One of the most misunderstood and often divisive words in theological circles is the word “inerrant.” To many, the inerrancy of Scripture is the ground of our faith. If we deny the Bible’s inerrancy, we’re putting the entire Christian belief system at risk.
At the same time, I’m reminded that, for the first followers of Jesus, what was at the center of their faith was not a book but an event. The resurrection of Jesus compelled his followers to rededicate themselves to His Lordship. The resurrection provided the impetus for the various writers to pen the manuscripts that were eventually assembled into a collection we’ve come to know as the New Testament. The resurrection gave birth to this book we regard as inspired and authoritative—not the other way around.
Because the word “inerrant” is such powder keg I tend to avoid it, preferring instead to speak of the inspiration and authority of the Bible. A while back, I was interviewing for a position where a member of the search committee asked me about inerrancy. I guess the answer I provided wasn’t satisfactory because a couple of weeks later they emailed me a lengthy theological statement on inerrancy and asked me to respond. I won’t share the depth and detail of what I shared with them but let me try to summarize.
First—one of the things I’ve noticed is that two people who use the word “inerrant” may mean different things. This is especially true when one person has a more Wesleyan approach to the concept and another takes a more fundamentalist approach. But I’ve also noticed that a number of people who claim to be Wesleyan have a somewhat fundamentalist view of inerrancy. This is why I tend to avoid using the term altogether, referring to Scripture as “divinely inspired,” “authoritative,” and “true in all it affirms.”
The primary challenge in the inerrancy discussion is in determining what, exactly, the inerrant part is. Is it the actual words of the text itself, or is it the insight, meaning, and truth those words were meant to convey? Also, where do we see the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Is it in the specific details of a writing—the vocabulary, idioms, and metaphors biblical writers employed—or is it in the hearts of the individuals that compelled them to write in the first place? In both instances, fundamentalists tend to believe it’s the former and Wesleyans tend to hold to the latter. As a result, fundamentalists pay more attention to the “letter of the text” while Wesleyans pay attention to the “spirit of the text.” When we become preoccupied with the letter of the text we can run into problems because we view the Bible through a different cultural lens than its original audience did. We approach the text asking it to answer questions and address issues the biblical writers didn’t necessarily intend their writings to address.
This is not to say the truth of the Bible can’t transcend cultural and chronological boundaries—it most certainly can! The enduring quality of the truth housed in the Bible can be attributed to the fact it is inspired and inerrant. But when we approach the Bible without considering what it meant for the original audience and ask it to do something it was never meant to do, we run the risk of interpreting it in ways to where we claim it says things it never intended to say. When a first century text is read with twenty-first century eyes, the original meaning can often be missed.
The issue I had with the statement the search committee placed before me was the words that Scripture is “verbally God-given.” While I understand the intent, my belief is those words reinforce a view of the authority of Scripture that houses the inspiration in the mechanics of the text the writers produced rather than in their hearts and lives. In addition—if the inspiration was “verbally God-given,” how do we account for the stylistic differences between the writings of Paul and Luke, or the preference for certain words and themes in the writings of the apostle John?
Were the writers of the Bible passive participants whose writings were like those of a court transcriptionist who recorded everything God told them to say exactly as He told them to say it? I don’t believe so! I believe, rather, the Spirit of God inspired them to write what they understood to be true—in their own words, shaped by the norms and customs of their culture, reflective of their own personality, and stamped by the understanding of the world in which they lived. And because they were carried along by the Spirit of God in the process, the original message of what they recorded is authoritative, truthful, free from error, and has enduring and lasting value.
I guess my answer was not to the search committee’s liking, as I received an email back a couple of days later saying they’d completed their assessment and regretted to inform me I was no longer in consideration. But—even though I wasn’t offered the job, I feel good about what I wrote on the topic of inerrancy. For just as Jesus was fully God and fully man, so the Bible is fully human and fully divine. If our understanding of inerrancy undermines the human component of the Bible, we are just as off base as the heretics of centuries ago who denied the humanity of Jesus.