Kevin Vanhoozer, Inerrancy, and the Chicago Statement

As we plow ahead in our series on inerrancy, it’s important not only to uphold the truth in the face of opposition, but to see where improvements – or at least fuller understandings – can be cultivated for our own position as Christians. None of us as apologists have “arrived.” Kevin Vanhoozer is one particular scholar who is active in addressing these needs in the realm of hermeneutics.

Last year (2009), Vanhoozer was made the Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, and his area of expertise is in hermeneutics and linguistics, publishing the three major books Is There Meaning in This Text?, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, and The Drama of Doctrine. He is also one of what I call “the Cambridge Big Five” of the 21st century- the five leading conservative Cambridge Ph.Ds (the others being GK Beale, DA Carson, Wayne Grudem, and Mark Dever) that are doing amazing things for the Kingdom in our age – all of who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture as defined in the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy. Vanhoozer has said:

The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture, in the original manuscripts and when interpreted according to the intended sense, speaks truly in all that it affirms.

In a 2005 JETS essay “LOST IN INTERPRETATION? TRUTH, SCRIPTURE, AND HERMENEUTICS,” Vanhoozer makes a number of remarks regarding inerrancy and hermeneutics. While he doesn’t really criticize the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy, he does legitimately suggest improvements of it. Additionally, he takes aim at the “Second Chicago Statement,” the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics – which is, for good reasons (i.e. it wasn’t put together well), less popular in scholarly circles. Whatever the case, a number of good insights emerge from this work:

Inerrancy—the belief that the Bible speaks truly in all that it affirms—does not necessarily generate interpretative agreement even among those who hold to it… It is one thing to posit the Bible’s truthfulness in all that it affirms, quite another to say what the truth of the Bible is. Inerrancy alone, then, is not yet a full-fledged hermeneutic. For many Church fathers, the entire truthfulness of Scripture was compatible with allegorizing. Contemporary evangelicals, by contrast, are more likely to equate truthfulness with historicity. 97

Is inerrancy really the bastard child of evangelical faith and modernity? And has a modern distortion or reduction of truth proved inimical to evangelical theological interpretation? …The [Chicago] Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is in my opinion by far the more successful [than the second statement on hermeneutics]. Interestingly, one looks in vain in that statement for the terms “fact” or “factuality.” The Statement speaks instead of the truth of Scripture in “all matters” it addresses (Art. IX, XI). The Statement acknowledges the presence of diverse literary styles (Art. VIII, XVIII) and figures of speech: “So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor . . . and so forth.” The key claim for our purposes comes in Article XIII: “We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.” 98

To interpret the Bible we need to do more than grasp a few isolated truths; we need to be able to grasp the whole, and to situate the parts in the whole. The unity of the Bible is neither that of a philosophical system nor a system of moral truths. On the contrary, the unified sum and substance of the Bible is theodramatic: it is all about God’s word and God’s deeds, accomplished by his “two hands” (Son and Spirit) and about what we should say and do in response. It is because theology’s subject matter is theodramatic that it must do more with the Bible (the script) than squeeze out its propositional truth. The Bible is not just our authoritative script; it is one of the leading players in the ongoing drama, interrupting our complacency, demanding its reader’s response…To focus on propositional content only is to fail to recognize the Bible as divine communicative action, a failure that leads one to dedramatize the Scriptures. 101-102

It is one thing to ascribe inerrancy to a map, then, quite another to know how to interpret it. To understand a map, you need to know its conventions. For example, you need to know the scale. You also need to know the key that explains how to read the various symbols used by the cartographer to represent places like rivers and cities. Finally, you need to know the legend, which is a way of imagining the world. The Bible is composed of different kinds of literature, each of which maps the theodrama in a distinctive way. Yet all the maps are reliable: they correspond—in different ways!—to this or that aspect of what is really the case. They are not only compatible but complement one another. Maps are no good, however, unless you are oriented. 104

The Chicago statement affirms the truth of Scripture “on all matters” that it addresses (Art. IX, XI). As we have seen, there is no one uniform way in which the biblical authors address their subject matter. We therefore need to add another phrase to our definition of discourse: what someone says in some way about something to someone. “In some way.” We read in Hebrews that God has spoken in former times in diverse ways, but now he has spoken by his Son. I submit that in Scripture God continues to speak to us in diverse ways—to be precise, in and through different forms of discourse and different literary forms. 106

The Lausanne Covenant (1974) and the Chicago Statement (1978) use similar formulations to define biblical inerrancy, the one saying the Bible is “without error in all that it affirms,” the other that “it is true and reliable in all matters it addresses” (Art. XI). Strictly speaking, however, “it” neither affirms nor addresses; authors do. 106

The Bible speaks truly in all that it literally affirms. It is an egregious mistake, however, to identify the literal with the literalistic sense of Scripture, that is, with the empirical object or state of affairs to which it refers. The literal sense of Scripture as a whole is the theodramatic sense—God’s words and acts, especially as these coalesce in  Christ—but the way the Bible is about these acts is not always narrowly historical, literalistic, or analytic. That the literal sense is the literary sense has important  consequences for inerrancy. What, after all, is an error? Simply to speak of a factual mistake does not get us very far. What are mistakes and how do we recognize them? What in one context might count as an error is another person’s best estimate. Errors, then, are relative to the kind of claim being made. But we can only assess success and failure if we know what kind of claim is being made.59 This is precisely where literary forms become important. Our expectations as to what kind of claim is being made in a text must line up with what kind of claim the text is making. If a text makes no claim to chronological accuracy, then chronological inaccuracy is no error. Different kinds of texts aim at different kinds of precision. Poetry is precise—it demands just the right word in just the right order—but its precision is of a different nature than the precision we expect in modern history or science. 108

I do not usually trade in etymologies, but I cannot help pointing out that “errancy”—as in “knight errant”—is related to the Latin errare (“to stray”) which in turn is related to
the term “itinerary.” Inerrancy is first cousin to itinerary, and this reminds us that Scripture reliably maps the way of Jesus Christ, not as a theological Euclid—a book of abstract propositions—but as a book of theodramatic wisdom. The Bible is wholly trustworthy and true because its direction is wholly reliable. 113

Essentially, Vanhoozer expands/revises the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy. His major suggestion is that in Article XI, the phrase “it is true and reliable in all matters it addresses” should be changed to “it is true and reliable in all matters it addresses in some way.” He also says it’s important to realize that authors – and not self-contained, isolated entities of text – are the ones making affirmations. Furthermore, he suggests (p. 113):

Perhaps we need to rehabilitate the classic term “infallibility” to make sure that theological interpreters of Scripture do not become mere information processors. Inerrancy is most appropriate as a description of biblical assertions.

Careful discernment is needed at this point because this sounds awfully familiar (i.e. McGowan in The Divine Authenticity, etc.). It is one thing to say we should never use the term ‘inerrancy’ because it’s not true, we should use the term ‘infallibility’ (McGowan, etc.) and quite another thing to say inerrancy is an accurate term for certain aspects/literary genres of Scripture, but overall, infallibility may be more useful (Vanhoozer). The latter is legitimate, while the former is not. McGowan’s claim is illegitimate as we’ll see in the next several weeks. Vanhoozer’s claim is legitimate simply because that is precisely what is meant by “inerrancy” in the first place – it requires that an assertion be made in the text, something that can be said to be directly “true” or “false.” If Grudem’s definition of inerrancy (“the Bible does not embrace anything contrary to fact”) is true, than inerrancy in this context is only applicable to portions of Scripture that make assertions that can either be “true” and “false” in that way.

We shouldn’t be surprised, that Vanhoozer’s colleague (at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), DA Carson, said:

Inerrancy does not mean that every conceivable sequence of linguistic data in the Bible must be susceptible to the term ‘inerrant,’ only that no errant assertion occurs. – D.A. Carson and John Woodbridge, Eds. Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1986), 31.

David Clark, Provost of Bethel Seminary and Bethel University, put it this way:

As a rabid American fan, Tim yells, ‘Yeah, Smith!’ The purpose of his exclamation is to express his feelings. It makes no sense to ask whether ‘Yeah, Smith!’ is true…So is ‘Yeah, Smith!’ true? No. Does it communicate? Of course…these utterances are neither errant (false) nor inerrant (true), and the evangelical theologian who is obsessed in inerrancy will ask the wrong questions of those utterances.  – David Clark, “Beyond Inerrancy: Speech Acts and An Evangelical View of Scripture,” in  For Faith And Clarity: Philosophical Contributions to Christian Theology, James Beilby, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006),119-120

Of course, it is unfortunate that Clark provides no indication of who this “theologian who is obsessed in inerrancy” really is. It certainly isn’t Vanhoozer or DA Carson, and actually, it probably isn’t any of today’s major proponents of the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy. Who then, is Clark trying to correct? Clark continues:

Some biblical language is nondescriptive. Asking whether that language is inerrant is truly odd.

Not if a person is using the term “inerrant” to simply mean “true in what it’s communicating.” But, if a person is using “inerrant” to mean “true in assertion,” and that text is not assertive (“nondescriptive”), then yes, Clark may have a legitimate point, and stands in line with the previous quotes of Carson and Vanhoozer.

John Hobbins agrees, and points out on his blog post “Reflections on Inerrancy,” that Michael Horton is on the same page:

…where evangelicalism rules the landscape, it is time for saner voices to take courage with two hands and patiently, ever so patiently, advocate for a broader and safer use of the word “inerrancy.” This is precisely what I see Michael Horton doing, and I commend him for it.

Of course, the great irony is that the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy (exposition) itself already aligns the doctrine with the idea of “assertion”:

…‘inerrant’ signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

Perhaps, then, Vanhoozer and Clark’s criticism is correct, although not as relevant as it immediately appears.