After a considerable hiatus, I conclude a series of posts wherein I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella about philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI.)
I thought I was finished repurposing for Substack my site’s 2024 series on philosopher Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of my worldview approach to defending the Christian faith.
Last week, however, he added “Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration”; please study it before considering my comments. He does not name me but seems to have me (among others) in mind.
A while ago, he declined an invitation to “rejoin” the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS), an outfit to which he had never belonged. He had published in EPS’s journal, Philosophia Christi, but that’s as far as things went. He cannot in good conscience join because of the first sentence of the Society’s doctrinal statement:
The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the original manuscripts.
Bill is unable to identify without qualification the Scriptures with “the Word of God” because the latter symbol also applies to the timeless Second Person of the Trinity who became flesh as Jesus Christ in time.
The triune God of the Christian Bible (who, I believe, Bill believes exists) has revealed Himself to man, and one way He has done so is through the Bible. But Scripture, Bill says, is a collection of texts composed at different times by different ancient human authors.
“Scripture does not exist before being written,” he writes, “but comes into existence within history, gradually, as these authors set down their works in human languages, e.g., Hebrew.” The Second Person of the Trinity, however, existed timelessly “before” being incarnated in time and on earth.
The Bible’s authors were historical actors who mediated God’s thoughts to other historical actors. Their mediation of the divine “signal” cannot, Bill claims, eliminate the human “noise” that masks it. If what we get when we read those texts is what God intended, it’s only “at a second remove.” Further, “the signal-to-noise ratio will be non-negligible.” It “will vary from author to author and thus from text to text . . .”
Scripture [Bill writes] is not the same as the Word (Logos) of God (verbum dei) referred to in the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . .”
The Word or Logos is co-eternal with the Father; Scripture is not. Scripture might never have come into existence. . . .
Scriptural revelation is revelation to humanity; humanity consists of human creatures; there is no necessity that God, being a se and wholly self-sufficient, create anything; hence, there is no necessity that humanity exist and that scriptural revelation exist. God cannot reveal himself to man if there is no man to reveal himself to. . . (Emphasis in the original.)
The Second Person is metaphysically necessary, whereas the Scripture is metaphysically contingent. And the Second Person is co-eternal with the First Person, but the Bible, i.e., Scripture, is not co-eternal with any of the Persons. (Emphasis added.)
According to Bill, the Bible
. . . is not eternal at all. It exists in time, but not at every time. Scripture does not eternally exist, nor does it always exist. So, we can’t even say that the Scripture is omnitemporal, i.e., sempiternal.
There’s much to unpack here.
First, Bill learned about the Son’s relationship to the Father from Scriptural revelation. I assume he accepts the timeless existence of the Second Person of the Trinity because he never offers that as a reason for not joining the ETS. He presumably found Scripture reliable enough on that point.
Second, it is unclear in what sense Bill holds that history’s countless “contingencies” (dependencies) are metaphysically contingent. As someone who puts his philosophizing after, not before, Christ, I must qualify this statement.[1] It seems that instead of deriving his metaphysics from Scripture, Bill hopes to harmonize the former with the latter.
Ordinarily, what is necessary could not be otherwise (or fail to exist or occur), and what is contingent could be otherwise (or fail to exist or occur). But the things and occurrences we call contingent (or dependent) are details of what God has decreed and, having been decreed, could not fail to be or occur or to be that way.[2]
The Decree is both the necessary and sufficient condition of anything created thing or event. The existence or occurrence of a created thing or event is a consequence of God’s free decision to create, but no less necessary for that reason.
What God decrees to happen necessarily happens, but the necessity attaches to the decree, not to the things or events thereby necessitated. The Scriptures are metaphysically contingent, but not like, say, the outcome of the World Series. Like everything else that comes to pass, every detail of the Scriptures is contingent upon the Decree. This dependency is not like anything in the Greco-Roman tradition (of philosophy, not wrestling).
Fuel, oxygen, and heat, for example, are the necessary and sufficient conditions of combustion (burning), a rapid chemical reaction that releases heat and light. Removing fuel, oxygen, or heat stops the fire. Their conjunction makes fire conditionally, but not metaphysically necessary unless a particular conflagration is a detail in God’s plan. Of course, if God didn’t decree this world, no condition of fire would obtain.
Nothing can prevent God’s freely designed plan from being enacted in its every detail—including the evolution of Hebrew and its role in the preservation of God’s Word in writing.
Scripture is no less necessary for being conditionally so, the condition being God’s decree to create this cosmos.
God might have freely deigned that the Scriptures not come into existence, but since they have, they are members of the class of “whatsoever comes to pass” (Isaiah 46:9-11; Lamentations 3:37; Ephesians 1:11).
If God’s decree includes someone’s birth—say, any link in the genealogical chain culminating in His prophesied birth—then it’s inevitable or inescapable.
Yes, that which could be other than the way it is need not be at all—unless God decrees it, in which case it cannot fail to be. It is therefore not absolutely, but rather contingently necessary, contingent (or dependent) upon God’s decretive will.
What has Plato or Aristotle to say about God’s decree and His meticulous providence over creation? Nothing.
The God in Whom I think Bill believes (a) created spacetime according to His decree, which originates outside of spacetime and (b) interacts with his created image bearers within spacetime. That’s biblical theism. What’s Bill’s brand?
. . . Scripture . . . is written down by men who, finite and fallible and culture-bound as they are, not to mention suffering from the noetic consequences of sin, add their ‘noise’ and filtration and limitation to the divine ‘signal,’ so that the end result is at best derivative from, but not identical to, the divine Logos, or Word of God in the original sense.
Yes, yet Jesus held His “finite and fallible and culture-bound” audience of Pharisees responsible for what was in the written Hebrew Scriptures centuries earlier (men above whom there was no “magisterium” to interpret them authoritatively). The written Scriptures were, and are, God speaking (Matt 22:31).
Finally [Bill writes], would it not be absurd to suppose that He Who Is, He whose name is Being itself (Exodus 3:14) thinks in Hebrew from all eternity and composed Scripture in Hebrew from all eternity and handed a bit of it to Moses on Mount Sinai?
No, not absurd at all, but first, why the Hellenistic eisegesis? To view the אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה (ehyeh, the future of “to be”) of Exodus 3:14 as the equivalent of Thomas Aquinas’s esse ipsum subsistens (Summa Theologiae, especially I, q. 4, a. 2) is to anachronistically import Scholastic concepts into Exodus, whose context is about God’s presence and action in history.
Second, it’s not absurd if one presupposes that human languages developed with the same “contingent” detail predetermined from all eternity
Hebrew is a human language; no Hebrews, no Hebrew language; the existence of the latter presupposes the existence of the former.
The evolution of human languages does not occur in a chance universe. If God foreordains all that comes to pass, then the existence of the Hebrew-speaking people is no metaphysical accident. It expresses the necessity that follows from God’s decree, not of God’s nature, but no less necessary for that reason. So, when Bill writes
There is no necessity that humans, or any creatures at all, exist and so no necessity that human languages exist.
. . . my response is that there is the decretal necessity according to which, I repeat, whatever God decrees comes to pass. Creation is not a crap shoot where God finds out what’s in His creation only after He has effected it (e.g., “looking down the corridors of time”).
. . . God, however, is from all eternity noēsis noēseōs [νόησις νόησεως; Aristotle’s work Metaphysics, Book XII (Lambda), Chapter 9, 1074b35], thought thinking itself, without need of any human language. (Of course, I am not suggesting that the God of the Bible is identical to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.)
Then why invoke Aristotle at all?
Now, if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, or “in its entirety” as per the EPS statement quoted above, as some of my Calvinist and other evangelical friends say it is.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that He who ordained every particular ordained an inerrant Scripture such that every proposition that Scripture affirms or implies is true.
Bill suggests that it’s because the human
. . . “receivers” are crappy so that, even if the divine Transmitter and his transmission are pure and impeccable, distortion and noise will be introduced by the lousy “receivers.” The ancient authors each received a truly divine message, but then each had to express it in his own way with his own words as he understood the words of his native human tongue. Cultural and tribal biases may be expected to creep in, not to mention distortions and limitations of a syntactic and semantic type: human languages are not equal in their expressive capacities. A Calvinist should have no trouble adding to the mix by chalking up some of the noise and distortion to the “noetic consequences of sin.”
Did these factors surprise God? Did He fail to take them into account?
When the Spirit moved those ancient authors (2 Peter 1:21) to write down His message, He was not on a fool’s errand. Contingencies never frustrate God’s communicative purpose, which is why it would not be unjust for God to hold anyone responsible for what He has spoken through the Scriptures.[3]
So [Bill continues] I am wondering whether those who tell us that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribe to the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration [VPI].
Is the inerrancy of Scripture any more difficult to believe than God’s foreordination of every historical detail, whether or not reported in Scripture? Perhaps for Bill, they’re equally difficult, nay, impossible to believe. Bill quotes a definition of VPI:
. . the [biblical] text we have is verbatim the text God inspired, down to the very terminology and syntax. It is not that God gave human authors a general impression or message that they then communicated in their own words and according to their own understanding. Rather, God accommodated his message to each author’s style and understanding, even as such did not interfere with the content.[4]
And then the late evangelical scholar Norman Geisler:
. . . the locus of meaning (and truth) for an evangelical is in the text, not in the mind of the author behind the text. It is the graphai that are inspired, not the author’s intentions behind them.[5]
Yes, Godbreathed, Theopneustos (2 Timothy 3:16).
Bill finds VPI “incomprehensible” but it’s not clear to me why. The Bible, as VPI, expresses the worldview that is the foundation of our comprehending anything. He suggests that his inability to subscribe to VPI is like a Protestant’s inability to submit to Rome:
Protestants trust their own judgment and will not submit to the Roman magisterium. They have their reasons, and I am not saying they should submit. Well, I am doing something similar. I am going by what I take to be the case, after the exercise of protracted and indeed prayerful due diligence. Isn’t that what Luther did? What else can anyone do? You examine the matter seriously, and then you live by what you find to be the case.
Bill’s parity argument is hampered by the unique role that Scripture plays in the Protestant’s theory of knowledge, but not Bill’s: Scripture is where we find a worldview that makes sense of sense-making, that is, of the harmony of logical laws, empirical generalization grounded in the regularity of nature, and moral absolutes.[6]
What I’ve found to be the case is that the noise of human frailty does not, cannot, frustrate God in His purpose to communicate. He cuts through the noise as He has decreed, but the cutting is as variable as the soil or rock on which the seed of the Word falls (Matthew 13:23-33).
This necessity of decree governs what God does. Creation, providence, redemption, and “whatever comes to pass” are freely willed by God, but not required by His nature (as is their being three divine persons).
Once decreed, however, they’re necessary. Hypothetically necessary, not absolutely so, but still necessary: given that God has decreed X, X must exist or occur. In His sovereign freedom, God could have decreed otherwise, or not at all. Athens has no room for this insight from Jerusalem.
As Francis Turretin (1623–1687) put it, the divine will is free with respect to its object but necessary with respect to its execution once decreed.[7] And that includes the contents of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as among the things that “came to pass.”
Nothing created is necessary to God, including the Scriptures, but because God is immutable and his decree certain, it is necessary that what he has decreed happen. Again, not metaphysically necessary (as is, e.g., God is Triune), but conditionally so.
The Father is “bound” to the Son by identity of essence, but “bound” to His decree by His faithfulness to His will. The former is intrinsic and immutable; the latter, extrinsic and contingent.
Atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen (1926-2021), convinced that belief in God was groundless, opted for a Feuerbachian explanation for theistic belief.[8] Similarly, Bill apparently feels the need to supply a reason for why “some are so enamored of Biblical inerrancy: they just cannot tolerate any uncertainty. Hence, they enforce it doctrinally and demand it of others.” I confess that I don’t recognize myself in Bill’s diagnosis, but my confession may only confirm it for him.
We all have security needs of various sorts [Bill writes], among them, doxastic security needs. We like to be secure in our beliefs, and we don’t like our beliefs to be questioned. Our deepest beliefs are tenets, things we hold onto. And so we . . . take a stand. Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders! It is no surprise to me that some people are overwhelmed by their doxastic security needs to the detriment of their critical faculties. I take the ability to live with uncertainty to be a mark of mental maturity.
So do I, and my Christian Individualism does not imply otherwise. I live with the facts of pervasive interpretational pluralism when it comes to Scripture, as I have with pervasive speculative pluralism in philosophy. My transcendental gambit does not require me to impugn the motives or question the mental maturity of those who don’t see things as I do—and I’m sure Bill didn’t mean to blanket me with his thesis.
If I’m wrong, however, he’ll let me know. Otherwise, it will seem that he’s “psychologizing,” that is “arguing from the mental makeup of Scriptural inerrantists.
Assuming that my reasons against inerrancy are good, it is perfectly reasonable to inquire into why anyone would hold such an untenable view.
Again, behold the Nielsenean-Feuerbachian gambit.
In his last paragraph, Bill tries to give the psychologizing that he denies a touch of irenic respectability with a homily on the conduct of “respectful, rational discussion” of a “controversial matter.”
I will take up his welcome challenge to help him “come to a better understanding of” his own position “by saying something that forces a serious modification of my position or its outright abandonment.” I must, however, conclude this series of reflections on Bill’s position.
To sum up: Bill’s worldview apparently doesn’t have room for a sovereign God who can enter into his creation as His Son did. His God has to see how created image bearers will evolve linguistically and is subject to that evolution.
God’s agency is the only free one. He freely designs a cosmos, creates it, and then interacts with His creatures within, including holding them accountable for acting in accordance with their motivations. (No puppetry.) Whatever happens within the cosmos must happen, but only because of His free decision to create.
I’m deeply grateful for the thinking that Bill’s critique has occasioned. The remaining issue, as I see it, is how a “Protestant” Christian Individualist like me negotiates his theological business in a world overflowing with pervasive interpretational plurality, a problem I’ve wrestled with in its philosophical dimension for almost fifty years.
Merry Christmas. See you in the New Year.
Notes
[1] As in “Thou shalt not have any gods before (עַל־, al)” Me.” Exodus 20:3
[2] Not only the predestination of believers (Ephesians 1:11) but also the actions of their enemies (Genesis 50: Isaiah 10; Acts 4:28).
[3] An implication of Casey Chalk’s argument in The Obscurity of Scripture, a Romanist apologetic I’m studying.
[4] Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, eds. Merrick, Garrett, and Gundry, Zondervan, 2013, 19.
[5] Five Views, 18-19.
[6] See my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, self-published, 2022. 
[7] Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Volume 1. Question: Does God will some things necessarily and others freely? Trans. George Musgrave Giger, P&R Publishing, 1992-1997, pp. 500–515. God’s decrees are “free . . . in the exercised act insofar as it resides in God’s liberty to decree this or that thing” and “necessary . . . as to internal existence within God.”
[8] See, for example, Kai Nielsen, “God and the Basis of Morality,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 1982, 335-350.