Inerrancy – a mainly American problem?
Michael Bird, while not disavowing biblical inerrancy, is concerned with how that doctrine has functioned, especially in North America.
‘American evangelicals demand a rigid precision for inerrancy not shared by the global church, they position inerrancy rather than christology as the chief marker of orthodoxy, and they police inerrancy in their networks with a Taliban-esque ferocity.’
Moreover, suggests Bird, when they seek to defend inerrancy what they often end up doing is defending the inerrancy of their own interpretation of Scripture and the hegemony of their own evangelical tribe.
Bird notes the following:
- The firing of J. Ramsay Michaels from Gordon-Conwell Seminary for using redaction criticism to understand the Gospels.
- The ejection of Robert Gundry from the Evangelical Theological Society because he interpreted the Matthean infancy narrative as based on a form of midrash.
- The dismissal of Peter Enns from Westminster Seminary because of his book Inspiration & Incarnation, which was designed to stop evangelicals from losing their faith when they learned about things such as ancient background texts like the Enuma Elish, debates about the dating of Jericho, Old Testament war texts, and source criticism. Yes, I know that Peter later wandered far from the evangelical fold, but throwing someone off a cliff will do that to you.
- The ostracizing of my friend and former colleague Andrew McGowan for his book The Divine Spiration of Scripture because he pointed out that James Orr was better than B.B. Warfield when it came to inerrancy.
- The canceling of apologist Michael Licona by evangelical leaders for denying inerrancy because he interpreted Matt 27.52-53 as “apocalyptic special effects” rather than literally.
Of course, the fires had already been well stoked back in the 1970s with the publication of Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible. The cause was taken up by Norman Geisler, who had a hand in more than one of the ‘cancellations’ just mentioned.
I agree with Michael Bird that inerrancy is, mercifully, less of a watershed issue here in the UK. But I go a little bit further than him when I suggest that ‘inerrancy’ is simply not a useful theological concept.
To put it simply: ‘inerrancy’ is something that might be predicated of a telephone directory, but not of a psalm.