Ridiculous Excrement

There are things that, in some circles, you just don't talk about. When I am with my mother-in-law, I don'’t talk about animals that have been hurt. When I am with my wife's grandfather, I don't talk about America's faults or how wrong war is. When I am with my father, I don't talk about racism. When I am with my wife, I don't talk about snakes. And when I am with most of the religious world, I don't talk about the doctrine of inerrancy. It's one of those things that everyone has an opinion on, but most aren't sure what the doctrine actually means. Inerrancy is one of those elephants in the room that everyone knows is there but no one wants to talk about. It's potentially volatile, but if we can just keep from talking about it, maybe it will go away. We at least won't have to become divided over it. Let'’s not talk about error, scribal inaccuracies, or historical contextualization. The Bible is good; leave it at that.

Or not. Let's jump in.

It seems to me that the whole battle over inerrancy is irrelevant to the Kingdom of God. The emphasis we have put on inerrancy and the raging war associated with it is like getting all worked up over Y2K. It just doesn'’t matter! Count it down - :05, :04, :03, :02, :01, Happy New Millennium! Look around. We're all still here. The power grid is still on-line. Bank accounts are in tact. And 10,000 children across the globe are still starving to death tonight.

The religious world has scrambled to try to assert their opinions on the battle of inerrancy. One side trying to change the other's mind and vice versa. Some are caught in the middle and are trying to figure out what side to join. Some are trying to ride the fence and play both sides; and some are just trying to stay out of it. But what if it's all in vain? What if, at the end of the day, after the "other side" wins, everything still goes on? What if the win or loss of the doctrine of inerrancy ends with no cataclysmic events whatsoever? What if, after the smoke, scholarship, blood, and original manuscripts clear, we are all still trying to make sense of the mysterious message of Jesus? And God's relentless pursuit of humanity? And what our role as the church really is? I think we will. I think the battle of inerrancy is an enormous snare that sidetracks the real Missio Dei.

I am reminded of this great scene in Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams plays a poetry-loving, marrow-out-of-life-sucking, English teacher named John Keating in an Ivy League Preparatory School. As a student reads aloud from the preface of his poetry textbook by J. Evans Pritchard, Keating begins to chart Pritchard's assertions on the blackboard: a vertical line graphs the poem's importance, and an horizontal line graphs its perfection. Shading in the charted area will determine a poem's greatness. As all of the students scramble to copy Keating'’s graph in their notebooks, he turns to them and says:

"Excrement. That's what I think of J. Evans Pritchard. Now I want you to rip out that page."

After the boys in the class finally begin tearing, he continues: "Be gone J. Evans Prichard... This is a battle, a war, and casualties could be your hearts and souls. Armies of academicians going on measuring poetry... No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race; and the human race is filled with passion. Poetry, beauty, romance, love, those are what we stay alive for."

In the same way that J. Evans Pritchard and his "Understanding Poetry" essay confine the true greatness of poetry by asserting some rediculous measuring device over it, the doctrine of inerrancy asserts some rediculous assumptions about the Bible. The doctrine of inerrancy sujects the Bible to a human measuring stick - a post-Enlightenment ethic of factual truth based on reason and emperical data. Inerrantists claim that the Bible is true without any mixture of error. The other camp (I guess we could call them "Errantists") claim that errors, though undeniably present, do not nullify the "truth" of scripture.

(I must stop here and state that the above descriptions, to people who are in the heat of the inerrancy battle, are a grave over-simplification. I do not refute that; in fact, I agree. And if you are in the heat of that battle, are reading this, and are offended by my over-simplification of your position, I apologize. I make no claim to be a professional theologian. But I am also not in that battle and have no plans of entering it. My desire here is to raise questions of a different sort.)

Now back to the issue, Dead Poets Society, J. Evans Pritchard, and rediculous graphing and assumptions. The battle of the doctrine of inerrancy has resulted in three unfortunate things:

1) The Bible has been reduced to a book of facts and propositions. The living Word, when funneled through the doctrine of inerrancy, dies a sad death. Facts are not free to speak into the lives of God's people. They are true, or they are false. Facts are, at best, two-dimensional; the living Word is, at least, four-dimensional. Facts are black-and-white; the living Word is psychedelic. The living Word is organic, evolving, speaking to the needs of individuals and communities...calling us into the great Missio Dei. In the words of Doug Pagitt, the living Word does not provide application; it creates implication. When the Israelites were fighting, the Bible says that the "sun stood still" so that the day would linger and the Israelites would have opportunity to win the battle. Here's the thing: the sun doesn't move. We all know that from seventh grade science. The author of the passage didn't take seventh grade science. It was a pre-Copernican writing. They believed the sun revolved around the earth. The day was made longer by keeping the sun at a stand-still. So the debate/war continues: Did the sun really stand still? Or did the earth stand still? Does the scientific inaccuracy nullify the truth of the Bible? Hmm... Honestly, I don't care. The "greatness" of the Bible doesn't depend on how factual it is, Mr. Pritchard. The greatness of the Bible rests in the Logos, the timeless message of God. It is timeless because it is "living." It is timeless because it transcends fact. It transcends proposition. True, the Bible contains propositional truth, but it also contains narrative, parable, poetry, apocalyptic literature, and letters. It is alive, and it transcends any kind of human assumptions we can place upon it.

2) The Bible becomes a "special book." Errantists make statements like, "The Bible is not the Word of God; Jesus is the Word of God." They look at the Bible as a special book that contains the message of God. They claim that message is true. There may be factual errors in the details; Jonah's fish may be mythical; but the message is true. The Red Sea may have been the Sea of Reeds, but the message is true. The earth may have been created in an allegorical six days, but the message is true. The sun may not have, in fact, stopped, but the message is true. The demon-possessions Jesus encountered may have been epilepsy, but the message is true. You get the point. But here's the thing: there is still the human-ized measuring stick: true or false. The only thing that has changed is what is being measured.

3) The Bible has become the devinized appendix to the Trinity. The inerrancy battle, where one is an errantist or an inerrantist, is guilty of committing idolatry on the altar of "truth." Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Holy Bible. "Holy, Holy, Holy...God in four persons, blessed Trinity...plus one more." We have spent so much time making the Bible "right" that we have either elevated the Bible itself or bridled the work of God. Either way we are guilty. Blasphemy or Idolatry. Doesn't matter. By asserting post-Enlightenment, westernized ideal of factual, propositional, proven truth, we have crowned the scriptures as a god in herself. Doug Pagitt and his church Solomon's Porch refer to the Bible as a "living, authoritative member of [their] community." It is alive. It interacts with them. It sits on no lofty throne. She speaks to our sitz im leben out of her own sitz im leben.

So when we get down to it, why would we want a book that is merely factually correct and loftily perfect (inerrancy)...
Or why would we want to have a special book whose message is merely "true" (errancy)...

...when we can interact with what it is: alive, implicating, and true?

Once again, the Church is giving answers to the wrong questions. The answers are thought out well, and a great deal of scholarship (even good scholarship) has gone into constructing the answers. But the answers are only good if they address questions people are actually asking. Otherwise, the answers are irrelevant. And that brings us back full circle: The battle of inerrancy is irrelevant to the Kingdom of God. With all the rediculous talk of different kinds of truth (absolute, real, full, undeniable, moral, etc.), the Church has felt the need to defend the Bible based on what I refered to above as "Post-Enlightenment, Westernized, proven-by-empirical data" truth. We have assumed that a "modern" determinant of truth was the same as a "post-modern" determinant of truth. It's just not the case.

The Bible, when we let is listen and speak as it is - without holding it to this human measuring stick - remains as it is: in community, in relationship with the people of God. It's not that it speaks for itself. Rather, it speaks for God. It speaks for us. It speaks for you. But then again, it speaks to God; it speaks to us; and it speaks to you. And yet, as part of the community, it listens to God; it listens to us; it listens to you. It is mysterious. It is alive.