Before I started working in immigration courts and preparing for state and federal interpreter certification, I thought contradictions were mostly a theological problem. Now I think they're an evidentiary problem, and that shift has changed the way I read pretty much everything.
One of the first things many of us learn in apologetics (I hold a BA and an MA in Christian Studies) is how to spot presuppositions. If someone begins with the assumption that miracles are impossible, we immediately recognize the issue: the conclusion was baked into the method before the investigation ever started. No amount of evidence could change the outcome, and the only option after that catch-22 is materialism.
Fair enough. I agree with such criticism.
What I find interesting is how quickly that skepticism disappears when we talk about biblical univocality. We become the "non-contradictorianists" we often mock.
Because if someone begins with the assumption that the Bible cannot contain contradictions, disagreements, competing perspectives, or genuine theological development, hasn't the outcome been predetermined there, too? The difference is that one presupposition gets exposed while the other gets protected.
Language ends up doing a lot of the protecting.
We don't say "contradiction"; we say "apparent contradiction." We don't say "disagreement"; we say "different emphasis." We don't say "conflicting accounts"; we say "complementary perspectives." The conclusion often sneaks into the discussion through the vocabulary itself.
Take a simple example.
One account says there was one person present. Another says there were two. We've all heard the move:
"Well, if there were two, then technically there was also one."
Okay, sure... Now try that in court. Seriously. I hope I get assigned to interpret that hearing!!
Imagine a witness says one person was present and another says there were two. Nobody says, "Excellent. We have achieved harmony." Nobody says, "The witnesses are speaking with one voice." Nobody says, "If you squint hard enough, these are basically the same testimony."
The discrepancy becomes part of the evidence. That doesn't mean either witness is lying. It doesn't mean the case falls apart. But it does mean the difference matters.
I've seen people get deported over discrepancies way smaller than that.
In fact, if I tried some of the harmonization techniques I've heard in church circles in an immigration courtroom, I'd probably end up needing my own attorney after being DQ'd.
The job isn't to make the tension disappear. The job is to account for it, whether it is direct or cross-examination.
That's probably the biggest thing the interpreter world has forced me to confront. The record doesn't care about my theology, my preferred outcome, or my doctrinal commitments. Words mean what they mean. Witnesses said what they said.
A discrepancy is not proof of anything by itself, but it is evidence. Something to be examined, weighed, contextualized, and sometimes left unresolved... but it can't just be explained away with hermeneutical gymnastics.
The more time I spend in that world, the harder it becomes not to notice a strange inconsistency. Christians spend an enormous amount of energy teaching people how to identify miracle deniers, but far less energy teaching people how to identify contradiction deniers.
In fact, I think they work similarly.
You can usually identify an election denier with a simple question: "Who won the 2020 election?"
The answer isn't interesting because of its politics (topic for another post). It's interesting because it reveals whether someone is capable of acknowledging a fact that creates tension with a prior commitment.
I think contradiction denial works the same way.
Ask: "Does the Bible contain contradictions?"
Not apparent contradictions. Not tensions. Not difficult passages.... Contradictions.
Then watch what happens.
Watch how quickly the discussion shifts from evidence to outcome. Enjoy the intellectual machinery that gets deployed before the evidence is even discussed. Count the number of qualifiers that suddenly appear.
If you've watched any recent nomination hearings, you'll recognize the pattern immediately. The question itself is usually simple.
The challenge is that answering it directly creates problems for the larger narrative. So the conversation shifts from answering the question to managing the implications of the answer.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that every alleged contradiction is real. Many aren't. Some are ridiculous. That's not the point. The point is whether the possibility was ever allowed.
Because once a conclusion becomes impossible in principle, regardless of what the evidence says, we are no longer investigating... we are protecting. And we see a whole lot of protecting in evangelical circles these days.
Sometimes it feels like we've become so committed to preserving univocality that we make language do the heavy lifting. We call things "apparent" before we've established they are. We construct harmonizations that we would reject in virtually any other context. We perform circular scholarship, hoping the tension will disappear. But it doesn't.
As we get closer to another World Cup, I can't help but think of the VAR. The implementation of VAR was supposed to help us see what actually happened.
Yet every football fan (sorry... did I say football? I guess I meant soccer) has watched the replay get shown again and again, from different angles, in slow motion, with lines drawn all over the screen, only to realize that the conversation is always about finding a way for your team to survive the replay.
And sometimes our conversations about biblical contradictions feel uncomfortably similar.
We keep reviewing the footage, not because we're genuinely open to changing the call, but because we're trying to find a frame where the original call can still stand.
We are not here to formulate that a harmonization is impossible. The problem is that the conclusion was never allowed to lose. And that strikes me as oddly similar to the very thing apologetics taught me to criticize in the first place.