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Authority of
Scripture
What are the doctrines of Verbal
Inspiration and Inerrancy of Scripture?
Why are they important? What difference do
they make in our spiritual life?
Verbal Inspiration means that the Holy
Spirit saw to it that the very words of the
documents of Scripture are exactly what He
wanted, in order to convey the truth we
needed to know. Does it mean He dictated
those words? In most cases, "no," but
there are a few passages that begin, "Thus
saith the Lord," and the tablet of the law
was actually written by God's own hand.
Are we to be worshipers of words? Even in
Scripture we have precedent for translation
because Jesus probably read from the
original Hebrew of the Old Testament,
taught in Aramaic and was recorded by his
disciples in Greek. Clearly what is
important is the meaning that the
words convey, but that means also that the
words cannot be conveying a wrong
meaning.
And for the most part, the writers were
using their own words and the concepts God
had taught them, as well as including
concepts that they may not have
fully understood themselves. For example,
David almost certainly did not realize in
writing of his own anguish in Psalm 22 that
he was also prophesying the suffering
of Christ. Can God do this? Of course.
Can He also see to it that the
Jewish community and the early church were
moved to canonize the inspired documents
and reject those that were just ordinary?
Why not?
What does inerrancy mean? It is usually
stated as "inerrant in the
original documents (or autographs)." Some
might say that since we only have copies
of copies of copies, which might have
errors of transmission, what difference
does it make? It is this. By the
techniques of textual criticism, two or
more copies can be compared and the most
likely original be determined. Wear and
tear of the original or slips of the pen
might be introduced but the common ones
are recognizable. Ancient translations are
also helpful because common errors in one
language will be different from those in
another language.
And anyway, the integrity of the text in
the copies was carefully preserved, and
this is attested to by comparison of the
Dead Sea Scrolls with copies dated nearly
1000 years later. Jewish scribes would
carefully copy, then check, then count the
words, count the letters, find the middle
word and the middle letter, in both the
original and the copy. If discrepancies
could not be reconciled, the copy was
discarded, no matter how long it took to
prepare. We all recall that the Scribes
did not all recognize Jesus when He came.
He rebuked them for not seeing Him in
the Scriptures but did not tell them to
stop reading (or copying) the
Scriptures.
Inerrancy of the Scripture means that the
Scripture does not teach error.
For example, when we read in Ecclesiastes
"all is vanity, everything is
useless," does the Scripture teach that
statement as a fact? No, of course not.
The reader of the whole book knows that the
writer (it sure sounds like Solomon
from the description) really felt that way
at the time, but he came to the
conclusion at the end of the book that
meaning comes from obeying God - and THAT
is the teaching. Further, clear poetry can
be accepted as poetry and clear imagery
as imagery. But when something is written
as history it is not "docu-drama" and when
it is written as prophecy, it is not after
the fact.
Does it make a difference? If Scripture
has errors, then, even by reconstructing
the original, it could not be considered to
always teach truth. For example, if we
reconstruct a document to state that
Jericho was destroyed under the leadership
of Joshua but in truth Jericho was already
in ruins at that time, then Scripture is
teaching an error. And indeed, that was
the view of some archeologists until the
dating of the exodus from Egypt was
corrected. In their view, the Jericho
account was a made up story used to teach a
lesson -- that could also be described as a
pious fraud. But a correct dating of the
events revealed that the Scripture was
completely vindicated -- the walls fell
outward (so they were not pushed in) and
the invaders could have walked right in, it
was harvest time with grain lying on the
rooftops and yet the city was not
looted.
Can inerrancy be proven logically? Not
really because it is not possible to prove
a negative. Does that mean it is
illogical? Certainly not. It makes sense
that God would not mislead us and whenever
the Bible is confirmed by new discoveries,
it increases our faith that the unsolved
mysteries can also be solved. Also, unlike
the holy books of many other religions, the
Bible is tied to history. Thus when God is
known as "The God Who brought you out
of Egypt," it clearly implies that the
events really happened. The same is true
of "the God Who raised Jesus Christ from
the dead." By tying the principles of
the gospel to verifiable events, God is
saying, "You can believe the things
you cannot test on the basis of the things
you can."
Thus, if some of the testable facts of the
Scripture are proven false, it throws the
trustworthiness of the spiritual message
into doubt as well. If Jonah was a made up
story and Jesus talked about him as a
historical person, we may wonder what else
Jesus might be mistaken about. If Jesus
claimed to cast out demons but it could be
proven that he was simply treating mental
illness, does that not make us less
confident that He is really the way, the
truth and the life?
Of course the Scripture must be properly
interpreted and there may be
questions about some passages. Some people
think the book of Jonah is too dramatic to
be real and question the possibility of
survival in the belly of the large
sea creature. But that presupposes that
God could not have performed a
miracle. And, after all, Jesus really DOES
speak of Jonah and his experience as real
and an actual foreshadowing of His own
death and resurrection.
Can a person be a Christian and not believe
in the inerrancy of Scripture? Yes, of
course. But their knowledge of Christ is
in danger of erosion. And their attitude
towards the Scripture changes. Instead of
coming to the Scripture humbly, to be
judged and to learn, they come to judge,
deciding which parts are genuine and which
parts are false. The end of that line is
seen in the so called "Jesus Seminar" which
regularly meets to pare away what its
participants regard as additions to the
Gospels and ends up with a human
teacher.
Can the authorship of a book in the Bible
be in doubt and it still be regarded as
inspired? Yes, of course. If we believe
that the early church was equipped by the
Holy Spirit to determine which books were
to be included, they could surely have done
that even for books of uncertain
authorship, although the qualifications of
an author tended to be a Devine stamp of
approval. The book of Hebrews, for
example, does not sound like a writing of
Paul, but some feel that it was written
under his authority by an associate who was
given stylistic latitude.
And in the case of the Pentateuch (Genesis
through Deuteronomy), although the last
chapter was clearly not written by Moses
(describing Moses death) and the events
recorded in Genesis occurred before the
time of Moses so that he would have had to
reply on other sources, whether oral or
written or supernatural knowledge, still
the tradition of the Jews and the most
logical conclusion is that these are indeed
"The Books of Moses."
Thus we would expect them to be
contemporary accounts of the event he
witnessed and to be rich in geographical
and cultural details that would have been
lost if this were all written 800 years
later, perhaps by Ezra, after the
Babylonian captivity. And also, in
addition to having reasonable doubt about
those details, the reader would have to
conclude that some things were made up.
For example the finding of the "Lost
Scrolls" of the Law in the time of Josiah
would have to be interpreted as a cover
story, explaining why the (newly
written) "Books of Moses" had not been seen
before. This would put Ezra on the same
level as Joseph Smith who found and
translated the golden tablets and then
reported that they went up into heaven.
If confronted with a seeming contradiction
or inaccuracy in the Scripture, the person
who does not believe in inerrancy says,
"See, there you have it." Such as the
parallel passages in 2 Samuel 24:1 where it
says that God incited David to take a
census and 1 Chronicles 21:1 where it says
that Satan incited David to take a census.
That person would possibly conclude that
the Jews borrowed the concept of Satan from
the Babylonians. Yet the person who
believes in inerrancy will not give up so
fast and in that case knows that both can
be considered true. Just as in the case of
Job's suffering, Satan was given permission
to afflict Job, so it was God and it was
Satan. Moreover, it does not mean that God
is evil, because the Lord had His own
agenda in all this, and He accomplished
it.
R.S.O.
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