Rev H M Cartwright
Attacks upon the doctrine that there are no errors in the Bible are not new. As the history of the Scottish Church in the late nineteenth century demonstrates, they are not new even within professedly Evangelical circles. But they have emerged more recently within Evangelicalism after a period when belief in Biblical inerrancy was one of the generally recognised characteristics of Evangelicalism. In 1958 J I Packer was able to write, in ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, that Evangelicals reject “the supposition that Scripture errs, for the Scripture claims not to err. They reject all methods of biblical criticism which assume about Scripture something other than Scripture assumes about itself. They reject all approaches to Scripture which would not permit it to function in the Church as a final authority.”
The situation was obviously changing when, in 1978, the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” was produced at a Conference of prominent Evangelicals who were concerned at the departure from this position which they observed to be taking place within Evangelicalism. Perhaps I can quote from this Statement to demonstrate the common position of these men, whether they were Calvinistic or Arminian. Their basic position was that “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration”. They argued “that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write”. They denied “that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word”. They affirmed “that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses”. They denied “that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science”.
This position has been challenged in recent times by men professing to believe in the reality of Divine revelation, the inspiration and infallibility of the Word of God, and the evangelical doctrines derived from the Word of God. The advocate of infallibility without inerrancy nearest home has been Dr A T B McGowan in his 2007 book, The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging evangelical perspectives. Dr McGowan regards Scripture as infallible “not in the sense of inerrant autographa but in the sense that God has given us the Scriptures and they will infallibly achieve God’s purpose in giving them” (p 149). He regards the inerrancy of the original Scriptures as a modern, rather rationalistic, reaction to liberalism.
In the limited time available we shall attempt to summarise: (1.) The orthodox view which we hold, and then go on to look at (2.) The alternative positions being advocated in some professedly Evangelical circles; (3.) The echoes we can hear of the downgrade movement which destroyed the orthodoxy of the old Free Church; (4.) The fundamental significance of Biblical inerrancy for the whole position of biblical Christianity; (5.) The basis on which we are to defend what we believe to be the biblical, orthodox position.
1. The orthodox view of Biblical inerrancy.
We call it the orthodox view primarily because it is the Bible’s own view. It has been the view of those throughout the ages who have held biblical views of the Bible, such as Irenaeus, Augustine, Calvin, the Scottish Reformers, the Westminster divines and the theological teachers of the Disruption Free Church.
E J Young (in Thy Word is Truth) defines “inerrancy” as meaning “that the Scriptures possess the quality of freedom from error. They are exempt from the liability of mistake, incapable of error. In all their teachings they are in perfect accord with the truth.” This freedom from error does not only characterise the doctrine or theological matter of the Bible but all its statements on any subject and the words in which these statements are made. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim 3:16). “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet 1:21). Although the Bible came to us through human instrumentality and although the distinctive human personalities and characteristics of the writers are evident, divine inspiration preserved them from making erroneous statements on any subject and ensured that they spoke or wrote the words of God, which can only be true.
Inspiration is God’s method of ensuring that those to whom He revealed Himself and the mystery of His saving purpose would communicate that revelation precisely as God wished it to be communicated. God took steps to ensure that, not only were His revealed thoughts conveyed to us in a generally-accurate way, but in words which precisely communicated what was in His mind. God moved the writers, carried them along, in such a way that the words which they used give the precise record of the revelation which God intended. God did not merely give them the thoughts, He gave them also the words which would convey these God-given thoughts in the best possible way so that, when we read their words, we are reading the very words of God. All of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, in its words as well as in its thoughts, is the product of a supernatural work of God which ensures that it is inerrant, infallible, wholly trustworthy.
The Bible was written by men, not by machines. But the men, their circumstances, characteristics, experiences and faculties were prepared by God, and God took these men whom He had prepared and carried them along supernaturally so that they wrote exactly what He intended them to write. It was their writing, but it was God’s words that were written. God the Holy Spirit brought directly to bear on the writers of Scripture a divine influence which ensured that, as long as they thought and spoke and wrote under this influence, all their statements accurately conveyed what God revealed to them of His mind, so that we have the thoughts of God infallibly communicated to us in the words of God as well as in the words of men. Inspiration preserved the writers from error which would be natural to them as sinful men, and guided them in their expression of thoughts and use of words, so that what they wrote is God’s own Word.
That the Scriptures are free from error is implicit in the doctrine of their divine inspiration. And it is essential to their infallibility and authority. As Dr Packer puts it: “Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God ‘who cannot lie’, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore may be trusted implicitly. This is just the conviction which our Lord was expressing when He said: ‘The Scripture cannot be broken’ and ‘it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one title of the law to fail’. God’s Word is affirmed to be infallible because God Himself is infallible; the infallibility of Scripture is simply the infallibility of God speaking. What Scripture says is to be received as the infallible Word of the infallible God, and to assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii) the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God. The value of these terms is that they conserve the principle of biblical authority; for statements that are not absolutely true and reliable could not be absolutely authoritative.”
We believe that there is nothing in the limitations of human language or of human writers of Scripture to justify the claim that there are errors in the Bible. We believe that there are no real discrepancies or contradictions or deviations from truth in anything written in the Bible. This, of course, applies to the Scriptures as they were originally written. Even if we have no access to these original manuscripts now, their inerrancy is a matter of great significance. Error in the autographs would undermine Scripture’s doctrine of God and doctrine of inspiration and make man the judge of what, if anything, should be regarded as authoritative in the Scriptures. Their inerrancy is a matter of great significance also because we believe that we have in the copies of manuscripts and in our translation of the Bible access to those Scriptures which God “immediately inspired” and has “by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages” (Westminster Confession of Faith 1:8).
1The first section of a paper delivered at the 2009 Theological Conference.
2The autographs, the original manuscripts.