Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

—James 3:12 (NRSV)

I believe the Bible to be inspired and free from error. In holding this view, I stand in a long line of Christians spanning back to Christianity’s birth.¹  Of course, as readers we often bring our own experiences to the texts we read. That is why, after spending a couple of months in the riverless and lakeless Marshall Islands, this verse from James caught my attention as I led my parish Bible study. For, on the tiny island of Ebeye, salt water does yield fresh, and if it weren’t for the roaring hum of the diesel powered desalinization plant, water use would be even more restricted than the couple of hours a day that we got when things were going well.

Does the Bible err? At least here, in one very real sense, it can be argued that it does. Even before the rise of modern technology, industrious individuals have discovered ways in which salt water can be made to yield fresh. And while the point that the author of James was trying to make is not dependent on the scientifically insufficient example produced, this apparent error of fact can give pause to an embrace of a literalistic²  inerrant view of the holy Scriptures.

There are ways, of course, to hold to both an inerrant Scripture and to this verse in James as well. The author of James was writing within and to the scientific limitations of his day. Indeed, despite people knowing for centuries how to extract fresh water from salt, there has never been a corresponding abandonment or even a serious challenge to the error-free nature of the Scriptures on the basis of this verse. Theologians throughout history have been able to affirm error-free Scriptures with the understanding that God, working throgh the human authors, could have accommodated Himself to the scientific limitations both of the human author and the intended audience of the epistle. Weak though this example may be, there simply is no faith-shattering³ problem here.  This verse is not antithetical to an error-free Scripture.

Historically, Missouri Synod dogmaticians have affirmed the error-free nature of the Scriptures, even if they have not used the technical term “inerrant.” In his definitive-for-Missouri Christian Dogmatics, Francis Pieper favorably quotes seventeenth-century German dogmatician Johannes Quenstedt:

The canonical Holy Scriptures in the original text are the infallible truth and free from every error, or in other words, in the canonical Holy Scriptures there is found no lie, no falsity, no error, whether in the things or in the words, but all things, and each single one, that are handed down in them are the most true, whether they pertain to doctrine or morals, or history, chronology, topography, or nomenclature; no ignorance, no thoughtlessness or forgetfulness, no lapse of memory, can or dare be ascribed to the amanuenses of the Holy Ghost in their penning of the sacred writings.⁵

In this strict view, the inerrancy of the Scriptures is not limited to the historical, scientific, and cultural understandings of the authors of the Scriptures. Pieper writes, “Holy Scripture, however, is the Word of God. Its statements are always and in all places absolutely correct. Scripture cannot be broken, not even in a single word.”⁶ Without an understanding of a proper context of the definition of inerrancy, it can be difficult to embrace Pieper’s assertion when one considers the questions raised by such an embrace. Did God not know how to desalinate water? Did He not know that eventually people would be smart enough to develop the technology to do it? Did God not know the future? Or does God accommodate Himself to the limited scientific perspectives of his day? Without being willing to making a concession to God’s accommodation, an unyielding literalistic inerrancy falls on something as irrelevant as saltwater.

The attribution of qualities or responsibilities to God, such as producing inerrant Scriptures, can become a stumbling block when God fails to live up to our human-imposed expectations of what that inerrancy should look like. Ultimately, the core problem with inerrancy is that the term must continually be qualified to take into account new discoveries: scientific, archeological, and historical.

It is difficult to even begin to have a discussion concerning inerrancy, and its possible limits in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Our church has provided a strong defense of an error-free Bible, as can be seen in the writings of Missouri’s early dogmaticians, even before the term inerrancy was introduced into our theological lexicon. It is not, however, accurate to say that Missouri theologians and orthodox Lutheran fathers have been beholden to a literalistically inerrant view of the Scriptures. One of the more masterful explorations of the term was done by twentieth-century Missouri Synod scholar Arthur Carl Piepkorn in a 1965 article entitled “What Does ‘Inerrancy’ Mean?”⁷ In it he traces the etymological roots of the word, its history within Lutheran dogmatics, and the problem it poses for contemporary theology. After showing how an understanding of what it means to have Scriptures that are “free from error” has changed throughout Lutheranism’s history, he concludes, “It does not seem to this writer that we are serving the best interests of the church when either we continue formally to reaffirm the inerrancy of the Sacred Scriptures or even continue to employ the term.”⁸

In fact, Piepkorn argues, even though Quenstedt made what sounds like a modern-day inerrantist position, he has to be taken within the context of what was going on at his time. Piepkorn writes, “[T]he doctrine of what a later generation was to call ‘inerrancy’ is in the late seventeenth century a secondary Schutzlehre. It is designed to protect and vindicate the truthfulness of the Holy Spirit, who increasingly appears in the theological literature of the period less as the principal Author than as the exclusive Author of the Holy Scriptures.”⁹ As a result, our contemporary use of the term is fraught with dangers. “Our motives may be most laudable and our understanding of the implications of the term for ourselves may be most correct. Yet we run the risk of confirming our contemporary sectarians in their confusion and of projecting a false image of our own theological position.”¹⁰ Despite his misgivings, Piepkorn still recommended that his colleagues continue to use the term, lest they be misunderstood as heretics.¹¹

Times have changed, however. The radical historical-critical approach to the Bible that modern inerrancy was formulated to combat has faded as a relevant approach. Now the threat to confessional Lutheranism seems to come not from historical-critical scholars but from our own misunderstanding of the limits of inerrancy as a theological construct. Such a misunderstanding can lead us inadvertantly to embrace the non-Lutheran, fundamentalist theology that lies behind its origin. American historian Mark Noll remarks that “[a] history of inerrancy shows that the question has been worked out differently among different groups of Christians,”¹² or, to put it another way, “The whole history of Protestantism since the Reformation shows that inerrantist Lutherans have interpreted certain Scriptures differently than inerrantist Presbyterians, who in turn have interpreted some passages differently than inerrantist Baptists.”¹³ Just defending an inerrant Bible is no guarantor of orthodox faith.¹⁴

Risking a literalistic inerrancy that would deny that God worked through human authors is a theological risk that is ultimately unnecessary, for the term in orthodox Lutheranism is nothing other than what is already affirmed by the doctrine of inspiration. No less a defender of inerrancy than Robert Preus¹⁵ observed: “The dogmaticians use the same arguments and proof texts for the inerrancy of Scripture as for its inspiration.”¹⁶ Or, as he writes elsewhere in his definition of inerrancy, “In other words, the holy writers, moved by the Spirit of God, infallibly achieve the intent of their writing.”¹⁷

It is possible to affirm the inspiration of Scripture, and the importance of taking the actual words of Scripture seriously, while at the same time holding the view that inerrancy is a less-than-helpful term. For if inerrancy must continually be qualified by further definitions, does it really have any value as a definitive term in and of itself?
In his essay 1987 essay “The Inerrancy of Scripture,” Robert Preus opens by describing his view of inerrancy:

Inerrancy is plenary or absolute. 1) It pertains not only to the substance of the doctrines and narratives in Scripture, but also to those things which are nonessential, adjunct, obiter dicta, or other things clearly assumed by the author. 2) It covers not only the primary intent of various pericopes and verses but also the secondary intent (for example, a passing historical reference within the framework of narrative, such as that Christ was crucified between two thieves, that wise men visited Him at His birth, that Joshua led the children of Israel into Canaan, that Ruth was a Moabitess, Nimrod a hunter, etc.), not only soteriological, eschatological, and religious intent and content of Scripture but also all declarative statements touching history and the realm of nature.¹⁸

Such a position is necessary, according to Preus, because “[i]f errors of fact or contradictions are admitted in minor matters recorded in Scripture (matters that do not matter[?]), by what right may one then assume that there is no error in important or doctrinal concerns?”¹⁹ That such a view of inerrancy cannot stand unqualified is apparent from the rest of Preus’s essay, where he restricts the practical scope of his statement with no fewer than twelve “adjuncts” which cover everything from “inerrancy does not imply verbal exactness of quotations”²⁰ to the assertion that “in describing the things of nature Scripture does not employ scientifically precise language.”²¹ In the end, inerrancy either dies the death of a thousand qualifications, or it is assumed to mean something which it clearly should not.

As a historian, I can appreciate what twentieth-century Lutherans were trying to accomplish by introducing the term into Lutheran dogmatic circles in defense of infallible and reliable Scriptures. Certainly the reliability of God’s word and its inspired nature need to be affirmed against those who would casually dismiss the biblical accounts as irrelevant or fictitious. But taken to its literalistic, fundamentalist extreme, inerrancy weakens God by attributing to Him a position that is untenable—namely, that every iota and argument of Scripture was handwritten by God, without reference to historically-conditioned knowledge and historically-conditioned human authors.

I hesitate to use the term, therefore, not because I am opposed to what at its best the term affirms, but because I don’t find it sufficiently precise to be a helpful addition to today’s theological discourse. It is a term whose beneficial time has passed. Perhaps a new theological expression, a new “homoousios”²² needs to be coined, to combat the limitations of those who would hold to a literalistic view of Scripture, while at the same time to affirm the infallibility and reliability of the sacred Scriptures. Such a task is clearly not beyond the realm of the possible, any more than drawing fresh water out of saltwater.

Notes

1. For a helpful view of the history of inerrancy see Mark Noll, “A Brief History of Inerrancy, Mostly in America,” in The Proceedings of the Conference on Biblical Inerrancy—1987 (Nashville: Broadman, 1987), 9–25. Among other things, Noll describes how inerrancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries arose as a way to defend the Scriptures from the attacks of modern historical-critical methods.

2. In using the term “literalistic” here, I have in mind the description given by Arthur Carl Piepkorn, who understood “literalism” and its variants as the use of a literal interpretation when, for one or more reasons, a figurative or symbolic interpretation is called for. Specifically in this case I define it as “asserting a pseudo-docetic view of the Scriptures that so emphasizes the role of the divine in formulating them that the role of the human authors becomes irrelevant.”

3. I leave it to biblical scholars to debate other more serious so-called “errors” or discrepancies in the scriptures. The issue of the James verse was raised simply to provide an example of how so-called errors can be addressed without denying the error-free nature of the Scriptures.

4. See Noll, The Proceedings.

5. Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, vol. 1 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1950), 223, quoting Quenstedt’s Systema, I.112.

6. Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, vol. 2. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1951), 138.

7. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, “What Does ‘Inerrancy’ Mean?” Concordia Theological Monthly 36/9 (1965): 577–93. Reprinted in Arthur Carl Piepkorn, The Sacred Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions, ed. Philip J. Secker(Mansfield, CT: Center for Evangelical Catholicity, 2007), 25–55 [hereafter cited as SSLC].

8. “Inerrancy,” 588; SSLC, 40.

9. “Inerrancy,” 578; SSLC, 25.

10. “Inerrancy,” 589; SSLC, 40.

11. “At the same time, we must take care not to deny the inerrancy of the Sacred Scriptures, both for pastoral reasons and because the initial affirmation of the freedom of the Sacred Scriptures from error was designed to reinforce and to affirm in other words the doctrine that the Sacred Scriptures have the Holy Spirit as their principal Author and that they are the truthful word of God of Truth to men. An explicit denial of inerrancy would almost certainly be interpreted as a rejection of the main thesis of which inerrancy is a Schutzlehre.” “Inerrancy,” 593; SSLC, 44–45.

12. Noll, 21.

13. Noll, 23.

14. Here Noll cites the example of B. B. Warfield, one of the early champions of inerrancy in America. While clinging to inerrancy, Warfield also embraced a form of theistic evolution which held that, for everything except the human soul, “God could have exerted his creative power through the evolutionary process.” Ibid., 22.

15. Robert Preus was the long-time president of the Missouri Synod’s Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and one of the leading proponents of the inerrancy of Scripture in Missouri Synod circles.

16. Robert Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture (Mankato, MN: Lutheran Synod Book Company, 1955), 78, n. 2. Cited by Piepkorn in “Inerrancy,” 589; SSLC, 40–42. Piepkorn’s complimentary review of Preus’ book is in Concordia Theological Monthly 28/11 (1957): 868–71 and in SSLC, 22–24.

17. Robert Preus, “The Inerrancy of Scripture,” in The Proceedings, 49.

18. Ibid., 50.

19. Ibid., 51.

20. Ibid., 51.

21. Ibid., 55.

22. A philosophical term, not found in Scripture, adopted by the first council of Nicea to combat the incorrect christological teachings of the Arians.