Saturday, August 8, 2015

John 10:35, Sola Scriptura, and Inerrancy

If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken. (John 10:35)

Many Evangelical Protestants cite this verse as evidence of Sola Scriptura and the doctrine of inerrancy.

With respect to the former, there is nothing in this verse about the limits of the canon, the formal sufficiency of Scripture, and other issues that are part-and-parcel of the requirements of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura; to use such a passage is to engage in eisegesis. Furthermore, the "scripture" in question refers, not to the entirety of revelation, but Psa 82:6, previously quoted by Jesus in John 10:34. Absolutising John 10:35, one will have to regard Psalm 82:6 as the entirety of divine revelation. For a previous blog post on John 10:34-35, see here.

As for the latter point, the doctrine that the original autographs were inerrant, Methodist New Testament scholar, James D.G. Dunn, provided the following exegesis in response to the likes of B.B. Warfield and Leon Morris:

But the point is not whether the psalmist was in error when he called judges 'gods'. It is rather that the psalmist's words cannot be without significance: that is, cannot be emptied of the significance they obviously contain, and which significance Jesus proceeds to draw out in the typical Jewish a fortiori or a minori ad mauius argument. So the first half of Morris's last sentence catches the sense well ('scripture cannot be emptied of its force'), whereas the latter half ('by being shown to be erroneous') is his own corollary rather than that of Jesus or John. (Dunn, The Living Word [Fortress Press, 1987], 95).

Dunn also offers this caution against "bibliolatry," an attitude many LDS apologists have encountered all too often:


[The insistence on inerrancy gives rise to] the fear that the heirs of Princeton theology are in grave danger of bibliolatry. By asserting of the Bible an indefectible authority, they are attributing to it in an authority proper only to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. if we say the biblical authors wrote without error, we attribute to their writing what we otherwise recognize to be true only of Christ. We do for the Bible what Roman Catholic dogma has done for Mary the mother of Jesus; and if the charge of Mariolatry is appropriate against Catholic dogma, then the charge of bibliolatry is no less appropriate against the inerrancy dogma. We cannot argue for a precise analogy between the divine and human in Christ (effecting sinlessness) and the divine and human in scripture (effecting inerrancy) without making the Bible worthy of the same honour as Christ--and that is bibliolatry. (Ibid., 106).