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Inerrancy is Alive and Well on Planet Evangelical

Three perspectives about how the Bible should be viewed always seem to emerge.  Either what the Bible teaches can’t be trusted at all, or parts of it can but others can’t, or it can be trusted in its entirety from the start.  To trust it completely is to make the Bible’s inerrancy an issue worth investigating. 

Definition

In light of this investigation, there are several possible ways to define full inerrancy, but the following is sufficient: The Bible is free from error in its original autographs, free from communicating untruths in the whole and in the part in all that it intends to affirm.  In other words, we can have total confidence in God’s written, special revelation to us.  Consistent Christian faith, then, calls for affirming the entire truthfulness of the Bible at every level – faith, practice, history, science, etc.

One way to illustrate this is to say that the perfect – the living Word – once came to our planet; perfect God became perfect man without any loss of Godhead.  By the same token, the perfect – the written Word – came to us originally in the form of an inerrant body of Scripture without any loss of truthfulness.  The analogy holds.

 A Little History

Baptists not familiar with the intellectual backdrop of today’s inerrancy debate should at least go back as far as the early 20th century Princeton tradition and its stalwart theologian B. B. Warfield.  Warfield’s penetrating and sustained argument for the verbal plenary theory of biblical inspiration has yet to be systematically undermined by opponents, especially his nuanced exegesis of the Greek word theopneustos found in 2 Tim. 3:16, which literally says that the Scriptures are “God-breathed.” 

But Warfield’s approach is ancient by today’s standards, we are told by some.  Yet this falls prey to the logical fallacy that because something isn’t contemporary, it must be mistaken in what it asserts.  What about contemporary obedience to an “ancient” word from God, as in, say, the Old Testament?  Absolutely!  Then Warfield’s words of less than a century ago can also ring true. 

But the Princeton tradition is nothing more than Protestant scholasticism and relies too heavily on Thomas Reid’s Scottish common sense realism, it’s also objected.  Scholars debate this, but the non-inerrantist approach to the Bible can be said to rely too heavily on a neo-orthodox framing of the question, a là Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, even while placing too much stock in the conclusions drawn by German rationalism and the higher critical methods of interpretation it helped create. 

But, it’s further argued, inerrancy is so hurtfully divisive to the church and to individuals.  As far as evangelical theology is concerned, a good case could be made that inerrancy is the most ecumenical doctrine of all, with the very existence and flourishing of the Evangelical Theological Society through the years lending support to this historical contention.

Harold Lindsell joined the inerrancy/infallibility fray with his pivotal 1976 volume Battle for the Bible.  In effect he shows how even the smallest of departures from full inerrancy have often played out historically through individuals, churches, denominations, synods, conventions and seminaries.  All the way to the point of rejecting the truthfulness of other evangelical doctrines such as Christ’s deity, his vicarious atonement, the virgin birth, and a literal bodily resurrection.

In 1979 Jack Rogers and Donald McKim put forth the thesis that biblical inerrancy has never been the position championed by historical Protestantism.  Their book called The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible was an attempt to free up biblical authority from the disrepute brought upon it by the doctrine of inerrancy.  Somehow, they maintain, the Bible can simultaneously contain errors yet give us an infallible perspective about salvation and all it entails.

But what started as a critical book review of the Rogers/McKim proposal, soon became the full-blown 1982 work written by John Woodbridge called Biblical Authority, an incisive work that shows how the historic weight surrounding the issue is clearly on the inerrantist side.  In brief, Woodbridge exposes the shoddy scholarship of Rogers and McKim – the arbitrary selection of data, their doubtful documentation, their tendency to label historical movements too simplistically, along with a host of other surprising shortcomings that good scholarship should always take into consideration.

And finally, who could forget the late Carl F. H. Henry’s masterful six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority, which serves as something akin to an irresistible force moving at Mach speed whenever opponents of inerrancy come up against its conclusions.

Hermeneutics

Inerrancy is the sure foundation for clear biblical thinking, meaning that only God and his Word are sufficient to communicate divine truth.  While this seems restricting to some thinkers, it actually sets the theological enterprise free!  Why?  Because no provision is made for either blatantly liberal or unintended allegorical/mystical interpretations of texts, approaches that miss altogether what the biblical authors had in mind as they wrote with a clarity of thought that can still be grasped today.  So you can’t speak about inerrancy without getting hermeneutics – the principles for biblical interpretation – into the mix; they are inseparable yet distinct.  The link between the two is therefore real and determines in a life-size way how you go about doing your theology in plain view of the Bible’s full authority. 

Of course we pay attention to the solidly human factors lying back of the Bible’s inspiration!  Of course we exegete Scripture contextually with both grammar and the history of texts in mind so that we don’t get swallowed up by tradition!  And of course we recognize that the Bible was revealed to us progressively!  This is part and parcel of basic evangelical hermeneutics.

But whatever new hermeneutic or theology comes along – whether narrative theology, the resurgence of rabbinical models, or something else – whenever these methods depart significantly from the tried-and-true, grammatical-historical approach to interpreting Scripture, their conclusions get used wrongly time and again to siphon away all meaning from the very concept of inerrancy.  But inerrancy as a doctrine can’t be drained so quickly nor so easily cast aside on such a methodological basis. 

Discrepancies, errors, wrong numbers?

Commitment to inerrancy involves the more-than-reasonable assurance that we can get to the bottom of what a text meant to its original recipients and how it should be applied to our lives today.  It doesn’t distort the gospel nor push it toward sterility or legalistic impotence either.  It’s simply a way of looking at Scripture as more than merely a functional instrument we use to serve God and his purposes; rather, the Bible is also propositional truth itself, given to us by God himself.  The trick is getting at those propositions precisely.

Inerrancy doesn’t imply, however, that exhaustive answers to every conceivable question can be achieved on this side of the grave.  Instead, it is framed by humility, making arrogant scholarship its dreaded enemy.  Interpretational challenges remain, true, but evangelicals have proximate, if not exhaustive, answers at their disposal to each of the difficulties thrown their way. 

For example, when the biblical writers penned Scripture, they had other purposes in mind than living up to a 21st century precision regarding numbers.  Error and minimal imprecision are not the same thing.  Attacking the Bible’s infallibility by cataloguing specific instances of alleged discrepancies, regarding numbers or other issues, just won’t work any longer as a modus operandi for inerrancy bashing. 

Whatever so-called contradictions in Scripture are unearthed by modern scholarship, the vast majority of these were touted by critics centuries ago and have been dealt with previously in a number of effective ways.  But more than a few modern critical scholars seem blissfully unaware that this is the case, that a vast body of literature dedicated to further developing the hermeneutical, theological and philosophical underpinnings of inerrancy is already out there for the taking.

In closing, the doctrine of inerrancy provides a solid footing, not to mention the impetus, for Southern Baptists to move ahead decisively with ministry, evangelism, missions, and apologetic concerns to boot!  It even involves investigating Jesus’ own stated approach to the whole question of Scriptural authority, but that’s a story for another time.

Hal N. Ostrander

Chair, Division of Religion and Philosophy

Brewton-Parker College

Mt. Vernon, Georgia  

October 2003