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1. If I say, \u201cI hate oatmeal\u201d and then turn to someone else and say \u201cI love oatmeal,\u201d I am contradicting myself.<\/p>\n
2. If I said 20 years ago \u201cI hate oatmeal\u201d and now say \u201cI love oatmeal,\u201d I am not contradicting myself. Rather my view of oatmeal changed over time.<\/p>\n
3. If I say \u201cI hate oatmeal\u201d but my son says \u201cI love oatmeal,\u201d that would not be a contradiction. We are two different people voicing our opinions.<\/p>\n
The Bible\u00a0works more like the second two examples, and not at all like the first. We create problems for ourselves when we assume the first example is relevant. It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Someone might say, \u201cAha. I\u2019ve got you, Enns. The first example IS the right example because God inspired the Bible<\/strong>, and therefore there is<\/em> only one<\/em> voice in the Bible: God\u2019s. So for God<\/em> to say one thing and then the opposite is<\/em> a contradiction (and we can\u2019t have that) so we know there are no contradictions.\u201d<\/p>\n But surely that is simply a wrong way of thinking.<\/p>\n The writers of the Bible spanned centuries, lived in different times and places, faced different circumstances (personal and political), and responded to those circumstances from the point of view of their settings in life. A book that brings all of this under one cover is,\u00a0of course,<\/em> going to exhibit a lot of diversity.<\/p>\n But if inspiration means that God is all about corralling these different voices because \u201cGod wrote the Bible\u201d then God did a pretty bad job of it.<\/p>\n So maybe \u201cDoes the Bible contradict itself?\u201d is posing a false question rooted in bad theology.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how else to respect the Bible and what I read there but by arriving at a conclusion like this.<\/p>\n Others may argue that (1) since [as we all know] \u00a0God DID<\/em> \u201cwrite the Bible\u201d and (2) since God by definition\u00a0can\u2019t<\/em> be self-contradictory, therefore (3) any contradictions are only \u201capparent contradictions\u201d\u2014they appear so to us, but are easily resolved in God\u2019s mind.\u00a0In that case, our job is simply to trust that this is so and defend the Bible against the charge of contradiction.<\/p>\n But that has always struck me as a very, very bad solution.<\/p>\n It seems nonsensical to me to argue \u201cGod inspired the Bible, and therefore the Bible doesn\u2019t contradict itself,\u201d and yet\u2014that divine inspiration produced a book that seems so untended and raises so many questions.<\/p>\n And it seems even more nonsensical to me to think that, in response to this untended Bible, the \u201ctruly faithful\u201d are called by God to see past all that self-evident messiness and affirm with absolute conviction that behind it all God is completely consistent and one day when you\u2019re dead and you face Jesus you\u2019ll see for yourself, but in the meantime your job is not to accept the presence of \u201ccontradictions\u201d but to defend the Bible against the charge, knowing by faith that whatever the Bible seems to be doing it isn\u2019t really doing if you had enough faith in God to see past what you\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m exhausted just writing that.<\/p>\n Although I never once mention oatmeal, I do talk about the nature of the Bible quite a bit in\u00a0The Bible Tells Me So<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(HarperOne, 2014),\u00a0The Sin of Certainty<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(HarperOne, 2016),\u00a0Inspiration and Incarnation<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Baker 2005\/2015), and\u00a0The Evolution of Adam<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Baker, 2012).<\/p>\nHowever inspiration\u00a0works (and I defy anyone who thinks they have a handle on it), the following is demonstrably true:<\/h2>\n
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What are referred to as \u201ccontradictions\u201d are only so if one assumes that the purpose of inspiration (however it works) is to align or override the down-to-earth diverse voices we actually encounter in the Bible.<\/h2>\n
The \u201ccontradictions\u201d in the Bible aren\u2019t contradictions,\u00a0for the Bible does not reflect the \u201cperfectly consistent mind of God,\u201d but the diversity of time and place of the writers.<\/h2>\n
How about another way of thinking about what appear to be contradictions in the Bible:<\/h2>\n
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