Seminary -- Inerrancy 5

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26. The question of how Matthew 2:15 interpreted Hosea 11:1 must have stayed on my mind. Matthew thinks of it in relation to Jesus leaving Egypt as a child. Hosea was writing about the exodus of Israel from Egypt, and how they went ahead to serve other gods.

I have heard people explain the connection on a higher level. As Moses led Israel out of Egypt so Jesus is the new Moses who will save us from our sins. Quite possible. I do indeed believe that Matthew meant his readers to think of Jesus as a greater Moses.

But this is a higher level of thinking than my Thompson Chain Reference KJV. It had almost forty prophecies that I'm pretty sure it took as predictions about Jesus. Hosea 11:1 is not a prediction about Jesus. It refers to the past, not the future. It is about Israel, not Jesus or the Messiah. It tells about how Israel was unfaithful to God, while Jesus was without sin.

There is no problem here. Matthew is using Jewish exegesis. He sees a broader similarity than Hosea had in mind. Jewish exegesis had no problem with taking a snippet from the passage rather than the whole in context.

The problem was with my expectations. In the world of fundamentalist apologetics, the fulfillment of prophecy is sometimes used as an argument for the truth of the Bible and Christianity. But that set me up for the wrong expectation of Hosea. I expected it to be a prediction. It wasn't.

27. Most of the Old Testament passages that the New Testament authors saw fulfilled in Christ had an original meaning in their own context. Again, there is nothing wrong with the way the New Testament authors read these passages. The error is with those who try to twist the Old Testament into straightforward predictions.

This is quite a matter of discussion in certain circles. There are whole books written with the intent of showing that, after all, the Old Testament authors did mean the same thing as how the New Testament authors took them. But this is more cooking of the books. As someone who used to try to make the Bible say what my tradition wanted it to say, I fully recognized the far-fetched machinations of book cookers.

And I am not talking about popular thinkers. I am thinking of recognized evangelical scholars like Walter Kaiser and Greg Beale. There is a whole commentary devoted to such book-cooking.

There is nothing wrong with Matthew hearing the virgin conception in Isaiah 7:14, but there was a first meaning, a "near" meaning in the day of Isaiah. Virgins conceive all the time, when a woman gets pregnant the first time she has sex. Psalm 16, Psalm 22, all of these texts had an original meaning that made perfect sense in ancient Israel. And there was nothing wrong with the New Testament authors and early Christians hearing echoes of Jesus in them either.

28. I found these things troubling when I first realized them. Fundamentalist apologetics had set me up for failure. I return to something I said earlier in this narrative. I might have had less of a faith crisis if I had come from a more reflective Christian background.

Matthew's use of Hosea is not in error. It was my expectations that were in error. I thought that Matthew had wrongly interpreted Hosea, which in my twenty-one year old mind looked like an error. But there's nothing wrong with Matthew interpreting Scripture like a first century Jewish Pentecostal.

At the time, it put me into a pickle. There was no denying that Hosea was not a prediction about Jesus. But I thought Matthew thought it was, and thus that Matthew was in error. At the time I understood inerrancy to mean there could be no errors of any kind in the Bible in terms of what I considered an error to be in my culture and paradigms.

So did God want me to believe something that wasn't true? Was this a test of obedience? Was I willing to make myself believe something that wasn't true to show that God was first in my life? Now there's a twisted thought.

For one thing, I'm not sure you can make yourself believe something you know isn't true. Maybe you can. But I would eventually conclude that God is a God of truth. Truth goes with God, and God goes with truth. If you could prove God didn't exist, he would say before he left, "Oh, ok. Well that's that then." :-)

I don't mean to suggest that truth is bigger than God. I mean to say that truth and God go hand in hand. At some point I truly fused my quest for truth with a longing for what God knows. I have often worried over what people might think about various conclusions I might reach. But at a certain point I no longer worried about God in this regard. If I became certain that something was true, then I was simply discovering what God already thought. God knew.

29. But what about the Bible? I was now in preparation for Wesleyan ordination. I had to appear before the District Board of Ministerial Standing and answer questions about things like inerrancy.

When I did, by the way, Rev. Taylor, former pastor of Lakeland, asked an insightful question. He said something like, "We've known you your whole life Kenny. You are Lee's son. Sometimes a young man grows up and doesn't believe the same things he did when he was young. Do you still believe the same?" I believe I answered truthfully that, while I had made the beliefs my own and thus had put them into my own framework of understanding, I still had the same basic beliefs."

In the summer of 1988, I was trying to figure out how to believe in inerrancy. Russ Gunsalus and I, for some reason, made a visit to David Thompson to ask him how he managed as a Wesleyan to affirm it. I think Russ and I had been in Ron Crown's class together.

I don't really remember what Thompson said. Perhaps Russ does. As is often the case, I remember that I didn't find his answer entirely satisfying. I just remember that he was caring.

As I recall, Thompson had undergone a certain dark night of the soul at one point. He had left teaching to pastor in the DC area, but he entered a phase where he didn't feel anything. He couldn't pray himself so instead read the prayers of others. Eventually, the feeling returned and he returned to Asbury.

I deeply respected him and continue to respect him to this day. He was incredibly authentic. What you see is what you get. I had him for Minor Prophets EB and deeply enjoyed it.

Back in Fort Lauderdale, I asked my pastor about inerrancy. He gave an answer I have heard from others. The Discipline says the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts, which we don't have. So perhaps something that looks like an error to me was different in the original manuscripts.

It was a nice attempt to help. But of course I had just finished a course in textual criticism. We pretty much know what the original manuscripts said.

30. I appreciated that President David McKenna had refused to let Asbury get torn up over the inerrancy debates of those days. I believe someone told me that he had dictated that Asbury would not fight over it. He was a Free Methodist.

By the way, the Wesleyans and Free Methodists had almost merged in 1976. I was there. I remember the vote. My Dad wasn't really in favor because we thought the Free Methodists were liberals. They actually put inerrancy into their Articles of Religion in preparation for merger. I was there in 1976. I remember what I thought was a vote. I thought we had voted to merge.

But a trick of parliamentary law thwarted the merger. The presiding general superintendent didn't want to merge for the same reason my family didn't. What I thought was a vote was actually a round of applause to "receive" the recommendation of the committee, not to "adopt" it. We would never merge.

31. The Wesleyan Church has never defined what it means to say the Bible is without error. I wrote a blog piece some time ago to give my take. I have always liked the way Asbury put it, "without error in all it affirms." Kevin Vanhoozer gives an even better framework that I would put like this, "The Bible is infallible in that it never fails to accomplish what it sets out to do. When that purpose is to convey information, it is inerrant."

As a biblical scholar, it gets complicated. First, there is the question of genre. It is not reasonable to expect Acts to conform to the expectations of the modern historical genre. We expect Acts to function like ancient history because that's who it was originally written for. We know from Thucydides that ancient history could involve invention of speeches--something a modern history would never do.

I have gone through the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I believe it means to prohibit drawing certain conclusions about the biblical text. But I do not think it succeeds at its intended goal because once you bring the question of genre into the discussion, the biblical text becomes much more flexible in the range of possibilities.

The Bible is incarnated revelation. That means that it was revealed extensively in the categories of the ancients. Paul apparently believed there were three layers of sky straight up until you got to God (2 Cor. 12:2). The Hebrews apparently believed that the sky was a dome in which God fastened the stars (Gen. 1:15). These are not errors because they are not the point of the revelation. They are the cultural frameworks within which God revealed his points.

The Bible seems to reflect a progression of revelation. The Old Testament largely does not understand that there is a conscious afterlife (e.g., Ps. 6:5; Job 7:9; Eccl. 9:5). The New Testament does.

I do not know how to come to any other honest conclusions than these. I can fit them within Vanhoozer's framework. They go well beyond the fundamentalist framework.

The Bible is infallible. It never fails to accomplish what God wanted or wants it to do. God uses it to do all sorts of things within the parameters he sets (to promise, to identify, to inform, to transform, etc...). Sometimes his purpose is to inform. In such cases the Bible is always true within the parameters God sets. Perhaps I will return to this discussion again later, for my explanations here took shape over many years.

32. I will say that Dr. Wang and Dr. Oswalt had the opposite effect on me than what they probably intended. I had Wang for Romans. Dave Smith and I were both in that class as well. [1]

I remember one day that a returning missionary asked him as we were getting up from class if a certain passage could be interpreted differently than how Dr. Wang did. It took several tries for Dr. Wang even to understand what he was saying. When he finally did, he said with a smile, "Oh, ok. I [will] come back next time with more reasons why I am right." [2]

It was a lighthearted comment, but in a way it did typify his approach to critical issues. The goal was never to try to be objective. The goal was to find arguments to support the answer we were supposed to come up with.

I remember hearing of an assignment he had for his exegesis class from Acts 13:48. The verse says, "Everyone who was appointed to eternal life believed." It sounds Calvinist. What I heard he wanted the students to argue is that the form was a middle rather than a passive: "Everyone who appointed himself to eternal life believed."

This is cooking the books. The middle is rare. One should always consider the passive to be the default likelihood unless there is something in the context that pushes you in a different direction. As I have said often, the search for truth is not about finding a possible argument that fits your prior conclusions. It's about going with the most probable conclusion given the evidence and logic.

33. Dr. Oswalt's Old Testament Interpretation class had the same effect on me. To be fair, he presented the different possible interpretations fairly and somewhat objectively. In those days, it was hard to draw a conclusion on many things. I remember reading some in Donald Guthrie's New Testament Introduction. He presented each case so fairly that I really couldn't tell what to pick as he presented each option.

But I was beginning to feel like there was a reason most scholars believed that there were sources behind the Pentateuch. There was a reason most scholars dated Isaiah 40-66 to the sixth century. *

Oswalt's commentary on Isaiah 40-66 sees these chapters as a prophetic vision Isaiah had in which he is, to put it in my words, transported into the 500s BC. However, as I see it, there are only two reasons to believe these chapters come from Isaiah himself: 1) the fact that it is currently packaged with Isaiah 1-39 and 2) the fact that the New Testament authors seemed to think these chapters are the voice of Isaiah.

Inductively, one would not draw this conclusion. Isaiah 40-66 nowhere mention Isaiah. He is not said to be the author of these chapters. Their setting is clearly the sixth century. Cyrus, Persian king of the sixth century, is mentioned by name. Jerusalem is in ruins and has been for some time (Isa. 61:4). Isaiah 36-39 is a bridge inserted from 2 Kings. Inductively, one would conclude that these chapters were appended from a later time and that the entire book was edited into a whole.

If God reveals himself in our categories, then it is no surprise that God would speak to the New Testament authors within their framework of thinking about Old Testament authorship. As far as packaging, it's not God's fault if I draw the wrong conclusion because of how a collection is put together. There is a good chance that Isaiah 40-66 was on its own scroll anyway.

I could say similar things about source hypotheses about the Pentateuch. Genesis never mentions Moses. Exodus through Deuteronomy talk about Moses in the third person--not the way an author would normally speak about him or herself. Deuteronomy even narrates Moses' death. No one would inductively conclude that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch. The only argument in its favor is, once again, the fact that the New Testament seems to refer to it in that way.

34. After emerging from my struggle over whether God would want me to believe a lie, I adopted an approach to go with the most likely conclusion given the evidence and logic. I don't necessarily mean what I blab or say in the classroom, but in what I think. God and I are best buddies in this. He understands. He knows my heart. I'm not worried about him condemning me for what I think. I want only to think what he thinks.

The Bible is revelation but it is not the totality of God's thoughts. And it is God's thoughts incarnated into numerous ancient contexts. There is also natural revelation. There is greater precision to be had on many items that the ancient audiences couldn't have fathomed. Truth is thus bigger than the Bible. The Bible is in the truth.

See if you agree with this line of thinking. It is very scary, but it seems inevitable to me. If the Bible was revealed in the categories of its original audiences--which makes sense because God revealed these words to them first--then to follow only the literal meaning of the Bible is to lock up truth in ancient categories. But surely we know many things that the ancients did not. Here is the conclusion. To read the Bible in a fundamentalist way is thus to make God look stupid, because he is thus not allowed to be smarter than the categories of the ancient world.

[1] Dave remembered recently that I volunteered to read a German commentary for that class. I had recently taken O'Malley's Theological German course. It was a farse, however. I just wasn't that good at German at that time.

[2] There were stories of Dr. Wang's accent that students enjoyed sharing. I don't know if they were true or not. One was about a terrible accident with people "breeding in the streets." By the way, I believe Ken Foutz and Dr. Wang had been roomates at Emory.