"The Word of God" and infallibility

A couple of days ago, I was reading an article whose author first committed to the Bible being "the Word of God" and then a page later said that the Bible is not infallible in any way. I found this very puzzling. It seems:

• If an assertion of p is the word of x, then either: (a) p is true, or (b) x is mistaken about p, or (c) x is lying about p.

But God is essentially omniscient, so he can't be mistaken about anything. And surely it's foundational of our relationship with God that "God is not a man that he should lie" (Numbers 23:19). So every assertion in the Bible is true if the Bible is God's word.

Now, granted, there may be a bit of a gap between saying that every assertion in the Bible is true and saying that the Bible is infallible. One might note that there are speech acts other than assertions in the Bible, and infallibility for these speech acts comes to something else. For instance, there are commands in the Bible. I don't know what infallibility would come to in the case of a command, but it is plausible that whatever exactly infallibility would come to in the case of a command, a command from God would have that feature.

I fear that when people deny the infallibility or inerrance of Scripture and yet say it's "the Word of God", they are using "the Word of God" in a sense different from the one that historically and lexically attaches to the phrase. And that's misleading unless they are addressing a community that attaches that new sense to the phrase.

Aquinas on the senses of Scripture

The Tradition holds that Scripture has many senses. I found really striking what St Thomas does with this: "The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves." In other words, it seems that the Angelic Doctor thinks that the words of Scripture directly only have a literal meaning (which of course isn't the "literalistic meaning"; the literal meaning of an assertoric text is that proposition which is asserted in the text; as Aquinas says, "When Scripture speaks of God's arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member"). The non-literal meaning is not a meaning of the words of Scripture, but it is a meaning of the realities signified with the words understood in their literal meaning. Thus, the description of the Israelites' crossing of the sea in the Book of Exodus has as its meaning that the Israelites cross the sea. This text signifies a historical event—the Israelites' crossing of the sea. And the further meanings, such as a future baptism in Christ, are had not by the text, but by the historical event itself. The events of salvation history are thus a text, and the non-literal meaning of Scripture is thus not a meaning of the text of Scripture, but a meaning of salvation history itself.

I really like this. If the non-literal meanings of the text were really meanings of the text as such, it is hard to see what would distinguish them from the literal meaning. One alternative is to say that the non-literal meanings are intended by God but not by the human author. But if so, then that makes the human author less fully the author of the text, and it makes God an embedder of secret messages in the text. On Aquinas' view, the human author gets to be fully the author of the text, even if the human author does not grasp any of the non-literal meanings. For the non-literal meanings aren't really meanings of the text. (And there is nothing unusual about the events described by a historian having a meaning going far beyond that which the historian sees in them. But these meanings are of the events, not of the history book.) Moreover, this shifts us from being unduly book-centered. Those who experienced the Sinai event were not in principle worse off than the readers reading about the event. But if the additional meanings were meanings of the text and not of the event itself, then those who experienced the Sinai event were in principle worse off than those who read about it.

All this gives a strong sense to the idea that the non-literal meanings of Scripture depend on the literal meaning. For if the Israelites did not in fact cross the sea, then there is no historical event of the crossing of the sea to bear any of the non-literal meanings. The words of Scripture don't signify a future baptism—they signify a crossing of the sea. The crossing of the sea would signify a future baptism, but since the crossing didn't take place on this hypothesis, that is irrelevant.

Moreover, if Aquinas' idea is right—and I think it is right as the notion that God writes not just in words but in historical events is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition—then the theologian who denies the various miracle stories but hopes to save a non-literal meaning is in even greater trouble. For while we assert by speech and not by silence (unless we set up a special convention—"If I say nothing, assume I agree"), we implicate both by speech and by silence. If the Israelites did not in fact cross the sea, not only is the crossing of the sea not there to bear a non-literal meaning, but the non-existence of the crossing of the sea—i.e., God's refraining from causing a crossing of the sea—carries an implicature that we should be cognizant of. But the implicature carried by refraining from an utterance s is typically (though not always, but a special case would need to be made out that the present case is such an exception) opposed to the meaning that s would have had. So the theologian who reads the miracle stories ahistorically, if Aquinas is right, may well make God out to be implicating something opposed to the non-literal meaning that the theologian hopes to find there.

Exegesis of Scripture

It is standard in interpreting Scripture to ask questions like: "What did the Paul hope to accomplish by this passage?" or "What motivated the prophet to write this verse?" or "What must the p been thinking given that he wrote this?" These questions are interesting to ask and the answers seem to illuminate our understanding of Scripture. We investigate secular texts in exactly the same way. It potentially illuminates our understanding of Aristotle's thought to ask why he waited until Met. H.6 to give a solution to the problems of Met. Z.

But there is a crucial difference between the secular case and Scripture: Scripture is authoritative. But, I think, what is authoritative is the text that the human author wrote, rather than the human author's motivations and thinking behind that text. The inferred motivations and thinking of the human author give us insight into what the text means (more strongly, I think that speaker-meaning is the relevant kind of meaning for Scripture, but the point remains even if one denies this), and hence help us know what is being taught. But the human author's motivations and thinking, in and of themselves, are quite fallible, while, in the words of the Vatican II ecumenical council, "everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit" (Dei Verbum 11, emphasis added) and hence is true.

Let me argue for the claim that the author's motivations and thinking are not in and of themselves authoritative, though I may need to qualify it. Suppose we infer from internal and external evidence that an author wrote the text to a particular audience with the confident belief that the text would convince the audience of some proposition. Can we conclude that it is authoritatively taught that the audience was in fact convinced of that proposition? Surely not. We gain an insight into the intentions of the author, and this helps us understand what the text means, but the author's motivating belief is not authoritative. Or for an even more obvious example, from the fact that a sacred author writes a sentence s we can typically infer that he thought s was orthographically and grammatically correct and stylistically good Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. But this claim about grammar and spelling is not authoritative. Scripture is not to be taken as an authoritative examplar of style—that would be like the confusion of apostle and genius that Kierkegaard inveighs against (this is probably a point at which Christian attitudes to Scripture differ from Islamic ones).

It is sometimes possible to infer from the fact that the author wrote a sentence s that asserts the proposition p that there is some other proposition, q, which he also believed. For instance, suppose the author writes with great emphasis that anyone who does A will be doomed for eternity. We might be able infer from the emphasis that the author believes that some people do A, or at least that it is quite possible to do A. This belief, however, is not asserted by the author and need not be authoritative. However, the belief does help us with the interpretation of what the author meant. For instance, suppose we have two ways of interpreting "A": A₁ and A₂. Suppose, further, that internal and/or external evidence shows that the author probably would not have believed that anybody does A₁ but would have thought that some people do A₂. This now gives us strong evidence for the claim that the author meant A₂ by "A". Thus, probably, we are being authoritatively taught that those who do A₂ are doomed for eternity. But it does not follow from this that we are being authoritatively taught that anybody actually does A₂, even though our exegesis depended on attributing that belief to the author.

However, the above needs to be qualified. We must avoid the serious theological mistake of limiting the inspiration of Scripture to the inerrance of its assertions—the inerrance of assertions is a consequence of inspiration, but does not exhaust inspiration. There are large chunks of Scripture—much of the Psalms, for instance—where the illocutionary act is not assertion, but, say, prayer. Those parts are inspired as well, but the doctrine of the inerrance of Scriptural assertions says nothing about them. Similarly, even in the parts where assertion is the (primary?) illocutionary act, we should be open to the idea that something more is going on than inerrance. (Besides, inerrance is something basically negative—a preventing of error—while inspiration is a positive thing.) Thus, while what should be open to the idea that it does not exhaust the authority of an assertion of Scripture to say that we need to believe its content.

In particular, this raises the question of whether what is implicated by a text of Scripture is also authoritative. Here I will be entirely speculative. I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of implicatures. The first kind is where we can infer from some hypotheses about the text, such as that it tends to obeys Gricean maxims, that the author believed something, but the author does not intend for us to make that inference. The second is where the author intends for us to make some such inference. In the case where the author does not intend the inference, but we can make it nonetheless because we're clever, the inferred belief is not authoritative. In the case where the author intends for us to make the inference, we still need to distinguish between cases. The author may just want us to infer an autobiographical fact about him, that he happens to believe p. (For instance, maybe by a particular way of phrasing a question, the author wants to indicate to the reader which theological faction in Jerusalem he belongs to, and membership in the theological faction may be defined by believing p.) In that case, p need not be authoritatively taught. But the author may intend for us to learn that p from the text. In that case, p is authoritatively taught. Though maybe then p was in fact asserted?

In any case, in untangling these issues there is material for someone who is both interested in Biblical exegesis and philosophy of language for years of fruitful research. I am hoping that these reflections also show the necessity of a deep familiarity (greater than my passing acquaintance) with contemporary analytic philosophy of language to serious work on the theology of biblical inspiration.

Inspiration and inerrance

Some people prefer to talk of divine inspiration of Scripture instead of Scriptural inerrance, because they think this way they can avoid affirming inerrance and hence being subject to the apparent counterexamples to inerrance. However, I think the right concept of divine inspiration will make God a full author of the text (so is the human author, of course; I am not here addressing the interaction of the two authorships). Sometimes it happens to an author that the text asserts something that the author did not assert. I doubt this can happen in the case of an omniscient and omnipotent author. If it cannot, then anything that the text asserts is asserted by God. Moreover, it seems central to Christianity and Judaism that God does not lie. Hence, the text only asserts propositions that God believes to be true. But the only propositions that God believes to be true are propositions that in fact are true. Hence, anything the Biblical text asserts is true. If we add some plausible counterfactual robustness to this story (a hard question exactly how to do this—cf. this post), we get inerrance. So inspiration, understood the way I want to understand it, entails inerrance.

I don't mean for the above argument that inspiration entails inerrance (which is basically an expansion of the enthymematic argument for inerrance in Vatican II's Dei Verbum, section 11) to convince those who don't believe inerrance. Rather, I am here interested in a different point. Even if we believe in inerrance, as indeed the Christian Tradition does, nonetheless we have at least two good reasons to focus on inspiration as the basic concept.

First, if we can argue from inspiration to inerrance, but not from inerrance to inspiration, then inspiration is likely to be the more basic concept. If something like the strategy in the first paragraph of this post goes through, we can argue from inspiration to inerrance. But we cannot argue in the opposite direction. Inerrance is a negative doctrine, namely that a text does not contain any false assertions, plus a bit of counterfactual robustness. Such a doctrine could be made true by all kinds of positive realities, of which inspiration is only one. For instance, an uninspired text would be inerrant if, say, God resolves to paralyze the person at the first sign of writing a false. For a more extreme case, God could make a text be inerrant simply by resolving to preventing the human author of the text from setting down any assertions (thus, the text might contain questions, commands, nonsensical rhymes, etc.)

Second, inspiration is a doctrine about all of Scripture. Inerrance is only a doctrine about the truth of assertions in Scripture. An assertion can be true, and intentionally both deeply misleading and spiritually harmful. And there are important portions of Scripture, of varying length, where the main business is is not the making of assertions—but the offering of prayers (especially in the Psalms), the making of commands, the giving of advice ("Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways, and learn wisdom" is not an assertion), and so on. Inerrance says nothing about those portions. Inspiration does.

Presumably, there is some analogue to inerrance in the case of those portions of Scripture (perhaps, the analogue to inerrance in the giving of proverbial advice is that the advice is helpful when appropriately applied by a phronimos). But these are analogues to inerrance, not inerrance itself, and it is to the doctrine of inspiration that we turn to find out what these analogues would be.

Inerrance

Occasionally, the rhetorical question is asked of inerrantists: "What's the use of having an inerrant text, if your interpretation of the text is fallible?" Sometimes this question is asked by opponents of inerrance, and sometimes by those who think that those who accept inerrance don't go far enough—they should also accept an infallible exegetical authority. I've done this myself, as an argument for Catholicism.

But the argument implicit in the question is not a good argument without further work. It would be silly to ask: "Why do you care about having a calculator that makes no mistakes, given that you can punch the wrong numbers into it and read the answer off wrongly?" When using a fallible calculator, there are three sources of errors: the calculator, the data input, and the reading of the output. Surely it is a good thing to be able to eliminate one of the three, even if the other two remain.

Furthermore, there is the following advantage to having an inerrant text: progress in interpreting the text is apt to get us closer to the truth of the matter in the subject the text is about. But if the text is wrong on some point, it might be that the better we interpret it, the further from the truth we find ourselves (if we take the text to be authoritative). It is worth having this feature. We might be currently unable to tell what Scripture requires of us in some matter, but it is not unreasonable to devote significant effort into trying to figure it out—because it is likely true.

But let's go back to the rhetorical question and see if we can make it into any argument that can be defended. First of all, it's not clear how "What's the use of p?" even when met with no answer gives us reason to deny p. What's the use of the moon? I don't know, but my not knowing the use for it doesn't seem to significantly affect my confidence that it's there.

However, inerrance isn't like the moon. Inerrance is very unlikely without a miracle. And we might think that God doesn't work miracles except with good reason. So perhaps we could argue that if inerrance is of no use, God wouldn't bother with it. But that's going to be weak. How could we rule out all uses of inerrance? And in fact, surely there are some. The belief that Scripture is inerrant has inspired many people to obey various good commands in Scripture. Moreover, it is better be inspired by a true rather than false belief. So there is surely some use of inerrance. One might worry that the miracle is too great and the benefit disproportionately small. But I don't see why an omnipotent being can't do a great miracle for a small benefit (God helps me find lost objects sometimes—for all I know, he may even be miraculously transporting the lost objects to me, though somehow it seems more likely that he is simply directing my attention to the objects), nor do I see the benefit as small.

Still, there is, I think, some force in the argument of the rhetorical question. There are four sources of errors in information obtained from a text: errors in the original, errors in copying, errors in reading (decoding of words), and errors in interpretation. If it turns out that there are likely so many errors in interpretation that the benefit of lack of errors in the original is quite small, then there is something to be said for asking why God would have ensured a lack of errors in the original without ensuring an infallible method of interpretation. (If a measurement has two sources of error, one of the order of magnitude 0.001 units and the other of the order of magnitude of 0.020 units, a scientist would be unlikely to try to minimize the first error without trying to minimize the second.) But this would require a further argument that fallible interpretation would be quite unreliable—we couldn't just base the argument on the mere fact that interpretation is fallible. Moreover, I think this wouldn't so much an argument against inerrance, as an argument for an infallible method of interpretation (such as a magisterium or tradition or both).

Is it the case that errors in the interpretation of the Bible are so very common that there is something to the argument? I think it might be. Granted, there may be wide exegetical agreement on certain basic points. But if the point of inerrance is simply to preserve agreement on these basic points, we would not need full inerrance, but a more limited doctrine of preserving the truth in the basics (this point was made by one of our grad students in discussion today). So we might still argue: If we think God valued truth in such a way as to give us full inerrance in Scripture, we have good reason to think that he would also have ensured an infallible interpretative method, since that would serve the same value. This is an argumentum ex convenientia, an argument form well loved by medieval theologians.

So, yes, there is something to the argument in the original rhetorical question, but it would take significant effort to defend it carefully. I haven't put in that sort of effort in this post.