History and Inspiration

"The Christian faith is worthless apart from the validity of the central historical claims that it makes."


That was my argument in the previous blog (and I apologize that I have not come back to it as quickly as I had hoped to).  I believe this strongly; again, I draw your attention to Paul's word in 1 Cor 15: If the resurrection (an historical event) has not occurred, then your faith is futile.  I am convinced, as I think Paul was, that if the Christian interpretation of history is incorrect, then our faith is worthless and we are fools.


The rubber meets the road in an often ugly way, however, when we take this strong conviction to the Bible.  If the Christian faith is based on historical events, do we therefore have to accept everything written in the Bible at historical face value?


If you're pulse just increased a bpm or two, that's probably a good thing.  The minute we fail to take this question seriously, we have fallen into "Lessing's ditch"--that is, we have privatized our faith and renounced its relationship to historical events.  This question is a very important one, but it does not have an easy, one-line answer.  And part of the problem lies precisely in the fact that easy, one-line answers are what people usually expect to this question.


Because I come from a more conservative church upbringing, I constantly hear the affirmative, one-line answer: "Yes, everything in the Bible happened exactly as it is recorded."  Those who come from a more liberal church upbringing probably laugh at this because they've been fed the opposite answer all their lives: "No, only un-thinking, radical, right-wingers still believe that the Bible can be used to talk about actual history."  As I said before, however, one-line answers are inadequate to answer the question.


The most frustrating thing to me, as a student of the Scriptures and as an historian, is that I find that most of the people I hear answering either of these one-liners (and I am, because of my environment, more prone to hear the first answer) are not nearly as familiar with the scriptures as they pose to be.  It would be laughable to me, if I didn't think the issue was one of great importance, to hear--as I often do--a layman or even a minister in a conservative church swear by heaven that everything recorded in the scriptures is historically accurate, who can't tell me what even the basic contents of a book like Haggai or Zechariah or Ezra are!


I mean, what if you met a doctor who had never studied cancer?  Or what if you met a physicist who hadn't ever heard of Einstein?  This is how I feel when I encounter these claims, because it is so blatantly obvious that the person has formed their conclusion before actually dealing with the data.


What causes this?  Why do good, well-meaning Christians make themselves look so foolish by making great claims for which they have no real, studied basis?


The problem is our view of inspiration.  Specifically, the problem is that we have 
formed our view of the Bible's inspiration before we have even read the Bible!


I can't tell you how many great Christians I've met who tell me with one breath (not always in so many words) that they are completely committed to the view of inspiration that says that everything in the Bible is historically accurate, and in another breath tell me that they're hoping to make it past 2 Samuel this year in their attempt to read through the Bible.


This, as you can probably tell, often throws serious students of the scriptures like myself into a frenzy.  The sad truth is that many who get to a serious graduate level of biblical studies like myself often leave the faith because they see just how irreconcilable this view of inspiration is to the actual data of the scriptures.


So is this the answer?  If the Christian faith is based on history, but our history in the Bible is not always entirely accurate, should we abandon the faith?


I want to argue that this is not the appropriate response.  No historian throws out an historical source just when one, minor (or perhaps at times even major) detail is examined and found lacking in accuracy.  Why would we do this with the scriptures?


(At this point it might be worth noting that I am perfectly aware that some reading this blog are saying, "Where's your evidence that not everything in the Bible is historically accurate?"  To this I make no lengthy reply at this time because I have seen how worthless those arguments so quickly become.  Let me simply say that, in light of 250+ years of critical study of the Bible, the burden of proof no longer lies upon the person who says that there are historical problems in the Bible, but upon the person who contends there are none.  It is very difficult to prove a negative.  Even if the Bible contains a mostly accurate portrait of events in the ancient world--which I believe it does--this does not make it perfectly accurate.  In fact, the very definition of "written history" rules out any perfectly accurate historical account [because of, for instance, the perspective of the historian writing the history], and the scriptures are most certainly written history.)


I think that the better response is to tweak our conception of "inspiration," and perhaps also our definition of "written history."  Contrary to what fundamentalists have been arguing since the advent of the evolution-Creation debate, "inspired word of God" does not mean the same thing as "historically and scientifically infallible account."  We are afraid.  We are afraid that letting go of this view of inspiration will mean that we are turning our backs on the Bible.  While I appreciate this fear, as one conservative Christian to (hopefully) many others, I want to say that this fear is unfounded.


The Bible is a great historical resource, and ultimately I believe that the Christian faith depends on the Bible's being historically accurate on a great deal of what it says.  We need our doctrine of inspiration to be built upon what we find there, though, not on what we bring to it.


I leave you with these thoughts, because my post is already getting quite long, but invite your responses--any and all!  I may continue this train of thought in another post if I feel that it will be helpful to do so; there is so much more that could be said.