ICBI Inerrancy is not for the Birds

Joseph M. Holden
President of Veritas Evangelical Seminary

The current trend among evangelical New Testament scholars to utilize or approve of genre criticism (e.g., Craig Blomberg, Michael Licona, Darrell Bock, Michael Bird, Carlos Bovell, Kevin Vanhoozer, et al) to de-historicize the biblical text appears to stem from an aversion to the correspondence view of truth. To achieve their criticism, correspondence is replaced with the preferred intentionalist view of truth that seeks after unexpressed intentions and purposes of the biblical author as they correspond with extra-biblical literature of similar genre to determine meaning. For Bird, the Gospels give us a reliable “big picture” about Jesus, but the details do not matter. Regarding his approach and view of historical reliability, Bird affirms:

“My own approach is what I would term “believing criticism.” This approach treats Scripture as the inspired and veracious Word of God, but contends that we do Scripture the greatest service when we commit ourselves to studying it in light of the context and processes through which God gave it to us. Scripture is trustworthy because of God’s faithfulness to his own Word and Scripture is authoritative because the Holy Spirit speaks to us through it. Nonetheless, God has seen fit to use human language, human authors, and even human processes as the means by which he has given his inscripturated revelation to humanity. To understand the substance of Scripture means wrestling with its humanity, the human face of God’s speech to us in his Word.”

“After due allowances are made for the artistic license, theological embellishment, and inherent biases of the tradents of the tradition, our witnesses to Jesus remain steadfast in their conviction that the Jesus whom they narrate is historically authentic as much as he is personally confronting.” (Emphasis added.)

“This means that we are actually liberated to read the Gospels as they were intended to be read: as historically referential theological testimonies to Jesus as the exalted Lord. It does not matter then whether there was one demoniac (Mark 5:2; Luke 8:27) or two demoniacs (Matt 8:28) that Jesus healed on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus healed a demon possessed man in the vicinity and Matthew just likes couplets, making everything two’s where he can! Similarly, trying to prove that mustard seeds really are the smallest plants of the earth (Mark 4:31) or that Peter denied Jesus three times before the cock first crowed and then three times again afterwards (Matt 26:69-74; Luke 22:56-60; John 18:16-27; Mark 14:66-68) is like trying to understand the Magna Carta by arguing about whether the commas are in the right position. John Calvin himself said: ‘We know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates, or even in detailing minutely everything that Christ did or said.’[Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 216]. The Evangelists give us the big picture about Jesus, the gist of his words, the major outlines of his career, they position him in relation to the prophetic promises, and they declare the all important significance as to who he was and why he died. The details should not be treated with indifferences, but they are not the focus of the stories we call “Gospels.” While I think the overall historical reliability of the Gospels is vitally important less we treat Gospels as religiously laden fiction, we should not import anachronistic and modernist criteria of historical reality into our treatment of the Gospels and make it a condition for theological validity:” (Emphasis Added.)

Again, Bird remarks:

So then, how do we as a believing and confessing community approach the critical questions that the texts of the Gospels present to us?…. It entails we go through the Gospels unit by unit and ask what exactly did Jesus intend and how would his hearers have understood him. It equally entails asking why the Evangelists have told the story this way and why do they have the peculiarities that they do. Third, we have to explore the impact that the Gospels intended to make upon their implied readers and how the Four Gospels as a whole intend to shape the believing communities who read them now.” (Emphasis added)

ICBI Rejection of Bird’s View of Truth

ICBI rejected this intentionalist view of truth and affirmed a correspondence view of truth that every affirmation must correspond to the facts in order to be true: It declared: “We affirm that the Bible expresses God’s truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. We further affirm that a statement is true if it represents matters as they actually are, but is an error if it misrepresents the facts” (ICBI Hermeneutics Statement on Inerrancy, Article VI). What is more, the commentary on Chicago Statement on Hermeneutics, “By ‘biblical standards of truth and error’ is meant the view used both in the Bible and in everyday life, viz., a correspondence view of truth. This part of the article is direct toward those who would redefine truth to relate merely to redemptive intent, the purely personal, or the like, rather than that which corresponds with reality” (CSBH Commentary on Article XVIII).

So, clearly, Michael Bird, Craig Blomberg, and Michael Licona and all who agree with their approach are in denial of the ICBI view of biblical inerrancy which the Evangelical Theological Society has embraced as a guide for understanding inerrancy (See Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?, 136, 170-71; Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 185-86, 552-53, 555-556; Bovell, Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear, 55-58; Vanhoozer, Is Their Meaning in the Text?; see Bock’s blog statement approving Blomberg’s Can We Still Believe the Bible? and approving genre criticism as consistent with ICBI inerrancy at http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/craig_blombergs_can_we_believe_the_bible-_chapter_4 on March 16, 2014. Bock asserts, “Craig Blomberg’s fourth chapter in Can We Still Believe the Bible, examines some objections to inerrancy from both the right and the left. Yes, there is a position to the right of holding to inerrancy. It is holding it in a way that is slow to recognize solutions that fit within the view by undervaluing the complexities of interpretation”).