Biblical Inerrancy

Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that in its original form, the Bible is totally without error, and free from all contradiction; "referring to the complete accuracy of Scripture, including the historical and scientific parts."

Inerrancy is distinguished from Biblical infallibility (or limited inerrancy), which holds that the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice but not history or science.

According to the Chicago Statement and in general agreement within the evangelical community at large, strict inerrancy applies only to the original autographs (i.e. the very first manuscripts written). This leads to the conclusion that, "no present manuscript or copy of Scripture, no matter how accurate, can be called inerrant." Yet there are some from the past who believed that God perfectly preserved the autographs in the apographs (copies). Francis Turretin wrote in his Systematic Theology, "By "original texts" we do not mean the very autographs from the hands of Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, which are known to be nonexistent.

There remains the possibility of different interpretations. An interpretation that contradicts what seems to be the clear sense of other Scripture does not necessarily imply that the text is in error. More than likely the interpretation is at fault, and not the text. A famous quote from Augustine says, "it is not allowable to say, 'The author of this book is mistaken'; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.”

Inerrancy does not come without criticism. What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways." Through the use of textual criticism scholars are able to find what the original text was with great accuracy, and thus, Christians have no reason to worry because we "don't have the originals." yet unfairly writes as though these differences were monumental so as to effect the very foundation of the Christian faith.

Inerrancy in context

Many denominations believe that the Bible is inspired by God, who through the human authors is the divine author of the Bible. This is expressed in the following Bible passage:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 2 Timothy 3:16 NIV

Many who believe in the Inspiration of scripture teach that it is infallible. Those who subscribe to infallibility believe that what the scriptures say regarding matters of faith and Christian practice are wholly useful and true. Some denominations that teach infallibility hold that the historical or scientific details, which may be irrelevant to matters of faith and Christian practice, may contain errors. Those who believe in inerrancy hold that the scientific, geographic, and historic details and of the scriptural texts in their original manuscripts are completely true and without error.

Many religions include texts other than the Bible under various categorizations of inspiration. For example, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) consider the teachings of Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon along with the Bible as being the "word of God," but recognize translation issues.

On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church considers some teachings of the Church, such as solemn definitions issued by an Ecumenical council or the Pope, to be infallible in the sense that they are preserved from error. However, the Roman Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility is limited in application and is subject to contingencies. Since the doctrine was formally defined at the first Vatican Council in 1870, it has been invoked once, in 1950.

Basis of belief

The theological basis of the belief, in its simplest form, is that as God is perfect, the Bible, as the word of God, must also be perfect, thus, free from error. Proponents of biblical inerrancy also teach that God used the "distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers" of scripture but that God's inspiration guided them to flawlessly project his message through their own language and personality.

Infallibility and inerrancy refer to the original texts of the Bible. And while conservative scholars acknowledge the potential for human error in transmission and translation, modern translations are considered to "faithfully represent the originals".

In their text on the subject, Geisler and Nix (1986) claim that scriptural inerrancy is established by a number of observations and processes, which include:

• the historical accuracy of the Bible
• the Bible's claims of its own inerrancy
• church history and tradition
• one's individual experience with God

"Prima Facie" refers to evidence and claims from the Bible itself. "The Witness of the Spirit" is cited as proof to the person to whom God speaks. The "Transforming Ability" of scripture is cited as yet another supernatural proof to an individual. The "Unity of the Scripture" despite its myriad of authors, cultures, and topics, the "Historicity of the Bible" and how the archaeological record is interpreted to confirm the Bible, the "Testimony of Christ," "fulfilled prophecies," "apparent indestructibility" of the scriptures, and the "integrity of its authors" are all commonly taught as ways reliability is established.

Textual tradition of the New Testament

There are over 5,600 Greek manuscripts containing all or part of the New Testament. Most of these manuscripts date to the Middle Ages. The first complete copy of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus, dates to the fourth century. The earliest fragment of a New Testament book is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 which dates to the mid-second century and is the size of a business card. Very early manuscripts are rare.

No two manuscripts are identical, except in the smallest fragments, and the many manuscripts which preserve New Testament texts differ among themselves in many respects, with some estimates of 200,000 to 300,000 differences among the various manuscripts. According to Ehrman,

Most changes are careless errors that are easily recognized and corrected. Christian scribes often made mistakes simply because they were tired or inattentive or, sometimes, inept. Indeed, the single most common mistake in our manuscripts involves "orthography," significant for little more than showing that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most of us can today. In addition, we have numerous manuscripts in which scribes have left out entire words, verses, or even pages of a book, presumably by accident. Sometimes scribes rearranged the words on the page, for example, by leaving out a word and then reinserting it later in the sentence.

Some familiar examples of Gospel passages thought to have been added by later interpolators include the Pericope Adulteræ (John 7:53 - 8:11), the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7–8), and the longer ending in Mark 16 (Mark 16:9-20).

For hundreds of years, biblical and textual scholars have examined the manuscripts extensively. Since the eighteenth century, they have employed the techniques of textual criticism to reconstruct how the extant manuscripts of the New Testament texts might have descended, and to recover earlier recensions of the texts. Many inerrantists believe that the authorial recensions of New Testament texts are not only accessible, but accurately represented by modern translation. Though some inerrantists often prefer the traditional texts used in their churches to modern attempts of reconstruction, arguing that the Holy Spirit is just as active in the preservation of the scriptures as he was in their creation. These inerrantists are found particularly in non-Protestant churches, but also a few Protestant groups hold such views.

The books that are included and excluded from the Bible are the result of a long historical process, which was only finalised during the reign of Constantine, when finally certain books were included and others excluded as Apocrypha from the Biblical canon. For a position of Biblical inerrancy to be accepted, those holding this view must also believe that the separation of Canon from Apocrypha was also divinely inspired (for example Catholics accept 1 & 2 Maccabees within the Canon, Protestants exclude it).

Major religious views on the Bible

Roman Catholics

Roman Catholic Church teaching holds that the resurrection of Jesus affirms his divinity, that Jesus in turn appointed the Pope and the body of Bishops led by the Pope, guided by the Holy Spirit, to offer guidance on questions of faith and morals. Catholics believe this guidance has allowed the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles, in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture (the Bible), to be preserved and passed down to the present day. Speaking from the claimed authority granted to him by Christ, Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu denounced those who held that the inerrancy was restricted to matters of faith and morals:

The sacred Council of Trent ordained by solemn decree that "the entire books with all their parts, as they have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old vulgate Latin edition, are to be held sacred and canonical." [...] When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the "entire books with all their parts" as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as "obiter dicta" and - as they contended - in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus justly and rightly condemned these errors.

The Roman Catholic position on the Bible is further clarified in Dei Verbum, one of the principal documents of the Second Vatican Council. This document states the Catholic belief that all scripture is sacred and reliable because the biblical authors were inspired by God. However, the human dimension of the Bible is also acknowledged as well as the importance of proper interpretation. Careful attention must be paid to the actual meaning intended by the authors, in order to render a correct interpretation. Genre, modes of expression, historical circumstances, poetic liberty, and church tradition are all factors that must be considered by Catholics when examining scripture. The Roman Catholic Church holds that the authority to declare correct interpretation rests ultimately with the church through its magisterium. This teaching is reiterated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Eastern Orthodox Christians

The Eastern Orthodox Church also believes in unwritten tradition and the written scriptures, but it has rarely sought to clarify the relationship between them. Contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians debate whether these are separate deposits of knowledge or different ways of understanding a single dogmatic reality. Father Georges Florovsky, for example, asserted that tradition is no more than "Scripture rightly understood." Because the Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes the authority of councils, which belong to all the bishops, it stresses the canonical uses more than inspiration of scripture.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, most Eastern Orthodox theologians also recognize that a final seal of authenticity or ecumenicity is that the body of the church receives the councils. Since the acceptance of the Septuagint and New Testament by leading regional bishops of the second century was based on those texts' faithfulness to the same apostolic teaching to which the church traditions are also faithful. The Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes that the scriptures can only be understood according to a normative rule of faith (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, in short) and way of life that has continued from Christ and the Apostles to this day, and beyond.

Protestant views

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

In 1978, a large gathering of American Protestant churches, including representatives of the Conservative, Reformed and Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist denominations, adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement does not imply that any particular traditional translation of the Bible is without error. Instead, it gives primacy to seeking the intention of the author of each original text, and commits itself to receiving the statement as fact depending on whether it can be determined or assumed that the author meant to communicate a statement of fact. Of course, knowing the intent of the original authors is impossible.

Acknowledging that there are many kinds of literature in the Bible besides statements of fact, the Statement nevertheless reasserts the authenticity of the Bible in toto as the word of God. Advocates of the Chicago Statement are worried that accepting one error in the Bible leads one down a slippery slope that ends in rejecting that the Bible has any value greater than some other book. "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."

Evangelicals

Evangelical churches, unlike Eastern and Roman churches, reject that there is an infallible authoritative tradition that is held over, or on a par with, scripture. Some Evangelicals hold that the Bible confirms its own authority, pointing out that Jesus frequently quotes scripture as his final "court of appeal". The reasoning is that if the Bible is assumed to be inerrant and the only form of God's word, then that implies that the Bible is fully reliable. Tradition on the other hand is seen to be subject to human memory, and may have many versions of the same events/truths, some of which may be contradictory.

Evangelical churches which hold to Biblical inerrancy will often make a prominent, unambiguous statement supporting this in a list of their beliefs.

King James Only

Another belief, King James Only, holds that the translators of the King James Version English Bible were guided by God, and that the KJV thus is to be taken as the authoritative English Bible. However, those who hold this opinion do not extend it to the KJV translation into English of the Apocryphal books, which were produced along with the rest of the Authorized Version. Modern translations differ from the KJV on numerous points, sometimes resulting from access to different early texts, largely as a result of work in the field of Textual Criticism. Upholders of the KJV nevertheless hold that the Protestant canon of KJV is itself an inspired text and therefore remains authoritative. The King James Only movement asserts that the KJV is the sole English translation free from error.

Textus Receptus (non-English speaking cultures)

Similar to the King James Only view is the view that translations must be derived from the Textus Receptus in order to be considered inerrant. As the King James Version is an English translation, this leaves speakers of other languages in a difficult position, hence the belief in the Textus Receptus as the inerrant source text for translations to modern languages. For example, in Spanish-speaking cultures the commonly accepted "KJV-equivalent" is the Reina-Valera 1909 revision (with different groups accepting in addition to the 1909 or in its place the revisions of 1862 or 1960).

Wesleyan and Methodist view of scripture

The Wesleyan and Methodist Christian tradition affirms that the Bible is authoritative on matters concerning faith and practice. The United Methodist Church does not use the word "inerrant" to describe the Bible, but it does believe that the Bible is God's Word, and as such, is the primary authority for faith and practice.

What is of central importance for the Wesleyan Christian tradition is the Bible as a tool which God uses to promote salvation. According to this tradition, the Bible does not itself effect salvation; God initiates salvation and proper creaturely responses consummate salvation. One may be in danger of bibliolatry if one claims that the Bible secures salvation.

With this focus on salvation, Wesleyans need not make claims about inerrancy in the original autographs, subsequent translations, or particular interpretations. And yet Wesleyans affirm the Bible to be principally authoritative for faith and practice, and the Bible is often a principle means for God to promote salvation in the world.

Lutheran views

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the Lutheran Church - Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and many other smaller Lutheran bodies hold to Scriptural inerrancy, though for the most part Lutherans do not consider themselves to be "fundamentalists." The larger Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada do not officially hold to biblical inerrancy, though there are those within the ELCA and ELCIC who are Inerrantists.

Criticisms of biblical inerrancy

Proponents of biblical inerrancy often prefer the translations of 2 Timothy 3:16 that render it as "all scripture is given by inspiration of God,," and they interpret this to mean that the whole Bible is inerrant. However, critics of this doctrine think that the Bible makes no direct claim to be inerrant or infallible. The same sentence can be translated "Every inspired scripture is also useful...," with equal validity, nor does the verse define the Biblical canon. In context, this passage refers only to the Old Testament writings understood to be scripture at the time it was written.

The idea that the Bible contains no mistakes is mainly justified by appeal to prooftexts that refer to its divine inspiration. However, this argument has been criticized as circular reasoning, because these statements only have to be accepted as true if the Bible is already thought to be inerrant. None of these texts say that because a text is inspired, it is therefore always correct in its historical or moral statements.

Meaning of "Word of God"

Much debate over the kind of authority that should be accorded biblical texts centres on what is meant by the "Word of God." The term can refer to Christ Himself as well as to the proclamation of his ministry as kerygma. However, biblical inerrancy differs from this orthodoxy in viewing the Word of God to mean the entire text of the Bible when interpreted didactally as God's teaching. The idea of the Bible itself as Word of God, as being itself God's revelation, is criticized in Neo-Orthodoxy. Here the Bible is seen as a unique witness to the people and deeds that do make up the Word of God. However, it is a wholly human witness. All books of the Bible were written by human persons. Thus, whether the Bible is in whole or in part, Exodus claims of the Ethical Decalogue and Ritual Decalogue that these are God's word. However, critics argue that the Bible can still be construed as the "Word of God" in the sense that these authors' statements may have been representative of, and perhaps even directly influenced by, God's own knowledge.

There is only one instance in the Bible where the phrase "The Word Of God" refers to something "written." The reference is to the "Decalogue" which many Christian denominations consider "passed away." However, most of the other references are to reported speech which is preserved in the Bible. The New Testament also contains a number of statements which refer to passages from the Old Testament as God's words, for instance Romans 3:2 (which says that the Jews have been "entrusted with the very words of God"), or the book of Hebrews, which often prefaces Old Testament quotations with words such as "God says." The bible also contains words spoken by human beings to God, such as the prayers and songs of the Psalter.

That these are God's words addressed to us was at the root of a lively mediaeval controversy. The idea of the word of God is more that God is encountered in scripture, than that every line of scripture is a statement made by God.

The phrase "The Word Of God" is never applied to our modern Bible, within the Bible itself. Supporters of inerrancy argues that that is simply because the Bible canon was not closed.

Falsifiability

Biblical inerrancy has also been criticized on the grounds that many statements about history or science that are found in Scripture may be demonstrated to be untenable. Inerrancy is argued to be a falsifiable proposition: if the Bible is found to contain any mistakes or contradictions, the proposition has been refuted. Opinion is divided over which parts of the Bible are trustworthy in the light of these considerations. Radical theologians answer that the Bible contains at least two divergent views of the nature of God: a bloody tribal deity or a loving father. The choice of which viewpoint to value can be based on that which is found to be intellectually coherent and morally challenging, and this is given priority over other teaching found in books of the Bible.

Mythical cosmology, a Stumbling-Block

The Bible encapsulates a different world-view from the one shared by most people who live in the world now. In the gospels there are demons and possessed people: there is a heaven where God sits and an underworld, whither go the dead. Evidence suggests that the cosmology of the Bible assumed that the Earth was flat and that the sun traveled around the Earth, and that the Earth was created in six days within the last 10,000 years.

Christian fundamentalists who advance the doctrine of inerrancy use the supernatural as a means of explanation for miraculous stories from the Bible. An example is the story of Jonah. Jonah 1:15-17 tells how on making a voyage to Tarshish, a storm threatened the survival of the boat, and to calm the storm the sailors-

".. took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.

But the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights."

Bernard Ramm explained the miracle of Jonah's sojourn within the great fish or whale as an act of special creation.. James Barr severely critized this 'extreme supernaturalim :

From the wording of the KJ text, "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish," Ramm extracts this imaginative account of a specially created sea-creature, different from all other fishes or whales. No doubt it had a primitive form of air-conditioning for the well-being of the prophet. Perhaps it contained a writing-desk with inkpot and pen, similar to those actually found at Qumran, so that the prophet could indite on the spot the prayer which he recited (Jonah 2). These are not exaggerations for comic effect: in sober truth there is absolutely nothing to control speculation once the extreme supernaturalism of Ramm is accepted. There is no means of saying what is more or less probable, what is justifiable and what is not. The only limitaton is that such a supernaturalist speculation should have some scrap of biblical evidence to hang on to.

Inerrancy means believing that this mythological cosmology and such stories are 100% truthful. Rudolf Bultmann thought that modern people could not do this in good conscience, and that this understanding of scripture could become a stumbling-block to faith. Bultmann considered the Gospel a proclamation of the will of God; Jesus demands that the whole human person be obedient to God: and that obstacles or stumbling-blocks to real faith are found in the selfish will rather than the understanding of a person.

Translation

One point that has been argued is that, even if the text were guaranteed inerrant in its original language, this no longer holds true after translation, because there is no such thing as a perfect translation. The original texts were primarily written in Hebrew and Greek with translations in several ancient languages - Hebrew, Koine Greek, Coptic, and Syriac - which few are now familiar with. Translators from one language to another are often faced with several ways in which a phrase may be translated, particularly in the case of poetic passages, and the language into which the Bible is being translated is constantly evolving and changing. Mistaken translations of the Bible are occasionally proposed or discovered. For instance, scholars write that an early messianic prophecy did not require that the Messiah's mother be a virgin, only young. It has been proposed that the Gospels' description of the Virgin Mary were manufactured to fit with a prophecy they themselves read in a mistranslated version.

Some biblical passages are conventionally treated as verse, and others as different kinds of prose: this has not always been the case. Some of the prose contains many linguistic forms that indicate poetry. The two forms have a certain mutual overlap. Inerrancy as a doctrine itself provides no clear hermeneutic for discovering how the literal communications found in prose can be distinguished from the symbolic and metaphorical elements of poetry.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Boone, Kathleen C. The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism, State University of New York Press, 1989. ISBN 0-88706-895-2
• Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-518249-9
• Geisler, Norman, & Nix, William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible, Moody Publishers, 1986). ISBN 0-8024-2916-5
• Lightner, Robert P. Biblical Case for Total Inerrancy, Kregel Academic & Proficiency, 1997. ISBN 978-0825431104

External links

• The Authority and Inspiration of the Scriptures by B. B. Warfield
• Recent Perspectives on the Reliability of the Gospels by Gary R. Habermas
• Dei Verbum Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (1965)
• Dissolving the Inerrancy Debate (a postmodern view)

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