Is the NT Reliable? Part 1: Reliable for What?

I was recently invited to speak at RTS Washington’s Sed Contra series of talks. The series of talks is intended to be a casual space for conversation about difficult or controversial topics. Since I decided to write up my presentation “conference style,” I thought I’d chop it up into bits and post it on the blog. Here’s part 1.

I have been tasked with answering the question: is the NT reliable? Now I recently discovered a particular law, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’” I suppose that the law holds in this particular case because one certainly could, and many certainly have, answer the posed question with “no,” but it will come as no surprise to anyone here that I intend to answer the question with a resounding “yes.”

The “Hard” Problem

But first I would like to divide the question. It’s important, before we proceed, to have a better sense of what we’re actually asking. To put it simply: reliable for what? RTS is an evangelical institution, and if you’re familiar with evangelicals you likely know that they believe the NT—indeed the whole Bible—is reliable for everything. Evangelicals who are being careful will add a qualification to that claim: it is reliable, which is to say “true,” concerning everything about which it speaks. Thus, the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy, which is a defining document for many evangelicals, states:

Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises (Chicago, 2).

Now even more careful evangelicals will start talking at this point about things like genre, literary theory, authorial perspective, and historical situatedness. They will note, for example, that the Bible is not a science textbook and so never intends to speak about matters like the movement of quantum particles, the principles of natural selection, or the rotation of planets within the solar system—if it speaks on such matters, it does so with what we might call a “common sense” or “world as observed” perspective, much like we do when we say “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” In short, when affirming inerrancy it’s not only important to observe what the Bible says, but also how it says it, and careful readers need to pay attention to that distinction, just as they ordinarily do other things they read.

Yet, in the midst of all these clarifications, all evangelicals believe that the Bible is wholly true, “without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives” (Chicago 4). I’m going to call this “the hard problem” of NT reliability, and I’m not (here at least) going to argue that it is true, at least not directly. I’m going to (at least initially) make things easier on myself and establish the truth of what I’m going to call “the easy problem.”

The Easy Problem

The Easy Problem is this: is the NT generally reliable? That is, does it meet the ordinary standards of reliability that we require when we are talking to people about their day, about what happened to them during the war, about how they ended up in the challenging situation in which they now find themselves, about the injustice that occurred and their guilt or innocence with respect to that event? In short: does the NT meet the ordinary standards that we have when it comes to testimony? This is admittedly easier than the Hard Problem, much easier in fact. When it comes to personal testimony we naturally accept certain things that might be called “errors” by some. We accept things like bias, perspective, miss-remembering, conflation of events, narrative truncation, hyperbole, editing, etc. We don’t require someone to be “without error or fault” in everything they say to accept their testimony as true. This is usually what we mean when we use the word “reliable.” When we say that someone is reliable, that a newspaper is reliable, that an instructional video on YouTube is reliable, a comedian is reliable, we mean that they are generally trustworthy in a manner appropriate to the relationship that we sustain to that person or thing. Our friend is on time and engaged, the newspaper is reasonably unbiased and informed, the DIYer is accurate and helpful, the comedian is funny. That’s the task I’m setting myself: is the NT reliable in the ordinary ways in which we define reliability.

Yes, yes it is. Stay tuned for the next post for that discussion.