James Barr- Inerrancy dominates all other doctrines of the Bible to their detriment

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. I have already written some about this book, and will likely continue to do so as I read more.

Barr notes, in his chapter on the Bible in Fundamentalism, that inerrancy doesn’t actually yield or submit to a “literal reading” of the texts, despite what fundamentalists like to assert. Instead, inerrancy makes all other things about the Bible subordinate to itself. Because inerrancy is of first order importance–it is a doctrine that, for fundamentalists, cannot be abandoned–it cannot be yielded for any reason whatsoever. This includes the attempt by people who hold to inerrancy to read the Bible. They must constantly seek to defend inerrancy above all other things, even changing how the read the Bible in order to keep the doctrine of inerrancy possible in their minds.

Barr writes, “The point of conflict between fundamentalists and others is not over literality but over inerrancy. Even if fundamentalists sometimes say they take the Bible literally, the facts of fundamentalist interpretation show that this is not so. What fundamentalists insist is not that the Bible must be taken literally but that it must be so interpreted as to avoid any admission that it contains any kind of error. In order to avoid imputing error to the Bible, fundamentalists twist and turn back and forward between literal and non-literal interpretation… In order to expound the Bible as thus inerrant, the fundamentalist interpreter varies back and forward between literal and non-literal understandings, indeed he has to do so in order to obtain a Bible that is error-free” (40).

Several examples of this are provided by Barr which were and remain of interest to interpreters today–how to interpret Genesis 1, how to read the ages of Adam, Methuselah, and others, what to do with genealogies, and more. Now, Barr could not and did not anticipate the rise of Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and its attempt to read the Bible literally and continue to ignore or dismiss mountains of scientific evidence against it. But for modern readers, one could point out that even YECs rarely, if ever, read the Bible literally when it tells us about the dome over the Earth or the shape of the Earth and its being flat. Whether it’s God being above the circle of the Earth (Isaiah 40:22) or winds from the four corners of the Earth (Revelation 7:1), YECs do not read these literally, proving Barr’s point about even the most committed literalists oscillating between readings of the text in order to desperately try to preserve inerrancy.

The conclusion is clear: “Inerrancy is maintained only by constantly altering the mode of interpretation, and in particular by abandoning the literal sense as soon as it would be an embarrassment to the view of inerrancy held” (46). Inerrantists can only hold to their position by constantly shifting their interpretive style to suit whatever needs they have in order to maintain inerrancy. This can be seen in many modern debates among inerrantists, such as whether the Gospel authors invented details such as people walking out of their tombs (Matthew 27:53) or if morality itself vitiates against a literal reading of the genocidal commands and actions of Joshua (not to mention the lack of archaeological evidence for this conquest). It is never inerrancy itself that is questioned; rather, the literalists are suddenly non-literal whenever it suits them so as to protect inerrancy.

Obviously inerrantists are aware of this difficulty. Having been a longtime defender of inerrancy myself, and one with a degree and deep interest in apologetics, I had no small series of justifications for why the interpretation changed. It wasn’t the interpretation style changing; it was that different verses or sections of the Bible needed a different approach; some where obviously non-literal. But those that were non-literal just happened to align with whatever challenged the literal reading of the text. Flat earth? The answer- obviously the author is being metaphorical there. Moral challenge from Joshua? The conquest was not genocidal but merely a “normal” conquest with hyperbolic language. &c. &c. forever. But of course, it absolutely was the interpretation style that was changing in these examples, all at the behest of inerrancy, a doctrine that was only invented in answer to modernist questions about the Bible!

I’ll continue writing about Barr’s seminal work, Fundamentalism. I have found it deeply insightful on many points.

SDG.