Inspiration, Infallibility, and Inerrancy

The Bible's inspired, therefore it's infallible, and it's infallible, therefore it is inerrant, it is inerrant, therefore it is altogether true and trustworthy. The Bible is altogether true and trustworthy.

As you heard R.C. Sproul just say, it's inspired, infallible, and inerrant. But what do those theological words mean? Why is it important that you and I get it right? You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday.

I'm Nathan W. Bingham. There are those who reject terms like inerrancy, others who misunderstand what we mean when we say the Bible is inspired by God. Getting the definitions correct is not merely an exercise in academics, it is to uphold truth. And when we know the Bible to be altogether true and trustworthy, as Christians we can have a confidence to follow God's Word every day in the big things and the small.

Here's Dr. Sproul as we continue this week-long study from his series, Hath God Said? Any time the subject of the authority of Scripture is raised and people engage in discussions about it, there are three pivotal concepts that inform the conversation. And those concepts I'll write on the board and then we'll take some time to define them. They include the concept of inspiration, the concept of infallibility, and the concept of inerrancy. Now, before I go into a development of these concepts here, I'd like you to just think within the quiet chambers of your own mind, what are your personal reactions to these concepts?

What do you think of when you hear the word inspiration? And what goes through your mind when you think of the term infallible? And perhaps most importantly, how do you react viscerally to the term inerrant or inerrancy?

I ask these questions for a reason. There is a tremendous amount of emotion that casts a pall over each and all of these terms, and sometimes I find it in theology somewhat difficult for people to get past the emotion to examine carefully the content of these words. For example, when I was in seminary, somebody used the term inerrancy with respect to the Scripture that immediately categorized that person as being a backwoods fundamentalist with no education whatsoever. The normal response would be, how could anybody believe in the inerrancy of Scripture in this day and age after 200 years of profound academic analysis and scholarly criticism?

And so the term inerrancy emerged as something of a shibboleth, as a word that became a passport for orthodoxy or opposed to orthodoxy and so on. This issue became so severe that in the late 70s an organization was formed in America that included scholars from around the world, several hundred of them as a matter of fact, but under the leadership of an executive committee of 15 or 16 of them, to study the question of the authority, the inspiration, the infallibility, the inerrancy of the Bible. And this organization was called the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.

And it devoted itself not only to 10 years of study but also of publications of various sorts and several conferences. And the first summit meeting of this organization was held in Chicago in 1978 when several hundred people came together and discussed and debated various issues about the integrity of Scripture. And what emerged from that event was a document that included a united statement on Scripture and then a lengthier document that included affirmations, 20-some affirmations and denials about Scripture. That is careful definitions saying, we affirm that the Bible is this, this, this, and this. We deny that it is this, this, this, and this, so that it would be as clear as possible what was being stated on the matter. I was asked to write a commentary for the ICBI event on that document of affirmations and denials in brief form so that the layperson could have it and read through it and be educated and informed about some of these very subtle questions regarding sacred Scripture. Because again, as we examine this term, inerrancy, and how it has been used in church history, it's a long way from this negative term that I had heard thrown around loosely and sardonically when I was in seminary.

But I'll get to that in a moment. Let's look then at these three concepts of inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy. As I mentioned earlier in our session, when Paul says in 2 Timothy that all of the Scripture is inspired of God, that's the English translation, I mentioned that the word he used there should be translated expiration rather than inspiration because it is calling attention to the origin of the content of Scripture, not to the means or the method by which God endowed or governed or enabled human authors to become the instruments or the agents of His divine revelation. But that's what the word inspiration refers to. In theology, the term inspiration does not simply refer to somebody who is extraordinarily gifted or insightful or has a certain engaging charisma where we might hear a trumpet player play a triple-tongue riff in jazz, and when he's done we'll say, wow, that was an inspired performance. We don't mean by that that God Almighty enabled him in some supernatural way to play the trumpet, although we may wonder about that with people like Dizzy Gillespie and so on, but that was not what is meant by an inspired actor or an inspired football player or somebody who gives an inspired performance about something. When we're talking about inspiration in theology, we're talking about an activity that takes place through divine and supernatural help, or the term that we use is superintendence, by which the human author is enabled to be a vehicle for God's Word to be set forth. That's what we mean by inspiration. Now, in classical Christian theology, the church has not defined in detail exactly how that inspiration takes place, or what we would call the mode of the inspiration.

And there is a world of misunderstanding about this. Some people, when they hear that word inspiration or verbal inspiration of the Bible, what immediately comes into their mind is the idea that the human authors, as they set about the task of writing the Gospel of Luke or John or whatever, that they were virtual automatons. That is, their pen was seized supernaturally by the Holy Ghost in such a way as to bypass, to quench, and to squelch altogether any of the humanity of that writer so that his pen worked as a Ouija board, or as what we would call a kind of automatic writing, or where the humanity of the human author was so emptied in this process that the author became virtually a machine in the hands of God. Such a view of inspiration is called, therefore, a mechanical view of inspiration, meaning that the human author is reduced to the status of a machine. I don't know how many times I've heard people say to me, I don't believe in verbal inspiration, the orthodox view, because I don't believe that God reduced people to puppets and made them machines. And sometimes I get impatient, and I want to say, have you read anything in the history of Christian literature on this point? Because for centuries, those Christian theologians who have articulated the view of verbal inspirations have been super careful to point out that what they certainly did not mean by divine superintendence was mechanical inspiration.

Another theory that is rejected in orthodoxy with respect to verbal inspiration is what is called the dictation theory. Again, if you hear the term inspiration, maybe you're thinking that what inspiration means or what it suggests to you is that while Luke was at his desk writing on the parchment, preparing the scroll of his book, God was dictating what he was to write down in his ear, just as I might pick up the telephone and call it into the office and my secretary and say, can I ask you to take this down and send out this letter? And I tell her what to write word for word, and so she types it up and sends it over my signature and her initials. She actually is the writer, but she's not really the author because all she is doing is recording what I have dictated.

They're my words in her pen, see. Now, when I say orthodoxy does not subscribe to this notion of inspiration, dictation, I do so with a little more ginger spirit about it because at the Council of Trent, for example, in the fourth session that I've mentioned already, the Roman Catholic Church does use the term with reference to the Scripture dictante. It speaks about the divine origin of Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church says that the Scripture comes to pass, the Holy Spirit dictante. That means the Holy Spirit dictating.

So there's the word. If anybody wants to lay any blame for a dictation theory of inspiration, here's historical evidence that someone somehow in a very important position, a Roman Catholic Church Council of the highest magnitude uses the term. However, though the term dictating is used at Trent's, the concept of God whispering words to a human writer or saying them aloud is not conveyed by that concept even at Trent. What they're saying is that yes, there is a parallel between the human authors and human secretaries. Calvin, for example, said that the writers of the Scripture were like amanuenses, which was an old-fashioned word for secretaries.

They were like secretaries for God, but not in the sense that their individual style, vocabulary, and so on were overruled. And the church has stopped short of defining precisely the mode of inspiration. Now the second concept, infallibility, is one that has intrigued me considerably. Again, I go back to my seminary days when there was such a negative, hostile reaction to the word inerrancy, but there wasn't that same sort of violent, vehement protest against the word infallibility. In fact, I know of one institution that wanted to soften their doctrine of Scripture to accommodate certain forms of criticism, and that their old creedal statement declared that they believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. They changed that to mean they believed in the infallibility of Scripture.

Now you think about that. They used to believe that the Bible was inerrant, that is, without error, and now they don't believe that anymore. Now they believe that the Bible is infallible. Now they consciously were trying to write a weaker statement, but in terms of the meaning of the words, ladies and gentlemen, they strengthened the statement because the term infallible means unable to fail, incapable of making a mistake, whereas the term inerrancy simply says the mistake is not made. Now, is it possible for human beings without the help of divine superintendents, without the assistance of God the Holy Spirit, to do anything inerrantly? Let me say it again. Is it possible for a human being without any special help from God to do anything inerrantly? Your first impulse might be to say, no, you know, we are fraught with error through and through.

But you think back. Did you ever take a spelling test when you were in grade school, make a hundred? Did you ever take a math test where you had to solve ten problems and you got all ten right? Got a hundred percent? I have a student in my theology class, and no matter how hard I make the test, that guy makes a hundred. I would be deceitful to take a point off. It wouldn't be just that he makes a hundred.

He's inerrant, but I know he's not infallible and that his inerrancy is temporary. I mean, I can write an inerrant grocery list if you want to know what three items we need to buy at the store. Say we need bread, we need ketchup, and we need salt, and I write bread, ketchup, and salt. There, I've got it all. I've covered a hundred percent inerrant. It doesn't take any special help from God to do that. But when Karl Barth said that to err is human, he understood that the Bible is not a three-item grocery list or a ten-question spelling quiz, but involves 66 books over several hundred years about all kinds of historical, ethical, and theological matters. And given the vast scope of Scripture, if human beings were left to themselves without any special assistance from God, I would be the last person in the world to assume that what we would have would be an inerrant work. But what I'm saying is inerrancy is not as strong as infallibility. To be inerrant simply means one does not err. To be infallible means one cannot err. I can be inerrant temporarily, but I haven't been infallible for five seconds. Yet why would people trying to minimize inerrancy substitute the word infallible for it?

Two reasons. First of all, the term infallible does not have all this negative emotional baggage attached to it that the term inerrancy does. I remember when the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy met for the first time, and the Executive Council debated the question, how shall we define this organization? Should we define ourselves as theologians who are concerned to propagate the concept of inerrancy? And I remember saying at that time that I think inerrancy is a bad word strategically. Is it because we have to be so careful to define it, to avoid all the misconceptions about it, and there's such a widespread hostility to it out there, can't we find a better word that people will not be so emotionally tripping over that we'll be able to get a clear concept across, because really what we're concerned about here are not simple concepts like inerrancy and infallibility. What we're concerned about is the truthfulness of Scripture, that the Word of God is true and trustworthy. That's what we're concerned about. Well, how could it be true and trustworthy if it weren't inerrant?

And if it has errors, it's not altogether true, and if it has errors, it's not altogether trustworthy. Well, I was saying, I think we need a word that's more neutral. I said, it's a shibboleth. J. I. Packer said in his inimitable way, very patiently and calmly, in a very British manner, he said, I prefer the term inerrancy because it is a shibboleth.

And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, you know, the Old Testament days, the term shibboleth was a word that became a password. In the military situation, if a spy tried to sneak into the Jewish camp and pretend that he was a Jew, all the sentry had to do was say, give the password, say shibboleth, and people who weren't Jewish couldn't say shibboleth. They'd stutter all over that word.

And so only a true Jew could utter it. I remember when I lived in Holland, the Dutch had the same kind of a shibboleth test during World War II. To keep the Germans from sneaking in places they weren't supposed to be, they had a little seacoast town called Scheveningen. And in order to say Scheveningen, you need to either have to be Dutch or you have to have post-nasal drip. And the Germans could never pronounce Scheveningen. Hear that?

Scheveningen. They couldn't do that. And so that was what they would trip them up on. Packer said this. He said there's never been a confession written that somebody couldn't sign dishonestly to redefine the terms of the creed to suit themselves, to use language in a way nobody else uses it, which is sheer dishonesty. It happens every day, I'm sad to say, in the world of theology. But he said people really choke on inerrancy. He said they're not going to say they believe inerrancy unless they really believe it.

Why give them an easy way to cheat? Because every theologian knows what is meant by inerrancy and what isn't meant by inerrancy. And it's a perfectly meaningful and significant word, and it's a good word historically. Let's stick with it. And I was persuaded by that.

I said good for you. Here I was ready to soften, not because I wanted to soften the view, but for public relations purposes because I understand that sometimes scholars change their minds on certain issues not because they've really been convinced of the truth or the falsity, but because it's them academically a liability. Liberals hate the term inerrancy, and they're going to say you're not academic, you're not intelligent, you're not scholarly if you embrace a term like that.

And if you're not secure in your scholarship or in your intelligence, maybe you might be intimidated to negotiate. I think that's one of the reasons why people change from inerrancy to infallible. Why? Because even though the term infallibility is a stronger term actually than inerrancy, it doesn't have this anti-intellectual prejudice associated.

Why? Where do we most frequently hear the concept infallible or infallibility? Not for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America, not for the preaching of the local Baptist minister. He never claims to be infallible. The concept of infallibility is associated historically with what? With the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Infallibility of the church, infallibility of the papacy defined in 1870 by Pius IX, but a doctrine which has been defended, for example, by Jesuit theologians. And whatever else you think about Jesuit theologians and Roman Catholic theologians, it's not too often that somebody says they're stupid. Nobody has accused the Jesuits of being unintellectual or intellectually inferior. Protestant liberals tremble in their boots when they have to stand up against a Jesuit. And so the term infallibility has the cultural support of the intellectual credibility of the Roman Catholic academic world.

We follow my point here. But in terms of its actual meaning, it's a higher and stronger term, a stronger claim than the term inerrancy. Finally, before I finish this little time of definition, the other problem with inerrancy is inerrancy must be carefully defined. What it does not mean is that there aren't grammatical crudities to be found in the Bible. Or does it mean that the Bible speaks with absolute scientific precision?

Inerrancy means no errors of truth, no deceit, no fraud, no lies. But it allows, for example, the use of round numbers. When the Bible says that Jesus fed 5,000 people, there may have only been 4,978 there. But we would not call a report of a historical incident that rounds off things like that saying 5,000. We would not say that that's an error. Somebody objected to inerrancy because Jesus said that if you have the faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will be able to say to this mountain and so on, that the mustard seed is the smallest seed of all.

And people say, but wait, we have found smaller seeds than the mustard seed. Is there room in truth for the legitimate literary use, for example, of hyperbole? When Jesus goes into town and the gospel writer says, and all of Capernaum came out to hear Him, is that a legitimate use of hyperbole or do we have to insist that every man, woman, and child, sick or healthy, actually came out of their house and went out and listened to Jesus? Obviously the author does not intend to be saying that each and every person there, but rather is using the normal literary forms to convey truth. That's the biblical concept of truth.

And all that orthodoxy has insisted is that the Bible on every page and with every word is utterly and completely consistent with the Bible's own definition of truth. The Bible's inspired. It's infallible.

Let me back up. It's inspired therefore. It's infallible. And it's infallible therefore. It is inerrant. It is inerrant therefore. It is altogether true and trustworthy.

That was R.C. Sproul on the inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of the Bible from his series Hath God Said. This is an important series because the Word of God has been under attack ever since the serpent in the Garden of Eden. So if you'd like to work your way through the complete series or revisit some of these messages with the study guide, you can request your copy with your gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to receiving digital access to all of the messages and the study guide, we'll send you the two DVD set for your library or for you to give to a friend. So make your gift today by visiting renewingyourmind.org or calling us at 800 435 4343. Our own view of the Bible is important, but what did Jesus think of the sacred writings? What was his view of Scripture? That's how R.C. Sproul will conclude this week-long study tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .