The Virus of Inerrancy

How Inerrancy Infects our Beliefs

Photo by Michael Geiger on Unsplash

In his recent book Deweaponize, Ryan Canty compares the modern ideology of Biblical or textual inerrancy to a computer ransomware virus. He explains this by relating his story of experience with the WannaCry ransomware worm of 2017.

“It was a typical day in 2017 when I arrived at work, coffee in hand. I opened my laptop and procrastinated by scanning my typical nerdy news sources. My eyes widened as I learned more about the WannaCry virus. WannaCry was ransomware, a computer virus designed to encrypt your files, making them unreadable until you pay a ransom. This one functioned as a worm, encrypting hundreds of thousands of computers in over a hundred countries in just a few hours. What made WannaCry so nasty was that it affected some of the most vulnerable computer systems, such as hospitals, railways, and government systems, that touched the lives of everyday people in very real ways. The modern doctrine of Biblical inerrancy is very much like WannaCry.”

(Deweaponize: Re-examining how we read the Bible in pursuit of a more Christlike interpretation J. Ryan Canty, SacraSage)

This analogy clicked a proverbial lightbulb on in my brain. It was if I instantly recognized a pattern that had been in front of me for years. The doctrine of inerrancy as it is understood in modernity is a type of ransomware. Inerrancy locks the beauty, depth, diversity, and truth of scripture behind an encrypted wall. This wall prevents scripture from being what it is intended. You see, when scripture is locked behind a wall of encryption, then it can be used for control and wielded as a weapon. (Canty) The virus of inerrancy acts as a worm, weaving its ay throughout the Church catholic encrypting scripture and locking it with a key that can only be used with the correct and narrow decryption of an interpretation.

The very idea of textual inerrancy is not an idea we can find in scripture. Instead it is an idea fully born in modernism’s attempt to rationalize faith in ways it cannot be rationalized. Scripture does makes claims of being God-breathed or inspired, but that is not the same as inerrant. I recommend Canty’s book and Zack Hunt’s Godbreathed as good treatments of a more holistic approach to the nature and purpose of scripture. But to claim inerrancy is an extra scriptural idea that is not supported by the text itself.

That’s not to say that Christians do not believe inerrancy to be scriptural. Those who claim inerrancy of the text fully believe that scripture supports the idea. But they use bias and force that idea upon scripture. Canty rightly claims that this is to allow the message of scripture to be shaped and used doe control and even to be weaponized. This is the very problem Jesus had with the religious leaders of his day. They were placing interpretations upon scripture that helped them to control the ways that people viewed and understood God and other human beings. Jesus broke the encryption of their interpretations and opened the truth up to illuminate the true nature of God as revealed through himself.

The puritan roots of the United States helps inform the ideas of inerrancy and the necessity that some Christians believe is required of the Bible. The influence of puritanism upon Christianity in the U.S. is an idea that I share with Canty. Puritanism works with the viral worm of inerrancy to insist upon rigid and constricting interpretive lenses for scripture. It is responsible for the ideas of patriarchy, limited mercy, and other exclusionary doctrines. For holiness folk, inerrancy creates a version of holiness defined by purity and perfection of thought, interpretation, and belief. Holiness should be defined by the perfection of purpose in lives lived in service, welcome, and the seeking of a just world. Holiness should be about the lived experience of new creation transforming hearts and the world around us. Inerrancy cuts this perfection off and creates a pseudo-perfection of ideology rather than heart purposes.

So harmful is the infection of inerrancy that it causes those who belong to Wesleyan-Holiness traditions which largely reject inerrancy to fight against their own doctrines. I even know of an ordained member of clergy in my denomination who has claimed that the rejection of textual inerrancy is rooted in sin. This is the end result of inerrancy; for it forces a choice between itself and the wider truth. Inerrancy also does harm to scripture itself by forcing it to be something it is not.

The true purpose of scripture is to point to the person who is truth. Scripture is a beautifully complex and beautiful collection of stories and writings that reveal God and the way to have relationship with God and creation. Scripture shows us the complexity of the human experience while revealing the nature of a God whose holiness is poured out in love and invitation. In fact, the very idea of authority of scripture only exists in how it invites us to experience new creation and transformation.

I asked Ryan Canty how we protect ourselves against the tyranny of an encrypted truth behind a ransom of inerrancy. His answer was simple; education. That is partly why I will go back to the idea of inerrancy from time to time. This is an idea that harms scriptures and allows it to be used to abuse and control. Through the knowledge of truth in unencumbered scripture, we can find relational holiness and the beauty of truth as revealed in the person of Jesus.