How Are We Meant to Understand Genesis?

Rowland Croucher wrote:

Here’s an abridged version of my thoughts on the matter (from my book ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’). Although reason and tradition may have been illumined and guided by the Holy Spirit, they have a secondary and subordinate place to scripture. Why? Because this was Christ’s view of scripture. John Stott, for example, puts it simply in several of his books: ‘[Our] view of scripture… is [to be] Christ’s view of scripture. He endorsed the Old Testament, made provision for the New Testament, and because of Christ we accept the authority of the book.’

Don:

Amen.

Rowland:

Billy Graham’s position is similar to his mentor, Carl Henry’s: He has written and said many times: ‘I believe the Bible is the inspired, authoritative word of God, but I don’t use the word “inerrant” because it’s become a brittle, divisive word.’ Graham believed that the key issue between evangelical Christians in the 1980’s and 90’s would be hermeneutics, or how to interpret scripture properly and apply it to personal and social life.

Don:

If you (truly) believe Scripture is the inerrant Word of God, you will be very careful how you deal with it. You will also be much more likely to study it diligently and apply it to your life. This is a false dichotomy drawn here.

Rowland:

The inerrantist view assumes that unless the Bible can be shown to give trustworthy information on non-religious matters, then it can’t be trusted in the more important religious realm.

Don:

Well, if you can’t trust it in earthly things that you can test, why should you trust it in the heavenly things that you can’t test? How can spiritual truth be contained in factual error? This is only logical and Jesus reflected this logic in John 3 when he spoke to Nicodemus.

Rowland:

The neo-orthodox view says the Bible is a witness to God’s primary revelation in Christ, but as all human words are fallible it is not helpful to speak of the Bible as being in itself the word of God. It may _become_ the word of God as we encounter God himself in Jesus Christ through its preaching.

Don:

Those who affirm inerrancy also recognize that the prime purpose of Scripture is to reveal Christ. Amen. So this is a false dichotomy also. But the notion of the witness being carried in fallible human words readily becomes ‘anything I don’t like is the fallible words of men; the bits I do like are the word of God’. You quickly have a religion of your own design; an idolatrous religion where you become God, deciding what you will or won’t believe.

Rowland:

A third model we might call ‘progressive evangelical’. We find an exposition of it in John Stott’s chapter, ‘The Authority and Power of the Bible’, in Rene Padilla (ed.), ‘The New Face of Evangelicalism’ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1976). Commenting on the Lausanne Covenant phrase ‘without error in all that it affirms’, Stott writes: ‘Not everything included in scripture is true, because not everything recorded in scripture is affirmed by scripture.’ It would be naive, he argues, to declare that ‘every word in the Bible is true’. Consider, for example, the Book of Job. Of the speeches recorded there God says, ‘You have not spoken of me what is right’ (42:7). So in declaring that the Scripture is ‘without error in all that it affirms’, we are committed to ‘the responsible work of biblical interpretation, so that we may discern the intention of each author and grasp what is being affirmed’.

Don:

This is not a third model as such; the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy covers these issues. It’s pretty obvious, really, that the Bible records the errant thinking of people (another example is slabs of the book of Ecclesiastes; it’s really only at the end that truth ultimately asserts itself over meaninglessness).

Rowland:

Jack Rogers (Fuller Seminary) has a helpful comment on these three models. He says all three are useful inasmuch as they are seeking to answer different questions. The first model asks the question: Is the Bible an authoritative and trustworthy revelation for all of life? We can answer with the inerrantists: ‘Yes!’ The second model asks: In whom is God most fully revealed? We should answer with the neo-orthodox: ‘Jesus Christ, to whom scripture bears unique and authoritative witness.’ The third model asks yet another question: How is the Bible most helpfully to be interpreted? Answer: ‘It is a divine message given in human words which are best understood in their various historical and cultural contexts.’

And the Chicago statement covers all three bases. Innerrancy does not involve ignoring context, etc.

‘The issue’, says Rogers, ‘among evangelicals is not whether there is transcendent truth in the biblical revelation, but how that truth is incarnated in human, literary forms. The problem is not one of authority, but of interpretation’ (J. Rogers, ‘Mixed Metaphors, Misunderstood Models, and Puzzling Paradigms’, unpublished paper, Fuller Seminary, 1981).

Don:

If someone truly accepts the authority of the Word, then issues of interpretation can be discussed on the basis of what Scripture says and we can debate just what it is saying. However, if someone does not accept the authority of Scripture (e.g., Mark T on this forum), then we have no common ground for discussion. We end up like ships passing in the night.

Rowland:

The whole issue has become very complex. One of the problems with the inerrancy position is that it is but a short step away from validating biblical statements about the cosmos from contemporary science. Hodge and Warfield, two evangelical theologians, for example, believed that the Bible specifically predicted the results of nineteenth-century science. Very few inerrantists would now agree with them. But might not some aspects of today’s ‘creationism’ become similarly dated (foolish?) in a few years?

Don:

Yes, of course. I agree. It’s crucially important that our historical models, which might be consistent with the clear teaching of the Bible, are not equated with that teaching. That’s the mistake that the RC church made in Galileo’s day: their thinking had become so wedded to Aristotelian philosophy (the academic consensus of the day) that they ended up rejecting Galileo’s sound observational science. See http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v14/i1/galileo.asp Those who wed the Bible to the big bang or evolution or whatever today will find their Bible widowed tomorrow. In our creationist fraternity, catastrophic plate tectonics seems to explain a lot of earth history in a way that is consistent with the biblical account of the flood, but the Bible does not teach catastrophic plate tectonics. We endeavour to be very clear about such things. See for example, this editorial: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v11/i2/editorial.asp

Rowland:

Some other concerns with the inerrancy position include the following: * Inerrancy, in its modern form, is not spelt out like this in the Bible itself. It would be ironic to claim something for Scripture which it does not claim for itself. Nowhere do words like ‘infallible’ or ‘inerrant’ occur in Scripture.

Don:

A little logic needs to be applied here. Here are statements for the Chicago statement:

“WE AFFIRM that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses. “WE AFFIRM that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.”

A principle of logic is the law of the excluded middle. Now if Scripture claims that it is wholly reliable and accurate in all that it affirms, which it does in various ways, it also affirms that it is without error—i.e., inerrant. There is no middle ground to stand on. It is merely word games to claim otherwise.

Rowland:

Indeed, such a negative, abstract form of thinking was quite alien to the biblical writers. They preferred concrete concepts like ‘inspired’ (God-breathed). Jewish rabbinical thinking in Jesus’ day was ‘inerrantist’:

Don:

Rowland, you’ve just contradicted yourself here. You say that ‘such an abstract form of thinking was quite alien to the biblical writers’ but that the ‘Jewish rabbinical thinking of Jesus’s day was inerrantist’. Jesus learnt at the rabbi’s feet and the apostle Paul who wrote much of the NT was a trained rabbi.

BTW, ‘inerrancy’ here is painted as ‘negative’, but it is merely the flip side of a coin where the other side is ‘accuracy’.

Rowland:

they viewed every word of their scriptures as equally revelatory. But Jesus rejected this position, contending that some scriptures reveal the will of God more perfectly than others (see for example Matthew 23:23, Mark 10:4-9, John 7:22).

Don:

Jesus affirmed the rabbinical view that it was all inspired, even down to the smallest letter or mark on a letter. But of course that did not mean that all scripture was of equal importance and the Chicago statement recognizes that also:

“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.”

Rowland:

* Historically, the major creeds of the church have not included any notion of biblical inerrancy nor, in pre-Reformation creeds, any statement at all about Scripture.

Don:

That is simply because it was never an issue until Reformation times. The creeds dealt with heresies of the day (denial of the deity of Christ, as per Mark T, for example). They did not deal with issues that no one dissented on. The reliability and authority of Scripture just was not an issue that needed defining. However, the writings of the church fathers showed that they certainly viewed Scripture as wholly reliable in everything it touched upon (putting in the positive expression).

Rowland:

Throughout most of its history, the Christian church has looked upon the Bible as a source rather than as an object of belief.

Don:

The Chicago statement says: “WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history. “WE DENY that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.”

Some top scholars signed this statement.

BTW, I do not look at the Bible as an object of belief. This is another false idea of inerrancy. Christ is the object of my belief, but I only know of objectively of Him through the Bible.

Rowland:

* No one has a copy of the ‘original autographs’, so any notion of these being inerrant is a matter of theory rather than reality. …

Don:

The Chicago Statement also deals with this issue.

Rowland:

* For some, irreconcilable difficulties in our Bibles preclude any belief in inerrancy. ….

Don:

The Chicago Statement also addresses this issue.

Rowland:

In essence, I believe, the inerrancy debate is a function of two important and more fundamental issues. First, logic can be the enemy of truth. Every logical/rational human system will have its day.

Don:

This is about the only thing that I agree with Mark T about. Logic is *not* the enemy of truth. Unsound logic is, for sure. But the only way you could prove that ‘logic is the enemy of truth’ is to use logic and that would only prove that logic is not the enemy of truth! It is a self-defeating proposition. See the article “Loving God with all your mind” http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i2/logic.asp This attempt to deny logic seems like an admission that inerrancy is an inescapable logical deduction from biblical teaching about inspiration.

Rowland:

The problem with all our explaining the Bible – about any doctrine – is that we can be tempted to become wiser than God. One of the axioms of theological thinking, is that because God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, we will always have to live with antimony or paradox.

Don:

Of course there will be mysteries that we cannot fully understand. But that is due to our incomplete knowledge, not the failure of logic.

Rowland:

Now to the second issue. Whoever would have a vested interest in causing Christian people to fight one another, usually over partisan interpretations of our most important doctrines? A further question: Which two books of the Bible are evangelicals most prone to argue about? Genesis and Revelation – concerning the proton and the eschaton. What are these two books mainly about? The triumph of God and his Christ, and the downfall of Satan and evil. I believe there’s a clue there somewhere. Of course, in the final analysis, the practical question for Christians is not so much what we say about the Bible, but what we do with it. How committed are we to the serious study of the Bible? How regularly do we hear the Lord in a disciplined reading of and reflection upon God’s Word? How obedient are we to the Bible’s clear commands to live a godly, just and humble life? How willing are we to live _under_ the authority of God’s Word, (rather than, as critics, living solely _above_ the biblical text)?

Don:

I can only say Amen to those sentiments. It was not until I came to submit myself to the authority of the whole of God’s Word, not just the bits that I found to my liking, that I found true freedom as a Christian. I thought I believed, but I discovered that I really didn’t. How could God create everything is six days? Impossible! I could not imagine how all that could happen in that time. When I came to realize that He did as he indicated, suddenly God was the awesome, all-powerful One who could do anything, including answer prayer. God was out of the box of my own limited understanding. Furthermore, I found a zeal for studying and obeying the Word that I had lost. If you think the Bible contains errors (i.e., is not inerrant), then studying it loses a lot of its attraction.

Rowland: Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, had a ‘high’ view of Scripture. So must we.

Don:

Amen. That’s one of the major points of my submission on why I take Genesis as history.

Blessings,

Don