Our children’s faith might depend on how we define inerrancy
The Bible is the word of God. God is perfect, thus everything he says is perfect and 100% true. Therefore, the Bible is 100% true without error. It seems pretty straightforward.
The reality is a little more complicated. Anyone who’s read the Bible has noticed some discrepancies between books. There’s some stuff in the Bible that can’t be confirmed by history and even where the evidence seems to weigh against it. There’s some stuff where two accounts of the same story give differing details that, if not contradictory, seem way too different to be easily reconciled. There are some places where contradictory principles seem to be endorsed. And there are some places where there are unmistakable contradictions.
It’s important for us to be aware of this, because for decades we have taught our children that the Bible is “inerrant.” Sometimes we can get away with saying this and nothing more, because most teenagers don’t read the Bible very in-depth, if they read it at all. But for anyone who looks deeper, the actual Scriptures reveal a much more complex picture, one that Sunday schools and youth groups almost never talk about. But for those children and teens who are interested enough in the Bible to actually read it in-depth for themselves, when they discover the discrepancies and difficulties in it, are very prone to having their perception of the Bible shattered entirely, and that can be devastating for young people’s faith.
When we tell our children that the Bible is inerrant, and they open it up to find what sure seem like errors, they’re going to think, “If I was misled about the Bible’s perfection, what else am I being misled about?” It’s not an exaggeration to say that a discrepancy in Scripture may be the spark to a domino effect that crumbles someone’s entire faith. I know; I’ve seen and heard plenty to know it’s true. Sometimes this might not happen until college or adulthood, but it’s likely to happen if we don’t teach this concept properly. The lack of proper teaching on inerrancy has even created atheist and agnostic scholars. Bart Ehrman, an atheist New Testament scholar, writes in his book Misquoting Jesus that a “turning point” in his journey to unbelief was seeing an apparent error in Mark 2:26. In that passage, Jesus says that David and his companions ate the temple’s consecrated bread when Abiathar was the high priest, when 1 Samuel 21:1-6 says the high priest at that time was Ahimelech, Abiathar’s father. This started Ehrman on the road to dismissing the entire Bible as an unreliable human product, and eventually rejecting God’s existence. So I don’t exaggerate when I say that a misunderstanding of the inerrancy of Scripture can lead to a misunderstanding of Christianity, and of God himself, and that misunderstanding can lead some to reject it.
So let’s acknowledge honestly what’s really there. If we’re going to say that “inerrant” means there are no mistakes, discrepancies, or morally difficult teachings in the Bible on your bookshelf, that’s just not true. And anyone who picks up that Bible and reads it is going to see that. They’re going to find:
Unmistakable contradictions between parallel passages. There are some places, such as the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, that seem to contradict each other: Did the women go to the tomb before or after sunrise? Were there two angels or one? But these can be at least theoretically explained as different perspectives on the same story. (Someone might say sunrise is when the first light appears in the sky; others might say it’s when the full disc of the sun is actually visible. Perhaps there were two angels, but only one spoke.) There are some other places where one piece of information clearly contradicts the other; just look at the numbers in parallel passages in Kings and Chronicles. When one passage says 30,000 troops went out to battle, and another passage says 300,000 troops did, that’s not just a lack of perspective; that’s a big difference.
These can usually be explained, though, by the fact that the ancient manuscripts were copied probably hundreds of times, and numbers were bound to be messed up. If a manuscript was old or smudged from years of use, the scribe assigned to copy it would have a tough time getting everything right. Numbers are, in fact, a lot easier to mess up than words, because often there was little context telling a scribe what a smudged number should be. If you’re an ancient scribe and you’re trying to copy a smudged paper that reads “David s-nt -7,000 tro-ps out ba—-,” you can easily reconstruct that phrase — except for the number. Is it 17,000? 27,000? 97,000? There’s not any context to tell you. So, minor errors such as numbers, names, places, etc., can easily be accounted for this way, as the errors of scribes copying the manuscripts, not the original writers inspired by God. In fact, we have numerous passages and verses, especially in the New Testament, that we know are the result of scribes trying to insert information that wasn’t originally there (see John 8:1-11 for an example). That’s why you’ll find many churches say in their statement of faith that the Scriptures are inerrant in the original manuscripts.
Claims that seem to be contradicted by historical evidence. The Bible talks about events that are very ancient and pertain to specific individuals, not all of whom you would expect to find some record of. For example, the lack of direct extrabiblical historical evidence of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not evidence they didn’t exist, because we wouldn’t expect to find more records of three Mesopotamian nomads than we already have. But there are other things that are harder to explain. The Bible says that 600,000 men of Israel were in the exodus, which means probably a couple million when you count women and children. But at no point during the period of ancient Israel do we see evidence for that large a population. Or in the famous Christmas story in Luke 2, there is a lot of difficulty with the timing of the census, since the census that Luke mentions in Luke 2:2 (Quirinius) appears to have been governor several years after the birth of Christ. Bible scholars have offered solutions to the problem, but it’s a significant historical difficulty.
So far, there isn’t anything that demonstrates the Bible to be historically implausible. But if somehow, one of the historical claims of the Bible could be conclusively disproven, does that mean we should throw the whole thing out? That doesn’t make any sense. If you were on the jury in a murder trial, and there were several reliable, independent eyewitnesses who all witnessed the act and agreed on most of the events, but one of them said it happened on April 17 while it could be proven to have happened on April 15, would you automatically dismiss the whole account and find the accused not guilty? Of course not. But that’s what some people say they would do with the Bible if they were to find a single error. Some scholars have noted this and instead put forth the claim that the Bible is inerrant not in every detail of everything, but in all that it teaches.
Apparent endorsements or at least allowances of ideas and actions that we would judge to be morally reprehensible. The Bible was written in a different world. There are aspects of that world that we recognize today as barbaric, brutal, and reprehensible, but which the Bible at times seems to tolerate or even endorse. There are the wars against the Canaanites where God tells the people to kill every man, woman, and child. Slavery is tolerated in both the Old and New Testaments. The righteous kings of Israel, as well as Israel (Jacob) himself, have multiple wives. Many people have no idea the Bible talks about this stuff because it’s never mentioned, ostensibly for the purpose of not confusing them. But when they read the Bible for themselves and find this stuff there, without it having been explained to them, many are easily convinced that the Bible is just a fallible product of its times, or worse, an instrument for oppression and evil.
These sorts of things have to be addressed on an individual basis. We have to remember that we’re reading a book that was written 2,000-3,500 years ago on the other side of the world. We’re not going to use language and terminology in the same way they did. For example, Paul Copan, in his book Is God A Moral Monster? makes the case that many of the apparent commands to exterminate entire people groups, and descriptions of those exterminations, are hyperbole — wars were nearly universally described with hyperbole in the ancient near east. Plus, hyperbole shows up in Scripture all the time — just look at Jesus’ command that anyone whose eye causes them to sin should gouge it out and throw it away.
Slavery was more akin to indentured servitude — it was not permissible to kidnap and trade slaves; slavery was typically a way to work off debts or pay for a crime. Not that indentured servitude was a great arrangement, either, but in that society a better one was hard to come by. But this sort of thing is avoided in churches and youth groups, so when people read the Bible for themselves, what are they to think?
So with all that, what do we teach about the real nature of Scripture? It leads to some very shaky theological grounds if the Bible contains errors, for sure. How do we know exactly what is errant and what isn’t, especially when it comes to moral teaching? The opinion of society? Our own modern sensibilities? That seems to just leave us in a limbo where everyone is free to pick and choose what they like in the Bible and leave out the rest — which is what a lot of Americans do with Scripture anyway.
But we also need to make sure we are not making it sound like the Bible’s trustworthiness hinges on whether Ahimelech or Abiathar was high priest during David’s flight from Saul. Again, even if there is a mistake, no one should throw out an entire eyewitness testimony based on one or even a few trivial mistakes. If Mark accidentally misquoted Jesus (or some scribe copying his manuscript did), it doesn’t mean Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead. If the conquest passages from Joshua and Judges are not what they appear to be, it doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. That’s a complete non sequitur.
I should say that I am still okay with using the word “inerrant,” as long as we make it clear what we mean. However, it’s not my preferred term when speaking of the authority of Scripture. In fact, the apostle Paul already gives us a great description of how the Bible is authoritative in our lives: “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.”
Scripture is inspired by God. It teaches us, rebukes our sinful behavior, corrects us, and helps us become more like Jesus. Any book that is capable of doing all that is incredibly powerful. Who cares if some numbers are different? Who cares if there’s some small mistakes in copying or translation? We have pretty substantial evidence that the Bible has been, in almost its entirety, accurately recorded and accurately passed down. And if there are some things that are hard to believe — well, the Bible doesn’t have to prove itself to me. To some extent, we can trust that some unprovable things in the Bible are true simply based on the fact that we know the God who wrote it, and we trust him to tell us the truth. That, I think, is the message we should be sending our children.
