Inductive Inerrancy

In the months since the International Seminar on the Authority of Scripture that took place at Wenham, Massachusetts, during June of last year, numerous articles and letters-to-editors have appeared dealing with biblical inerrancy. Having established a reputation for volubility at the seminar (Dr. Ockenga seemed ready to give me a prolixity prize at the final session), I find myself emotionally compelled to enter the postmortem fray.

But what I have to say will be quite brief, since my concern is restricted to one key problem, which kept cropping up under various guises throughout the ten-day seminar: the question of induction vs. deduction in relation to the inerrancy of Scripture. I was amazed to find that a number of the seminar participants (generally exegetes) associated the historic Reformation, evangelical conviction that the Bible is factually errorless with a “deductive” process of reasoning from such passages as Second Timothy 3:16, while preferring personally to leave the question of factual error open on the “inductive” ground that every problem passage of Scripture warrants interpretative consideration sui generis.

Such arguments have been making headway even without Dewey M. Beegle’s Inspiration of Scripture (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 26. 1963). Thus Robert H. Mounce, in his June, 1966, Eternity article entitled “Clues to Understanding Biblical Accuracy,” asks his readers the (to him) rhetorical question, “Are we to argue deductively that inspiration logically necessitates Cape Kennedy accuracy, or shall we adopt the inductive approach and ask Scripture to define its own terms?” In my judgment, even if we blast the “Cape Kennedy” straw man from this question, we are still left with a query as misleading as, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

The great Wittgenstein, in a famous remark, claimed that the aim in philosophy is “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Let’s see if we can extricate the contemporary theological fly from the inductive-vs.-deductive fly bottle.

First and foremost, we must grant the priority of induction in setting out a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Why? Although all investigative operations involve the interplay of deduction and induction—together with a liberal dose of what Peirce called imaginative retroduction (see my paper, “The Theologian’s Craft,” American Scientific Affiliation Journal, September, 1966)—only inductively justifiable results necessarily jibe with the phenomenal world. The only purely deductive procedures are logical or mathematical in nature, and they at best offer only a “scaffolding” for the world of fact, not an account of any particular facts. Independently of the Bible, no one has any right, on alleged “deductive” grounds, to pronounce on the nature of scriptural authority.

But (and a more important “but” cannot be imagined) to affirm the primacy of induction in the inerrancy issue in no way establishes the view that factual error can be compatible with a proper inspiration doctrine. “Induction” is not a monolithic, simplistic procedure in which one stares at one problematic fact at a time and then draws conclusions from these facts. Actually, one does not know how to treat particular factual problems until one has a gestalt or pattern in which to fit them. This gestalt is, of course, inductively derived from the material to be analyzed; but, since it provides the structure for understanding the particulars, its significance transcends that of the details. Unless it is properly induced, further induction will be fruitless.

Let us take some non-biblical literary examples. In understanding modern stream-of-consciousness writing (e.g., portions of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; his Ulysses; parts of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), the reader is hopelessly led astray by the indicia of the narrative until he discovers, through the express teaching of the novel, the actual age of the characters involved. Having learned this, he has an inductively derived gestalt for understanding the particular problems of the stream-of-consciousness narration; to reverse the procedure would be to lose all hope of meaningful interpretation.

The wild hilarity of Frederick C. Crews’s Pooh Perplex (in which he “analyzes” Winnie-the-Pooh from the standpoint of “varying critical persuasions,” such as the Marxist and psychoanalytic literary schools) stems from an intentional overlooking of the gestalt principle. Each interpreter hopelessly misconstrues Pooh, not because he doesn’t employ genuine, inductively derived indicia from Milne’s book, but because he never determines the gestalt: the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh is a children’s book, not a treatise on class war or the Oedipus complex.

To know how to treat biblical passages containing apparent errors or contradictions, we must determine what kind of book the Bible is. A doctrine of limited biblical authority derived from passages manifesting difficulties is as false an induction and as flagrant a denial of the analogy of Scripture as is a morally imperfect Christology derived from questionable acts on Jesus’ part. In both cases, proper induction requires that we go to the express biblical teaching on the subject (Jesus’ deity; Scripture’s authority) and allow this to create the pattern for treating particular problems.

And how does one correctly determine the nature and extent of scriptural authority? Not by staring at genealogical difficulties or ancient king-lists as (to use Luther’s figure) a cow stares at a new gate, but by going directly to the Bible’s central character, Jesus Christ, who declared himself to be God incarnate by manifold proofs, and observing his approach to Scripture.

Christ’s attitude toward the Old Testament was one of total trust: nowhere, in no particular, and on no subject did he place Scripture under criticism. Never did he distinguish truth “in faith and practice” from veracity in historical and secular matters, and he told the Evil Foe in no uncertain terms that man lives “by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, quoting Deut. 8:3). To his apostles, under whose scrutiny the New Testament would be written, he promised his Holy Spirit, who “shall bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26, cf. 2 Pet. 3:15, 16).

Inerrancy? Yes. Induction? Yes. The way out of the fly bottle? Approaching Scripture always and everywhere as did the Lord Christ.

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