Inerrancy and Worldview: Modern Challenges to Inerrancy (Part 22)

Language is a dynamic and complex phenomenon. So is God. When we wrestle with the concept of inerrancy from the perspective of linguistics we ought to think carefully about the nature of God and his relation to language. If we start from the assumption that God has nothing to do with language we will set ourselves up for a clash with the doctrine of inerrancy. God, however, is intricately involved in the regularities of language. The regularities of human language and communication that we utilize everyday assume the God of Scripture is behind them.

It’s of paramount importance that as we aim to understand the elements of language we see God’s involvement. Christians do not believe in the god of deism, a far-off detached god. Rather, our God, the God of the Bible, is intimately involved in our world. He continues to uphold the existence of this world at every moment (Heb. 1:3). If we do not acknowledge God’s involvement in the regularities of language we will start from a fundamentally flawed assumption that will indeed create problems for our understanding of inerrancy. Vern Poythress writes:

In a broad way [some] thinking presupposes that God is essentially absent, both from the regularities of language and from the detailed processes of linguistic communication among human beings. According to [some] assumptions, God could only become present to human beings in some special, extraordinary intervention. And because such intervention would produce a break with the normalities of language, it would not be intelligible or digestible. But the fundamental assumption of God’s absence belongs to a worldview that is already impersonalistic and antibiblical at the start. It should not be surprising that it produces antibiblical fruit in its conclusions. (Inerrancy and Worldview, 95).

Behind the regularities of language is the God who created and governs language and human communication.

This is true even for those who criticize Scripture. In order for criticism to make sense we must have an awareness of the regularities of language. Poythress writes, “The principles of probability and the pattern of doubting both presuppose the regularity of God’s governance of the world” (96). To successfully doubt claims several things must be in place, all of which stem from God. We must, for starters, have certain expectations about human communication, a probability that can only exist because of “constant mathematical principles, which issue from the speech of God, which governs creation.” Doubting also requires certain “procedural patterns” which cannot be doubted in the process of doubting. And these procedures require knowledge of the difference between truth and falsehood which depend on an objective source, namely God.

When we discuss the regularities of language we mean concepts like criticism, analogy, and correlation. In each case we see evidence of God behind language. We’ve discussed criticism above, but analogy and correlation too reveal the creator. We see God in the principle of analogy. Our language reflects God, so that as we speak about earthly Kings, we understand those to be representations of God’s kingship. When we speak of fathers, we know those to be representations of God’s fatherhood. Romans 1:18-25 reminds us that God has revealed himself, his invisible attributes, through what he has created. As we speak then about our world the principle of analogy points us back to God.

Correlation too reminds us of God. We recall that meaning is partially determined by context, but we must also see that meaning is grounded in God. He is part of the context of human communication. Meaning is anchored in the mind of God. No view of language, then, that starts from the assumption that God is absent will lead us to embrace a doctrine of inerrancy. We must start where the Bible starts.

Language is not a self-contained closed system. God is the author and overseer of linguistic communication and as such reveals himself to us in it. God can communicate with us, and we can understand him. The Scriptures, then, can communicate inerrant and clear truth to us since God is the author of it and the overseer of it. If we start from this place we can begin to wrestle Biblically and fairly with the difficulties of human language and communication. We can wrestle, then, while still submitting to the authority of Scripture.