The Doctrine of Full Inerrancy: Why It Matters

The principal cause of a distorted worldview is the rejection of the inerrancy of scripture.[1] Since the dawn of the Enlightenment age, the doctrine of inerrancy has been the subject of intense debate. According to Beeke and Smalley, authors of Reformed Systematic Theology, observe that “the inerrancy of the bible has come under attack by both liberal modernists and professing evangelicals infected by modernistic principles.”[2] It has been argued by some that the bible has no specific instructions to inerrancy and therefore neither should we. Others object and say as John Wesley proclaimed, “Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible there may as well be a thousand.”[3] For Christians to properly understand scripture, God’s word must first be viewed as infallible and its writings honored as the authoritative works of biblical canon. Without the doctrine of full inerrancy, a biblical worldview will fail and the exposition of scripture will be false.

In this article, I will argue that to deny full inerrancy would undermine the authority of the bible and ultimately the person of Jesus Christ. I will accomplish this in three steps. First, I will articulate the alternative views of absolute inerrancy, limited inerrancy, and inerrancy is irrelevant. Second, I will discuss and support the position of full inerrancy of God’s word. Third, I will respond to the common objections against the position of full inerrancy by examining the issues of human fallibility and contradictions in the bible.

Positions on the Issue

This section will discuss the positions of absolute inerrancy, limited inerrancy, and inerrancy is irrelevant by providing an overview of each perspective.

Absolute Inerrancy

The position of absolute inerrancy is the view that the Bible contains both scientific and historical descriptions that are entirely valid. It is believed that the biblical authors intentionally provided scientific and historical evidence in their writings. Therefore, any discrepancies are to be examined. An example of absolute inerrancy can be seen in 2 Chronicles 4:2 in which the pericope describes the making of the ceremonial bath. According to the passage’s description, the bath is measured at 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits in circumference. The bath’s dimensions, however, are contradictory to the circumference of a circle. So therefore since the text in question has an error, the verse must be examined to provide a valid explanation.

Limited Inerrancy

The position of limited inerrancy is the view that “the bible is infallible in that it teaches no false or misleading doctrine related to faith and practice. However, in their view, that does not mean scripture has to be factually accurate in all its words.”[4] Prior to this view, inerrancy and infallibility were regarded as dependent on each other. Limited inerrancy, in special instances, upholds the position that scripture is inerrant and infallible when it refers to salvific doctrinal references.[5]

Furthermore, limited inerrancy distinguishes between nonempirical and empirical references in the bible.[6] This position regards the scientific and historical passages as subject to the understanding of that era. The same applies to revelation and inspiration. Erickson explains “God did not reveal science or history to them. Consequently, the Bible may well contain what we would term errors in these areas.”[7] The doctrine of limited inerrancy does not consider these errors significant. It argues that the bible was not given to provide factual data but that scripture was given for faith and practice. Some of the characteristics associated with the doctrine of limited inerrancy are the beliefs that two persons authored the book of Isaiah, Jonah is a fictional tale, and Adam and Eve are metaphorical figures. Limited inerrancy is a view that has become increasingly popular among evangelicals.[8]

Inerrancy is Irrelevant

This position holds the belief that inerrancy is not a significant issue. The bible can be authoritative and at the same time contain discrepancies within its texts. This concept understands inerrancy and authority as mutually exclusive and disregards inerrancy altogether. This position argues that “if errant copies of the original text are sufficient, then why did God have to inspire errorless originals?”[9] For example, a jaded record can play music, even if the quality is poor, but its original message is still present. The same can be said of the bible in communicating its truths.

The debate over the whole idea of inerrancy is fictitious and upsetting. It brings more harm than good and causes a great deal of disunity among Christians. Moreover, the word inerrant in itself carries a negative connotation. It would have been wiser to use an alternative term. In God’s word, the spiritual and moral quality of the person is of more value than erroring in their intellectual knowledge. The view of inerrancy as irreverent, helps Christians focus their energy on listening to what the passage is trying to tell them about God, rather than focusing on insignificant and minute discrepancies.[10]

Support for Full Inerrancy

Full inerrancy, also known as plenary inspiration,[11] is the view that autographs were written without error because of their divine origin. Of the three views I discussed above, full inerrancy is the most biblically sound and orthodox in its belief. This position subscribes to the idea that every book of the bible is uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit through a human author. To say that scripture is inerrant is to say it is without error.[12] As of today, the original manuscripts have been lost to us but their copies remain. According to the research done on the remaining copies, they have been proven to contain “99% of the original autographs.”[13] The doctrine of inerrancy applies specifically to the veracity of the original manuscripts and not their subsequent renderings.

Moreover, with the rise of modern thought came challenges to the inerrancy of scripture. Beeke and Smalley recount the crisis of 1978 in which evangelical leaders from across America convened in Chicago to respond to the allegations laid against the inerrancy of scripture. With the approval of 240 attendees, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy presented this statement “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, that in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.”[14] The council also stressed the consequences that if the authority of scripture were in any way damaged, it would lead to disastrous ramifications for Christianity.

The doctrine of inerrancy, nonetheless, does not deny that extant copies differ in various instances from each other. Additionally, the doctrine of inerrancy does not affirm an errorless transfer of text. A close examination of the Hebrew and Greek documents will reveal the areas in which the writing deviates but this is easily remedied by comparing other manuscripts. The copyist’s mistakes do not render the veracity of the autographs, which were composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and nor should it cause us to doubt our bible.[15]

Historically, the church has affirmed the position of the inerrancy of scripture. There was a consensus on the reliability of scripture throughout church history. St. Augustine is noted to have also written his thoughts on the bible’s inerrancy. He says “I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error.”[16] It would not be until the modern era that this doctrine would be composed into a formal statement because of the controversy surrounding the definition of the word inerrancy. Despite the objections to this positional view, inerrancy surprisingly allows for flexibility when used with ordinary language.

To be clear, inerrancy does not follow the prescribed language standards of the post-modern era. When the bible provides depictions of the sun rising (Psalm 113:3) and the rain falling (Isaiah 55:10), it is written from the vantage point of the speaker. Scientifically speaking, those descriptions are inaccurate, for the sun does not rise but it rotates. The rain does not fall but it is drawn downward by the earth’s gravitational pull. To use such examples of didactic speech would make communicating impractical.[17] The purpose of inerrancy is about its truthfulness, not its accuracy in describing events. Another important aspect of inerrancy is that it allows for the use of loose quotations.

For people living in the United States and England, it is grammatically correct to record a person’s exact words in quotations. This ensures the preservation of the person’s intended message. Yet in the ancient world of the New Testament, Greek had no such grammatical constructs. According to Grudem “only a correct representation of the content” was required for proper citation.[18] As is with the case of quoting Jesus. The New Testament writers recorded “his own voice” (ipsissima vox) rather than “his exact words” (ipsissima verba). It is also important to note that Jesus originally spoke in Aramaic and his words were later translated into Greek.[19] So while there is no definite way of knowing which is a direct quote or indirect quote of Jesus, we can be confident that words written down by the apostles, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are true representations of Jesus’ teaching. Full inerrancy is not about the perfect transmission of words but their intended meaning. Likewise, inerrancy also allows for the use of uncommon grammatical construction.

It has been observed by scholars of the grammatical irregularities within the writings of Revelation. It could also be argued that scholars studying the canonical text may not fully comprehend the syntax structures of ancient Hebrew and Greek. Nevertheless, biblical authors left no instructions or comments on the standards for grammatical correctness in the bible.[20] Were the composition of scripture be placed in our hands, it would “have a consistently elegant, magnificent literary style throughout with no misspelled (or irregularly spelled) words and no deviations from accepted grammatical rules.”[21] The positional view of full inerrancy does not claim that the original manuscripts were composed with impeccable grammar but that they are the truthfulness of God’s word. A statement may be grammatically incorrect but its meaning remains true. Inerrancy is focused on the veracity of scripture.

While we often discuss the inerrancy of scripture, we sometimes overlook the fact that inerrancy is ultimately about the truthfulness of God’s word. In the 2nd volume of Systematic Theology, Grudem says inerrancy “just means that the Bible always tells the truth, and that it always tells the truth concerning everything it talks about.”[22] Truth and inerrancy are intrinsically linked. The Bible gives claim to its own truthfulness in saying “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and “not the smallest letter or stroke of the Law of Scripture shall pass away” (Matthew 5:18). In the bible it says “all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16), meaning that the origins of scripture are divine. God used men under the influence of the Holy Spirit to communicate his will (2 Peter 1:20-21). For this reason, we can trust that every word contained in our bibles because it is God’s written word.[23]

We must trust the bible because in not doing so would be the equivalent of not trusting God and his trustworthiness. If the Bible were to have fictitious statements, God had to be aware of it or he had to be ignorant of it. Beeke and Smalley argue “if God knew something to be false but still declared it in his Word, then God is a liar.”[24] To call God a liar is unthinkable and unbiblical. In Exodus 35:6 God is proclaimed as the God of “truth” and in Numbers 23:19 it says, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and he shall do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he make it good?”[25]

Additionally, Jesus supported the truthfulness of scripture. In Jesus’ ministry, he never brought into question the inerrancy of Old Testament passages. Indeed, Jesus repeatedly affirmed its integrity as noted in Matthew 5:18 and John 10:35. Even Jesus’s opponents never asked questions concerning the inerrancy and inspiration of Old Testament scripture. The only subject that Jesus addressed concerning scripture was people’s distortion of God’s laws as was recorded by Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount.[26]

To deny the inerrancy of scripture would remove the authority of Jesus. Truth is not simply a concept but truth is the person of Jesus Christ. In John 1:1 Jesus is referred to as the Word of God and in John 14:6 he is identified as the Truth. In fact, Jesus never communicates anything outside of his relationship with God. According to Barrett “this raises the dilemma for those who oppose inerrancy of Christ’s words. If they find error in what Christ has spoken, what are they to make of Christ’s person? Our faith in the errant written Word is ultimately faith in the unerring Son of God.”[27] Therefore, it is imperative we trust and hold onto God's words because if we fail to do so we may fall into unbelief as New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman and come to the conclusion that Jesus nothing more than a legend.[28]

Objections to Full Inerrancy

The first objection against full inerrancy is the problem of human fallibility. Humans are prone to error and are imperfect beings. Since the bible was composed by humans under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is only reasonable to conclude the bible contains errors because humans error. Christians refute this claim by professing that all the books of the bible contain God’s word because every word is from God. God used human agents as a means to communicate his verbal and written messages. God is the author of the bible. According to Frame, author of The Doctrine of the Word of God, he argues “the humanity of God’s word is not a liability, but a perfection.”[29] It is not possible to separate the bible from its heavenly origin, to do so would prove the bible and God as false.[30]

The second objection against full inerrancy is the problem of contradictions in the bible. Critics argue that there are discrepancies within the text, and therefore the bible cannot be true. The areas of doctrinal concern are the differences between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, the variations between Jesus’s quotes in the gospels, the alteration of Old Testament passages in the New Testament, and so forth. Christians refute this claim by affirming that the bible when it is properly understood, contains within it a structure of truth. Throughout biblical history, God has continuously revealed his truth and stayed faithful to his covenants.

Unfortunately, there are Christians who wrongly interpret the God of the Old Testament as a moral monster. They forget how Adam and Eve sinned and brought death to mankind (Genesis 2:17).[31] The prophet Jonah was sent by God to Nineveh to call the people into repentance or face the dire consequences of God’s judgment. Jonah deliberately fled God’s order because he says “for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). This is one of many passages that prove God is the same in the Old and New Testaments.

Moreover, the four gospels contain different accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. This method of collecting multiple angles ensures the truthfulness of scripture and the faithfulness of eyewitness accounts. An analogy to this would be the various accounts of a car accident. Each witness views the car accident from a different vantage point. The same can be said of “the Gospels as providing us with different kinds of pictures of Jesus’s life and teaching.”[32]

Conclusion

In my article, I discussed the importance of upholding the inerrancy of scripture and how its denial would lead to the erosion of the bible’s authority and the person of Christ. I achieved this by structuring my argument into three points. First, I provided the alternative views of absolute inerrancy, limited inerrancy, and inerrancy is irrelevant. Second, I provided support for the doctrine of inerrancy. Third, I provided a rebuttal to the objections against full inerrancy by answering the issues of human fallibility and contradictions in the bible. In closing, while the doctrine of inerrancy may seem overly tedious in its criteria, this doctrine is essential not only for the learned but for every Christian believer. It should bring you great comfort in knowing that you can trust in God and that “God will never break his promises to us in Christ.”[33]

Footnotes:

[1] Michael Graham, “The Inerrancy of Scripture: A Doctrine Under Fire,” Diligence: Journal of the Liberty University Online Religion Capstone in Research and Scholarship, Vol. 1, Article 13 (September 2016): 1, https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/djrc/vol1/iss1/13/.

[2] Joel R. Beeke, and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 375.

[3] Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 91-92.

[4] John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue, Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017), 109.

[5] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology. Unabridged, 1 Vol. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), 222.

[6] Erickson, Christian Theology, 222.

[7] Erickson, Christian Theology, 223.

[8] Mal Couch, An Introduction to Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics: A Guide to the History and Practice of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Kregal Publications, 2000), 18.

[9] Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology. Vol. 1, Introduction Bible (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2002), 503.

[10] Erickson, Christian Theology, 224.

[11] Mal Couch, An Introduction to Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics: A Guide to the History and Practice of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Kregal Publications, 2000), 18.

[12] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 372.

[13] MacArthur and Mayhue, Biblical Doctrine, 112.

[14] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 372.

[15] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 373.

[16] Erickson, Christian Theology, 225-226.

[17] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. 2nd ed., (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 86.

[18] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 87.

[19] Jonathan T. Pennington, Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 63.

[20] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 373.

[21] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 88.

[22] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 86.

[23] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 376.

[24] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 377.

[25] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 377.

[26] MacArthur and Mayhue, Biblical Doctrine, 110.

[27] Matthew Barrett, God’s Word Alone: The Authority of Scripture, What the Reformers Taught . . . and Why It Still Matters, The Five Solas Series (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 283.

[28] Timothy P. Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2007), 83.

[29] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), 73-74.

[30] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 384.

[31] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 387.

[32] Pennington, Reading the Gospels Wisely, 61.

[33] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 380.

Bibliography:

Barrett, Matthew. God’s Word Alone: The Authority of Scripture, What the Reformers Taught . . . and Why It Still Matters. The Five Solas Series. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016.

Beeke, Joel R., and Paul M. Smalley. Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2019.

Couch, Mal. An Introduction to Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics: A Guide to the History and Practice of Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Kregal Publications, 2000.

Erickson, Millard J. Christian Theology. Unabridged, 1 Vol. ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985.

Frame, John M. The Doctrine of the Word of God. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010.

Geisler, Norman. Systematic Theology. Vol. 1, Introduction Bible. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2002.

Graham, Michael. “The Inerrancy of Scripture: A Doctrine Under Fire.” Diligence: Journal of the Liberty University Online Religion Capstone in Research and Scholarship, Vol. 1, Article 13 (September 2016): 1. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/djrc/vol1/iss1/13/.

Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020.

Jones, Timothy P. Misquoting Truth: A Guide to The Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2007.

MacArthur, John and Richard Mayhue. Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth. Wheaton: Crossway, 2017.

Pennington, Jonathan T. Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012.

Ryrie, Charles C. Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth. Chicago: Moody Press, 1999.

Bao Vang is a wife and mom of two amazing daughters. When Bao's not serving her local church, she likes to write and spend time with her family. Bao received her MA in Theological Studies from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and she is currently working on a PhD in Bible Exposition at John W. Rawlings School of Divinity at Liberty University. Bao is also a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Society of Biblical Literature.