Rhetoric About Inerrancy: The Truth of the Matter

We have to select our battlefields more carefully and wage our battles more graciously.

Recently a pastor wrote the editor: “Please cancel my subscription; I have heard enough about inerrancy. When you begin to carry more articles on the spiritual nurture of the soul and less on picky theologians’ quarrels like that over inerrancy, I’ll renew my subscription.” We sympathize with that pastor. Fine points of theological debate may intrigue nit-picking scholars, but they are a poor diet on which to nourish the soul.

A few days before the letter arrived from that disenchanted pastor, a world-famous evangelical theologian (not noted for any exclusive preoccupation with the inerrancy question—Carl F. H. Henry, no less) gently chided the editor for not participating decisively enough in the current discussions of this topic. The golden mean between too much and not enough is difficult to determine.

At a recent conference in Toronto (CT, Aug 7, p. 34), faculty members from 27 colleges, seminaries, and universities, plus many students and pastors, gathered to discuss the topic of inerrancy and related issues. They came from most of the centers of evangelical learning and opinion. From Fuller Theological Seminary came Jack Rogers, Lewis Smedes, and Charles Kraft. From Trinity Evangelical Divinity School came John Woodbridge and Grant Osborne. From Westminster Theological Seminary came John Frame and Richard Gaffin. From the Dutch Reformed movement came James Olthuis and John Vander Stelt. Among the many others who participated in the meetings were: Carl Armerding and Ian Rennie of Regent College, Robert Johnston of New College (Berkeley), William Abraham of Seattle Pacific University, Stephen Mott of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Ray Van Leeuwen of Calvin Theological Seminary, and Robert Webber of Wheaton College.

There were also evangelicals from mainline denominational seminaries: Richard Longenecker from Wycliffe College (Toronto), Clark Pinnock from McMaster Divinity School, Gerald Sheppard from Union Theological Seminary (N.Y.), Donald Bloesch from Dubuque Seminary, and Iain Nicol from Knox College (Toronto). Graduate schools of theology were likewise represented: William Lane from Western Kentucky University, Anthony Thiselton from the University of Sheffield, T. Baards from Free University (Holland), and many others.

Last September the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy met in Chicago for a conference from which issued the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The same organization has called for another conference to be held late this year in Saint Louis.

Surely all this demonstrates that the church is exceedingly troubled over the question of inerrancy. We may well regret the uproar as a tempest in a teapot or lament that the issue is long overdue for more thorough study by evangelicals. But the concern of the church is evident. At CHRISTIANITY TODAY we seek to keep our readers informed, to note the significance of the controversy, and, when we can, to clarify issues and provide readers with data necessary for drawing intelligent and responsible conclusions.

Lessons From A Theological Controversy

A major breakthrough in the ongoing evangelical debate over inerrancy may have occurred at that recent gathering of scholars, students, and pastors in Toronto. The conference reflected in microcosm the broad range of evangelical conviction. But it was more than a sharing of opinions. With a minimum of posturing and positioning, earnest scholars learned the value of meeting face to face and exploring firsthand the several angles of vision each brought to the Bible. The result was a remarkable credit to the Christian spirit of those present.

The most significant outcome of the colloquy was a meeting of minds on central issues that divided the group. Before the conference, many were uncertain about how much they really shared in common. After all, harsh words had been exchanged in recent years and a great deal of suspicion had been generated. Many differences remained unresolved, and a basic understanding of the nature of biblical authority still divided some of those present. Still, throughout the conference, conviction grew that not only had the participants achieved great progress in mutual understanding, but that many had reached agreement or near agreement on the most critical issues relating to the errancy or inerrancy of the Bible.

The Bête Noir Of Inerrantists

Jack Rogers, author of The Scripture in the Westminster Confession (Eerdmans, 1967), editor of Biblical Authority (Word, 1977), and coeditor with Donald McKim of The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (Harper and Row, 1979) has become the bête noir of defenders of the inerrancy of Scripture. A consensus of evangelical writers, including Francis Schaeffer, Harold Lindsell, Carl F. H. Henry, John Woodbridge, William Barker, John Gerstner, Norman Geisler, the current editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and many others had charged Rogers with limiting biblical infallibility to faith and practice (sometimes without indicating exactly how one could determine which parts of the Bible were “faith and practice”). According to this view of “limited inerrancy,” only those biblical statements directly bearing on the doctrine of salvation should be accepted as God-given, and other aspects (nonsalvational matters) may well be merely erroneous human opinions that certainly were not divinely protected from error or were not possessed of divine authority.

Why Inerrancy Is Important

To the defenders of inerrancy this called for sinful man to stand in judgment over the Bible. It subverted the instruction about the Bible set forth by Christ, the Lord of the church, and flatly rejected the Bible’s own teaching on what is manifestly a religious matter—the authority and role of Holy Scripture in the life and thought of the believer. Its practical significance, moreover, was to render the Bible ineffective as the church’s guide to truth. Such a view of the Bible left the individual believer with two alternatives: either, on the one hand, to go snooping through the Bible trying to decide which parts of the Bible must be accepted (being salvational) and which parts could safely be discarded or, on the other hand, to rely upon a purely subjective response (which verses the “Holy Spirit speaks to me”). Either alternative frees the Christian from the authority of the written word of Scripture and leads inevitably to a fatal subjectivism.

Why Inerrancy Seems To Be A Dangerous Doctrine

For Rogers and company, on the contrary, the inerrantists represented a heretical innovation in the Christian church that (at least for some) resembled a malignant cancer that must at all cost be removed by immediate and radical surgery. Its malignancy manifested itself in two ways.

First, it represented a negative and degenerate stance adopted as an emergency measure in opposition to modern liberal attacks against biblical inspiration. Also, the new doctrine of inerrancy unfortunately proved utterly unacceptable to any thoughtful student of Holy Scripture. Its effect was to drive from the church any reasonable scholar who could not stomach the necessary “sacrifice of the intellect.”

Second, because of the importance to them of their view of biblical inerrancy (confusing it as they did with biblical authority), inerrantists became a major disruptive force to tear apart the church and to divert its energies to the support of impossible positions—energies that desperately needed to be employed in the church’s witness for Christ and the edification of the body.

Misconceptions Drove Evangelicals Apart

But things are not always what they seem. As the Toronto conference progressed, it became clear that massive misconceptions as to how each understood the other rendered most of their previously written interchanges largely irrelevant. With transparent honesty and disarming humility, Jack Rogers confessed that he had radically misunderstood what inerrantists were saying. He lamented his own “blind spots” and “lack of clear vision.” His writings had “not been neutral, objective treatises” but “arguments designed to defend a position under very heavy attack.”

Misconceptions About Inerrantists

Rogers’s first misconceptions, so he explained, related to the nature of biblical inspiration as defended by inerrantists. For them the Bible was wholly a divine book in which the human author (no matter what some of them at times affirmed) became totally eclipsed—or so he had thought.

This basic misunderstanding as to the nature of biblical inspiration in turn led the inerrantists, as Rogers had perceived them, to a false and dangerous hermeneutic. In conformity with their speculation as to how a perfect God must reveal himself, inerrantists viewed the Bible as a book of exact and precise language. They overlooked the human and culturally conditioned form of the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, so they seemed to be saying, is to enlighten mankind in all branches of human knowledge. And by inspiration, the biblical authors were not only informed as to future scientific and historical truth, but also enabled to record these truths in a form appropriate to modern scientific historical viewpoints. Naturally, the inerrantists also failed to discern the variant literary genre of the Bible and the importance of the historical-critical method of interpretation by which an author must be understood in the light of the way language was used in his own time and culture.

The basis for this false hermeneutic, so Rogers held, lay in the slavish dependence by inerrantists upon the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, the eighteenth-century Scottish realist. Inheriting Reid’s views as to the nature of human thought and language, the linguistic descendents of the Scottish realist held that all human knowledge is univocal rather than analogical. Biblical words, therefore, have a literal and universal character in which all meanings are obvious. In support of this naïvely realistic view of language, the inerrantists also adopted a rationalistic defense of Scripture as the Word of God that largely undercut the biblical view of the witness of the Holy Spirit.

Finally, this inerrantist view of a Scripture that was all divine but not at all human led to absurd hermeneutical corollaries that certainly did not represent the view of the church in the ancient, medieval, or Reformation periods. Rather, it arose late in church history and was polished off in its contemporary form by the Princeton theologians, Hodge and Warfield.

Such was Rogers’s view of the inerrantist position at the time he wrote all three of his major volumes. Since then he has come to see that many inerrantists simply do not hold the hermeneutical position or the rationalist defense of the faith that he has associated with the inerrantists’ position. And even inerrantists who tended in practice, if not in theory, to deny the full humanity of Scripture, may have misconceived the thrust of Rogers’s attack, thinking that he was really opposed to the truth of the Bible rather than to their false hermeneutic and unbiblical rationalism.

Misconceptions By Inerrantists

In much the same way, inerrantists discovered that they had radically misjudged the view of Rogers. He was objecting not to their cherished doctrine of the truth of the Bible but to the miscellaneous truths many of them were deriving from the Bible. Again and again Rogers stressed that “the Bible is an infallible divine message given in human culturally conditioned form. A study of the message in its original, cultural context and a translation of its intended meaning into our culture and time is the function of scriptural study.” With the Reformers, Rogers holds that the purpose of Bible study is not “to pick out technical information about the problems of science or society.” Rather, it is “to realize a right relationship to God and a right approach to structuring the covenant community.”

This means that the faithful student of Scripture is not to peruse its pages in order to find, by prophetic insight, the latest scientific theory imbedded in the Bible so as to demonstrate its divine origin. He is not to judge the historical writings of the Old Testament or the gospel in the New as though they were objective historical documents from the pen of a trained historian writing from our twentieth-century perspective.

To interpret the Bible in this way is to make it say what its human authors never intended to say. We must not always interpret the Bible writer to mean what we would mean if we used those same words today. We must acknowledge that the Bible is God’s word brought to us in human words—human words of a particular origin, spoken and written by particular human beings at a particular time and place.

But by no means, so Rogers avers, does that mean that Holy Scripture speaks falsely. Referring directly to those who “seemed to understand me as intending to prove that the Bible was errant in matters other than salvation and the life of faith,” he states emphatically: “That is not my position.” He specifically rejected the “ludicrous” view of an errant-infallible Bible. His previous opposition to inerrancy was against “a narrow theory regarding the interpretation of the Bible.” If “inerrancy simply means truth,” then “I certainly want to be an inerrantist.” He continues: “Imprecision of language, accommodation to ancient cultural forms of expression, and a variety of literary genre” are one thing; and he accepts this. But “picking or choosing or dictating what God may and may not say” is quite a different matter, and the latter he forthrightly rejects. He adds: “I do not espouse the errancy of the Bible. Nor do I espouse a limited inerrancy. If inerrancy means that the Bible is true, trustworthy, and authoritative, I believe in the full inerrancy of the Bible.”

In his historical surveys of the doctrine of the church, he did not affirm that the premodern church held that Scripture sets forth errors, but that for them, the Bible was not inerrant in the wooden hermeneutical sense of contemporary inerrantists as he then understood them. Of course, the fathers of the ancient church and of the Reformation churches, as well as the Westminster divines, taught the full authority and truth of Holy Scriptures.

In the discussion of his own understanding of biblical inspiration, Rogers states his view of the complete truth of the Bible is in agreement with the view of inerrancy set forth in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. That document, in emphasizing the complete authority of the words of Scripture, includes a safeguard against false aspects of a dictation model of biblical inspiration by its denial that in choosing the words of Scripture God overrode the writers’ personalities.

When probed further concerning his view of scriptural truth as related to science and history, Rogers defined his view more precisely. He does not believe that Scripture ever states what is false in science or history. Scripture could be interpreted that way if we insisted on reading back into Scripture our own contemporary ways of saying things, but that would be to misinterpret Scripture. We must constantly remember the religious purpose of the biblical writers and always allow them to speak in the language and cultural medium of their own day. But when we interpret Scripture fairly to mean what it really means to say in its own way, it tells only the truth and never in any part of it errs or guides us away from the truth. What more could any inerrantist ask?

Where Do We Go From Here?

What shall we say to all this? We rejoice that some evangelicals, at least, were willing to discuss their differences and to listen—especially listen—so that viewpoints became clarified and the issues that divided them were not beclouded but illuminated in a way profitable for all. Let this stand as a model for the rest of us.

A Plea To Inerrantists

As evangelicals respond to this humble attempt at a meeting of minds, certain dangers present themselves.

1. Inerrantists may choose to dig in and defend their previous interpretations of Rogers and his supporters. After all, both he and they are on public record in the books they have published. Such a response, however, would be fruitless and, in fact, harmful to their cause. The point is not whether or not inerrantists are justified in the way they have interpreted Rogers and others. The final authority on what Rogers really believes and teaches is Jack Rogers. We must not condemn him for views he says he does not hold. We must grant him the privilege of clarifying his position, and then we must deal with his view as he really means to present it.

2. Likewise, inerrantists must not focus their attention on refuting Rogers’s interpretation of Warfield, Hodge, and the old Princeton theology. After all, Warfield is not infallible. Whether Rogers’s understanding of Warfield’s position is right or wrong may be an interesting and highly mootable historical question. But we must all weigh Rogers’s view not by the standard of Warfield but by the infallible standard of Holy Writ.

3. Naturally, we must not think agreement on the inerrancy of Scripture really settles all issues (even when carefully defined so as to isolate the complete truth of Scripture from the related but quite distinct issues of hermeneutics and apologetics). It only provides us with the common ground of an infallible and inerrant standard (without limitation to only parts of Scripture) on which evangelicals may pursue other questions, some of which are of even greater importance. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons assert the full authority of the Bible, but they interpret it so as to eliminate the very gospel for which God gave us the Bible.

Many important issues, therefore, still remain. Over these, evangelicals may well wish to take issue with Rogers. They may object to his unqualified espousal of a philosophy of critical realism; they may see logical pitfalls in his commitment to the analogical nature of all human thought. They may regard him as too generous in his estimate of neo-orthodox or existential views of biblical inspiration.

Very serious questions, for example, need to be raised regarding Rogers’s application of his own hermeneutics and biblical exegesis. As he sees it, how does this relate to matters of biblical introduction? Does he agree with E. J. Young of Westminster Theological Seminary who, in his early work on biblical introduction, held that Solomon did not write the book of Ecclesiastes, and that rightly interpreted, the book does not really claim that? And what about the Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles, second and third Isaiah, multiple authorship of the Pentateuch, or the Macabbean date of Daniel? Is the Book of Jonah a story with a moral or history? Rightly interpreted, does the Bible tell us anything about the biological origin of man (evolution or creation)? Or anything relevant for the geological timetable (long ages of earth’s history)? Or the history of the human race (man as a recent phenomenon or as existing hundreds of thousands of years on planet earth)? What limits, if any, does he place upon the cultural relativity of the Bible. Does his insistence upon the cultural conditioning of all human language and thought forms destroy the possibility of valid human knowledge?

These questions face all evangelicals. Inerrancy does not in itself settle them. Some, no doubt, are trivial. But some of them are important issues demanding the serious attention of all students of the Bible—of all who take the Bible seriously as the guide of their thought and life.

The lesson we can draw from the Toronto conference is simply that the first rule in theological controversy is to make sure you understand what the other fellow is really saying. Controversy carried on in low visibility rarely engenders anything more than heat. We congratulate Jack Rogers for taking the initiative in the midst of controversy to clarify his own position and take new aim. We call on all inerrantists to do the same. If we really object to Rogers’s views on subsidiary positions that have surfaced in the course of the debate, let us direct our focus accurately upon them and the hermeneutical and apologetic issues they involve. We do not at all suggest that these are unimportant issues. Far from it—we encourage discussion and sharp debate of them. But let us not charge Rogers with holding that the Bible is errant in the sense that it says what isn’t so. He himself affirms that he holds the Bible to be all true, and he just might be merely misinterpreting what the Bible says, even though he is as eager as we are to insist that the Bible is all true in whatever it really says.

A Plea To All Who Have Objected To Inerrancy But Believe The Bible Is True

At the same time, we urge Jack Rogers—now that he understands what inerrancy means to most of its current defenders (rightly interpreted, the Bible tells us only truth, and truth that comes with divine authority)—to focus his attack not against inerrancy but against encrustations that have grown around it: the false hermeneutic (as he sees it), which so many who hold to inerrancy have espoused, and the false rationalism, by which so many inerrantists support their view.

We also urge him to put into writing his views on the complete truth and divine authority of Holy Scripture without surrounding his affirmations with so many qualifications that his affirmations are lost in the maze of qualifications. We need qualifications. That is proved by the frequent misunderstanding of the inerrantist position. But we also need statements that are sufficiently clear and forthright that people know what we are saying. Obfuscation of the truth by clarifications that do not clarify and by qualifications that do not qualify but negate is a disease endemic to theologians. For the good of the church, we must all battle daily to avoid it—especially if we are theologians.

The Reason For Urgency

What, then, was really at stake in the Toronto discussions about inerrancy? It was not a question of purity or compromise, of peace at any price. In microcosm at Toronto, and throughout the church at large today, a much larger issue is at stake. It is the unity of the evangelical witness to the full truth of the written Word of God. We ought not to follow those whose philosophy is to divide up believers into tiny sects in the name of an absolute purity of doctrine. Some issues are worth fighting for and some are not. And it is terribly important we know which is which. We should imitate the great evangelicals of the past who sought to preserve the unity of all biblical forces in their witness to the full authority of Scripture over the church and to its gospel for the renewal of the church and the conversion of the nations.

Let us hear the question posed in the Word of God: “Why then are we faithless to one another?” (Mal. 2:10). If we are going to make significant progress in the Great Commission of our Lord, we evangelicals will have to select our battlefields more carefully than we have in the past, wage our battles more lovingly, and submit our total strategy to the sovereign judgment of our Lord and his Word. We trust that this meeting may symbolize the rebirth of a discriminating unity in evangelicalism that will be at once consistently loyal to the full authority of Scripture (including the inerrancy of Scripture rightly and historically understood), and also irenic in spirit.

Evaluating the American Festival of Evangelism at the closing press conference were a Presbyterian (Leighton Ford), a Pentecostal (Thomas Zimmerman), a Baptist (Bill Hogue), and a Christian Churchman (Paul Benjamin). Not too many years ago such a joint appearance across denominational lines would not have been possible. Hogue spoke to the new posture of the Southern Baptists: “We intend to work with other evangelicals.”

These men were there not at the behest of the press, but because they shared a common commitment to winning people to Christ. Over the years evangelicals have learned they can trust each other, and they can deemphasize denominational distinctives for the sake of making a dent in this country’s multitudes who don’t care about religion, churches, or the gospel.

We commend these leaders, and many others, for their persistence in the cause of evangelism. Plans for the festival floundered in the early going, not simply because huge gatherings cost huge sums to promote, but because of skepticism in some circles that enough lay people cared about evangelism. If anything, the festival proved that people want help, they want that help in terms they can understand, and they are not content to theorize about evangelism.

It is our hope that the Kansas City festival will spawn at least two or three similar meetings in the future, perhaps in the Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast. The momentum must not be lost. The Evangelistic Association of New England has proved over the years that regional conferences work.

The Kansas City festival must be duplicated across the country not only because evangelism demands trained disciples, but also because the unconverted need to see Christians dropping their denominational fists. Didn’t Jesus say something about the world believing in him because of the unity of his people?

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