This is a series based on short papers I’ve written for my church’s elder class. We are going through Boice’s Foundations of the Christian Faith and discussing different subjects out of our church statement of faith. Where appropriate I’ve edited them slightly to make them more general in tone as opposed to specific to my church, as well as expanded on areas that could use it since these were originally written to fit into a five-minute presentation time.
This entry’s subject: The inspiration of Scripture and what it means for it to be inerrant.
When we say that Scripture is inerrant – without mistake – we have to recognize that its inerrancy is focused on the information it is wanting to impart in its context. We must say that everything it affirms is true, and that it does not affirm anything that is untrue. And we must understand that it is inerrant because it is God’s speech to us, not because of any special skill of the writers.
The Christian view of inspiration is not that human beings were involved in some sort of automatic writing experience, where their minds disconnected from their bodies and when they reawakened, they had a book of the Bible in front of them. Rather, the authors wrote from their own experiences and with their own voices, but what they produced was ordained by God to be His Word. Likewise, God’s people have recognized what His Word by the same means that it came into being – the work of the Holy Spirit. The Bible consists of multiple kinds of literature, including historical works, poetry and song, wisdom literature meant to instruct, and letters written to churches or individuals for various reasons. The voices of the authors are intact and unique, even though their subjects vary widely. But as Peter wrote, “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
But in defending this to those who would deny such a status to Scripture, we have to recognize three main issues that should be kept in mind.
Answering in wisdom and love
First – Scripture’s inerrancy is bound up in its context and intent, not its faithfulness to modern scientific standards and conceptions. Many debates have arisen, for example, over the issue of creation and how we are to understand the opening of Genesis in the face of scientific claims regarding the age of the earth and the larger universe. Many Christians have chosen to stake out fierce defenses of a certain interpretation of time out of a belief that anything else would mean a denial of scriptural inerrancy. But the debate itself causes both Christians and non-Christians to miss the point of the text – that God is the author of all that is, that He rules it and it all obeys His will, even when sin and disobedience are in view. Likewise, when God includes bats in the list of unclean birds the Israelites may not eat in Leviticus 11, it is not an error because bats are actually mammals. An Israelite of the time would have looked at a flying bat and classified it with birds because it flies like most birds, and the Linnaean classification of bats as mammals was thousands of years in the future.
Second – the challenges posed to inerrancy by others are not always rooted in good faith, and that when pushed into pursuing truth in good faith, their questions do typically have answers. For example, many modern academic critics exploit the wiggle room they are granted when writing popular works, room which they do not exploit when actually producing academic works on the same topic. One well-known critic of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, has gained many adherents through books claiming that we can hardly claim to know what the original autographs of Scripture said, while admitting in academic works and debates with Christians that by and large we do have an accurate conception of the text by any reasonable standard. If the concern about Scripture’s claim to inerrancy is determining what is true, we surely must admit that truth requires consistency, and arguments using inconsistent standards cannot hold out against the claims of Scripture.
Finally, that debating inerrancy should be pointed towards a desire to reveal the heart of another, and less to nitpicking specific points. Using the previous example of an unbeliever who is willing to use double standards to attack Scripture, we must consider the words of Proverbs 26:4-5: “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” In other words, beware allowing the mindset of the world to affect our approach to this issue, where fear and doubt might drive us to likewise engage in double standards and untruth. Rather, we should be forthright in our approach and positions, and build a relationship in discussions that encourage others to do the same, so that we can engage openly and display our reliance on Christ, and the sufficiency of His Word for revealing everything that we need to know about the Lord we love.
Scripture is enough
There is one final question that I want to answer: why is this important? The answer is that we need to have God’s guidance in our lives. Our hearts, as Jeremiah 17:9 says, are “more deceitful than anything else, and incurable – who can understand it?” The answer to the prophet’s question is that God can and does. He knows our hearts long for things that are destructive to our well-being. He knows our inclination to look at a thing that is bad and call it good, out of our own desires – desires that we know point us to destruction. Knowing that God has spoken clearly means we have a foundation to build upon. It also means that when that building goes wrong, we have the reassurance that God has redeemed us, and that He will bring the work He began in Christ to its fulfillment in this world through the patient endurance and loving sacrifice of His church. And finally, we can live in an open-handed way with everything – even our own lives – knowing that the day is coming that Jesus will come to restore everything that human sin has broken.
The position that Scripture holds for Christians – that it is theopneustos, God’s own breathed-out words to His people – means that inerrancy is a necessary consequence of this truth. Because it is God’s words to us, we must confess that it is the authority above all others. We cannot place authorities above it or beside it, and the Lord administers it to our hearts by His Holy Spirit, through the work of the church. We can dig into mountains of evidence for its truth, whether archaeological, historical, textual, or more. We can look at the method by which the New Testament was preserved from tampering as it spread across the ancient world and wonder at God’s providence in the face of the world’s opposition.
Above all, we must not take God’s Word for granted, but submit our hearts and minds to it while we minister to one another with it, in Paul’s words, “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” And the reason why it is so important to us that the Bible is God’s Word is found at the very beginning of the book of Genesis. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God and put their own wisdom over His, they and everyone descended from them inherited the curse of sin, of believing that our twisted desires are a greater and worthier truth than God’s wisdom. We need God’s Word to show us where we err, and direct us to what is right. When we submit to His Word, we find the way to the life that they left behind in that garden, in the obedient work of Jesus Christ, and we find renewal that we can trust to each day to bring transformed hearts and renewed minds.
How have you seen this work out in your life? Where do you struggle with this? Please let us know in the comments.
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