I just finished reading The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark.

This is a dangerous book… My favorite kind.

I don’t think I have ever agreed and disagreed with one book so much. I am a book scribbler and judge the worth of a book by how much I scribble in it. There are scribbles on almost every paragraph of this book.

But my scribbles are inconsistent. On one page, I crossed out an entire section, and scribble “NO! NO! NO!” all over the page. But on the very next page, I underlined and starred half of it, with “YES! YES! YES!” written in the margin.

And I’m not schizophrenic. That’s just the way this book is. It is the most troubling and helpful book I have read in a very long time.

What is the book about?

Well, the subtitle gives a hint: The Human Faces of God is about “What Scripture reveals when God gets it wrong (and why inerrancy tries to hide it).”

Whoa! For someone who received all of his education at some of the leading “Inerrantist” schools in the country, I found the book incredibly challenging. The good thing is that I had already been somewhat primed for this in my series on Bibliology where I questioned and challenged everything I had been taught about Inerrancy and Inspiration.

Book Summary

Chapters 1-3 reveal in stark reality the difficulties with the doctrine of inerrancy. In these chapters he shows why Scripture is not divine inerrant Word of God, and argues that such a view is impossible if we deal seriously and literally with the text, the way we all claim to do. Furthermore, he argues that the view of inerrancy is detrimental to our spiritual growth as followers of Jesus.

Then, chapters 4-9, Thom Stark digs a giant hole under all of us who believe in inerrancy. And I’ll be honest. I don’t have answers to most of the issues he raises. In chapter 4, he shows fairly convincingly that early Israelite religion was polytheistic.  Chapter 5 makes you cringe with the clear explanation of several Old Testament passages where Yahweh clearly seems to be calling for human sacrifice. Then there is chapter 6, which talks about the genocides in Scripture, all of which were undertaken at God’s command. Chapter 7 deals with a famous textual issue of whether David actually killed Goliath or not (cf. 2 Sam 21:19), and chapter 8 makes the case that Jesus was wrong in many of His predictions about the future.

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In a recent post, I suggested that nobody believes in Sola Scriptura.

In a comment, Tim Nichols from Full Contact Christianity challenged my definition of Sola Scriptura, as not being the same definition that was used by the classical Reformers when they talked about Sola Scriptura. 

I was intrigued, and so asked where I could read more about what he was saying. He recommended a book by Keith Mathison called The Shape of Sola Scriptura. So I obtained the book and read it last week.

It turns out Tim was right. And so was I.

Let me rephrase that. I stated that Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli “tried to reject tradition and return to the Sola Scriptura,’the Bible alone.’” This was the statement Tim Nichols objected to, and after reading the book by Mathison, I stand corrected.

Mathison argues fairly persuasively that when most people today talk about Sola Scriptura, what they really have in mind is Solo Scriptura. “Solo” Scriptura is the idea that we can learn all matters about faith and practice using the Bible alone, plus nothing else. If a group or person studies the Bible, and they think they have found some truth, doctrine, or practice in Scripture, then they should believe or practice this idea, whether or not it was ever believed or practiced previously in the history of the church. This is “Solo” Scriptura.

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