Lecture 8: Inerrancy: True in All That It Teaches

The lecture, section by section

1. The skeptic’s list, and the trap to refuse

   Patton recalls his own early hunger to answer every objection, and the drive-by skeptics who post lists of alleged contradictions and never return. Before any answer, a strategic refusal: never accept the premise that every discrepancy must be resolved before Christianity can be true. Christianity does not rest on inerrancy; it rests on the resurrection of Christ, a historical event established by historical evidence, and a historian can err in details while the great matter he reports remains true. The teachers hold inerrancy firmly, and hold it in its place: faith has content, the content that believers will die for is the risen Christ, and not every question must be gripped with a certainty of ten.

2. An issue of hermeneutics, and a young controversy

   Inerrancy, the teachers argue, is really a subset of hermeneutics: you cannot adjudicate a single alleged error without a method of interpretation, and this session quietly begins the hermeneutics unit. Historically the church did not debate inerrancy as a separate doctrine; the controversy is only some two centuries old, born when higher criticism and liberal philosophy began questioning whether the Bible is true in all its details, and the vocabulary hardened in the battles of the twentieth century.

3. Can Scripture err and still be inspired?

   The class is pressed with a test case: suppose Luke, in the original manuscript, simply got a name wrong, Lydia when it was not Lydia. Could that stand with inspiration? Everything depends on the view of inspiration adopted two weeks earlier. If inspiration lies only in the thoughts, names are negotiable. But verbal plenary inspiration guarantees the very words, so the question is no longer can Luke err but can God err, or can God overlook. And the door, once cracked, has no natural stopping place: admit historical error and you have admitted a category, and someone will soon ask how much of the Bible could be cut away, Chronicles, most of the minor prophets, the genealogies, before doctrine is touched. A shrinking Bible is the price of the concession.

4. Inerrancy and infallibility: the two camps

   Two terms, once synonyms, now name two camps. Inerrancy: the Scriptures, in the autographa, the original manuscripts, are true in all that they teach and thus without error. The teachers prefer the positive word true, because truth implies intent: Scripture truly records lies as lies, truly reports the bad counsel of Job’s friends, truly preserves the disillusioned journal of Ecclesiastes, and none of that is error, because none of it is asserted as God’s own teaching. Infallibility, in the newer usage, claims only that Scripture cannot fail in matters of faith and practice, leaving room for slips in history and science; the battle over that move split institutions a generation ago, grew ugly, and still shows in seminary doctrinal statements. The teachers hold both terms together: verbal plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant. And they answer the standing objection honestly: yes, inerrancy is claimed for originals no one possesses, but variants are copying questions, never inerrancy questions, and the appeal to the autographa is what makes textual criticism matter.

5. The arguments for inerrancy

   Four arguments carry the case. First, the simplest: Scripture is God-breathed, God is truthful and beyond error, therefore Scripture is without error; and there is no umpire in evangelicalism to tell us which parts are breathed if only some are. Second, the theological message rides on the historical: most of the Bible is history, its doctrine spoken by historical persons in historical events, and error admitted anywhere in the history leaves no principled line before it reaches Sinai and the empty tomb. A further cost: a Bible with private rules about which details count can only be read by insiders, and the church loses the ability to hand its book to the world. Third, the slippery slope is real: denial of inerrancy has historically opened the door to denying any doctrine the age dislikes, and the fall of the old universities and denominations into liberalism followed that road. Fourth, the Bible vindicates the patience of faith: the census of Luke 2 stood accused as a plain historical error until the governor of Syria was found to have served twice, and the teachers draw the lesson: when two things cannot yet be put together, say I do not know, and wait, rather than concede an error the next discovery may dissolve.

6. Perspective is not error

   A gentler observation prepares the workshop: honest histories differ in perspective without either being false. Historians dispute when wars began, since political beginnings and military beginnings differ, and the Thirty Years’ War took thirty-four years to fight; a couple may honestly disagree about when they started dating. Two biblical writers reporting one event from two vantage points can both be true, and the interpreter’s first question is always the author’s perspective, never a demand for machine-like uniformity.

7. The Chicago Statement: what inerrancy affirms

   In 1979 some fifty evangelical scholars produced the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, still the hallmark definition. The teachers walk its high points. Human language, though creaturely and touched by sin, is an adequate vehicle for divine revelation. Inspiration extends to the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, never the whole without the parts nor some parts without the whole. God utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of writers he had chosen and prepared, and did not override them: mechanical dictation is denied by the statement itself, which is why tone, mood, and style are hermeneutical data, not noise.

8. Not conferring omniscience: the progress of revelation and of understanding

   One clause the teachers linger over: inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters the writers were moved to address. The authors were not omniscient and were themselves in development: Moses could not have unpacked the promise of Genesis 3:15 he recorded; John, writing decades after the others, saw more of the Trinity than the earliest writers; and Patton offers, candidly as his own hard saying, that the church reading the whole finished canon may understand some doctrines more fully than Paul did in the year he wrote. Two motions must be distinguished: the progress of revelation, God giving more across the Bible’s writing, and the progress of understanding, the church growing in grasp of the finished whole. Neither motion introduces error; both forbid reading any author as if he had swallowed a systematic theology.

9. Scripture, science, and Galileo’s lesson

   The statement denies that scientific hypotheses may overturn Scripture’s teaching, and the teachers immediately add the caution history teaches: the church condemned Galileo for heliocentrism because it had misread Scripture as teaching that the sun circles the earth, and when the science stood, reexamination showed Scripture had never taught geocentrism at all. Rightly interpreted Scripture and rightly interpreted nature do not conflict; the conflicts live in the interpretations. The church’s first sixteen centuries approached such texts naively, and the modern emphasis on exegesis, on what the authors meant, is a hard-won gain. A standing warning travels with it: your theology will drive your exegesis, and every tradition tends to find its own doctrines confirmed in every passage, which is why good theology and self-suspicion must grow together.

10. What inerrancy is not negated by

    The statement’s most liberating denial: inerrancy is not negated by the lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, hyperbole and round numbers, topical arrangement, variant selections in parallel accounts, or free citations. We say about fifteen hundred and about thirty people without lying; Isaiah can say the moon will not shed its light, phenomenological language from the observer’s vantage, exactly as we say the sun went down; Jesus can command an eye gouged out and mean what metaphor means; the Sermon on the Mount can run longer in Matthew than in Luke without contradiction. Truth is measured by the standards of the text’s own usage and purpose, never by standards alien to it. And the confession matters: not necessary for salvation, the statement says, yet not rejectable without grave consequences to the individual and the church.

11. The workshop: hard cases in practice

    The class breaks into groups over the classic difficulties. Seven hundred versus seven thousand in parallel accounts: a scribal number error, easier still in Hebrew, where letters serve as numerals; one reading preserves the inerrant original, and inerrancy never claimed the copies. Judas’s death, hanged in Matthew 27, fallen headlong and burst open in Acts 1: multiple harmonizations exist, and the honest verdict is that no one can say without a doubt an error, while the writers’ own interests show the human element, Matthew the tax collector following the money, Luke the physician recording the anatomy. Summary versus detail in parallel accounts assumes falsely that every writer must report identically. Proverbs 12:21, no harm befalls the righteous, against the righteous beggar of Luke 16: genre first, for a proverb states general truth, then covenant context, then the meaning of harm, and the teachers model saying openly that the harmonization is not simple rather than pretending it is. The pattern across every case: when the original context, the author’s intent, and the science of textual criticism are brought to bear, alleged errors resolve into faulty hermeneutics or scribal transmission, and none survives as a demonstrated error of the original text.

12. The very words or the very voice

    A closing pair of Latin terms names one last liberation. Ipsissima verba, the very words, is the assumption that the writers always recorded speeches word for word; ipsissima vox, the very voice, is the recognition that they often summarized and paraphrased, giving the true voice of the speaker without stenography. The vox position is built into the Bible’s own design: Jesus taught in Aramaic and the Gospels render him in Greek, translation woven in from the first page, which is why hunting for the more inspired Aramaic behind the text misunderstands inspiration itself: what the authors recorded is what God guaranteed, and the Bible was written to travel into every language on earth. The teachers close by commending the standard reference works on Bible difficulties for the shelf of every student who will meet the skeptic’s list again.

1. The teachers hold inerrancy firmly while insisting Christianity stands on the resurrection rather than on resolving every difficulty. How does that ordering change the way you would talk with a skeptic armed with a list of contradictions, and where have you been backed into the wrong corner before?

2. The Chicago Statement protects round numbers, phenomenological language, and free citation. Which alleged error that once troubled you dissolves under those categories, and which difficulty are you still willing to hold with an honest I do not know?

3. The session warns that your theology will drive your exegesis, and every tradition finds its own doctrines confirmed in every passage. Where might your tradition’s lens be steering your reading, and what practice would help you notice?