The Infallibility and Multi-Vocality of Scripture

Part of reading and understanding the Bible is the acknowledgement to the fact that the Bible is inconsistent within itself - not unified, as it were - as we have been led to believe by well-meaning pastors and theologians. We find numerous mistakes, inaccurate witness, historic revisions, and irreconcilable passages within its pages. But rather than framing this truth in terms of a "fallible" Bible (a common knee-jerk reaction by scholars, the media, and wise-cracking friends) I would rather like to understand this as giving to us an "infinitely wider" Bible. One coloured by the perceptions of multiple authors, their real-life experiences, their accumulated knowledge gathered through training, perception, and life in general. One pitted with the veracity of time and tradition through the many ages of paganism, Judaism and the Church itself. A testimony which I understand to be the multiple voices (or, multi-vocality) of Scriptures.

As such, we now have in our possession a Bible that is replete with the Word of God through an infinite number of sources, viewpoints, and historic arguments both studied and pedestrian. Ranging from wise-fools to corrupt Kings, humble shepherds to hoary sagas, imperfect leaders to willful prophets, faithless priests to wicked scribes. From exasperated housewives to diligent fishermen, hardy camel drivers to orphaned girls lost and alone; from uncertain guards to irreligious jailers, doubting tax gathers to besotted wine-bibbers. From believing crooks to repentant murderers, incorrigible thieves to clear-sighted virgins, from endearing boys and girls to children of faith.

Within the testimony of Scriptures comes to us an infinite parade of beggars, clowns, fools, and ignoble. As well as the honorable, studious, faithful, and spiritual. We see the depressed, the destitute, the harmed and the hurting. We see the determined, the persevering, the blessed and the rewarded. We see repentants and the sinful; the disbelieving and the believing; the confessing and the wicked. The testimony of the Bible shouts to one-and-all its testimony to our fallibleness, making known to us that we are in good company with the residents of its historic pages down through time immemorial.

So then, the misnomer of ascribing the Bible's pages and integrity as "fallible" should be corrected and understood as "faithful and accurate" in its revelatory depiction of man's fallenness and his need for redemption, for guidance, for humility and graciousness. The Bible ascribes to us its "earthy testimony of a heavenly God's revelation to fallen men and women." A testimony as large-and-wide as God is wise-and-deep. A testimony both plain and mysterious. A testimony that can lend doubt, on the one hand, to our "too-well constructed versions" of who we think God is, what He is doing, who we are, and where all this is going. As well as lend certitude (as versus certainty), on the other hand, to those very same questions when constructed correctly, using a broader hermeneutic, a more balanced theology, a wiser understanding of what exactly the Scriptures actually are as redemptive revelation. In this regard we then have an "infallible" Bible in perfect testimony to the Divine.

Lastly, we must add to the revelatory vocality of the Bible the very revelatory voice of God himself in the wisdom, depth, and infinity of his divine personage and the Triune fellowship of Father, Spirit, Son. Whose voice rumbles through its earthy pages with the divine life and breath of our Savior-Redeemer who is the Creator-God and everlasting I AM. Who makes those who are dead, alive through His Spirit. Who empowers sinful men and women with a spiritual renewal to re-embrace life with the thunderous voices of the resurrected. Whose people rumble forth on the storms of His embrace on the troubling sounds of crucifixion - to death, to sin, flesh, and world - to dead men everywhere listening. Who hear in the storms of heavenly redemption the further sounds of lives reaped-and-harvested from emptiness, vanity, ego and pride. It is the sound of Love spoken down through the ages in grace and mercy. A sound more troubling to our soul than any other sound can ever be heard. For it is the voice of God heard in the revelation of Scriptures. A voice valiant and courageous, willing to seek, to find, to embrace all who hear his voice, seek and submit. It is the voice of everlasting Love.

R.E. Slater

November 2, 2011

I think “infallible” does a better job than “inerrant” so long as I can explain what it means. “Infallible,” to me, means the Bible never fails in its main purpose which is to identify God for us, to communicate his love and his will to us, and to lead us into salvation and a right relationship with our Creator, Savior and Lord. - Dr. Roger Olson, Why inerrancy doesn't matter

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On Not Harmonizing (the Gospels)

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/10/31/on-not-harmonizing/

J.R.Daniel Kirk

October 31, 2011

I’ve just wrapped up teaching the Synoptic Gospels part of my Gospels and Acts course. Going through the individual books, looking over proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem, and seeing how the seemingly harmonious stories portray Jesus’ ministry in quite different lights, we are left with a few conclusion that are surprising to many of us. Here are a couple:

• The Gospel writers have different ideas about how Jesus’ death works, which means they have different ideas about how God brings salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

• The Gospels we have used sources, including, probably, Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, and yet they felt free to change this source for various reasons, including: style, making a somewhat different point, causing the story to more clearly echo an OT antecedent, eliminating theological claims that they did not want to make, or including new theological claims that are somewhat at odds with the theological claims of the original story.

This means that there is not only a plurality of voices in the NT, there is an irreducible theological diversity.

But more importantly, this theological diversity is no accident of history but, on the human level, has been intentionally introduced into the texts we have in front of us. Luke intentionally modifies Mark (and Matthew?) to increase the continuity between the OT narrative and the work of Jesus, and to eliminate the idea of Jesus’ death procuring salvation for people as such.

Two questions came up that I think are important for us to keep working through, especially as evangelicals for whom such conclusions seem to push against our prior conception of what it means to call the Bible the word of God.

First, what does this mean for “scripture interpreting scripture”? This rule became quite popular at the time of the Reformation, or at least, if you Google “scripture interprets scripture” the people who are the most fierce advocates for the view are likely to be appealing to the Reformation traditions in their defense.

But what do we do when Luke says, “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized?

What are we to do when Mark says that you don’t put new wine in old wineskins, but Luke feels compelled to add, “No one wants new wine, old is better!”? Do we let Mark’s apparent meaning stand, where Jesus is the new wine that cannot be contained by the older Jewish practices? Or do we allow the “more clear” Lucan conclusion to change our reading?

http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=new+wine&qs_version=ESV

Matthew 9:17
Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved."
Mark 2:22
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins."
Luke 5:37-38
³⁷And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. ³⁸But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. ³⁹And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good/better.'"

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Biblical_Studies/New_Testament_Commentaries/The_Gospel_of_Mark/Chapter_8

[There can be two responses:] (1) [Do we] allow the scripture one author wrote help interpret that author’s other passages; [or] (2) allow the NT’s example of rereading the OT in light of Christ to train us to reread the OT as a witness to the saving life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.

Question 1 -

If we insist on giving the one meaning made clear by the other texts, we start to force the Bible into our preconception of what kind of Bible would be good for us, what kind of Bible would qualify as “word of God,” and in so doing we spurn the actual Bible that God did give us, and that God thought was adequate for conveying God’s word.

Question 2 - What do we do with this stuff as pastors?

My answer here: it is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.