Inerrant Scripture, Delivered by Errant Messengers

This week I've been contemplating the inerrancy of scripture.

Here's how Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation describes it:

Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.

After doing a bit of reading on the subject, it appears that some Christians believe that this inerrancy applies only to the original manuscripts, while others contend that it has been passed along through all the duplications and replications and translations.

An interesting argument, but I'm not going to take on either side of that debate. What I've been thinking about is what "without error" means.

Yesterday DiDi and I read scattered parts of 1 Corinthians, which prompted this thinking. Here we have Paul writing to the new Christians in Corinth, who have found themselves fractured between teachers with differing sets of rules and behaviors and interpretations they are to follow. You can almost hear Paul sighing as he writes, frustrated at the state they are in and their lack of teeth for chewing spiritual meat. Pouring out milk in the form of verbal slaps, periodically sweetened with a  sprinkle of encouragement.

He undoubtedly writes what is true. He tapped into the mind of Christ which he mentions in Chapter 2, and passed along what he thought the Corinthians needed to hear.

But just as I believe that some people confuse the Bible with God Himself, I think that some people confuse the inerrancy of scripture with the inerrancy of the individual writers.

Clearly they are not without error. In the case of this letter, Paul tells us that he himself is not innocent. In chapter 7 Paul admits several times that he is voicing his opinion rather than something that was given to him by the Lord. He is so convinced that the end is coming soon that he urges people not to marry (though he acknowledges that some of us are so weak that we can't help indulging and therefore better get hitched). And of course, we are still waiting for Christ to come again, thousands of years later. Paul believed that it was much better to live as he did, alone, celibate.
 
Are these things inerrantly true? For the purposes Paul tried to accomplish I would say yes, they were.

Are they the fullness of truth? No.

As the Vatican II document states, they were without error for that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided.

A subset of truth, those truths which God desired to be confided.

The letters were penned by people who did their best to channel the mind of Christ, to people who they assumed wanted to do the same. But those people were not perfect, at either end.

Imperfect people writing to imperfect people about perfect truth. Writing at that time, for that time, without error.

And now here we are, millenia later, reading Paul's words in chapter 11 about eating food which has been sacrificed to idols, and about how it is a disgrace for men to have long hair, and for women to pray with their head uncovered. Things which we disregard, believing them to be relics of the past, which no longer apply. Then we continue reading in the same chapter, words of the institution of the Eucharist, beautiful words which most Christians believe to be timelessly applicable.

Truth. Inerrant truth for specific purposes. Each word, each sentence completely without error, while not being globally true for every situation at every era.

Inerrant scripture yes, but delivered by errant messengers.

God Himself Violated the Law

While reading through some of the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy recently I came across the passage below:

Deut 22:23 If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, 24 you shall bring them both out to the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.

I wasn't hunting for marriage related laws, this one just happened to jump out at me. Why did it grab my attention? Because according to this passage, God Himself violated the law.

Luke chapter 1 describes the occurrence.

Mary the mother of Jesus was in a city; the town of Nazareth. She was betrothed to Joseph. The Holy Spirit came upon her, overshadowed her, and planted a child in her womb. She did not cry out for help because she didn't want or need it. Joseph initially believed himself to have been wronged and planned to divorce her.

All of these facts line up to show a clear violation of the law laid out in Deuteronomy 22.

At the very moment the New Covenant was initiated, God Himself broke an Old Covenant law related to marriage. Perhaps it was a sign of it's passing, a shattering of a clay tablet inscribed by a Pharisee.

The Spirit must have whispered to Mary "Don't think about what you've been taught. Simply love Me with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." Mary responded by opening to His request, despite knowing that she could be stoned.

I'm still pondering what this could mean. I don't have an answer. But since God Himself begins the very life of Christ through a violation of marital law, it certainly points out that the Biblical "view" of marriage is far from straight forward.

What God has joined together...

The gospel reading for yesterday was Mark 10:2-16. The priest focused part of her sermon on verses 2 through 12, which read:

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" 3 He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" 4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." 5 But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 7 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." 

Two things struck me about the passage, in relation to Marriage Revolution.

The first comes in verse 9, and in particular, the phrase about what God has joined together. 

In the past, I'd thought this referred to anyone who was married; if you ended up marrying, surely it was God's will, because marriage is a God-thing and a church thing.

But I realized that this thinking isn't quite right. Sure, He permits us to marry whoever we want. We have free will, and free choice. When you marry, it definitely falls within his permissive will. But then again, so does sin. He permits many things. Not all marriages fall under his ordained will however. Not all matches are made (literally) in heaven. Many, many marriages come as a result of us not listening to the voice of reason, whether it be spoken directly by the Spirit, or indirectly through friends, families, and our own logic.

So that's the first part of my realization; that just because you are married doesn't mean God directed it to happen.

The second part is a bit more nuanced. I'm a lover of the sacramental, and hold the sacraments in high esteem, so the idea of undoing a sacrament is difficult for me. I thought that all Christian traditions considered marriage a sacrament. Turns out that in Protestant denominations (including Anglicanism) it is not. 

Strike two against my fundamental thinking.

Even within the Catholic and Eastern traditions, which hold marriage as sacrament, there is an issue which shakes my thinking. Unlike the other sacraments, which have an ordained clergy member officiating, the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage. They officiate. And this seems to pull it even further out of the realm of what I'd viewed it to be.

Is it any surprise that half of our marriages end in divorce? We are not uniting as couples that God chose from His heavenly throne, we are most often not married sacramentally, and even in a sacramental union we are being our own ministers rather than joining with a priest in persona Christi to knit a chord of three.

My notions about the sacramental quality of marriage have fallen by the wayside. 

That doesn't mean that I don't believe what He says in verse 9: "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 

Woe be it to any who would do so. 

What has shifted is in my understanding of what God's joining together means. I think there are very, very few couples for which this description fits.

And that's the crux of the problem.

The "Adam and Steve" argument

One of the primary Christian arguments against same sex marriage is the Genesis creation account. You may have heard phrases along the lines of "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

But while I'm a Christian, and a fairly conservative one at that, I find a number of problems with this bit of scripture as a defense of traditional marriage.

Adam and Eve were not "married" as far as Biblical accounts are concerned. Their bond was something that is not really comparable, or comprehensible, to what we have now. For one thing, it reads like the first instance of successful human cloning, which appears to go completely against a properly ordered procreative union. Plus they were the only humans available, which meant there wasn't any aspect of choice. So it seems to me that we can't really use them as the model for marriage.

As a procreation model yes, but not as a marriage model.

In contrast, the Bible as a whole is the model. It concentrates on fidelity. Trust. Love. Covenant. Forgiveness. Generosity.

But back to marriage. Given that Adam and Eve can't really be the model we have to look at later scriptures. And unfortunately, marriages are rarely healthy and whole in the Bible. Most of the accounts show a lot of brokenness. The exceptions are few; the Song of Songs being one of them, and a beaut at that. Mary and Joseph being another one, but that relationship was chaste and therefore also not really comparable.

I think that God uses the broken accounts to contrast His own marriage with us, as described in the Song and in Revelation. The fullness of relationship. The true wedding supper fulfilled. True fidelity, in all ways.

Adam and Eve? Not so much. The first couple is immediately dysfunctional. They don't communicate, they blame each other for joint mistakes, they are homeless, and just look at what happens to their kids.

Not exactly a great model for marriage.

As Christian's we'll have too look harder.