Position · 1972

Limited Inerrancy

The view that Scripture is fully truthful and authoritative in what it teaches for faith and practice, but is not necessarily precise in every incidental historical or scientific detail.

History

Roots

The idea that the Bible’s purpose limits what it means to say is much older than the label. Augustine, who also held that Scripture contains no error, wrote in The Literal Meaning of Genesis that the Spirit speaking through the biblical authors did not mean to teach the shape of the heavens, since that knowledge does nothing for salvation. Galileo pressed the point in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), quoting a churchman’s line “that the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes” (Fordham Sourcebook). Neither man denied inerrancy. Both gave later writers a way to say that a passage’s scientific picture is not what it asserts.

The modern position took shape in the nineteenth century, once historical criticism and geology pressed on the details of the biblical text. At Princeton, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield answered with their article “Inspiration” (Presbyterian Review, 1881), which defined inerrancy as the truth of everything the original autographs affirm, history and science included. That article became the classic form of the view limited inerrancy reacts against. Others in the same tradition went a different way. The Scottish theologian James Orr, a contributor to The Fundamentals, held in Revelation and Inspiration (1910, Archive.org) that inspiration guarantees the trustworthiness of the revelation, not exact accuracy in every minor detail, and that staking everything on that accuracy was unwise. In American Presbyterianism the same question drove the heresy trial of Charles Briggs (1893), who denied the inerrancy of the original texts.

Causes

The term belongs to the post-war evangelical movement. Fuller Theological Seminary, founded in 1947 as the flagship of the “new evangelicals,” adopted a statement in 1949 that called the canonical books “free from all error in the whole and in the part” (wording reproduced here, secondary and critical of Fuller). Several faculty members came to doubt that clause. The tension broke into the open in December 1962, when a board meeting exposed the divide, and it took the rest of the decade to resolve.

Two writers gave the doubters their arguments. Dewey Beegle’s The Inspiration of Scripture (1963) collected the textual difficulties that, he argued, the Princeton doctrine could not honestly absorb; he expanded it as Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility (1973, Archive.org). Daniel Fuller, son of the seminary’s founder, told the Evangelical Theological Society in 1967 that Scripture’s inerrancy should be tied to its “revelational” teaching, what makes a reader “wise for salvation” (2 Timothy 3:15), and not to incidental matters (“Benjamin B. Warfield’s View of Faith and History,” 1968, PDF).

In 1971 Fuller’s board voted to revise the statement, and in 1972 the new text took effect. It calls Scripture “an essential part and trustworthy record” of God’s self-disclosure and “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” (current Fuller statement of faith), and drops the phrase about freedom from all error. That revision is the event this note dates the position from.

Influence

The change provoked the inerrancy wars of the next decade. Harold Lindsell, a Fuller founding faculty member and later editor of Christianity Today, published The Battle for the Bible (1976, Archive.org), naming Fuller and others and arguing that denying inerrancy is the first step out of evangelicalism. The book helped mobilize the conservative side of the Southern Baptist Convention and led directly to the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, whose Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (1978, ICBI scan, Dallas Theological Seminary) was written in large part to rule this position out. Its Article XII denies that inerrancy is confined to spiritual or redemptive themes and excludes claims about history and science.

Fuller’s side answered with history. Jack Rogers edited Biblical Authority (1977) as a reply to Lindsell, then with Donald McKim wrote The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (1979, publisher page), arguing that the church’s central tradition, from the Fathers through Calvin, cared about Scripture’s saving purpose and not technical accuracy, and that strict inerrancy was a seventeenth-century scholastic and Princetonian innovation.

The position never became the majority view among American evangelical institutions, but it is common among evangelical scholars outside the United States, in mainline Protestant churches, and among some Catholic interpreters of Vatican II. Later restatements include Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation (2005), which cost him his post at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008, and Kenton Sparks’s God’s Word in Human Words (2008).

Key ideas and contributors

Truth is measured by purpose. The central claim is that Scripture is without error in what it intends to teach, and that its intent is salvation and the life of faith (John 20:31, 2 Timothy 3:15–17). A passage’s cosmology, rounded numbers or ordering of events is part of how it speaks, not part of what it asserts. Daniel Fuller’s “revelational” and “non-revelational” distinction is the classic form.

Infallible, not inerrant. Holders often prefer “infallible”: Scripture will not fail or mislead anyone in what it is for. Stephen Davis drew this line explicitly in The Debate about the Bible (1977). Many pre-1970s confessions speak of the Bible as the “only infallible rule of faith and practice,” which Fuller’s revised statement reused.

Accommodation and incarnation. God speaks through human authors in their own language, genres and science. Calvin’s teaching on accommodation is the usual precedent, and Rogers and McKim built on it. Enns developed an incarnational analogy: as Christ was fully human, Scripture is fully human, which includes the limits of its authors’ knowledge.

Honesty with the text. Beegle and others argue that the doctrine should be drawn from Scripture’s actual features as well as from its claims about itself. Their standard examples include Jesus naming Abiathar as high priest in Mark 2:26 where 1 Samuel 21:1 has Ahimelech, and Matthew 27:9 attributing to Jeremiah a text close to Zechariah 11:12–13.

The Catholic parallel. The Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum says the books of Scripture teach “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (§11, Vatican). Some Catholic scholars read that clause as limiting inerrancy to saving truth. During the council debate, on 2 October 1964, Cardinal Franz König cited Mark 2:26 as an example of a factual slip, since 1 Samuel 21 places the event under Ahimelech, not Abiathar (Catholic Culture, secondary).

Clark Pinnock shows how the view spread among evangelicals. He defended strict inerrancy in the 1960s but by The Scripture Principle (1984, Archive.org) argued for a looser, purpose-focused account. I. Howard Marshall’s Biblical Inspiration (1982) made a similar case from British evangelicalism.

Key controversies

The slippery slope. Defenders of Biblical Inerrancy argue that once Scripture can err in small matters, no principled line protects the large ones: the resurrection is also a historical claim. Lindsell pressed this hardest, pointing to institutions that dropped inerrancy and later drifted further. Limited inerrantists reply that a doctrine which collapses at the first discrepancy is more dangerous, and that their line, the author’s intent, is principled.

Who decides what is incidental? Critics ask how a reader tells which statements belong to Scripture’s saving purpose. If the interpreter decides, Scripture’s authority depends on the interpreter. Defenders answer that every view must judge genre and intent; the Chicago Statement itself allows for round numbers, phenomenal language and loose quotation.

Jesus’ own view. Inerrantists argue that Jesus treated Scripture’s historical details as true (Matthew 5:18, John 10:35), so a limited view sets the disciple above the master. Limited inerrantists answer that these texts affirm Scripture’s authority without settling whether it is precise in every detail.

Whose history? The Rogers–McKim thesis was attacked by John Woodbridge in Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982), first sketched in a review essay in Trinity Journal (abstract). Woodbridge argued that Augustine, Luther, Calvin and others did hold that Scripture is free of error in history and science, and that the Princeton view was not new. Many reviewers judged that critique damaging to the Rogers–McKim thesis, though the debate over Calvin continues.

Is “infallible” a dodge? Inerrantists see “infallible” used after 1970 as a softened word that sounds stronger than it is, since in older usage it was if anything the stronger term. Holders of the limited view answer that inerrancy needed so many qualifications in the Chicago Statement that it no longer means what lay readers assume.

Dei Verbum. Catholic interpreters remain divided over whether “for the sake of salvation” restricts which truths are inerrant or describes why all of Scripture is true. The second reading has strong support in papal teaching before and after the council.

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that Scripture is God’s word, fully authoritative and trustworthy, and both accept that genre and intent govern what a passage asserts. The dispute is over the size of that allowance: whether intent can exempt real historical or scientific claims, or only figures of speech and approximations. The 2013 volume Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (publisher page), with Albert Mohler, Peter Enns, Michael Bird, Kevin Vanhoozer and John Franke, shows the question still open half a century after Fuller’s revision.