Understanding Inerrancy of Bible

The doctrine of Inerrancy has been long an emphatic affirmation of the Christian theological tradition in both Catholics and Protestants. ¹ But it has been looked at with considerable suspicion starting from the first decades of the twenty-first century, many skeptics considered the doctrine as a shibboleth.

But if the Bible contains errors then Christians are faced with a bigger problem. What is true and what is not true in the Bible? What is at stake is the shipwreck of our faith. How can we trust Paul and the others when they wrote that God resurrected Jesus from the dead? How can we believe that God will keep his promises if he could not keep his Word true through the centuries?

I don’t think that the inerrancy was a theory that was developed through the centuries but Jesus and the apostles themselves looked upon the entire truthfulness and utter worthiness of the Scripture. ² I understand that the inerrancy of the Bible is that the Bible does not contain errors.

The authors inspired by the Holy Spirit wrote exactly what God wanted. The text we have today is what the Holy Spirit inspired the authors to write. God revealed Himself through special revelations that were given directly from Him. These revelations were recorded in books as God told his prophets to do so, like in Jeremiah 30:2. “Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you”. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 “All Scripture is God-breathed (Gk. theopneustos).

Paul Wegner explains that this process is not just that God breathed life into the words of an author after he had written them; if this was the case, they would be primarily man’s words. ³ God was intimately involved in the lives of the authors that He knew what they would say and even how they would say it. ⁴ The individual personalities were thus combined with the indwelling, guiding work of the Holy Spirit to Create Scripture. ⁵

My understanding of the relationship of inerrancy to the doctrines of inspiration and infallibility is that the infallibility of Scripture does not rest on the infallibility of the human writers but on the integrity of God. ⁶ Because God is perfect, His Word is perfect and Scripture is perfect. It takes into account God’s character and the nature of his dealings with humans in the world. God used imperfect faulty men to write His Words but inspiration is not the elimination of all human involvement in the production of Scripture. Yet, the critical biblical affirmation of the inspiration is of the inspiration of the text. ⁷

So, God used fallible and faulty human beings and words as his own words. While inspiration and inerrancy are not synonyms, God is not a man that he should lie (Numbers 23:19). The text is God-breathed and it is the unfailing veracity of God that gives a truthful character to the text. ⁸ We don’t need to solve all difficulties in the Bible but it doesn’t mean it is not true, perhaps we need more time studying it.

The purpose of the Bible is to bring us in fellowship with Christ. ⁹ God created the human language and there is no reason why genuinely human language or a genuinely human text must be fallible or contain errors. ¹⁰ When difficulties arise, it is an invitation to engage in Scripture that is unfailingly true and always speaks and acts in accordance with the nature of God. ¹¹

Joel M Stevao

1. James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary, Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Illinois: Crossway, 2012),71.[↩]
2. James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary, Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Illinois: Crossway, 2012),77.[↩]
3. Paul G Wegner, The Journey from Text to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible (Baker: Grand Rapids, 2004), 29.[↩]
4. Ibid.,29.[↩]
5. Ibid.,29.[↩]
6. James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary, Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Illinois: Crossway, 2012),84.[↩]
7. Ibid.,95.[↩]
8. Ibid.,96.[↩]
9. Ibid.,97.[↩]
10. Ibid.,94.[↩]
11. Ibid.,97.[↩]