The biblicablogosphere sure has seen a lot of posts about “inerrancy” lately. If I started trying to link to all of the relevant posts just within the last few weeks, I would undoubtedly miss some.

In some ways, I line up with Alan Lenzi on this matter, though with different nuances and probably for somewhat different reasons. Alan asks, “Can we stop talking about inerrancy, please?!” I can pretty much assure Alan that he won’t find me talking much about inerrancy, or at least not deploying it as a defense for anything (one of Alan’s concerns). Alan rejects inerrancy primarily on grounds of the Bible’s historical embeddedness. While I think he’s onto something, my own reasons for equivocating on biblical “inerrancy” are different.

A little background may help at this point. I was born into and raised within the Churches of Christ, a more-or-less tightly-knit group of organizationally independent congregations. I don’t want to spend a lot of time here on the history of the Churches of Christ, so I’ll jump to the most salient features for this particular discussion. In some ways, the Churches of Christ were born from the marriage of American populism to a radicalized sola scriptura principle. Early leaders of the movement rejected (and railed against) creeds and human traditions, wanting to go “back to the Bible” and rely on the Bible alone as “the only rule of [Christian] faith and practice.” From this radicalized sola scriptura principle came certain catchphrases common in the 20th-century Churches of Christ, such as “Speak where the Bible speaks, and be silent where the Bible is silent” and “Call Bible things by Bible names.” Let’s call this “confessional biblicism,” for lack of a better term.

I’d better get back onto the main point before my train of thought runs off its track into an endless plain of reverie. Radical confessional biblicism combined with a populist mentality and grammatico-historical exegesis can be a potent mixture. Within Churches of Christ, no denominational hierarchy can tell church members what to believe, because no such hierarchy exists. Similarly, fidelity to a creed can never be a test of orthodoxy, because no creeds are imposed (though the danger of implicit creeds lurks around every corner). As a corollary, any theological claim by a member of the Churches of Christ could be considered “orthodox” to the degree that other members consider the claim to be persuasively supported by Bible-based arguments, and “unorthodox” to the degree that other members fail to perceive biblical justification for the claim in question.

Once one begins to understand the historical embededness of the various biblical books, one sooner or later comes to understand that most of the biblical books originated independently of one another, and that the canonical process was secondary to and largely independent of the compositional process. Grammatico-historical exegesis yields no evidence that any of the biblical writers thought that their books would be added to a canon of sacred literature (though I think certain models of Pentateuchal composition might move in this direction). I feel quite confident that the authors of most of the biblical books wrote hoping their books would find sympathetic or persuadable audiences, but not with any intention that their books be added to an existing body of scripture. The canonical process itself was long and complicated, consisting largely of the (e)valuation of individual books or small collections (like the Pentateuch) over time, rather than the composition of new materials.

It follows logically from these historical realities that none of the biblical books speak of the Bible as such. Nor could they, since the Bible as such did not exist until well after the materials themselves were written. We begin to get close to such references when, for example, “Luke’s” Jesus refers to “the Law and the Prophets,” but clearly the gospel of Luke itself does not belong to either of these categories, and nothing in the gospel of Luke suggests to us that “Luke” thought his book would (in a new category) be joined to those bodies of sacred literature. The canonization of “Luke’s” gospel was a later development, and we have no real reason to think that “Luke” himself foresaw that development (though clearly he wanted his reader[s] to believe his account, in some cases over against other existing accounts, as “Luke” makes clear in the prologue).

Because of my specific biblicistic heritage within the broader Christian tradition, I want my “doctrine of scripture” to derive from specific biblical statements and from observable biblical phenomena. Yet since no biblical writer talks about the Bible as a whole, one obviously cannot build a doctrine of “biblical inerrancy” from explicit biblical statements on that topic. No such statements exist; we would be working without data. From time to time, biblical writers did make statements about the “perfection” of a message from God, or of some specific text now within our canon (e.g., Psalm 19′s praise for the Torah, which could be a completed work like our canonical Torah), but generalizing from such specifically-focused statements to an overall attribution of pan-canonical inerrancy requires warrants that I find extremely hard to come by. Often the reasoning I hear goes something like this: “The Bible is the ‘word of God’; therefore, any text that speaks of ‘God’s word’ applies to the entire Bible.” The problem lies, of course, in establishing the premise. Since no biblical writer talks about the Bible as a whole, no biblical writer claims that the Bible is “the word of God.” That language comes to be used of the whole Bible as a generalization from small parts of the Bible, chiefly prophetic oracles—but this generalizing move requires warrants that are just as hard to come by as the ones I mentioned a few sentences back. Explicit biblical statements attributing inerrancy to the Bible simply aren’t to be had. Nor can one fall back on observable biblical phenomena. How, exactly, would one positively observe inerrancy? I cannot think of any way to do it. These considerations lead me to conclude that “inerrancy” is neither an explicit claim that “the Bible makes for itself” (sorry for personifying the Bible like that) nor an observable phenomenon of the Bible itself, but a theological judgment made about the Bible from outside, and usually a priori.

So that’s why you won’t find me talking about “inerrancy” very much, Alan. And you surely won’t have to worry about me pulling out “inerrancy” to try to shield the Bible from criticism (historical, form, redaction, or whatever, or just plain “boo”). To me, “inerrancy” is neither a property claimed by biblical authors for their texts nor a property that one can observe the texts to have, but a theological construct built up around the texts.