Fewer Broken Pieces

Here continues my commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, starting with the seventh article:

We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.

We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

I can give a resounding “Amen!” to thy mysterious nature of inspiration.  The eighth article:

We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

This article clearly answers the charge “if God wrote the Bible, why isn’t it homogeneous?”  The idea that the authors of scripture were mere scribes for the Holy Spirit has never been popular.  However, verbal plenary inspiration comes close to this position, where each and every word was chosen by God, but in conformity with the author’s style.  In effect, it comes quite close to removing all agency from the human authors in their writing of scripture.  This is hard to harmonize with the fact that some books (especially the epistles) indeed have a rather personal agenda for the author.  So when Paul sends greetings, or when he gives advice (but not divine command), how is inspiration working there?  It is a complex issue. The ninth:

We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.

We deny that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word.

This does not make the resulting documents “perfect,” however, as can be seen by various errors of spelling and grammar which may be found in the scriptures.  So what sort of error, and how severe, is a true threat to inerrancy?

It has been a while since I posted any new commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.  Here is the fourth article:

We affirm that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.

We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God’s work of inspiration.

I believe that this is only addressing the source languages of the Bible and does not concern translation.  Still, I think no statement of bibliology is of much use today without some clarification on translation, since so few read Hebrew and Greek.  The problem is that there is no such thing as a “perfect” translation, strictly speaking.  So how does the curse of Babel weigh on our understanding of written revelation?  I will watch for clarifications on the translation issue in the rest of the Statement. Article five:

We affirm that God’s revelation within the Holy Scriptures was progressive.

We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings.

The obvious question here: “how do you know that there has been no normative revelation since the completion of the New Testament writings?”  I suppose that will be addressed in later portions of the statement as well. The sixth article:

We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.

This is, to say the least, very interesting.  There were no verses, chapters, spaces, or punctuation (including explicit quotation marks) in the original texts.  So yes, the very words is an apt way of talking about the issue.

Hebrew, however, poses a challenge.  The original text of the Old Testament contained consonants only.  The writing and pronunciation system we use today was codified from the oral traditions by the Masoretes long after the consonants were penned.  So this leaves us with a dilemma.  There are many cases where the Hebrew consonants are ambiguous, and some where that difference can affect a significant shift in meaning.  However, the means to tell multiple options apart, and therefore the key to ascertaining the meaning of the text, was not part of written revelation.  It was oral tradition which was preserved in parallel with the text.  This bends our understanding of “written revelation” severely.  Affirming the whole whole and the parts of written revelation becomes problematic when one of the parts is not actually recorded in the text.

Not only does this make it difficult to speak of written revelation, it makes all the more important the need for some theology of preservation (in this case of the oral tradition of the Hebrew scriptures) if we are going to be able to rightly understand today’s bible as inerrant.

I have just finished Jaroslav Pelikan’s Whose Bible Is It?, which is “a short history of the scriptures.” But there is a bit more than history found in its pages. First:

The very familiarity of the Bible after all these centuries can dull its sharp edges and obscure its central function, which is not only to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the comfortable, including the comfortable who are sitting in the pews of their synagogue or church as they listen to its words.

And again:

The language of the Bible is to be read and reread, to be pondered and scrutinized. To the eyes and heart of faith, after all, it is a love letter, one long love letter. . . . The great commentators of the sacred text have been set apart from the run-of-the-mill exegetes by their having leaned to exploit its very strangeness to probe beneath the surface.