Robert bratcher, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, said last March, “Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. No truth-loving, God-respecting, Christ-honoring believer should be guilty of such heresy. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and infallibility is to idolatrize [sic] it, to transform it into a false god.” Bratcher, translator of the New Testament, Good News for Modern Man, and research associate with the American Bible Society, was speaking to the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention on the topic “Biblical Authority for the Church Today.”
Such strident language is usually attributed to evangelicals defending inerrancy. It is becoming to neither conservative nor liberal and brings neither peace nor light to the church. Bratcher’s approach is particularly significant in light of the current struggle within the Southern Baptist Convention and planned discussion at its upcoming annual meeting June 9–11.
We wonder how Bratcher explains Article One of the historic New Hampshire Confession of Faith: “We believe that the Holy Bible … has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.” This inerrancy clause was approved by the Southern Baptist Convention of 1925, and their “messengers” again and again have reaffirmed it at their annual state and national conventions.
If Dr. Bratcher were to respond that Baptists have no creed or confession to which they must adhere, we are still left with the fact that in the past, Southern Baptists have almost universally acknowledged the inerrant and infallible inspiration of Holy Scripture. With rare exceptions, biblical scholars in Southern Baptist seminaries held to the same view until the middle of this century. According to a recent Gallup poll, 94 percent of all Southern Baptist ministers hold that the Bible is the Word of God and without mistake in all that it says or teaches. Historically, Baptists have insisted upon the infallible truth and absolute divine authority of the whole Bible.
Certainly Bratcher cannot mean to assert that this historic Baptist position is heresy. Nor would he wish to describe the vast majority of Southern Baptist preachers as either willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
Indeed, inerrancy and infallibility represent the common doctrine of the entire Christian church throughout most of its history. As former Harvard scholar, Kirsop Lake, writes:
It is a mistake often made by educated persons who happen to have but a little knowledge of historical theology, to suppose that fundamentalism is a new and strange form of thought. It is nothing of the kind; it is the partial and uneducated survival of a theology which was once universally held by all Christians. How many were there, for instance, in Christian churches in the eighteenth century who doubted the infallible inspiration of all Scripture? A few, perhaps, but very few. No, the fundamentalist may be wrong, I think that he is. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he; and I am sorry for the fate of anyone who tries to argue with a fundamentalist on the basis of authority. The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the church is on the fundamentalist side.
Fundamentalist or not, the doctrine of an inerrant and infallible Bible has been common ground for all mainstream denominations as well as in the Southern Baptist Convention through most of their history. Perhaps the most charitable way of interpreting Dr. Bratcher’s statement is to assume that he misunderstands what evangelicals have meant by these terms when applied to the Bible.
What exactly do they mean by inerrant or infallible inspiration of Scripture? The word “inerrant” is derived from the Latin words meaning “not” and “to wander.” The Bible is inerrant, therefore, because it never wanders from the truth into what is false. Similarly, infallible means “not capable of erring.” As evangelicals perceive it, biblical inspiration is the work by which God guided the authors of Scripture in all their humanity so as to constitute the words of the Bible in its entirety as his written word to man, and therefore of divine authority and without error in its autographs.
In the current debate we must beware of red herrings that, whether so intended or not, divert us from the real issue. No evangelical scholar, for example, defends the idea that God dictated the Bible by a method analogous to the way a businessman dictates a letter to his stenographer. The few who (unwisely, we think) use the term “dictate” mean only that the end product is just as much the Word of God as though the whole Bible had been dictated by God.
The focus of evangelical teaching about biblical inspiration is not on the method of inspiration. Evangelicals have always felt chary of probing too rashly into the mysterious interrelationships between divine and human activity in the production of Scripture. Their concern, rather, has uniformly centered on the result of inspiration—that is, upon the divine authority of Scripture. They have insisted that Scripture is a product of God’s activity in such a sense that he records in Scripture what he desires in order to communicate to sinful human beings his message of mercy and his instruction for their life. Evangelicals are primarily concerned about biblical authority—the complete divine authority and, therefore, the truth of all that Scripture says.
Likewise, it is misleading to charge evangelicals with believing that the whole Bible is literally true. On rare occasions when an evangelical employs the term, he means only to contrast the literal with the allegorical method of understanding the Bible widely prevalent in the medieval period. Because all evangelicals wish to allow for figures of speech in the Bible, they have generally avoided this rather archaic use of the term. The Bible may speak in figures or literal language; but rightly interpreted, it is true in all that it says.
Inerrancy does not mean that the Bible always uses exact language. It does not require that the Bible employ up-to-date scientific terminology. Evangelicals are not trying to make the Bible into a science textbook; they mean only that it is true. Inerrancy does not suggest that the New Testament must quote the best text of the Old Testament. It does not even demand that all statements recorded by the Bible are necessarily true: the Book of Job, for example, teaches us that the three friends of Job, whose condemnations of the patriarch are recorded in Scripture, were dead wrong in what they said.
By the terms “inerrant” and “infallible” evangelicals mean that you can trust the Bible. They do not insist upon an arbitrary or wooden interpretation of it. In it, rather, the disciple of Christ brings his life and thought under obedience to his Lord. He turns to his inerrant Bible and trusts what he reads there. He does not find himself in the predicament of picking and choosing what in the Bible he can believe—a process which, in the end, inevitably throws him back upon human rather than divine authority.
Another red herring frequently encountered in current liberalism is the identification of inerrancy and “rationalism”—as though the archaeologist could prove the Bible to be inerrant by digging up gold bricks from the heavenly city to demonstrate the truth of the biblical teaching about heaven. Christians have never agreed upon exactly what is the best way to defend their faith or their view of the Bible. What they have agreed upon is that Scripture is true. It comes to us with divine authority, and therefore it is entirely trustworthy. And this is what evangelicals mean by the doctrine of biblical inerrancy or infallibility. They come to this position not by archaeological proof or any other kind of empirical or rational proof (though most reckon themselves rational and insist that there is adequate evidence to support their convictions). Rather, they come to it primarily because of the teaching of Christ.
This is not the occasion for any full-scale exposition of Christ’s instruction about Scripture, but surely that is the decisive matter for all who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and claim to be his disciples. What did Jesus teach about the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture?
Clearly Christ referred to it as the Word of God. In Mark 7 he declares that what Isaiah wrote is the “commandment of God,” and what Moses commanded is the “word of God.” In Matthew 5 (to select only one passage from many scattered through the Gospels), we catch a glimpse of our Lord taking sharp issue with certain Jewish leaders. His teaching did not square with their traditions. They had called him to task: You reject our traditions handed down from our godly leaders of the past that defend and explain the Scripture. Do you also reject the authority of Scripture itself? Our Lord responds unambiguously and emphatically, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.” Rather, he says, I seek to protect the written word of God. I oppose your tradition only because you use it to set aside the Scripture. “Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law.” (See also Luke 16:17: “It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of the pen to drop out of the Law.”)
Whatever else Jesus may have meant by these statements, he is clearly teaching that the whole of Scripture, even in its smallest parts, has divine authority. We are to believe all the Bible (Luke 24:25). Picking and choosing from it is not an option for a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.
The basic question really is: What do you think of Christ? If we accept him as Lord, it is consistent to submit to his teaching on the complete authority of Scripture. To accept Christ’s lordship and at the same time to reject the inspiration and authority of the Bible is inconsistent. This simple logic explains why evangelical Christians, out of obedience to Jesus Christ as their Lord, insist that the Bible must be believed and obeyed as the very Word of God.
It is worth noting, moreover, that few people like to be caught in flat disagreement with Christ on a religious question. This is the Achilles’ heel of most so-called neo-orthodox or liberal theologians. They purport to believe that Jesus Christ is their divine Lord (sometimes without too careful a definition of what they mean by either divine or lord). But the evidence is overwhelming that the only Jesus Christ who ever existed not only claimed to be Lord but insisted that his disciples submit to his lordship by believing and obeying Scripture.
The great difficulty evangelicals have with the Bible, of course, lies not in its infallible truth and inerrant authority, but in obedience to its teaching. Orthodoxy must never fall short of orthopractice. No true evangelical should ever rest satisfied merely with correct views about the Bible. The harshest words of Christ in all the Bible are directed not against disbelief in the truth of Scripture but against negligence, willful misinterpretation, and disobedience to Scripture.
If we believe the Bible is true, carries divine authority, and is the source of our knowledge about Christ and his will, then we should study it. And as we do, our Lord has promised his present, indwelling Holy Spirit to guide us to biblical truth, and to help us live a life of joyful and obedient fellowship with him as the Lord of Scripture.
