Inerrancy and Embodiment

The implications of humanity for our doctrine of Scripture

It is not uncommon for Christian children to want to pray for Satan. The logic is straight forward and simple. God wants us to love our enemies, Satan is our greatest enemy, therefore we should have compassion on Satan and desire his repentance. In fact one could argue it would be the height of piety to do so. Or there’s the more pragmatic children who realize that if you convert the Big Bad you take away the main thing driving all this crap. Shoot Hitler and the Nazis basically go away right? Get Satan to repent and you’ve basically ended the war.

But despite the fact that Jesus said to enter his Kingdom you need the faith of a child, the church has completely rejected this line of thinking. Not because the logic is incorrect but because the argument is unsound due to a premise children don’t know about: fallen angels can’t repent. Why does the church believe this? I’m not entirely sure, there is probably a theologian somewhere who knows, but that is not me.

One reason it is thought the fallen angels can’t repent is that they lack permanent embodiment. The spiritual entities which populate “the heavens” can almost certainly acquire bodies, or manifest themselves in flesh. There’s really no reason to think this isn’t possible and every biblical reason to think it can and has happened. Genesis 6 being one probable instance of spirit beings taking on flesh. But for whatever reason, God created the things we typically call Angels in such a way that they would not be permanently embodied, their primary mode of existence would be non spatial.

But why would embodiment lead to repentance? Or lack of embodiment lead to non repentance? Anyone who has struggled with sin probably thinks it is because they are embodied that they struggle with sin. Lusts of the flesh, etc. If you didn’t have biological imperatives wouldn’t it be easier to just stop sinning?

The goodness of the body is that it is inherently limiting. It requires us to achieve things slowly over time. Lacking a body is in some sense limitless. Which state is more conducive to humility and repentance? Limits or non limits? Obviously its limits. This is why Jesus’ incarnation is what makes Him so superior to any other god we know of. He chose limits, he chose smallness. We all work so hard to make ourselves bigger than we are. We strive for limitlessness, but the unlimited one chose to be limited. He chose to be embodied.

Permanent embodiment enables repentance through consequential awareness of sin and death. In Tim Powers’ book Declare, a supernatural take on the Cold War, he created fallen angels who have difficulty navigating basic awareness of reality. They have no sense of chronological sequence so it is difficult for them to understand what is happening. Our limits are good for us precisely because of the struggle they create. And I believe that God in his providence has incorporated our weakness into the scriptures themselves.

The doctrine of inerrancy is controversial among conservative Christians, let alone the unorthodox versions of Christianity. Conservatives tend to agree its true, or something like it is true. But no one really knows how to construct it anymore and the church has never really elucidated with much clarity exactly what we are to believe dogmatically about the nature of the scriptures except that they are in some very real sense God’s word, a sacred record of His activity with His people, and profitable for us in matters of faith, praxis, and most importantly a source of knowledge concerning the good news. The great Creeds make little of what we might consider a doctrine of inerrancy, yet they are all reliant upon Scripture as a source. For Conservative Christians there is no doubt the Scriptures come from God and that they are a source of divine knowledge. But do the scriptures contain errors? It depends almost entirely on how you define error.

I’ve considered myself a Chicago Statement of Faith style inerrantist since Seminary, but I’m not entirely sure I can claim that anymore. I think theres a lot of language in it that essentially opposes scripture with history and science, two topics I don’t think the biblical authors would’ve recognized as within the scope of their intent at least in the way our culture defines history and science. I think they thought they were writing history when they were writing history but their idea of history was not identical to ours, so there may be conflicts there that are essentially meaningless. I think this probably lands me in what used to be called the infallibilist camp, the things that scripture binds our consciences to are the things it speaks to with authority. That is without error, or even better that is what is true. I don’t think scripture is binding our consciences to things like when Jericho was sacked, but whether or not Jericho was sacked matters for our doctrine of scripture.

Now that I’m Anglican I guess I’m at least what might be called a sufficientist because Article 6 of the 39 says “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” And this article is titled the sufficiency of holy scripture for salvation.

Saint Augustine famously said

Only to those books of the Scriptures that are now called canonical have I learned to pay such honor and respect as to believe most firmly that not one of Scriptures’ authors has erred in writing anything. If I do find anything in those books that seems contrary to truth, I decide either that the text is corrupt [i.e., there are copyists’ mistakes], or that the translator did not follow what was really said, or that I have failed to understand it.

I think the simplicity of this, especially the last part about failing to understand, is instructive. And I think that making inerrancy about historical and scientific matters is essentially a failure of comprehension. Thankfully that also applies to so called scientific truths, because we have proven consistently that we are very good at failure to comprehend. As Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying in the end there will be no final conflict between God’s word and “Science”.

The contemporary fundamentalist thinks that inerrancy means that whatever the scripture records must be archaeologically and scientifically accurate, which is why they are willing to throw out science and archaeology whenever they contradict their interpretation of scripture. The irony is that the fundamentalist is far too modern, because they are allowing archaeology and science to determine their hermenutics and often completely ignore the deep theological meaning of scripture for the sake of poorly done apologetics. They are obsessed with tackling every contradiction. Take a contradiction like this:

Luke 10:4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no sandals, and greet no one along the way.

Mark 6:8-9 and He instructed them that they were to take nothing for their journey, except a mere staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belt— but to wear sandals; and He added, “Do not wear two tunics.”

Are there ways to harmonize this contradiction? Yes, there’s a few ways. It’s really not that difficult. But why feel the need to? Why not meditate upon what Jesus is teaching His disciples here?

But the one who feels the need to harmonize this contradiction will have to meditate on it. He will have to think about the meaning of the words. Even if he comes to merely apologetic conclusions he will have spent time meditating on the divine. How could this be a bad thing? Not only has he exercised his mind, which is good, but he has benefited his soul through spending time with God’s word. If your heart is full of hatred of atheists who point out contradictions and you have no love for God or his word in your heart, because your faith is so insecure that you obsess over the fundamentalist view of inerrancy then it probably won’t benefit you much. But I have met few people like this.

But what about a bigger contradiction? One that’s much more practical and applicable for contemporary people.

Jesus’ teaching on divorce is different in each synoptic Gospel.

Without looking exactly at this passage we can summarize the differences.

Mark: No divorce, no remarriage.

Luke: Incidental teaching not in response to the Pharisees, but agrees with Mark

Matthew: No divorce, no remarriage, except for the case of sexual immorality.

This is an oversimplification, but these three teachings clearly are not identical. Can these be reconciled? Yes, in good ways and bad ways. But is that the point? Is the point to try to reconcile them? Is the point to harmonize or to benefit from?

But there’s a deeper problem here. Modern people want the scriptures to be a moral guidebook that simply agrees with their morality and backs it up. That’s why people like Richard Dawkins become so infuriated with the Bible. It is not a mirror, but rather a document of antiquity that contains all kinds of things we find troubling today. Even Jesus seems to find the teaching of the scriptures troubling, specifically in these passages. He basically concludes that the law of Moses was imperfect because the people the law was given to were imperfect. That is profound. And its implications are much deeper than many realize. It means that God’s moral teaching is contextualized, gracious, and wise. There is never any turning from the ideal of heterosexual marriage here, but there is an acknowledgment that Scripture, something that Jesus held in the highest esteem, did not always contain God’s perfect will for us.

The scriptures are not a high and lofty collection of documents. They contain adultery, murder, human sacrifice, open disobedience, slavery, cries agaisnt God. They are not a simple document. They are an embodied document written by embodied people. I think the imperfections of scripture are not an argument agaisnt its holiness, but a further sign of it. God could have given us the Qur’an, a document Muslims believe (despite textual evidence to the contrary) that is essentially eternal and perfect, so divine that it is actually a potential doctrinal problem for their doctrine of Tawid or strict monotheism.

When scripture is confusing it causes us to meditate on it more, to dive deeper into its nature. Was Jesus really saying in Mark’s Gospel that to remarry after divorce is adultery? The only way to find out is to meditate on Scripture. The difficulties of scripture are like a pebble in your shoe, they cause you to attend to your feet, stop and take out the pebble. They require us to be limited in our understanding which leads to humility. I’ve seen people do the exact opposite with Jesus’ teaching, especially in Mark, and try to put heavy burdens upon those who have been abandoned by spouses or being actively abused. I think Jesus would have very harsh words for those people. Just as harsh as the words He would have for people who teach and practice laissez faire divorce and promote homosexual marriage in the Church. Before we throw around scripture like a weapon we need to come to it in humility, as a weapon to be used upon our hearts and souls first. God does not want to create proud people, he wants to create humble and self giving people. The difficulties of scripture can do that, because whatever you believe about innerrancy in the end the Bible is simply not a simple document. It isn’t a rule book for life as I was told so many times while growing up, its much better, it contains life giving wisdom. Bible doesn’t stand for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth because God’s word isn’t basic or merely instructions, it in itself is life giving and full of grace. It is something that should be struggled with and the struggle itself will bring grace and truth.