Matt Flanagan of MandM is thinking about inerrancy (here and here). Matt writes exceptionally well. He makes one good point after another….

“Admittedly they are ancient near eastern “ANE” historiographies and the fact that the genre of ANE historiography uses hyperbole, lack of precision, a degree of historical reconstruction, etc needs to be taken into account.”

Indeed that needs to be taken in to accout but the Chicago statement does take that into a count, does it not?.

“Article VIII.

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.” (Source: http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html)

and:

“Article XIII.

WE AFFIRM the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

WE DENY that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.” (Source: http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html) (I recommend two great articles on this: http://www.tektonics.org/gk/hyperbole.html and http://www.tektonics.org/whatis/whatinspire.html)

In the quote from the blog post above Matt mentions that one of the things we need to take into account is “lack of precision” and the Chicago statement does take that into account by saying: “We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision”.

Also wouldn’t the case of cloak at Troas, if there was no such cloak, be a case of ” the reporting of falsehoods” and hence fit with the Chicago view? 2 Timothy would only be “errant” under this view if Paul did not issue said command/instruction. As an example if I wrote a book quoting Bill Clinton as saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” would the book be in error because of that? No. Since Bill Clinton did indeed say those words. Well suppose the account I gave of an error was my own, would that change the situation? I don’t see why it would. The doctrine of inerrancy(both versions discussed here) are about 2 Timothy(in this case) and not Paul as a person.

At this juncture I also think that is useful to distinguish between inspiration and inerrancy, while I think the former implies the latter, they are two distinct things. It is the inspiration that is verbal under the Chicago view(at least that is my interpretation of it) not the inerrancy. Jeremy Pierce is correct, the sentences(as present in the autographs and understood in their original socio-cultural, linguistic as well as textual context) are the units of inerrancy.

Verbal inspiration just means that God providentially brought about the very words and word order of the autographs. I think a good example of what I am trying(and doing a fairly poor job of, I know) trying to say here is the mention in Article XIII quoted above of “free citations”. When the NT quotes Jesus as saying something that should, under this view, not be taken to say that he said those exact words in that exact order.

Here the citation of Jesus is taken to be inerrant because in accurately reflects what was said, even if it does so in a manner that is not verbally precise.

What the verbal inspiration view says is just that in conveying that meaning these human authors were inspired by God in choosing the very words and word order they did.

This is different from saying that those words and their order were exactly the same as the words flowing from the lips of Jesus.

As an aside to this discussion about different views of inerrancy and inspiration in the Christian community, it is important to note, to all unbelievers out there, that the truth of Christianity does not depend on any particular doctrine of inerrancy, or indeed any doctrine of inerrancy at all.

Propositions like “There is a God”, “Christianity provides a true view of the world”, “God raised Jesus from the dead”, “Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews”, Jesus was born of a virgin”, “God is a Trinity”, etc do not at all contradict the proposition “The Bible is not inerrant”. Inerrancy should not at all be considered a hurdle that unbelievers most get through before becoming Christian.

http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2010/02/christian-carnival-cccxv.html

I think VPI and DPI can be affirmed simultaneously.

Problems lie elsewhere. For example, does a work of biblical historiography have to be free of all historical error to be a text that leads us into all truth, which illumines the soul, and so on? According to Luther, it does not; surely he was right. “Let it pass,” he said, when people got all flustered about the discrepancies between 1 Sam – 2 Kings and Chronicles, discrepancies that cannot reasonably be explained away based on the assumption that pristine originals of Chronicles agreed with pristine originals of 1 Sam – 2 Kings.

Furthermore, if this kind of perfect concordance were important, such that texts w/o this kind of concordance are unreliable in a strong sense, then something went terribly wrong in the course of transmission of the texts, effectively leaving us with errant and unreliable texts.

Furthermore, why on earth did God give us four gospels, with minor and major discrepancies of many kinds between them?

Surely each of the four gospels is a tremendous gift to God’s people. Our praise of Scripture is more fulsome because of the fourfold witness, even if the fact of having four versions that disagree in detail creates problems and opportunities for those in search of the historical Jesus.

A historian works with the sources he has, not the ones he wishes he had. There is no evidence to the effect that God suspended this well-known rule for the purposed of biblical historiography. The rule remained in effect for the biblical authors.

VPI and DPI are tenable nonetheless, but need to be qualified to allow for this working of this rule. Just an example of how the language of inerrancy has to be qualified to fit the facts of the case.

I think the key to some of your examples is a sufficiently externalist theory of meaning. When someone speaks of a sunrise, the thing they’re actually referring to is not literally a sun rising (well, from relativity I suppose it’s also a sun rising with respect to one reference frame but a bunch of other things from the many other reference frames). So the actual occurrence that we see as the sun rising locks onto the reference of the term “sunrise”. We thus have successful reference whether the speaker intends to see it as a sun rising or as something else. That happens whether the speaker is a contemporary scientist speaking unscientifically but in ordinary idiom or a biblical author simply using the language of the day without caring about the scientific question.

You can thus say that the speech is true as intended, and thus the very words used construct a true sentence. If the word “not” had been inserted, it would have been false, but as it stands it’s true. This is not a rejection of VPI, because the unit of truth-value is the sentence, not the words, and the sentence gets its meaning by reference magnets such as actual events involving the sun, the horizon, and so on, as long as the person speaking isn’t trying to give a scientific theory. The Chicago Statement would be happy saying this is compatible with its conception of inerrancy.

I’d say the same goes for references to the heart and kidneys as metaphorical for the mind and emotions, the same way the use of the heart for us in English today is metaphorical for the emotions, and what people say when they say their heart was crushed by a breakup is still true, even if not true of their literal blood-pumping organ. VPI is compatible with accepting metaphorical speech as true. The actual words used in the metaphor were intended by God, and the sentence is true and without error. The only error is if some anti-apologist comes along with some kind of cultural superiority, pretending the language of ancient Israel involved claims that your physical organ the heart is the organ that makes your decisions for you and that your physical organs the kidneys are where your emotions are located. There’s no reason to think they even thought that, but even if they did the reference-magnet feature of natural language kicks in with this the same way it does with sunrises.

I’d say that your way of handling the cloak command is novel to me. It’s not at all how I’d have thought to deal with that. I’m not sure if I think it violates VPI if Paul happened to make a mistake about where he left the cloak. Here’s one reason to think it might not. Maybe there’s a genre switch from his apostolic commands (e.g. instructions how to conduct his ministry in the church and instructions how to live in a godly way) to his personal commands to Timothy like this one. The first are binding commands on Timothy, and any assumptions they explicitly make that are wrong would violate inerrancy.

If it turns out Adam wasn’t made first (or at least if it turned out that in the account of Adam and Eve Adam wasn’t made first, depending on whether Paul’s commands there require the historical reality of the Genesis account, an issue I won’t try to settle here), then we have an error. But maybe the command to get his cloak is a mere reporting of a request from Paul to Timothy the way the book of Luke reports what the disciples did when they asked Jesus questions with false assumptions. If it’s possible for a genre switch of that sort to occur within a book (and I wouldn’t want to rule it out immediately without thinking about it sufficiently), then maybe VPI is compatible with Paul being wrong about where the cloak is.

I don’t think you hold to VPI. I think you’ve explicitly said some things that VPI wouldn’t allow. It’s just that most of your examples here to try to pull apart DPI and VPI don’t seem to me to do so as easily as you think they do, because someone holding VPI could accept your take (or at least one very similar) on those cases.
.-= My last blog-post ..Views on Baptism =-.