Biblical Inerrancy and Human Fallibility

I keep hearing from starkly conservative Christians on various issues arguments along the following lines:

1. The Bible is the Word of God
2. Therefore, the Bible cannot be wrong,
3. The Bible says thus-and-such on an issue.
4. Therefore, thus-and-such must be so.

Here's the thing. This argument overlooks the role of the reader of the Bible in understanding what it says, among other things. Let's take a closer look at this argument.

The Bible is the Word of God
Well, yes, but only secondarily. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, as the Bible itself says in John 1. The Bible is God's message to us. But that message says that Jesus Christ is God's ultimate message to us: God's self-disclosure of who God is. So while it is the case that the Bible is the Word of God, it is not the ultimate Word of God. The Bible is important, but it is not as important at Jesus Christ. If the Bible seems to say something which is at odds with what Jesus says or does, then Jesus is the surer guide to truth.

Therefore, the Bible cannot be wrong.
Well, yes. The Bible is God's message to us that Jesus Christ is God's ultimate message. There is really no reason for God to lie, or even be mistaken, in telling us that. However, it is about this message that God has for us in the Bible that the Bible cannot be wrong. Other aspects of the Bible are secondary. They are aspects that God uses to get the main message across. They need not be correct in themselves. In some cases, in fact, they had to be wrong.

Why? God may have inspired the Bible, but from the moment that any given verse was more than a divine thought humans were involved. These humans were, as all of us are, products of their time and place. Modern ideas about such things as the origin of life, the creation of the universe, and the age of Earth would have been absurd to those who first heard them as well as several generations of those who transmitted the texts. The result would have been that any texts which described the world in modern terms would have been considered nonsense by its first hearers and likely lost.

The Bible says thus-and-such on an issue.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. How can you tell? The only way to tell what the Bible says is to read it. And therein lies the issue.

The Bible cannot be wrong. But you can. And so can I. So can any of us who aren't God. And as soon as you introduce a fallible human into the picture, the picture changes. Because while the Bible cannot be wrong about its central point, you and I can be wrong about what the Bible means. The error, then, isn't the Bible's, it is ours. And when we make a mistake of this sort, then our claim that the Bible says a certain thing is wrong, even though the Bible is not wrong.

Therefore, thus-and-such must be true.
Well, yes, if the Bible actually says that. But see the section above. Not every interpretation of the Bible is necessarily true, simply because it is an interpretation of the Bible. This last statement is somewhat trite. It is trivial to come up with patently incorrect interpretations of the Bible. Nonetheless, interpretations which are offered seriously can have errors, not because the Bible is fallible, but because the interpreter is fallible.

So while every step of this argument is at least potentially true, the argument as a whole is far from ironclad. As it is usually used, it acts as a shutting down of discussion due to what those arguing seem to consider to be obvious truths. But it is only possible to make this argument if you ignore the role of the interpreter or reader in communicating the claimed statement of the Bible. Yet this role is vital: without someone to read, and by reading interpret, the Bible, it is an inert document, no more capable of revealing us God in Jesus Christ than a coffee mug in a box in the back storeroom of a coffee shop.