Franke’s concern with inerrancy as formulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) is that it has been used in such a way to silence the plurality of voices in Scripture in order to formulate a central system in which one must resolve all incoherent or seemingly contradictory statements in Scripture. He explains:
I have often been dismayed by many of the ways in which inerrancy has commonly been used in biblical interpretation, theology, and the life of the church, as though it served as some kind of panacea for resolving difficult and complex questions related to Christian faith and life in the world.
He is further concerned by the way inerrancy has been used to judge who is “in” and who is “out of” evangelicalism. He also does not think that inerrancy does not express “the core idea of the authority of Scripture as a witness to the mission of God.”
He says that inerrancy should:
[P]reserve the dynamic plurality contained in the texts of Scripture by ensuring that no portion of the biblical narrative can properly be disregarded or eclipsed because it is perceived as failing to conform to a larger pattern of systematic unity.
Franke’s argument rests upon his doctrine of God. He maintains the creator-creation distinction. Who God is cannot be ascertained without knowing what God does. God is therefore a being-in-act. God is love; the Trinity has eternally existed in a relationship of mutual love. God is missional. He demonstrates his love by the Father sending his Son and the Father and Son sending the Spirit.
Language is a social-cultural construct and is not able to completely describe the eternal, universal God.
As such, each language, is a particular conceptual scheme that lacks the capacity and universality required to provide a description of God or ultimate truth that can be thought of as absolute.
Since God is wholly-other, the language used to describe God is perspectival in nature. Scripture contains many voices, in their unique social cultural construction, describe God’s revelation. Scripture is a witness to that revelation.
Scripture is not static, however. Scripture, as Franke cites Goldingay, “calls a new world into being.” Franke caveats with this statement:
However, the point needs to be stressed here is that this capacity for world construction, while bound closely to the text, does not lie in the text itself. Instead this result is ultimately the work of the Spirit speaking in and through the text as the instrumentality of world creation.
The Spirit through the means of Scripture seeks to transform the world into the ideal world.
Inerrancy, as cited above, ought not to transform the text into something that it is not. Scripture is a collection of witnesses to God’s revelation. One voice is not allowed to dominate: “Inerrancy means that none of the texts of Scripture should be forced into conformity with others for the sake of systematic unity.” No one should try to construct a single system of theology since such an idea runs counter to the way the God revealed himself to humanity.
While I think Franke is right in that we must be careful not to subordinate the voices of Scripture to each other. Proof-texting is one the ways in which Scripture has been take captive and put into service in a foreign context in which it was not born to serve. Such hermeneutics have created a “diaspora” of verses to elucidate systematic formulas.
I do have two major concerns. First, I do not know how we judge when a witness is faithful or not. I don’t see how we are allowed to say “true” or “untrue” if truth does not have some relationship with, for lack of a better term, “the real world.” Secondly, Franke does not really define inerrancy. I know what it should do, but I don’t know what it actually is. I would like to know!