How Inerrancy Displaces God

James Barr (1924-2006) was a renowned biblical scholar who, in part, made some of his life’s work pushing back against fundamentalist readings of Scripture and Christianity. I have found his work to be deeply insightful, even reading it 40 or more years after the original publications. His most controversial and perhaps best-known work was Fundamentalism (1977), in which he offered a survey and critique of fundamentalism, which applies incredibly strongly to Evangelicalism and conservative Christianity to this day.

One of the many incredible insights Barr provides is how the doctrine of inerrancy actually displaces God by making the Bible a or the primary focus of Christianity. We’re going to take an extended look at what he writes about the Bible under fundamentalism, along with some commentary, below [all these quotes are from pages 36-38 in the edition I have):

“For fundamentalists the Bible is more than the source of verity for their religion… It is part of the religion itself, indeed it is practically the centre of the religion, the essential nuclear point from which lines of light radiate into every particular aspect. In the fundamentalist mind the Bible functions as a sort of correlate of Christ. Christ is the personal Lord… the Bible is a verbalized, ‘inscripturated’ entity, the given form of words in which God has made himself known, and thus the Bible equally enters into all relations, its words cannot be quoted too often, its terms, cadences and lineaments are all to be held dear.”

Barr here starts his fusillade by noting that for the fundamentalist, the BIble is nearly on par with Christ. Why? Because like Christ, the Bible is in every relationship, and because it is visualized as verbally inspired–the very individual words God intended–it becomes in a way like the deity Christ-self.

“While Christ is the divine Lord and Saviour, the Bible is the supreme religious symbol that is tnagible, articulate, possessable, accessible…”

Christ is far off, almost mythical compared to the reality of the Bible one can just hold in one’s hand. Barr does moderate this a bit:

“From this point of view it is wrong to say, as is sometimes said, that they put the Bible in the place of Christ. But from another point of view the Bible is really more important: it is the Bible, because it is the accessible and articulate reality, available empirically for checking and verification, that provides the lines that run through the religion and determine its shape and character.”

So while it may be wrong to say the Bible is put in place of Christ, in reality the inerrantist almost makes the Bible even more important than Christ. Again, Christ is not immediately available, in their minds, to pick up and interact with. But the Bible is. So one can open the Bible and verify what is supposed to be reality.

“The Bible is thus the supreme tangible sacred reality.”

I think here of my own (Lutheran) tradition in which we believe we can experience sacred reality through Christ’s promises and literally being present in, say, the Lord’s Supper.

“…once the symbolic elevation of the Bible goes beyond a certain point it begins to alter the shape and character of evangelical religion altogether. Certain kinds of biblical criticism and theology are felt to threaten the status of the Bible as absolute and perfect symbol of the religion; and in order to protect that symbolic status of the Bible the religion itself has to be adjusted or distorted.”

I think here of the many, many times I heard inerrancy as the central part of Christianity. Not Christ; inerrancy. Because–it was reasoned–after all, if the Bible has an error, why trust it about Christ? And so you lose everything if even one error exists. And here we see how the Bible is absolutely the central religious symbol.

“The fundamentalist position about the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible is an attempt to prevent this tradition from being damaged through modes of interpretation that make the Bible mean something else… Especially in its intellectual and apologetic work… [fundamentalism] finds that it gradually has to alter and even abandon essential elements in the very religious tradition form which it started out. When this happens it is valid to say that the Bible as symbol, rather than the Christ who speaks through the Bible, has become the supreme controlling factor.”

I think here of my background as a young earth creationist, in which certain elements of geology were seen as specifically threatening to my faith in a way that no Christians prior to the 1900s would have been able to even comprehend.

“This symbolic function of the Bible has a deep effect on personal behaviour… [such as] the incantational use of Scripture.”

This hits hard–the idea that merely repeating utterances of the exact wording of Scripture has some kind of power or reality-bringing for it.

“In a religion lacking in ritual, the citation of Scripture has often functioned as a practically ritualistc procedure. The Bible… undergirds and harmonizes with the fundamentalist tradition of religion. It is a matter of course that preaching will use biblical texts, celebrate the centrality and infallibility of the Bible, and quote it frequently. It is by no means, however, a matter of course that it will make a careful exegetical examination of the meaning of the passages. Most fundamentalist preaching merely reiterates the traditional evangelical point of view, quoting the accepted proof texts but not really asking openly after the meaning.”

Yes! I have found it deeply ironic that in the conservative Lutheran circles I grew up in, the attempt to actually find what the Bible means was avoided. While saying they wanted to use the “historical grammatical” method of interpretation rather than the “historical critical” method, I’d encounter pastors and theologians who would explicitly tell me I “shouldn’t” be using actual historical facts about the Bible or its setting in the interpretation thereof. It was far more important to affirm the tenets of conservative Lutheranism rather than ask questions about what the text might “really” mean. Indeed, asking what a text might “really” mean was compared to the snake in the Garden asking if God “really” said something.

I haven’t even gotten to Barr’s chapter in this book on the Bible itself, but it has already provided immense food for thought. Insisting on Biblical inerrancy not only undermines how Scripture works, but it also displaces God, making the Bible the ultimate symbol of faith.

SDG.