Inerrant? Inspired? What is Scripture?
There has been a long standing debate in Christianity with regard to the degree to which Scripture is inspired by God. On one extreme, Scripture was essentially written directly by God. Human authors dictated direct wording they received from God. In this view, every word in the Bible is perfectly factually true and there are no mistakes or contradictions. The other extreme is that the Scriptures were written by people with absolutely no input from God. These are just historical documents like any other historical document. There are mistakes, contradictions, historical factual errors, and bad ideas mixed in with the good stuff. Between these two poles are a wide variety of stances, most of which generally agree to call the Bible inspired but not inerrant.
The ELCA takes one of these views in the middle, acknowledging that God speaks to us through the Scriptures and through proclamation of the Gospel, but allowing that these books were also written by humans with human limitations. Of course, some people who believe in inerrancy oppose this stance by the ELCA, and often when they want to show its weakness, they point to 2 Timothy 3:16. This verse is so fundamental to the debate about inerrancy that I suspect anyone who has had this discussion with someone probably already has this memorized.
“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
As much as this may look like a clear case for inerrancy, it isn’t necessarily that clear. In this translation, it simply says that Scripture is inspired and useful, not inerrant and perfectly factual. Someone may argue that this translation isn’t quite right. The word translated “inspired” here is translated “God-breathed” elsewhere. That would be convincing were it not for the fact that humans are also God-breathed (Genesis 2:7), and we certainly aren’t inerrant and infallible. This verse doesn’t actually seem to be arguing that there are no factual mistakes in Scripture, but rather that God can speak through any part of Scripture to teach us something. I can’t imagine how the first eight chapters of 1 Chronicles are useful, but maybe someone can find some important lesson even in there. It doesn’t sound like this passage is actually referring to Scripture being inerrant, but even if it were, what does it mean by Scripture?
There is no way this verse could refer to our modern Protestant Bibles for a few reasons. One, modern English didn’t exist for more than a millennium after this verse was written. What we have now are translations of the Scriptures, but most people would agree that the translation wasn’t inspired by God, rather the original manuscript was. Furthermore, I highly doubt that the author of 2 Timothy had imagined this letter was going to be included in Scripture. The New Testament hadn’t been collected into canon yet. No one writing knew their letters would at one point be considered Scripture. There were numerous other Gospels and letters written that didn’t get included in our New Testament, some of these writings were very popular and circulated among the canon for hundreds of years, but eventually got left out. It is very hard to believe that the author of 2 Timothy considered his own letter part of Scripture.
In fact, if there was anything he would have considered Scripture, it would have been what we call the Old Testament today. Unfortunately, there is another problem here. Which Old Testament would he be referring to? The Greek edition of the Hebrew Bible that was circulating at the time was called the Septuagint. The Septuagint contains some things that aren’t in the Masoretic Text, which is what our Bibles use for the Old Testament, but it also leaves some passages out that are in the Masoretic Text. If the author of this letter was referring to the Septuagint as Scripture, does that mean that our Old Testament is incomplete? If this verse doesn’t refer to our New Testament because the canon hadn’t be collected yet, and it doesn’t refer to our Old Testament because there are some differences between our Old Testament and the Septuagint, and it doesn’t refer to our translations because the author would have been speaking about the original languages, what Scripture can we cling to for inerrancy? What exactly is the infallible, inerrant Word of God, and is it something that we can actually access?
But there is another problem with using this verse to force inerrancy. Sometimes the Bible offers different kinds of advice, tells contradictory stories, even argues with itself. When we demand that Scripture be inerrant to support our faith, we take away a great deal of the power that Scripture provides when we let it be free to wrestle. This is really part of the legacy of Israel, a name given to their ancestor Jacob for wrestling with God. The Bible isn’t supposed to simply fit perfectly. In reading it carefully, we can see a struggle throughout. Does good fortune in life depend on your behavior, or do bad things sometimes happen to good people? Does God forgive and forget or hold some people accursed for generations? Should we fight evil with violence or should we remain peaceful under all circumstances? The Bible has different answers to all these questions depending on which passage you read, and there is good reason for that. There is a time and place for all of these things. Even the dark, violent parts of the Bible can be useful for us to read to help us let go of our anger. But through the Bible, God blesses us with so many different ideas under so many different circumstances that we will always be able to find something to resonate with us, no matter what obstacles we face or joys we find in life.
If you want an example of the Bible disagreeing with itself but with good reason, briefly read through 1 Samuel 16, 17, and the first few verses of 18. If you read this, you will find that Saul met David, and David entered Saul’s service twice, in two different stories. In 16, Saul needs someone to play the lyre for him to keep him from having fits. A servant suggests David, a young man who is the son of Jesse. At this point, David is already considered a “man of valor” and “a warrior.” Upon Saul’s request, David joins the royal court and becomes close to Saul by playing the lyre for him.
In the next chapter, Israel is facing the Philistines, and David, just a young boy, goes to deliver some supplies to his brothers on the front line. He volunteers to fight Goliath, and Saul doesn’t appear to know who he is. They try to dress him in Saul’s own armor, but it doesn’t fit, so he just takes his sling and a handful of rocks, not exactly what you would expect of a warrior and man of valor who has already been part of Saul’s court for a while. After David defeats Goliath, Saul asks his general who David’s father is, but no one in the court seems to know, until they ask David directly. This seems strange as they knew David’s father in the previous chapter. Now, if one really wanted to make these stories fit, one could argue that they are in reverse order. David went to the line as a kid, killed Goliath, went home, and was called back to play the lyre years later. Unfortunately, that story would contradict 18:2, where the story makes clear that Saul took David into his service the day he killed Goliath and didn’t let him return to Jesse. Maybe the court suffers from memory loss, so when David returned home from service for a while, they completely forgot about him and his entire family, but that doesn’t seem likely.
What is more likely is that these two stories don’t function together perfectly because the author of 1 Samuel included two different stories about how David entered Saul’s service. One emphasizes David’s musical ability, which resulted in him being able to drive away an evil spirit with his lyre. The other story emphasized David as a warrior, who used not personal strength and valor but faith in God to defeat his enemies. If we spend too much time trying to force these stories to align, we will miss what they tell us about David, and more importantly, what they tell us about God. God is there in the ministry of those who work in the arts. God can drive away evil with the power of music. God is present with us when we gather with joy to listen. At the same time, God is there with us when we are most afraid, when the enemy seems too great and terrible for us to defeat. God can make a young boy rout an army with simply the power of faith. If we demand that these accounts be simply fact, these stories contradict each other, but if we look for some deeper meaning, they can both be true. Even if the Bible has errors, contradictions, and historical mistakes, that doesn’t reduce the power of the Spirit to make the text come alive for us. In fact, a text that argues with itself is much harder to reduce to dead and empty words than a text that lies down and gives up in the face of even the most rudimentary interpretation. The Bible is active and living because it is wild and refuses to be tied down, even by inerrancy. The Spirit invites us to let the Scriptures speak, not tell them what to say, and when we listen the text becomes more alive than we could possibly hope or imagine.
