The Erosion of Inerrancy?

I understand why many evangelicals regard the inerrancy of the Bible as important, but they need to think hard about this doctrine before (in Roger Olson's words) it dies the death of a thousand qualifications. What Olson means is this: there was a time when inerrancy was defended in a straightforward and full-blooded way. As evangelicals began to take modern biblical scholarship more seriously, they gradually began to qualify inerrancy and make it more realistic. To cut a long story short, evangelical theologians who defend inerrancy today often see it as entirely compatible with biblical phenomena like the following:

(1) Lack of precision.

(2) Spelling errors.

(3) Grammatical irregularities.

(4) The topical arrangement of material.

(5) Variant selections of material in parallel accounts.

(6) The use of exaggeration (hyperbole) and round numbers.

(7) Popular and observational descriptions of nature e.g. the four corners of the earth.

(8) The accurate reporting of falsehoods e.g. the author of Chronicles infallibly reported erroneous statements which he faithfully reproduced from the sources that he used.

(9) The use of free citations e.g. the fact that the New Testament often quotes the Old Testament in inexact ways (and also sometimes interprets the Old Testament in unexpected and unusual ways).

A brief comment on the fourth item above (topical arrangement of material). Many modern evangelicals, seeing that the synoptic gospels locate the Cleansing of the Temple at the end of Jesus' ministry and that John's gospel locates it at the start of his ministry, are happy to say that there was one Temple-cleansing event which different writers located in different contexts for topical or thematic (or perhaps even theological) reasons. Many of the earlier evangelicals would have been outraged at this suggestion; as far as they were concerned, there were two separate Temple-cleansings, end of story... Similarly with Peter's denial of Christ. A number of earlier evangelicals, in order to resolve the anomalies in the four gospels' accounts about the incident, concluded that the cock crowed more than twice and that Peter denied Christ more than three times.

Let's be generous and concede that the modern evangelical view of inerrancy is still tolerably coherent. But I think that Olson is right; if inerrancy is modified any further, then terms which evangelicals like to apply to their theological opponents (fuzzy, equivocal, compromise, doubletalk) will begin to fit the evangelical doctrine of the Bible.

One of the things that challenges evangelicals to examine and clarify the doctrine of inerrancy is debates about GENRE in the biblical writings. Every evangelical Christian (even the most literalistic Dispensationalist) has always admitted freely that one can identify a variety of genres (e.g. history, narrative, prophecy, apocalyptic, poetry, psalmody, parable) in the Bible. What makes the subject of genre potentially controversial is that some evangelical scholars have recently begun to do two things that mark a departure from the longstanding (and familiar) evangelical approaches to genre:

(a) They argue that the genre of certain biblical passages has hitherto been misunderstood by mainstream evangelicals; what was previously classified as "historical" or "narrative" can now rightly be classified as something else.

(b) They have begun to extend the range of genre to include things in the Bible like religious fiction and midrash.

Please don't misunderstand me; I am not assuming that these unconventional evangelicals are correct in their various diagnoses. What I am saying is that their arguments and discussions cannot simply be dismissed as "liberal Christian betrayals of biblical truth". The unconventional evangelicals are not playing the tiresome liberal card of reinterpeting and updating the Bible to make it say something congenial to modern ears (e.g. "Jesus would have approved of marxist philosophy or multiculturalism or homosexual lifestyles", or whatever). The evangelical renegades are claiming to do what responsible evangelical biblical studies has always done: to study biblical passages in a way that is faithful to things like the author's intention and the literary genre of the particular passage under discussion.

Disagreement about genre is not something new in evangelical Christian circles; it has been around for centuries. Long before Darwin ever put pen to paper and long before modern Israel was established as a nation, evangelicals debated with each other (and with Matthew Henry!) about the proper interpretation of Genesis 1-3 or about the meanings of the term "Israel" in the O.T. prophets and in Paul's letters, and some of these disagreements have always depended on different verdicts about the genre of certain biblical passages.

One cannot short-circuit the whole debate by taking your stand on biblical infallibility; no amount of pondering about infallibility can guarantee that your understanding of Ezekiel chapters 40-48 is right and everyone else's is up the pole.

In 1959, there were probably not more than four hundred Christians in the world who supported young-earth creationism. Today, there are probably at least thirty million young-earth creationists in North America alone. In a climate where an evangelical can be bitterly attacked for defending a hallowed old position like old-earth creationism (let alone that satanic invention known as theistic evolution), the young evangelical scholar who dares to publish his unconventional thoughts about the genre of Genesis 1-3 had better have a thick skin and a robust constitution.

UPDATE: In a blog post on 7 December (entitled "Getting Inerrancy Wrong"), Michael Patton defended "reasoned inerrancy" and argued that "technically precise inerrancy" is a misleading and unnecessary modern distraction. He also supported the view that the Gospels recorded the ipsissima vox of Jesus rather than his ipsissima verba (i.e. his authentic voice rather than his actual words).