Inerrancy is a terrible framework to build a doctrine of Scripture from. Building a theological doctrine should never start from a negation, but from a positive starting point that has the capacity to bear real conceptual and theological fruit. I think John Webster, in his little book Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch provides the best way forward for thinking a doctrine of Scripture, alongside what he calls an ‘ontology of Scripture.’ An ontology of Scripture entails a way of thinking Scripture from a theological taxis within a God/world relation. In other words, an ontology of Scripture entails seeing Scripture in its proper light and orientation as a reality given by God in and through Christ in the event of salvation. It is humanity’s reconciliation with God, in the mediating humanity of Jesus Christ, that Scripture finds both its gravitas and res (reality); since Scripture has no meaning, no telos outwith its givenness in Jesus Christ (Jn 5.39; Col 1.15ff etc.). In other words, as Webster argues, Scripture ought to be understood with particular reference to soteriology; even more pointedly, in the realm of sanctification. It is as we are participatio Christi, as we are being sanctified from glory to glory, that the rose colored glasses become clearer and clearer as the day of salvation draws closer today than it was yesterday. It is as we encounter Christ in Scripture that we are set apart over and again until that great day of beatific vision. So, there is, indeed, and instrumentality to Scripture, as Webster et al. are wont to emphasize, including Katherine Sonderegger; but this does not also need to mean that Scripture, as the looking-glass for seeing and encountering God in Christ, must also then have the capacity to be fallible. Webster doesn’t take that turn, but Sonderegger et al. does. That’s what I want to highlight in this post.

Katherine Sonderegger in a chapter she has written for the book Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum gives us insight into her doctrine of Scripture. As I just alluded to above she posits that Scripture is fallible, or that it can contain errors given its human composition. She maintains that the church’s tradition, and the supervening and providential work of the Holy Spirit can and will direct Holy Scripture to its proper end in Christ; but she takes the unnecessary step of casting doubt on Scripture’s veracity, in regard to the factual statements it makes about things related to history, cosmology, science, so on and so forth. The context she writes the following within is her engagement with Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, and in that context she wants to press the idea of Scripture as being an instrument; but I contend she presses that metaphor to its theological breaking point. She writes:

You’ll note that I opened the door a bit to the notions of fallibility, of scriptural error. Now this is no small topic, no abstract or cool tenet of the schools, but rather a “painful school of honesty,” to borrow Schweitzer’s celebrated phrase, a testing crisis of the Christian faith in modernity. Dei Verbum, you remember, forged a delicate sentence to capture the wide-ranging opinions of the Fathers and periti on the doctrine of inerrancy. The full sentence—itself a master of joinery!—reads: “Since all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.” Now an entire treatise could be written on this complex sentence so I will not pretend to do it justice here. But commentators have been quick to point out that this truth God “wishes to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” is for our salvation; we are not in the presence here of a mere scrupulously correct instruction book. God’s intention or will for the creature, the liberation and healing of the whole world, is the proper subject-matter of the Holy Bible. Now it seems to me that the image of the mirror would allow us the wide-open vista of a reflection that is itself true and without error, even if the reflective instrument is itself flawed, partial, even woefully inadequate. I see my gray hair quite accurately, unmistakably even, in the poorest Woolworth looking-glass. There are limits, to be sure. Cardboard does not reflect; even the components, glass without the silvering, show nothing. But we might, in this image of the mirror, capture something infinite distance between God and his creatures, including the works of their hands, yet remain still children of the Word, seeing in part and in a riddle, yet truly, faithfully, and in confidence of the whole that will be seen one day, God willing, face to face.[1]

Her doctrine of Scripture, as sketched in this passage, sounds close to Barth’s, ironically. I say ironically because her theological prolegomenon (theological methodology), with her respective theory of revelation in tow, does not have Barth’s Christ concentration; indeed she is heavily critical of this concentration (see her Systematic Theology V1). Because Barth has his ‘threefold form of the Word’ (the eternal Logos, written, and preached/proclaimed) he has the sort of theological recourse to think Scripture within the Christological/soteriological frame that Sonderegger does not equally have (I will have to develop this more later).

As you read my concern in this post you might think that I simply want to argue for a crypto-inerrancy position, but that really isn’t the case. I do believe that the intention of biblical inerrancy is right, because it wants to affirm the reliability and utter truthfulness of Holy Scripture as God’s ordained means of presenting Himself afresh and anew through its reality in the encountering Christ therein. But I don’t think that a doctrine of inerrancy, as a doctrine of Scripture, per se, is the best way for framing Christian Scripture; as already alluded to earlier. My problem is that when people want to operate with a confessional notion of Scripture, as Webster, Sonderegger, Barth et al. do, that it is unnecessary, in my view, to get into the binary of an error or inerror discussion about Scripture. But Sonderegger (and Barth and TF Torrance et al) feel compelled to emphasize, at points, Scripture’s errors, in order to magnify the Holiness of a triune God who can still use it for His purposes of encountering the world through its reality in Christ.

But really, I see that WHOLE discussion as an orientation provided for by modernity rather than by Scripture’s witness itself. In other words, I see it as a capitulation to the higher critics and their text-criticism of Scripture on the one hand, while on the other attempting to salvage Scripture (in a rather, ironically, Schleiermacherian mode) as an instrument that God can still use despite its many errors; as those are related to points of science and the facts of history. This is an unnecessary attempt to work around a foreign naturalism and historicism imposed on the text of Scripture. For my money it would be best if this discussion was left to the side; which is why I like Webster’s approach so much (he doesn’t fall prey to feeling compelled to say Scripture has error or doesn’t have error, since he sees Scripture from within a genuinely Christian dogmatic frame).

PS. I also like Barth’s deployment and appropriation of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of second naïveté as he engages with a doctrine and reading of Holy Scripture. This is something that Sonderegger also does not have in her tool-box.

[1] Katherine Sonderegger, “Holy Scripture as a Mirror of God,” in Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum, edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, OP (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 51-2.