Over at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew Wilson recently wrote a piece called “Why I Don’t Hate the Word ‘Inerrancy’.” He explains that
when asked the street-level question, “Does the Bible contain mistakes?” I always answer, “When interpreted properly, no.” That first clause is important; after all, an awful lot of people in history have thought that the Bible says the earth is at the center of the universe, flat, and built on pillars. There is also a plethora of texts whose literal meaning cannot be their original meaning—ranging from the obviously poetic (“your breasts are clumps of dates”) to the obviously symbolic (“then I saw a beast coming out of the sea”) and the obviously hyperbolic (“cut your eye out and throw it away”)—as well as a group of other texts whose literal meaning may or may not be their original meaning…
I agree with Wilson that while facile interpretations of inerrancy can back us into some unfortunate corners, it is still a good word to use. To regular evangelicals, it connotes that which is true: the Scriptures are the fully inspired, authoritative Word of God. But I think there’s an additional reason to not use inerrancy as a bludgeon, and that is the relatively recent advent of the term’s use. Indeed, the history of the word “inerrant” is a fascinating case study in the history of language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words “inerrant” and “inerrancy” did not come into common use in English until the 19th century. Until the 1880s, their use in religious writing almost always concerned the authority of the pope (“inerrant” was employed by critics of the pope to describe his power).
This pattern abruptly changed in the 1880s, when higher critics of the Bible began to assail the doctrine of “inerrancy,” a term which higher critics themselves popularized. For instance, A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield’s seminal 1881 article “Inspiration” did not use the word “inerrant.” (It used “inspired or “inspiration” some 94 times, and “errorless” or “without error” 11 times.) The key figure in the inerrancy debate was Charles Augustus Briggs, a Presbyterian pastor and seminarian who was ultimately tried and convicted by the Presbyterian Church for his heterodox views of Scripture. The provocative Briggs argued that the theory that the Bible is inerrant was “the ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” The Briggs trial was one of the opening shots in what became the great Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy of the early 20th century.
The problem with Briggs – and much of the inerrantist backlash against critics like him – is that he insisted on interpreting Scripture through a very narrow lens: the lens of the late nineteenth century scientific mindset. Thus, he wrote, “we are obliged to admit that there are scientific errors in the Bible, errors of astronomy, of geology, of zoology, of botany, and of anthropology.” The Bible, to Briggs, had to be judged by contemporary scientific trends. Some fundamentalists went right along with this game, saying that the Bible would be vindicated – on the exclusive grounds of the modernist scientific worldview.
We’re on safer territory – and orthodox territory – when we affirm that the Bible, every verse of it, is true in all that it claims. We, of course, may not always completely understand what it is claiming, because we do not fathom all of God’s ways, nor is it always entirely clear, as Wilson says above, whether to interpret a passage literally, poetically, symbolically, or hyperbolically. We all struggle, moreover, to remove our blinders of time and culture when reading the Scripture. This is one of the reasons church history is so important. As I once wrote with reference to Rob Bell, “when anyone claims to discover a new biblical truth, one that almost no stalwarts of the faith have believed for 2000 years, it’s a good bet they’re wrong.”
But our caveats regarding interpretation should focus on our limitations as fallen readers of Scripture, not on the supposed imperfections of Scripture itself. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”
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