Not really. I don’t think fallibility or infallibility applies to texts. God is infallible, so God’s communication is trustworthy and effective and I would say his intended meaning is good and true. But deciding that means God’s communication in the biblical texts is perfect like God is perfect is the problem. Communication is not some abstract entity that emanates from God and his character. It’s a processs, one that inherently involves an imperfect medium (human language and translations of human language) and imperfect hearers (humans with a whole host of cognitive biases as well as different contexts and perspectives). Meaning is what we make together. The Bible is special because God led people to choose it and God’s spirit works through it in a special way. I don’t think it’s authoritative because of some magical inherent quality in the texts, it’s authoritative because the Church, Christ’s body on earth, indwelled by God’s own spirit, ascribed it authority when they declared it canon.
Certainly God does inspire and communicate through other people and texts as well, and to the degree those people or writings reveal God’s message, they are trustworthy and effective as well, but the global church has not declared them special revelation. So they aren’t authoritative in the same way.
I went back to reread the original comment as I assumed I must have misread a degree of nuance. I honestly don’t see anything being nuanced. “The composers, compilers, redacters, and preservers of the text were moved by God’s spirit in some way to record and maintain the Scriptures…”
I think God’s revelation is the message the texts communicate or represent, it’s not the text itself. The message Scriptures communicate is God’s word. I don’t put my faith in a text or think a text is Truth. I put my faith in God through Jesus. I believe Jesus, through his church picked the canon, so it has authority to reveal God to us, but it’s Jesus I trust to do that, not the texts. It’s the Holy Spirit speaking through the texts that brings conviction of sin, correction, wisdom, encouragement, discipleship, and formation, not the texts.
It’s just a stone’s throw to making the judgement that since God is infallible, his so moving the writing, editing and preservation of the text would also be an infallible work.
Sure, but describing God’s work as infallible is different than describing the result of God’s work as infallible. We shouldn’t confuse the result of a causal process with the agent behind a causal process. God’s work of sanctification in people’s lives is holy, but that doesn’t mean that all Christians who have been worked on by God’s holiness are completely holy.
This is a significant part of that. But as you so well said earlier in the thread, even this is hard to believe given this history of the church. I’m not sure what’s harder to believe, that or an inerrant text
I recall my thesis advisor noting that there is a concept to be learned from Hebrew and Greek texts where there is no spacing between words, and not just that writing materials were expensive: it’s that they didn’t even view individual words the way we do but saw them as part of a whole. I doubt that the ancient scribes intended to convey such a lesson, but especially given texts where there were marks ending sentences it was definitely one that could be derived.
I’ve often noted that in Koine Greek the word order required taking each concept and “sticking it on a shelf” until a key word revealed the connections – the most obvious two examples being putting a subject at the start and parking the verb at the end, or setting down a definite article followed by one or more clauses before writing the noun the article belongs to. To me that indicates that they thought differently than we do, that each such clause was a single concept and each concept was built up in specific order – I recall being delighted when one professor chided a student (who’d come through one of the weaker Greek programs) for trying to make the Greek into English by hunting for words to make it come out in English order, saying we should think with the author by taking the ideas in the order in which he presented them (not delighted at a fellow student being chided, but because that was the ideal that my first Greek professor had set out – not to read the New Testament as a modern American, but to read it as a first century Greek).
There’s definitely a “single valid reading” for a lot of it, but to say all of it only has a single valid reading is imposing modern categories – ancient writers could use words and phrases that could mean two different things to mean both those things at once. Choosing a single reading in such a case loses part of the message.
In a way it’s part of the problem with “translating” by looking up a list of possible “meanings” and picking one – that treats words like little boxes that have several pieces in them and any of the pieces can be selected. But words aren’t like that, they’re boxes with crystals inside that come with multiple facets and can employ – or must employ – more than one facet at the same time. Venn diagrams are better representations of word meanings than any list; one professor used them to try to get us to struggle after the core concept of a word along with its range of meaning in English words as a single set of meaning, a single whole.
Language is a filter that limits concepts even while it is a medium that conveys concepts, so no communication in human language can ultimately be infallible because the filter inevitably restricts the concepts – and that’s before it gets to the filter of each mind since each mind grasps many words slightly differently.
The flip side is that though the text isn’t perfect, it is what we have, so we don’t get to dismiss parts we don’t like (or don’t understand?) and just work from what we do.
No, because that misses the essential element that the text, even if God had chosen every single word, is still in human language and cannot be infallible. That’s where literalists deviate: they fail to consider the one thing that can get us as close as possible to the not-quite-infallible meaning – the historical context including language, literary genre, culture, and worldview.
An infallible bricklayer can make a fallible wall if he doesn’t have infallible bricks. No matter how good the artist, he is limited by the possibilities of the medium.
How do you understand Jesus’ words recorded in John ‘The Scripture cannot be broken’. He seemed to be referring to specific words in the OT, ie the text, to make his point.
I don’t see what that has to do with inerrancy – it’s a reference to authority. We moderns have this notion that authority comes from being propositionally correct – which is actually an amusing conceit since it rests on the arrogant assumption that what we (think we) know about science and history are correct – but to the ancients authority derived from source; if a deity told a story, that story didn’t have to have actually happened in order to have its lessons be real.
No, that is not how cognitive science sees language. It’s an outdated model.
The strong view of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that claimed cognition is largely influenced by language has been pretty thoroughly disproven. This kind of observation about Greek just sounds like the kind of thing English speakers like to say when they realize English isn’t the default norm for humanity. Greek works like any other language. There are conventional information structures in any language and preferred discourse patterns are built into the grammar and syntax, but Greek does the same kind of communicative things with topic and focus and participant tracking as any other language. Both English and Greek are Indo-European languages, they have a ton in common conceptually, and modern Western culture has been greatly impacted by Greek patterns of thought. Relative to other languages and cultures of the world, they really are not that far apart.
Concepts are formed pre-language from experience and linking abstractions to experience. So it’s actually our experience that limits concepts, not our language. We have concepts we don’t have word labels for and we all have words in our vocabularies that we lack fully developed concepts for. It’s our concepts that are fallible because our ability to take in stimuli and make sense of our experiences is limited by our cognition. Communication is more than a transfer of concepts from a sender to a receiver.
It’s a metaphor comparing Scripture to something an unbreakable or an unchangeable object to make a point. In the context of arguing with the Pharisees (experts at quoting Scripture to defend their rhetorical points), he was trapping them by the rules of their own game to admit he wasn’t a blasphemer like they claimed, but was really sent by God. So yes, he was referring to specific words in the OT text to make a point (that’s what the rabbis did all day after all), but the point wasn’t “therefore, inerrancy!”
If words don’t contain meaning, then there’s no meaning to be had. That makes them meaning containers. Thy are more than just that, but if they’re less then there’s no meaning at all.
If you’re talking about cognitive linguistics, from what I’ve read that’s purely theoretical and doesn’t even concern itself with particular languages.
If Koine Greek was spoken the same as it got written then it doesn’t “work like any other language”, definitely doesn’t work like English because it can stack concepts in a normal sentence such that any English speaker would have to take notes in order to figure out what was just said. It’s similar to “Sissy with Grandma from the old country on the boat just came over” – a person might be able to get accustomed to concepts coming like that, but some just can’t. The reverse is also true; I’ve met German speakers who just could not manage English because their brains couldn’t manage English sentence structure, or at least some structures, and tried helping Spanish speakers learn English who had the same problem.
It’s an observation made by some of my professors who were fluent in at least six different languages and had taught in several of them: different languages package thoughts differently and those ways of packaging are not always compatible.
I wish I could remember the specifics, but one instructor set out how the concept of something that seems as simple as “time” varies between several languages, and given that variance there are just some things that cannot be transferred between languages. That’s a plain instance of language limiting our concepts.
Then there was the Vietnamese guy who explained that his kids breezed through arithmetic because the operations of arithmetic were built into the way that Korean speaks about numbers – I can’t even conceive of how that could work, but it’s another example of language limiting concepts, in that case English being the language doing the limiting.
But it cannot be less than that, or there is no communication.
The meaning of the words is not exact or specific enough to have a single understanding.
Inerrancy or infallibility relies on a single understanding. it assumes that there is a single meaning or message.
Black or white? right or wrong? All or nothing?
Look around you. The world is full of diversity. Paul claims God’s essence can be seen in creation. If so why would His Scripture be singular?
Richard
PS I am sure that God could have made Scripture perfect in every way but think of all the time, effort and entertainment He would have denied you, let alone the pleasure of getting it right. (not to mention lawding over those who haven’t got it right)
