"Now, if the providence of God can guarantee the authority and message of Scripture throughout the preservation of its texts despite the copies having errors, the same could be true throughout the composition of those texts despite the autographs having errors." (Licona, pg. 7)
He gives a fuller explanation on the following pages.
"If Paul’s statement “Christ is speaking through me” [2 Cor 13:2-3] is an example of what it means to be theopneustos or “carried along by the Holy Spirit,” the message Paul preached derives from God and is approved by God. But to insist that every last word in Paul’s preaching was always inerrant in the CSBI sense, is something that I doubt most of us in this room would want to argue. Yet if minor errors of detail could be present in Paul’s preaching when Christ was speaking through him, why could they not also be present in Paul’s writing when Christ was speaking through him? This is not to say there were errors in the autographs. It is to say that we cannot know if there were and that the position that they could not have been is based on a dubious concept of inspiration." (Licona, pg. 8-9)
I find it refreshing that Licona is willing to discuss revisions of the CSBI and the general way Evangelicals view inspiration and inerrancy. I too have made my own attempts at addressing the shortfalls of this doctrinal statement in my blog and through some published papers (here, and here). Yet I can't help but find Licona's attempt somewhat flatfooted.
First is the fact that Licona seems to misunderstand what the CSBI is proposing. He emphasizes one particular phrase in the CSBI: "although the human writers’ personalities were expressed in what they wrote, the words were divinely constituted" (emphasis by Licona, pg. 4-5). According to Licona, this goes beyond the scriptural support found in verses like 2 Timothy 3:16 or 2 Peter 1:20-21 and emphasizes the divine origin of the scriptures at the expense of their human authorship. Licona introduces William Lane Craig's proposal of the confluence of scripture and its dual authorship as a new addition to the discussion (Licona, 6). Yet the CSBI does emphasize the human authorship of scripture, noting that the language and styles of the authors would not have been overridden by God.
"Article VIII. We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities."Craig's view of the dual authorship of scripture is essentially no different than Article VIII of the CSBI.
Licona also briefly discusses the problems of the New Testament authors quoting from the Greek version of the Old Testament (LXX) as though this is something not encompassed by the CSBI (Licona, 8-9). Along the same lines, the synoptic problem and Matthew's alleged "correcting" of Mark's grammar are also presented as problems that are outside the narrow scope of the CSBI's view of inspiration and inerrancy (Licona, 4-5). Again, the inerrancy envisioned by the CSBI is loose enough to account for these kinds of "problems" in Article XIII.
"We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations."Finally, Licona's thesis that God is concerned only with the message of scripture seems to mis the mark altogether. Licona fails to understand the context of 2 Timothy 3:16 because earlier Paul directs Timothy,
"Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you."Paul really seems to be emphasizing that the very arrangement of his divinely inspired words are being entrusted to Timothy and are to be guarded by him. This goes against Licona's interpretation of θεόπνευστος (God breathed) in 2 Timothy 3:16. Licona seems to be making the same error of misunderstanding that Bart Ehrman has done, confusing the preservation of scripture with inspiration. I think it is important to quote Ehrman's comments in full here.
‛Yποτύπωσιν ἔχε ὑγιαινόντων λόγων ὧν παρ’ ἐμοῦ ἤκουσας ἐν πίστει καὶ ἀγάπῃ τῇ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ· τὴν καλὴν παραθήκην φύλαξον διὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου τοῦ ἐνοικοῦντος ἐν ἡμῖν. (2 Tim. 1:13-14)
"Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted "born-again" Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don't have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. Moreover, I came to think that my earlier views of inspiration were not only irrelevant, they were probably wrong. For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them." (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 211)Now compare this with Mike Licona's conclusions in his paper quoted above. Though Licona points to the doctrine of inspiration that needs tweaking, it seems like he is really looking at the manner in which the text has been preserved (very humanly with variations and errors in the manuscripts), and the lack of the preservation of the autographs and questioning whether the text was inerrant in the first place. Obviously Licona believes that the scriptures are the inspired word of God, unlike Ehrman, yet the similarity of their conclusions are striking.
Overall, Licona seems to be missing the point, that inerrancy really has to do with God and his character and little to do with the mechanics of inspiration God employed. It is irrelevant whether one looks at the hand of God writing on tablets of stone, or Isaiah orally giving prophecies from God, or Paul writing letters to Churches, the scriptures are inerrant because God doesn't lie. If the scriptures are divinely inspired, then they are truthful in everything that they claim. If they are not then God must be called a liar and cannot be trusted. We may not have full access to inerrancy because we do not have access to the physical autographs (see my paper here for a full definition), but we do have access to the "text" of the autographs, even if imperfectly (see the final paragraphs of my paper here). I am fully in agreement with Licona's conclusions that what we have preserved today is certainly enough for the Holy Spirit to work!
I am also completely onboard with Licona's desire to re-address the CSBI, I too believe that Evangelicals should be discussing the doctrine of scripture and better articulating our understanding of inerrancy beyond the CSBI. I hope that this blog post is a step in that direction.
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Quotations from the CSBI are taken from "Defending Inerrancy" (https://defendinginerrancy.com/chicago-statements/)
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Quotations from the CSBI are taken from "Defending Inerrancy" (https://defendinginerrancy.com/chicago-statements/)
