Inerrancy Is Older Than the Word "Inerrancy"

 

I keep hearing that biblical inerrancy is a modern invention, a rationalistic box imposed on Scripture by nervous fundamentalists who needed the Bible to behave like a science textbook. Historically, that simply will not do. Yes, inerrancy as a technical term was sharpened in later controversy, the way Trinity, homoousios, and hypostatic union are all postbiblical terms too. But the question was never whether Christians in A.D. 180 used our vocabulary. The real question is whether they believed the thing the vocabulary names. Jude urges believers to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints" (Jude 3), and Lee Allen Anderson traces that "faith" to an objective body of revealed truth whose authoritative source is the God-breathed Scriptures themselves.[1] If the God who gave them cannot lie, his Word cannot finally be a mixture of divine truth and human falsehood.

The biblical case is short and direct. "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16); the prophets spoke from God, "carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet 1:20–21); God cannot lie (Titus 1:2; Heb 6:18); his Word is truth (John 17:17); and Jesus Himself says the Scripture "cannot be broken" (John 10:35). David King leans hard on that last text in the first volume of the masterful Webster–King Holy Scripture trilogy: Christ is not appealing to Scripture as helpful religious testimony but to an authority that cannot be annulled or deprived of its force.[2] Watch how Jesus actually handles the Old Testament, too. He reasons from individual words, grammatical tense, historical persons, creation, Jonah, Sodom, Noah, David, Moses, the Queen of the South. Accommodation, genre, phenomenological description, ordinary human discourse, call it what you like. Jesus never once treats a biblical affirmation as simply mistaken, or even open to question. The Lord gives us no category of “God said it in Scripture, but that particular affirmation was mistaken.”

The theological argument runs deeper. Scripture is theopneustos (literally “God-breathed”) because God is its ultimate author, and speech follows the character of the speaker. Stephen Wellum makes this move by way of the divine attributes: God's Word is righteous, faithful, pure, true, eternal, perfect, and he approvingly cites John Frame's blunt formulation, "God cannot lie or deny himself.... Therefore, his Word abides forever."[3] That is the whole issue in a sentence. A Bible carrying genuine authorial falsehood needs some account of how the God of truth breathes out what is untrue, and human authorship does not solve that problem. Inspiration never suspended the humanity of Moses, David, Luke, and Paul. God worked through them as they actually were, so what they wrote is also His Word (the term for this is concursive). Millard Erickson states the traditional inference in one line, quoted approvingly by Anderson: "Inerrancy is a corollary to the doctrine of full inspiration."[4]

Here the historical argument turns inconvenient for the theory that inerrancy is Princeton's invention, because Princeton's own architect denied it. In 1894, decades before "inerrancy" hardened into a fundamentalist shibboleth, B. B. Warfield published a lecture, "The Inspiration of the Bible," arguing that the church's doctrine of Scripture's trustworthiness was "not the growth of yesterday, but the assured persuasion of the people of God from the first planting of the church until to-day." He traced it through Irenaeus, who called the Scriptures "perfect, seeing that they are spoken by God's Word and his Spirit"; through Polycarp, the pupil of John, who named anyone who perverted "these oracles of the Lord" the firstborn of Satan; through Origen, who held lapse of memory or falsehood impossible to the evangelists because the Spirit co-authored the Gospels with them; and through Augustine, who told Jerome he most firmly believed no author of the canonical books had erred in anything he wrote.[5] The very tradition supposedly guilty of manufacturing the doctrine is, on its own founding document, telling you, footnoted and dated, that the doctrine already had eighteen centuries behind it. Webster and King simply let the fathers keep talking past where Warfield stopped. Clement of Alexandria calls Scripture an "infallible criterion of faith." Chrysostom compares it not to a mine holding gold mixed with dirt but to something that is "gold and only gold." Epiphanius insists the Gospel narratives hold "no contradictions" and were "truthfully given."[6] None of these men owned a copy of the Chicago Statemen on Biblical Inerrancy, obviously, and their exegesis sometimes makes modern Protestants wince. But their instinct about Scripture's truthfulness is unmistakably premodern all the same.

Augustine is harder still to wave off. Writing to Jerome around the turn of the fifth century, in the same letter Warfield leans on, he draws a categorical line between canonical Scripture and every other Christian author: "of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error." When something in Scripture looks contrary to truth, he says, he suspects a textual problem first, a translation problem second, his own failure to understand it third.[7] Augustine reached this conclusion about fifteen centuries before the Chicago Statement did, without needing a committee to draft it. Anselm later states the same conviction from the other end: if anything he says is "undoubtedly contradictory to Holy Scripture, it is wrong."[8] The medievals, the Reformers, and the post-Reformation scholastics developed the doctrine with different vocabulary and different emphases, and none of them invented the underlying conviction. Nicaea did not invent the deity of Christ by confessing the Son homoousios with the Father, and Chalcedon did not invent the incarnation by distinguishing two natures in one person. Warfield did not invent biblical truthfulness by giving inspiration sharper analytic precision either; he presented his own 1894 lecture as a restatement of what the church had "always" held, not a discovery. Webster and King's three volumes work the same seam from three directions: the first lays out the biblical case, the second the historical case, the third the patristic evidence.[9] Piled together, the "modern invention" thesis gets very hard and in fact impossible to sustain.

None of this means inerrancy distracts from the Bible's "real purpose," as though truth and transformation, fact and divine encounter, history and the grand drama of redemption were competing goods to be traded off against each other. The Bible gives us the cosmic story of the Triune God making all things new in Christ, but that story turns on stubbornly factual claims: Israel really existed, the Word really became flesh, Pontius Pilate really condemned Jesus, the tomb really emptied, Christ really rose. Paul hangs the whole religion on the last of those: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless" (1 Cor 15:17). Scripture is far more than a set of true propositions. But it is certainly not less than true. The church did not invent that conviction in the nineteenth century at Princeton. She inherited it with the Scriptures themselves, and Warfield, of all people, said so in writing.

Notes

[1] Lee Allen Anderson Jr., "The Inerrancy and Authority of Scripture in Christian Apologetics," Journal of Ministry and Theology 21.1 (2017): 46–47.

[2] David T. King, Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, vol. 1, A Biblical Defense of the Reformation Principle of Sola Scriptura (Battle Ground, WA: Christian Resources, 2001), esp. 239–41.

[3] Stephen J. Wellum, Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, vol. 1, 160, 248; citing John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 623–24.

[4] Anderson, "Inerrancy and Authority," 54–55, citing Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed., 251.

[5] B. B. Warfield, "The Inspiration of the Bible," Bibliotheca Sacra 51.204 (Oct. 1894): 616–18, citing Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 2.28; Polycarp, Ep. ad Phil. 7; Origen on Matt. 16:12 and John 6:18; Augustine, Ep. ad Hier. 82.3.

[6] David T. King and William Webster, eds., Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, vol. 3, The Writings of the Church Fathers Affirming the Reformation Principle of Sola Scriptura (Battle Ground, WA: Christian Resources, 2001), 25–26, 177–90.

[7] Augustine, Letter 82.1.3, reproduced in King and Webster, Holy Scripture, 3:94.

[8] Anselm, Why God Became Man 1.18, cited in Wellum, Systematic Theology, 1:260.

[9] David T. King and William Webster, Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, 3 vols. (Christian Resources, 2001); vol. 1 the biblical defense, vol. 2 Webster's historical defense, vol. 3 the patristic source collection.