Topic

Scripture and Inerrancy

In what sense the Bible is without error: whether its truthfulness covers every statement it makes, including history and science, or chiefly what it teaches about faith and life.

History

Roots

Every Christian tradition has called Scripture true. The New Testament writers cite the Old as God speaking: “all Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16), “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21), and “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). What the Early Church did not do was define “error” or decide what kind of statement the promise of truth covered.

Augustine came closest. Writing to Jerome around 405, he said that of the canonical books alone “do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error,” and that if something in them seemed false he would assume a faulty manuscript, a bad translation, or his own failure to understand (Letter 82). Augustine also warned Christians against making the Bible say foolish things about nature, and Origen before him had argued that God placed “stumbling-blocks” and “impossibilities” in the history so readers would look for a deeper sense (On First Principles IV). The early tradition held high trust in the text alongside freedom about how to read it. Thomas Aquinas put the literal sense first while keeping the spiritual senses built on it (Summa I, q. 1, a. 10).

The Reformation made Scripture’s Authority the center of the fight. Sola Scriptura raised the stakes on the text’s reliability, since the Bible now stood above popes and councils. Martin Luther and John Calvin both treated Scripture as God’s word, though Calvin also taught that God “accommodated” his speech to ordinary human perception, as when Genesis calls the moon a great light. The Westminster Confession (1646) grounded “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof” in “the inward work of the Holy Spirit” (ch. 1.5). On the Catholic side the Council of Trent (1546) affirmed God as author of both Testaments and set the canon.

Causes

The modern question arose when the Bible’s accuracy on history and nature came under pressure. Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) argued that Scripture speaks in the language of appearances and quoted a churchman, usually identified as Cardinal Baronius, that “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes” (Fordham Sourcebook). Spinoza (1670) and then German historical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treated the Bible as a set of human documents with sources, dates and contradictions. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) added a scientific challenge to Genesis (see Creation and Evolution).

Two kinds of response took shape. The Princeton theologians A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield gave the classic statement of Biblical Inerrancy in their article Inspiration (1881, Archive.org). They argued that the original manuscripts, the autographs, were without error in all they affirm, and that alleged errors had to be proven against the autographs rather than later copies. The Presbyterian heresy trial of Charles Briggs (1893), who denied inerrancy, showed the doctrine being used as a boundary.

Rome took a similar line. Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus (1893) declared it “absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred,” while allowing that the writers described nature as it “sensibly appeared” (§§18, 20). Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) then opened Catholic scholarship to historical method and literary genre (text).

Influence

The Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum (1965) settled the Catholic formula: the books of Scripture teach “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (§11). Some read “for the sake of salvation” as limiting which truths are covered; others read it as stating why all of Scripture is true. The ambiguity is part of the Catholic debate to this day.

Among Evangelical Protestants the fight broke into the open. The Evangelical Theological Society, founded in 1949, made one doctrinal claim: the Bible “is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs” (constitution). In the early 1970s Fuller Theological Seminary revised its statement of faith to drop strict inerrancy. Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible (1976, Archive.org) named names and called inerrancy the watershed of evangelicalism. The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy answered with the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (1978).

The Southern Baptist “Conservative Resurgence,” launched in 1979, used inerrancy to take control of the convention’s agencies and seminaries. Its result is visible in the Baptist Faith and Message (2000), which calls Scripture “truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter” (art. I). The Lausanne Congress (1974), whose covenant John Stott chiefly drafted, gave global evangelicalism a softer but similar formula: Scripture is “without error in all that it affirms” (§2).

Key ideas and contributors

Full inerrancy. Biblical Inerrancy holds that Scripture, as originally written, is true in everything it affirms, including history and science. The Chicago Statement’s Article XII denies that inerrancy is “limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science” (text, PDF). The argument behind it is short: God cannot lie, God inspired every word, so every word is true. Inerrantists also stress Jesus’ own view of the Old Testament (Matthew 5:18). Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology (1994) carried this definition into a generation of evangelical classrooms.

Qualifications. Inerrancy as defined in Chicago is not literalism. Article XIII denies that inerrancy is undone by “a lack of modern technical precision,” round numbers, loose quotations, or the language of appearances. Article X locates inerrancy in the autographs, affirming that copies are God’s word “to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.” Defenders argue these are ordinary rules for judging any truthful speaker.

Limited inerrancy and infallibility. Limited Inerrancy holds that Scripture never fails in what it teaches about faith and practice, but its incidental details of history or science need not be exact. Holders often prefer “infallible” to “inerrant.” Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (1979, Archive.org) argued that this was the older Christian view and that the Princeton doctrine was a nineteenth-century innovation shaped by Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Clark Pinnock moved from a strict defense of inerrancy in the 1960s to a looser account in The Scripture Principle (1984).

Catholic and Orthodox frames. For the Roman Catholic Church, Scripture is inspired and without error in the truth God intended for salvation, but it is read within Holy Tradition and interpreted by the Magisterium (Dei Verbum §§9–12). The Eastern Orthodox tradition seldom uses the word “inerrancy” at all. It treats Scripture as the heart of the church’s Tradition and reads it liturgically and through the fathers, so the evangelical question of isolated factual errors has less purchase there.

Incarnational models. Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation (Baker Academic, 2005) compared Scripture to Christ, fully divine and fully human. He argued that ancient Near Eastern parallels, diversity inside the Old Testament, and the New Testament’s unusual use of the Old show that God spoke through the conventions of ancient writers, and that evangelical doctrine should be built from what the Bible actually looks like.

Key controversies

Is inerrancy old or new? The historical argument has never closed. Rogers and McKim, and the historian Ernest Sandeen before them (The Roots of Fundamentalism, 1970), said strict inerrancy was invented at Princeton. John Woodbridge answered in Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982, Archive.org), citing Augustine, Luther, Calvin and many others who held Scripture free of all error. Most historians now grant both points: the church long held that Scripture does not err, while the precise definitions, with autographs and articles of denial, are modern.

The slippery slope. Lindsell and the Chicago signers argued that once Scripture is allowed to err in small things, there is no principled place to stop. Critics reply that the slope runs the other way. Tying faith to the accuracy of every detail sets believers up for a crisis the first time they meet a hard text, and many ex-evangelical stories begin there.

The autographs. No original manuscript survives. Critics, Bart Ehrman most widely (Misquoting Jesus, 2005, Archive.org), ask what use an inerrant original is if we have only copies that differ. Inerrantists answer that textual criticism recovers the original with high accuracy, and that the Chicago Statement denies any essential doctrine depends on disputed readings (Article X).

Genre and how far inerrancy reaches. The sharpest recent fights have been about genre. In 1983 members of the Evangelical Theological Society voted to ask Robert Gundry to resign after his commentary on Matthew read parts of the birth narratives as midrash rather than history. In 2010–2011 Norman Geisler, a Chicago drafter, attacked Michael Licona for suggesting that the raised saints of Matthew 27:52–53 might be apocalyptic imagery. Enns left Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008 after the dispute over his book. Each case asked the same question: does reading a passage as a non-historical genre honor what it affirms, or deny it?

Science and Genesis. Chicago’s Article XII also denies that “scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.” For many, this ties inerrancy to Young Earth Creationism. Inerrantists who hold Old Earth Creationism or Evolutionary Creation reply that the article forbids overturning Scripture’s teaching, not rethinking what Genesis teaches; Galileo made the same move about the sun.

Is the term useful at all? Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (Zondervan, 2013), edited by J. Merrick and Stephen Garrett, put the options side by side. Albert Mohler defended Chicago; Kevin Vanhoozer proposed an “Augustinian” inerrancy focused on what authors actually assert; Michael Bird argued that inerrancy is an American fixation that evangelicals elsewhere do without; John Franke wanted it recast; and Enns argued that inerrancy, “however defined, does not describe what the Bible does.” Critics of the volume said it really held two views, not five.

What remains unresolved

Almost every side agrees that Scripture is true and that interpreters must attend to genre and the authors’ intent. The disagreement is about the order of operations. Inerrantists start from what Scripture must be, given its divine author, and read hard texts in that light. Their critics start from what Scripture is observed to be and build the doctrine from there. Each side’s weakness mirrors the other’s strength: inerrancy can look like harmonising at any cost, while the alternative can look like a doctrine with no fixed edge.