While I’m weaving my way carefully through Christianity’s response to the historical philosophical duel between Platonism and Aristotelianism, we ought to make a pitstop at the topic of the innerrancy of the Bible.

Biblical inerrancy seems to go hand in hand with the “Sola Scriptura” ideal of the Protestant Reformation, whereby it was believed that the Scriptures ought to be the sole arbiter on issues of faith and doctrine. This was part of Martin Luther’s anti-authoritarian one-two punch against the power and corruption of the Church of Rome. I’m having trouble tracking down the actual historical roots of the concept of Biblical inerrancy itself, but it seems to have taken it’s modern form in or around 1978 in the interdenominational (Evangelical) Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Some choice quotes from the Chicago Statement:

We affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses. […]

We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit. […]

We affirm the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.

We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved violate the truth claims of the Bible.

I have to say it’s quite an interesting read (not overly long either). It also builds nicely on a conversation we were having earlier about using beliefs as filters. In this instance, they seem to have set up a very intentional “Bridge Out” sign to keep people out of certain philosophical and theological waters. But in doing so, just what have they called down on themselves?

Before I try to answer that question, it might be useful here to highlight a Catholic belief that Evangelicals and other Protestants have railed against and argued over for centuries, the Transubstantiation:

This doctrine holds that the elements are not only spiritually transformed, but are actually (substantially) transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. The elements retain the appearance or “accidents” of bread and wine, but are indeed the actual Body and Blood of Christ, the actual, physical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. […]

“Substance” as a philosophical term describes what a given object is, the properties of the object that are essential to “it” being “it.” Without its substance, an object ceases to be what it “is.” Accidents are non-essential properties; even without its accidents (such as color, taste, or shape), an object remains what it “is.” For example, hair is an accident of humans, while being a mammal is substantial. If a human loses its hair, it is still human. If a human stops being a mammal, it is no longer a human, because being a mammal is essential to being human. At Consecration, the substance of the Eucharistic elements change; while the non-essential properties (shape, taste, color) remain the same, the essence of what it “is” changes into Christ’s Body and Blood.

The Transubstantiation is nothing less than a masterful piece of mytho-philosophical wrangling. Upon it rests the full weight of the doctrine that Jesus was fully man (ie, Aristotelian real) and fully god (Platonic ideal). In this story, we’re asked to simultaneously believe in two things that essentially conflict: the perceptions of our senses, which tell us it’s ordinary bread and wine, and the perceptions of our soul, which tell us that it’s Christ’s own blood and body mystically. If you can “swallow” this inherent paradox, then you can play the rest of the Catholic symbol game and win.

Not surprisingly, non-Catholics often see this as totally crazy (I hope I don’t need to explain why), and many Protestant denominations see this doctrine as dangerous, bordering even on idolatry. I’m sure these people would chafe at my comparing the two, but to me the notion of Biblical Inerrancy seems like a clever substitution. That is, it plays the same trick on you, of forcing you into a paradox where you believe that the Bible is absolutely without fault, even if it’s teachings disagree with your sense perceptions or historical knowledge. The difference to me, however, seems two-fold. First, this doctrine rams home the belief in Sola Scriptura, and requires good Evangelicals to turn to Scripture whenever they have a question about anything. If we’re going to take it back to Platonism vs. Aristotelianism though, it would seem to come down on the side of the Platonic Ideal in that the Bible is Ideal, and this Ideal is the only true conduit to God. The Catholic Transubstantiation seems different because it never asks us to discount our senses. It says that our senses our accurate (the “accidents”), but that our souls have a different kind of perception as well, and the “mystery” consists of the fact that both are accurate.

Evangelicalism has freed itself from the constraints of reality though, thanks to the Platonic Idealist doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. And we can see the effects of this change extrapolated into our Evangelical President George W. Bush. In that now famous NY Times article, Ron Suskind quotes a White House aide as saying:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,”

Especially not if the world has been taken up a notch by Platonic Idealism packaged in new and ever-evolving forms.