Attributes of Scripture in a Realist Mode

Part 5 of The Nature of Theological Truths

We ought to conclude a defense of the thesis by a positive sketch of its implications for various attributes of Scripture. The value of this will be clear. If the greatest stumbling block to the acceptance of my thesis among the Reformed is that it seems to compromise the authority of Scripture by these “objects with natures,” then it behooves me to show how attributes such as inspiration and inerrancy are given a better defense in a theological realist mode. The principle can be extended as well to attributes of the biblical canon, authority, sufficiency, and clarity, yet the two chosen here will suffice to make the point: inspiration and inerrancy.

As we go, we will notice about both that the entire circle, or set of propositions that could result as a translation, that represents “inspiration,” will be the exact same circle representing what is inerrant. Notice what this implies about translations from one language to another—not merely to the language of logical propositions, but I mean from the original languages to English—namely, that we are speaking ultimately of objects of meaning.

We are speaking of the real essence of the truth in the mind of God communicated through the inspired authors. This communication is the illumination of intellectual objects. They include what we often call “objects,” namely of physical phenomena, human action, and events. But these are not their ultimate real essence.

And that is very good news for the coherence of the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy.

A defense of the inspiration of Scripture requires realism.

Beginning with biblical inspiration, we should note that the “concursive operation” [1] model championed by Warfield already assumes all that I have been saying here. God-breathed Scripture implies wholly divine truth through human words. There is a dilemma to anyone who would reject my thesis and would still hold to inspiration. Does the truth of the ideas in the inspired author’s mind originate with God or with men? If we say the latter, we deny the orthodox doctrine. If we say the former, then we affirm the object communicated through the human mind as wholly determinative of the words’ meaning. Notice that the issue is not how much of God’s mind is logically coextensive with the idea in the human author’s mind. We will say more about those two circles when we come to inerrancy and the idea of “full meaning.”

Here it is only crucial to note that either circle (1. the human author’s meaning inside of divine meaning, or 2. the totality of all that God means by it) is an object of truth to which our reading of Scripture seeks to conform. 

Vanhoozer poses the question of what exactly God inspires: authors, words, ideas? He says that what is specifically inspired is “discourse” [2]. Ward essentially does the same with a covenantal twist on speech-act theory [3]. That is why we can say that whatever the Bible says, God says, and yet we have not divinized the text. It is not the proposition that is divine, but rather God’s presence to act in or through it. Fair enough—up to a point. The Reformed Classicalist weighs both presence and propositions in the balance, not so as to find them wanting, but rather to ask whether either is the object of meaning per se.

We can also view inspiration in terms not of the process, but of the product. What we have is the inscripturated word of God. But is it only in the Hebrew and Greek form that we have such a word of God? If we must affirm that our English translations are the word of God, then what do we mean by it? Letham makes the case that accurate translations are the word of God [4], adding: “The line between fallible and infallible can never rationally be drawn between the thoughts and words of Scripture” [5]. Divinely inspired human words must correspond to divine thoughts. But that is only another way of saying that inspiration requires that all inscripturated divine truths regard attributes of God and ideas in the mind of God. In short, inspiration is the human words given by God, as the instantiation of theological universals, in the various redemptive-historical media. If realism falls, the doctrine of inspiration will not be able to resist various forms of scrutiny.

A defense of the inerrancy of Scripture requires realism.

The whole difficulty of restricting the meaning of the word of God to the original languages parallels the restriction of the meaning of inerrancy to the autographa. In one sense that is necessary to the doctrine. In other words, we do not hold that the copyists were inerrant. Rather God was utterly truthful in all that he inspired. More than that, it was not only that he “was” inerrant in his inspiration of truth to the biblical authors, but that this word is utterly true down through the translations. 

However this raises the question: What exactly is that which is inerrant? Two fallacies of the critics of inerrancy will help us gain clarity. I have coined these two terms from very good responses given to critics of the Bible by Francis Schaeffer and the other by Frame. The first I call the fallacy of exhaustivism and the other I call the fallacy of precisionism. They are really two sides of the same coin, as they represent the pedantic pride of the modern skeptic, demanding that God be just “inerrant” enough to satisfy their present curiosities. Notice how they set about it.

Skeptics will hold the Bible in “error” when it hides from them the exact age of the earth, fuller genealogies of the dispersion of cultures from Babel, the exact identity of interesting persons (e. g. Where did Cain get his wife?), records paralleling pagan histories, and so forth. In his pamphlet-sized work, No Final Conflict, Schaeffer explained what is missing from this sort of inquiry: “The Bible is not a scientific textbook in the sense that science is not its central theme, and we do not have a comprehensive statement about the cosmos” [6]. However, he goes on to argue, there is a great difference between saying that the Bible speaks truly as opposed to exhaustively about the same subject matter.

If exhaustive knowledge were required about a thing in order to have any true knowledge about that thing, well then every single claim to knowledge in finite modes of communication would fail by that standard. Thus the demand for exhaustive knowledge from an inerrant Bible confuses the matter and makes no dent in the doctrine whatsoever. If the critic is consistent, no knowledge about anything would be sound.

The other fallacy is one of misplaced expectation for precision. Frame explains, “Now precision and truth are not synonyms, though they overlap in meaning. A certain amount of precision is often required for truth, but that amount varies from one context to another … But outside of science and mathematics, truth and precision are often much more distinct.” He then uses examples of asking someone their age and how big a book is, as distinguished from, say, the sum of 6 + 5. He concludes, “Indeed, when someone gives excess information in an attempt to be more precise, he actually frustrates the process of communication, hindering rather than communicating truth. He buries his real age under a torrent of irrelevant words” [7].

The critic of inerrancy has other assumed targets, to be fair, but it is equally fair to recognize that a great many of the supposed “errors” in the Bible are nothing more than a pedantic demand that the words of Scripture perform works of satisfaction to the sovereign reader that no reader would ordinarily expect in any other area of finite communication. Lost in the shuffle is nothing less than meaning itself.

Inerrancy means that the Bible is utterly truthful in all that it means to say, not in what the skeptic would like it to address.

Another definition adds the clauses, “that when all the facts become known,” its claims “correctly interpreted” [8], that precise object of mind, and only that, is what is without error. The only alternative to the fallacies of exhaustivism and precisionism is theological realism. 

The divine “full meaning” is an object with a nature.

Another area of inerrancy where the ontological must drive the lexical is in the New Testament author’s use of the Old Testament. Peter Enns is but one of many who suspect the Apostles of playing fast and loose with the intentions of some passages they quote [9], and often alter the order of words (as Paul clearly does in Ephesians 4:8 with Psalm 68:18) [10]. In several works, G. K. Beale has responded that the New Testament authors were engaging in what amounts to Spirit-inspired “grammatical-historical exegesis” [11], but of a sort with a redemptive-historical arc.

One such example covered by both Enns and Beale is Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 in 2:15 of his Gospel. That the prophet did not discern the meaning of Christ to come is granted. Yet his own reference back to the original exodus is not at all incompatible with the reference forward to Christ being called out of Egypt [12]. How so? Without getting into additional biblical-theological categories that can fill out that picture, it is the “dual frames” of that picture that concerns us here.

Let us call everything that the inspired prophet Hosea knew that God meant by Hosea 11:1 the “picture within the picture,” and let us call everything that God meant by Hosea 11:1 (which includes everything that Matthew would mean in the reference back in Matthew 2:15, and theoretically innumerable other layers of meaning beside) the total picture. We might call everything within that outer frame the text’s “full meaning”.

The Old Testament author did not have to mean all of the same things as the New Testament author did appropriating his text, since both are smaller sets in the same circle of full meaning. The notion of “full meaning” is not new. Miller points out Augustine’s own appeal to the concept [13]. The key here is how this becomes yet another aid to defending inerrancy as it really is, rather than the caricature that the critic would make of it. The Bible never errs in all that its ultimate Author means by the totality of its truth. 

While friendly toward a doctrine of inerrancy, Ward attempts to mediate between a Barthian view of Scripture and the traditional Reformed view by means of speech-act theory. In Scripture, we have “a God who, by his very nature, acts by speaking,” and more than with any other speaker, “for God to say the words is to perform the action” [14]. Ward seems to want to say that inerrancy is the proper inference from inspiration, but that this is specifically true of all scriptural “propositions.”

How then does he differentiate biblical “propositions” as inerrant, from biblical “non-propositions” which are not? In his differentiation between the “speech-acts” and the “propositions” [15], Ward says, “language never exists simply to state propositions: its primary role is as a means by which one person acts in relation to others” [16]. So propositions are “part” of what is really a more profound action. We can agree that language is more than propositional, but on what ground do we say it is also not less? If theology is merely lexical and not also ontological, then it would be difficult to argue with Ward on this point. There is poetry and narrative and law, and not all in strict “propositional” form.

The only way for the speech-acts that are not strict propositions to communicate the reality that propositions do is if, well, if those speech-acts are also signs still beyond themselves toward being. Hence we can only answer Ward by coming full circle back to Augustine. 

Concluding thoughts—Toward a Reformed Classicalist Prolegomena

We do not learn our ABCs from Bible-reading, and we do not say that Critical Race Theory is “unbiblical” because there is any Scripture that explicitly deconstructs it. In other words, both at the level of our attention to method in systematic theology, and in our interaction with ideas in the culture around us, a theological realist account of biblical words meaning objective things is required. My own labels may strike the reader as novel, but what I am proposing is really nothing other than the basic mode of thought before the Enlightenment. 

John Owen wrote,

“Use is to be made of words and expressions as, it may be, are not literally and formally contained in the Scripture, but only are, unto our conceptions and apprehensions, expository of what is so contained. And to deny the liberty, yea, the necessity hereof, is to deny all interpretation of the Scripture—all endeavors to express the sense of the words of it unto the understandings of one another; which is, in a word, to render the Scripture itself useless” [17].

All of this is but one piece of the puzzle in my overall project of reviewing the role of (1) reason and (2) nature(s) at the foundations of systematic theology. I do not know how much more concisely what I mean by the latter can be expressed without simply using the one word “nature” and that in both its singular and plural application. It is put in this way because I do not want to communicate that this field of revelation concerns merely the physical world, which is one legitimate use of the word “nature,” and a relevant use in this context to be sure. I want to be clear that it is the objective nature of things as such, and so real objects with natures, that properly constitute the whole field of God’s revelation of himself in our ectypal form. 

This totality of truths concerning natures—including logical relationships between them—make up one pillar of the definition work of my larger thesis. The other is the essence of reason and how it relates to the forms of revelation and integrates them. Here, in this essay, I have only sought to establish that theology as a whole, and biblical truth in particular, is both ontological (of the nature of things) and lexical (as supremely defined by the words of Scripture), but that the ontological does have a metaphysical priority that will go a long way to explaining the various epistemological relationships between our fields of divine revelation.

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1. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, 94; cf. 83, 96.

2. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Holy Scripture,” in Allen and Swain, ed., Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 48.

3. Timothy Ward, Words of Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

4. Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 210; Although he appears to approvingly quote the Westminster divine, Daniel Fealty, who argued to the Anabaptists that translations err except “so farre onely as it agreeth with the Originall.” See footnote No. 80 on 210.

5. Letham, Systematic Theology, 211.

6. Francis Schaeffer, No Final Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1976), 23.

7. Frame, Systematic Theology, 599.

8. Paul D. Feinberg, quote in Treier, “Scripture and Hermeneutics,” in Kelly Kapic & Bruce McCormack, ed., Mapping Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 86.

9. Peter Enns, Incarnation and Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 114-116; 152.

10. Incidentally, Paul shows his own awareness of the potential for disputation of the citation by adding in the very next words, “In saying he ascended, what does it mean … ?” (v. 9) In short, Paul was inspired by the Spirit to take up the hermeneutical question. He was aware that he was expounding upon meaning not to be discerned merely by retracing the express ink patterns.

11. G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 86-87.

12. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism, 88-89; cf. Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 110; 2, 15, 17, 20, 29, 57, 60, 62-63.

13. Miller, Seeing by the Light, 19, see footnote no. 25.

14. Ward, Words of Life, 22.

15. Ward, Words of Life, 135.

16. Ward, Words of Life, 137.

17. Owen, quoted in Duby, God in Himself, 211.