Rev H M Cartwright
4. The fundamental significance of Biblical Inerrancy for the whole position of Biblical Christianity.
We can concur in the assertion of the framers of the Chicago Statement that “the authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church”. As they say, “great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible, whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible which God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasonings, and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that, at bottom, independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic Evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an Evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the Evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.”
1The last section of a paper delivered at the 2009 Theological Conference. The previous part appeared last month.
As E J Young says, “if, as a matter of fact, the revelation of God is not free of error, the message of Christianity must ever remain in doubt”. As he says again, “the Bible, according to its own claim, is breathed forth from God. To maintain that there are flaws or errors in it is the same as declaring that there are flaws or errors in God Himself.” James Montgomery Boice, in Foundations of the Christian Faith, claims that “what is at stake is the whole matter of revelation. Can God reveal Himself to humanity? And, to be more specific, can He reveal Himself in language, the specifics of which become normative for Christian faith and action? With an inerrant Bible these things are possible. Without it, theology inevitably enters a wasteland of human speculation”.
5. The basis on which we are to defend what we believe to be the biblical, orthodox position.
One could pursue an historical survey which would show that those who have contended earnestly for the faith down through the ages have held firmly to the inerrancy of the Bible. Wayne R Spear, in his discussion of “The Westminster Confession of Faith and Holy Scripture”, in the book To Glorify and Enjoy God: A Commemoration of the 350th Anniversary of the Westminster Assembly, repudiates the notion that the Westminster Divines were not acquainted with or committed to Biblical inerrancy, which some claim was an idea that came to Britain after the Assembly. Spear shows that the Westminster position was very much that of William Whitaker, Professor of Divinity in Cambridge from 1579 till his death in 1595. Whitaker had expounded in print “an explicit doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture” 60 years before the Assembly. He “contended that God is the Author of Scripture and He does not lie or make mistakes; therefore Scripture contains no lies or mistakes”.
Hugh Martin in his The Westminster Doctrine of the Inspiration of Scripture (1877) makes the point that the Westminster Confession says, “It pleased the Lord to commit the same [that is, His revelation of Himself and His declaration of His will], wholly unto writing’. The Lord Himself committed them to writing.” He points out the contrast with the statement of the Free Church College Committee: “‘The revelation of God and the declaration of His will are committed wholly to writing’. They are committed to writing. That’s all. The College Committee says not by whom.” Dr Spear goes on to say that “one can go back to Augustine and find an explicit doctrine of biblical inerrancy. In his very significant work, The Harmony of the Evangelists, he said that if we find that the Gospel writers were inaccurate historians then our confidence in their doctrinal teaching is undermined. Augustine laboured to show that there are no historical discrepancies between the Synoptic Gospels.” An historical survey would be reassuring but we have not time to attempt it and, after all, it would be appealing to the testimony of men.
One could examine the passages of Scripture which are assumed to be unhistorical, unscientific, contradictory, and show that such assumptions are at least unwarranted and often refutable. E J Young warns: “When we meet difficulties in Scripture, it is well to be cautious about asserting the presence of error”. Perceived difficulties are not incapable of solution, and if we cannot solve any of them it is most likely because “we do not know all the factors involved”. As Hugh Martin put it in the fifth of his Letters to Marcus Dods (also 1877): “Let your difficulties about ‘inaccuracies’, about ‘lapses of memory’, and all that sort of thing, alone; and study, unprejudiced, the proof that is proffered for the divine authorship of the Word of God. Then, if convinced, deal with your difficulties as all wise men do with difficulties in reference to what they have believed on its own sufficient evidence, especially (as in this case) when the evidence is the testimony of God.”
John Murray, in “Inspiration and Inerrancy” (Collected Writings, vol 4), observes that “in dealing with any subject which Scripture brings to our attention we must take into account all the relevant data made known to us, and since these data are not all concentrated in one place, we must address ourselves to the task of correlating all the data drawn from various parts of Scripture. Too often we find what we think to be discrepancy, because we have left out of account, it may be, only one significant datum. Furthermore, we must recognise that oftentimes we are ignorant of significant data relevant to a particular subject, and we must be humble enough to admit the limitations under which we labour.”
The ultimate basis on which we defend what we believe to be the biblical, orthodox position is that it is biblical – that it is derived from explicit statements of Scripture and “by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture”. If the Bible is trustworthy at all then it is trustworthy in what it says about itself. The divine Word carries its own authority and is believed on account of that authority by all those who are given spiritual perception. John Murray, in “The Infallibility of Scripture” (Collected Writings, vol 1), makes the point that “the only ground is the witness of Scripture to itself, to its own origin, character and authority. . . . Are we not begging the question? . . . We depend upon the message of Scripture for every tenet of our faith, for every ray of redemptive light that illumines our minds, and for every ray of hope against the issues of time and eternity. Christianity for us today without the Bible is something inconceivable. . . . If we do not accept its verdict respecting its own character or quality, we have no warrant to accept its verdict respecting anything else.”
(a) There is the Bible’s claim to be the product of Divine Inspiration. James Bannerman summed up the relation between revelation and inspiration: “A supernatural communication of truth from God is a revelation; the supernatural transference of the truth to the spoken or written word is inspiration”. Inspiration is not our subject but, as we have noted at previous Conferences, the Old Testament bears witness to its own inspiration. Our Lord bears testimony to the inspiration and authority of Old Testament Scripture, and to the fact that it is without the slightest error and ever enduring (Mt 5:17-19; Jn 10:35). This view of the Old Testament Scriptures as inspired and infallible is also set forth by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament in the teaching of the apostles. They refer to God speaking through men. They ascribe to named men what was spoken by God. They write of the Scripture saying something when it was God who spoke. They quote what is spoken in Scripture by man as the utterance of the Holy Ghost. They refer to the Old Testament Scriptures as the oracles of God. The New Testament bears witness to itself as part of the Holy Scriptures, with the same divine origin and infallibility and authority as the Old Testament (for example, 2 Pet 3:15,16 with 2 Pet 1:19-21; 1 Tim 5:18 with Deut 25:4; Lk 10:7).
(b) There is the Biblical view of the extent of Divine Inspiration. Inspiration extends to the words and not simply to the thought. As John Murray puts it in his article, “The Infallibility of Scripture”: “The inspiration of Scripture involves verbal inspiration. If it did not carry with it the inspiration of the words, it would not be inspiration at all. Words are the media of communication. It is nothing less than verbal inspiration that Paul affirms when he says in 1 Corinthians 2:13, ‘Comparing spiritual things with spiritual’ . . . They are Spirit-inspired words in the sense in which they were intended by the Holy Spirit”.
He says in “Inspiration and Inerrancy” that “it is strange that the term ‘verbal inspiration’ should evoke so much dissent if not scorn. When we speak of the inspiration of Scripture we refer to Scripture as written; otherwise we should not be speaking of Scripture. But there is no Scripture without words, and, if we are to speak of the inspiration of Scripture at all, we cannot dispense with the inspiration of words. Or if we are thinking of revelation in word, revelatory word, we cannot think of revelation apart from words, nor of the inspiration which guarantees the veracity and supplies the content of that revelation apart from words.” “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26).
(c) There is the omniscience and the truthfulness of God. God knows the truth about everything and God cannot lie. The God who is truth cannot err. R C Sproul makes the point that “unless we want to join the ranks of the absurd, or unless we confess that God inspires error and join the ranks of the impious, or unless we confess that the Bible as a whole is not inspired, then we are forced by what Martin Luther called ‘resistless logic’ to the conclusion that the Bible is inerrant . . . a logic that is driven to a conclusion drawn from the premise of the integrity of Christ”. Calvin in his comments on 2 Timothy 3:16 asserts that “we owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God; because it has proceeded from Him alone, and has nothing belonging to man mixed with it”.
The Bible is God’s Word and not merely the means of communicating God’s Word. God cannot err in anything that He says and therefore the Bible must be free from all error. We shall let E J Young have the last word: “It is perfectly true that if we begin with the assumption that God exists and that the Bible is His Word, we shall wish to be guided in all our study by what the Scripture says. It is equally true that if we reject this foundational presupposition of Christianity we shall arrive at results which are hostile to supernatural Christianity. If one begins with the presuppositions of unbelief, he will end with unbelief’s conclusions.”