with Luke 4:18-19). If you or I read the Bible this way we could be accused of editing by omission in line with our own preferences. But when Jesus does it, it is the author showing us how to read his own book, editing in line with his own character.
Hey Jesus, who do you think you are - God?
So here we are. We can continue to wrestle with t
he question of biblical violence, slavery, and sexism while we work in partnership with Jesus to make the world better, or we can walk away from what seems to me to be the only coherent and spiritually-inspiring movement on the planet that has the potential to make a world-changing difference.
I for one will continue to walk with Jesus, with my questions and all.
We don't have the actual words of God?
If you grew up in a conservative Bible-believing church, you might remember the moment you stared at the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11 - Jesus is genius in that story!) and pondered whether it really happened or not, because your Bible tells you it isn't in the earliest manuscripts. Was it lost and then found again? Or just a fantasy inserted later? Or was it passed on through oral tradition and margin notes in manuscripts until one scribe decided to insert it where he did? We don't know.
Then there is the ending of Mark's Gospel (Mark 16:9-20). We also learn that it wasn't in the earliest manuscripts (which makes snake-handling sects even more unfortunate). Or maybe it was, but got torn off because of how it was attached to the centre rod of the scroll. We just don't know.
These examples and others leave us with a series of fundamental questions: What are we to do with a supposedly perfect book that comes to us with footnotes about sections that used to be there but maybe should not have been? Was the Bible never perfect until they removed those bits? Or was the version of the Bible with those bits the perfect version? What does "perfect" or "inerrant" even mean in relation to the Bible we hold in our hands today?
Every Christian believes that the Bible we hold in our hands is imperfect. Even an inerrantist who believes the original autographs were perfect, does not apply the doctrine of inerrancy to the transmission or translation process. Transmission refers to the copying process to preserve the text down through the generations. And translation means, well, you got that one. But it's worth noting something my old pastor used to say:
Every translation is an interpretation.
So, according to conservative Evangelical belief: God went to great lengths to produce perfect first copies, free from any error. Then he changed his process to allow for thousands of years of imperfect copying of copies and imperfect translations of those imperfect copies. All with some measure of guidance and protection by his Spirit. If that switcheroo in process seems strange to you, you are not alone.
But here's where we all agree again: it makes sense to believe that if God entered history at a specific time and place, he would want that event to be recorded and shared with all people in all places at all times. And if God inspired the writers of Scripture to pass on God's perspective and their observations, it makes sense to think he would continue to inspire or at least guide the transmission and translation process.
Some theologians call this belief "Providential Preservation". They believe that God has protected the Bible from significant corruption down through the generations of copies and copies of copies. And even though God has been involved in this process for centuries, overseeing and guiding by his Spirit, at the same time Providential Preservation does not guarantee a perfect process. So, Christian theologians who believe in Providential Preservation accept that two things can be true at the same time:
God can be fully involved offering protective guardrails.
Within those boundaries, humans will make mistakes.
Therefore the final product is trustworthy, even if it has minor mistakes.
And I'm asking - why can't we just apply this same belief, the same logic, to the original documents? God inspired their writing (2 Timothy 3:16), assured they would be fundamentally accurate, and left evidence of his fingerprints all over the texts. And yet within that same process he allowed humans to leave their fingerprints all over the texts too, including lots of little mistakes. The result is not only Scriptures I can trust, but Scriptures I can relate to because they were crafted by imperfect people, like me.
The academic author Os Guinness says:
"Contrast is the mother of clarity."
~ Os Guinness (Social Critic)
So let's compare and contrast two different views of religious holy books to help us better understand why mistakes in the process of writing, copying, and translating the Bible is no threat to Christian faith.
My Muslim friends insist that the Quran is God's Word to us, and that just by reading it we can sense its truth, its beauty, and its perfection. Just reading the Quran is one of Allah's greatest ways of affirming the truth of Islam to our hearts. When I tell them that I have read the Quran and I find it a mix of beauty and boring, but definitely not divine, they tell me that it's harder for me to hear God's voice through the book because I am reading a translation and not the actual Quran. God revealed each specific word to Muhammad in Arabic and only an Arabic copy of the Quran is a real Quran. Only by reading the Arabic original can we appreciate the poetry and power of God revealed in the Quran. So I tell them that I have friends who have studied Arabic to read the Quran in its original form, and they were not convinced of its grandeur. And my Muslim friends tell me that its hard to fully appreciate the power and poetry of the Quran when Arabic is not our first language. At this point, I tell my Muslim friends that I think the version of Allah they are telling me about seems a tad prejudice. He has left one of his best clues to his reality - the overwhelming beauty of the Quran - to only native Arabic speakers to experience. The rest of us have to just trust a native Arab-speaking Muslim that the Quran really is that amazing.
This Muslim view is not too dissimilar to the Christian Doctrine of Inerrancy (discussed below). That original Hebrew or Greek Bible manuscript would be very compelling, if only we had it and could read it. But alas, no one can.
But here's the thing - the Christ-centred view that I am proposing is that the message, not the specific words in a specific language, is the Word of God. This makes the Bible amazingly resilient and powerful. Whenever the Good News Message of the Gospel is preached, people are hearing God's Word. And God's word is powerful.
After talking about the importance of going to others to share the Gospel, the apostle Paul says:
Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.~ The apostle Paul (Romans 10:17)
The power of the Gospel is not restricted to any one language, nor is it contained only within the original words of our holy book. The book tells us the amazing truth of Jesus, and then we translate that truth and tell it to others in our own words. And importantly, the message doesn't lose its power in that process. It's the message of the Bible, not the specific words of the Bible, that reveal God's truth and beauty.
This understanding of the Bible is reinforced by the Bible itself, especially the four Gospels. Scholars believe that Jesus mostly spoke Aramaic and, at least among his Jewish countrymen, would have preached in Aramaic. But when it came time to record his words in print to send the story of Jesus further to more people beyond the Jewish world, the writers of the Gospels decided to write in Greek - the lingua franca of their day. Apparently, the Gospel-writers believed that the message of Jesus could be faithfully transmitted across languages.
To the writers of the Gospels, it was more important to get the word about Christ heard by the most people than it was to preserve the actual words of Christ.
For Christ-followers, the specific words are not where the magic is found. The Word of God is the message of God, about the Son of God, preached in any language, even if proclaimed by imperfect people, preserved imperfectly in an imperfect book.
Human error cannot hold back the transformative power of the Gospel.
Just think of early converts to Christ among African slaves brought to the Americas. These slaves were introduced to the Gospel in a context that gave them every reason to believe the opposite. One might think that whatever the religion was of the people who stole them, enslaved them, and oppressed them, that religion could be scratched off the list of potentially true faiths. And yet, the Gospel got through. In 1807 a new edited "Slave Bible" was published for The Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves. (Seeing slavery as an opportunity to evangelize would become one way of soothing the Christian conscience and justifying the horror of slavery.) This special edition of the Bible cut out 90% of the Old Testament and half of the New testament. As you can imagine, Galatians 3:28 - in Christ there is no slave or free, for we are all one - did not make the cut. The astonishing thing is that, with or without this perverted Bible, enslaved Africans learned to distinguish the Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel apart from the distorted Christianity practiced by their enslavers. Even many of those who could not read the words for themselves in any version of God's Holy Book, resonated with God's Holy Message. These slaves knew the Word of God better than their church-attending Bible-reading masters. And they produced an authentic vibrant, Jesus-centred, Spirit-filled faith movement that outshone any religion of Empire.
That is the power of the Gospel.
"Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."~ Frederick Douglass
(Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave, 1845)
The Doctrine of Inerrancy VS Inspiration in Partnership
Related to the above point, but important enough to be listed as its own reason why some Christians deconstruct, is the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy. This is one of the biggest reasons given by conservative Evangelicals for questioning, and eventually leaving, their faith. (If you are familiar with the story of the deconversion of Bart Ehrman you know at least one example of someone beginning to question their faith when wrestling with Bible mistakes, as he documents in his first best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus.)
When I was first hired as a pastor for an Anabaptist church (I had previously been a part of Pentecostal, Baptist, and independent Evangelical churches), I was surprised to find that "inerrancy" was not part of their statement of faith. I asked the Bishop about it, wondering if they were secretly hiding their liberalism. He simply said, "No, we Anabaptists just believe the Bible is inspired and we should use it. Why say more than that?" I had never heard this way of thinking before. Could it really be that simple?
The Doctrine of Inerrancy holds that all Scripture was inspired by a perfect God (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21), and therefore itself must be perfect, free from any errors. It allows for things like human personality, hyperbole, and non-chronological narration, but everything the writers of Scripture assert is believed to be 100% true and free from error. So, the perfection of the Bible itself becomes a kind of apologetic evidence for the truth of the Christian faith (like our Muslim friends and the Qur'an).
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.~ The apostle Paul (2 Timothy 3:16)
Notice Paul's words about biblical inspiration. Paul does not say all Scripture is God-breathed and is therefore inerrant. He says because it is God-breathed it is therefore useful. That's what my Bishop told me when I first became Anabaptis: The Bible is inspired by God - so we should use it.
I now contend that the idea of biblical inerrancy is based on a misunderstanding of how God works in this world, and in the end, it becomes a setup for significant disappointment.
All Christians believe God is perfect, Jesus is perfect, the Holy Spirit is perfect, and the message the Spirit reveals to us through the Bible is perfect. But the Doctrine of Inerrancy goes one step further. It teaches that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to write perfect words with no errors (hence, in-errancy). Augustine of Hippo said:
"I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books or Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error."
~ St. Augustine (Letter to Jerome)
Augustine taught that if Scripture appears to be mistaken, the only explanations could be:
the manuscript (not the original) had been corrupted,
the translator had erred, or
the reader had misunderstood.
Augustine refused to consider the possibility that the original authors made any mistakes. The reality is, however, that although God is perfect, the people he inspired to write Scripture were not.
Once we have a partnership between perfection and imperfection, the result will always be (I'll give you three guesses)... imperfection. Even something that is mostly perfect or almost entirely perfect is imperfect. Just like the copyists and translators and printers and publishers of Scripture are not perfect - and yet we believe God worked with them throughout history to preserve his Word to the world (remember the doctrine of "Providential Preservation") - so too the original authors remembered and wrote imperfectly, even though they were inspired by a perfect God.
[As an aside: I recently got a new first edition Bible that has a significant mistake in the printing. Apparently this can often happen in first-editions, and I'm glad I got it. It reminds me that, although God is perfect, the people he partners with to deliver his message are not.]
The upside of this doctrine of inerrancy is that it breathes confidence in conservative Evangelical Bible believing Christians... until it doesn't. And that's the downside.
The Bible can become a totem for our faith in the perfection of Christ. As a conservative Evangelical, holding a Bible can feel like you are holding a perfect conduit to Christ and his power. Like a wizard's wand or a magic book of spells. Reading the Bible or even just holding the Bible can feel like you're holding a supernatural miracle in your hands. It's a little bit of divine perfection in this very imperfect world.
I get why the doctrine of inerrancy feels so good emotionally. The problem is that it makes no sense rationally. And when something can be disproven so easily, the emotional benefit turns out to have been a religious setup all along. One mistake, one error, one contradiction, and your faith can crash and burn before you can say "Codex Vaticanus". Because, if you have been told that your faith in God rests on a perfect Bible, then your entire faith falls apart along with your crumbling doctrine of inerrancy.
The belief in the absolute absence of any mistakes in the writings of Scripture is a perfect setup for deconstruction. It needlessly manufactures a crisis of faith. Inerrancy creates a house-of-cards faith ready to fall once one simple unnecessary belief is pulled away.
This all-or-nothing thinking is not rooted in reality. All-or-nothing thinking considers something to be 100% perfect or 100% garbage with no room for nuance. And that kind of binary thinking is completely out of tune with our world and how our God works in our world. When a questioning Christian who has been trained in all-or-nothing thinking confronts a Bible imperfection, their system of thought doesn't bend, it breaks, and their faith can shatter.
Biblical imperfections should not be scandalous; they should be embraced as evidence of God's beautiful way of working in our world. Finding imperfections in the Bible should not shake our faith; it should solidify our faith in a perfect God who chooses to do everything in partnership with his imperfect people.
The Protestant Reformers challenged the Catholic idea of Church authority being on par with Scriptural authority. The Pope might be a great Christian, but he was far from infallible. Then these same Reformers imbued the Bible with its own version of papal infallibility. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Thankfully, Anabaptists and other Christians ever since have been rejecting the idea of the "Paper Pope".
Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, made one Bible verse his personal motto, and he put it on the title page of every one of his books and pamphlets:
For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.~ The apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 3:11)
All theology - including our soteriology, our ecclesiology, and our bibliology - must be built on our Christology.
We believe in the authoritative, infallible, inerrant Word of God
- and his name is Jesus.
The failures of the Church to follow Jesus perfectly do not diminish my faith in the perfection of Christ. And neither does the failure of the Bible's inspired authors to write everything perfectly.
Besides, the doctrine of inerrancy makes its claims of textual perfection only about the original manuscripts, called the autographs, none of which have survived. This makes the doctrine a bit of a slippery fish, since whenever someone points to an apparent error or contradiction in the Bible, inerrantists can still claim perfection for the original source, sans evidence.
Golly, this doctrine seems like a lot of wasted energy investing in defending a book in a way that God never asked us to defend it.
When I was young, if someone pointed out any of the many biblical mistakes, errors, and contradictions to me, I simply had no way of computing what I was hearing. I had to assume that each error could be explained away as a non-error somehow if I was going to maintain my faith. My fragile faith was pitting faith against reason and I had to selectively shut down my critical thinking in order to maintain my faith. Now when I hear the arguments about possible biblical errors I can lean in with interest and not lean back in fear.
Unfortunately, for those conservative fundamentalist Christians who have been taught the doctrine of inerrancy as indispensable to the Christian faith, it doesn't take much to shake their house of cards and watch it all fall.
And for those of us who are thinking "What errors?!", here is just a small sampling. I will stick to the New Testament for now, but this list could grow ten times as large if we included the Old Testament.
A NEW TESTAMENT TOP TWELVE LIST OF BIBLE DIFFICULTIES
(It's like a "TOP TEN" list, but more biblical.)
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(Special mention goes to Red Robe VS Purple - Matthew 27:28 VS John 19:2)
Now, to be fair, Evangelical scholars claim to be able to explain each of these apparent contradictions, factual errors, or ethical dilemmas. And I agree that many of them are not genuine contradictions, but merely appear to be. But even if we could explain away all of them, there is freedom in no longer feeling the need to.
The need to argue that no Bible difficulties are acutal difficulties is what sociologists and psychologists call "Motivated Reasoning": once someone's conclusion is already locked in (i.e., the Bible MUST be perfect) their brain will perform impressive cognitive gymnastics to make the evidence fit the conclusion.
(As an aside, we are ALL prone to the blindness brought on by our own "Motivated Reasoning", so it makes sense to assess ourselves and not just point it out in others. My non-negotiable is not the perfection of Scripture, but the perfection of Jesus. What's yours?)
For those of us who hold to a non-inerrantist position, we don't have to come up with any explanation beyond human error. And yet, human error is not the threat to our faith some might suppose.
So I am not persuaded by the Doctrine of Inerrancy and in fact discourage it for many reasons. Here are seven:
It isn't fundamental to our faith. That is, our theory of biblical inspiration isn't an "Apostles' Creed" level faith item.
Any time a non-essential belief is made essential for someone to be considered a true Christian, something unhealthy is evolving and Jesus is being displaced at the foundation of our faith. (1 Corinthians 3:11)
It is born out of what could be considered an idolatrous impulse to give a thing, even an inspired thing, the qualities we should attribute to Christ alone, such as perfection/sinlessness and full authority. (I am not accusing all inerrantists of being idolatrous. I simply believe that we have unwittingly allowed the impulse of idolatry to sneak into our theology.)
Inerrancy quietly moves Christianity toward the Islamic model of Scripture, with perfection residing in words no one can access.
Even if this doctrine used to be mostly benign, today it does more damage than any perceived good it gives. At best, defending the Doctrine of Inerrancy is an energy drain and attention distraction for the Church of the 21st century. At worst, teaching inerrancy sets up unsuspecting conservative Christians for deconstruction. What an entirely preventable tragedy.
The Doctrine of Inerrancy distracts from the profound truth that Jesus and his message, not a book, is the Word of God.
We can reserve our beliefs about perfection and inerrancy for Jesus alone as God's Word while we celebrate the delicious irony that we learn this truth about God's perfect Word from an imperfect book. I can tell you from personal experience that my love and admiration and honour for Scripture has only increased over the years as I let go of my magical thinking about the perfection of manuscripts we don't even possess.
Today, every time a Christian leader holds up a Bible and says something like "We've got to get back to the Word of God" or "Let's open the Word of God today" they are reinforcing the wrong belief.
It was to a group of Scripture-reading, Scripture-loving, Scripture-memorizing, Scripture-studying religious leaders that Jesus said:
And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent.~ JESUS (John 5:37-38)
These religious leaders had more Scripture in them than any of us every will. They just didn't have the Word of God.
The Bible is more like John the Baptist pointing to Jesus than it is like Jesus. We don't have to believe John the Baptist was perfect in order to trust his word that Jesus is "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world".
(To dig deeper into this topic, see this article here.)
So, dear Christian sisters and brothers, please remember:
The Bible is not our guide for life.
The Bible is our guide to Jesus,
and Jesus is our guide for life.
So, don't follow the Bible.
Read the Bible so you can follow Jesus.
If this way of thinking is new to you and you want to learn more, get in touch. I am still learning alongside amazing people and you are invited to come join us.
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