Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022)
Article: Evaluating "Providential Errancy Theory": Does God Inspire Moral Errors In The Bible?
Author: Joost Pikkert

SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022) p. 156

Evaluating Providential Errancy Theory: Does God Inspire Moral Errors In The Bible?

Joost Pikkert

Joost Pikkert trains Bible translators through a cooperative program between Trinity Western University, Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Canada Institute of Linguistics. He earned his PhD from the University of Nebraska and his MA from Wheaton College. He worked for 20 years in Indonesia, served for 8 years as Associate Professor and Academic Dean at Taylor College and Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and was a researcher for the Asia Development Bank. His publications are in linguistics, education, missiology and theology.

Introduction

Randal Rauser in his book Jesus Loves the Canaanites: Biblical Genocide in the Light of Moral Intuition invents a new theory of Biblical interpretation: Providential Errancy Theory. This theory posits that the driving concern in interpreting a Biblical text is not the context, language, discourse style, or worldview embedded in the narrative, but the “moral intuition and moral perception in theology and hermeneutics”1 that the reader brings to the text. As he further asserts: “It behooves us as morally serious readers who seek to be like Christ to rebut seriously errant readings [of the Bible] and defend interpretations consistent with our moral intuitions and the theological and ethical ends for which we believe the text was revealed.”2

In applying his theory, Rauser attacks as inadequate all other interpretative approaches that defend God’s reasons for dispossessing the Promised Land from the Canaanites and argues that the Christian God could never have

SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022) p. 157

made such a demand of Joshua and the Israelites.

This article will argue that Providential Errancy Theory is based on (1) an inadequate view of human moral intuition, (2) an inadequate view of human flourishing and (3) an inadequate hermeneutic. In the end, it will become apparent that Providential Errancy Theory has locked itself into a WEIRD (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) worldview and undermined the possibility of ever approaching the mind of the original author of the Biblical text. This article will look at the effects Providential Errancy Theory, and finally, it will become apparent that Rauser is just recycling contemporary literary theory that theologian and philosopher Kevin Vanhoozer indicates is bound up with the modification or the outright rejection of orthodox Christian theology.3