Biblical inerrancy stands for the complete truthfulness of Scripture, not only in what it teaches about God and salvation, but in its historical and more factual statements as well. Although inerrancy is a negative word, it stands for a very positive truth and that is that the Bible can be trusted in everything that it says wherever it says it and about whatever it speaks. Inerrancy, far from being an irrelevance is actually an aspect of biblical truth with far-reaching consequences in a number of areas of Christian thought.

Semantically, inerrancy does not mean that the biblical writers will say everything in the way we in the modern, scientific and technological West would say the same thing today. Truth does not have to be expressed with mathematical exactness or with matter-of-fact language to be true. Yet inerrancy means that there is nothing in the Scriptures that conflicts with what we might say today in more precise ways of stating things. The Bible is an ancient text and must be understood, read and interpreted in terms of its own literary conventions and different genres. When inerrancy is understood in this way it is a very reasonable position to hold and a necessary one, as we will try to show.

Biblically, we may ask whether Scripture teaches its own inerrancy? The answer to that is Yes, for a number of reasons. First, by affirming its fully inspired and God-breathed nature, as in 2 Timothy 3:16, it teaches its own inerrancy. The one is implied by the other (see Westminster Confession 1.6). Whether Paul is referring to every scripture or to the whole of scrip­ture it is inconceivable that the Bible would be the product of God’s creative breath and yet be untrustworthy or liable to error in any sense.

Second, the God of the Bible is a truth­ful God who cannot lie or mislead (Tit. 1:2). Therefore His words are like Himself (John 17:17).

Third, the Word of God in Scripture is a seamless robe in the sense that its factual information which often comes in the form of narratives, is inseparable from its religious and moral truth that centres on Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 3:15). The intricate connectedness of facts and their meaning in Holy Scripture is not unlike the mys­tery of the relation between body and soul in the human person.

Fourth, Scripture claims its own perfection in places like Psalm 19:7 and 119:96 and we have no reason not to take God at his word.

Theologically, we believe that inerrancy is one of the essential attributes of Scripture as the Word of God. Along with biblical inspiration and authority, inerrancy forms a triad of truths that together express the mystery of revelation. Omitting inerrancy is like missing out one of the attributes of God that makes Him what He essentially is.

Objection is sometimes made that inerrancy is a negative term and should be dropped. But so is “infallibility” which some people prefer. In the history of Christian teaching negative terms are sometimes unavoidable and actually serve a positive purpose. The famous four negative qualifiers of the Chalcedon Creed that speak of the two natures of Jesus Christ being unconfused, unchange­able, undivided and inseparable, are a case in point.

The analogy between the human nature of Jesus Christ and the human writers and texts of Scripture is helpful here. Just as there was an exception to the full humanity of Christ in his sinlessness, so there is the exception to the human­ness of the biblical writings in their inerrancy. In both cases we ascribe this exception to the preserving activity of the Holy Spirit who kept Jesus from sin of any kind (Heb. 9:14) and the human authors from error of any kind (2 Pet. 1:21).

Christ’s human soul thought and felt like a real man, but without sin ... Isaiah’s human mind when under inspira­tion thought and perceived like a real man, but without error. He was not without sin; for inspiration does not sanctify. But he was infallible; for inspiration enlightens without any mixture of untruth.W.G.T. Shedd

Hermeneutically, the belief in biblical inerrancy is important when we come to interpret the Bible. Inerrancy sets limits and safeguards that should prevent the biblical scholar from a natural tendency and temptation to manipulate the text. For example, inerrancy encourages the practice of harmonisation wherever possi­ble between parallel accounts of events, as in Kings and Chronicles or between the same event or saying of Jesus in the first three Gospels. Or again, inerrancy warns us away from the idea that a biblical writer may be in conflict with himself or any of the other biblical authors.

Yet again, inerrancy reminds us that because the human text is always at the same time God’s text we cannot indulge in the free play of imagination or the dys­functional methods of postmodern critical literary theory that have done so much to destroy the humanities and classical lit­erature studies in our government schools and universities. The same is true of the ancient Jewish practice of midrash that too often leads away from the natural sense of Scripture rather than elucidating its true meaning. The two Chicago Statements, on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) and on Biblical Hermeneutics (1982), are classic statements of the way we may understand inerrancy and the hermeneuti­cal methods that are appropriate for it.

Practically, inerrancy may be objected to because of the way that it concentrates our attention on the lost original manuscripts of the Bible rather than on the texts and versions that we have to work with today. There are a number of responses to this. First, Christian faith requires us to believe that everything that God says is true and the doctrine of bibli­cal inerrancy of the original documents satisfies this need (by this faith a Christian believes to be true whatever is revealed in the Word, WCF XIV 2).

Second, while it is true that we no longer possess the original texts it does not follow that belief in their inerrancy is not important for what we do have. Most scholars recognise that our current form of the biblical text in Hebrew and Greek is, with few exceptions, probably as close to the originals as makes little difference. The vast majority of textual variations and problem passages have to do with inciden­tal matters or can be reasonably resolved using available evidence of a documentary kind, for example, the difficulties raised by the Septuagint Greek version of the Old Testament compared to the Masoretic text.

Historically, it might be objected that inerrancy is a recent belief in the confession of the churches and has been largely an American issue at that. Both of these observations are misleading. The issue of biblical inerrancy has resulted from the post-Enlightenment obsession with a scientific approach to knowledge. Inerrancy is an attempt to answer in part the criticism, from both inside and outside the churches, that the Bible is unscientific and unhistorical. However, the totally truthful nature of Scripture is something the Christian Church has always embraced until it began to be an issue in modern, scientific times. It is of more than American inter­est though, as the doctrinal basis of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Great Britain quickly shows, while a representative European theologian like Herman Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics I/IV.13) identifies himself with all that inerrancy stands for.

In this year of historical remembrance of Calvin’s birth we do well as Presbyterians to take our bearings on this issue, as we do on other matters, from our leading Church Father. Anyone familiar with Calvin’s principal writings, the Institutes and commentaries, will know that he held the highest view of Scripture in speaking of it as the image of the Holy Spirit (Institutes I.9.3) and the mouth­piece and the words of the Holy Spirit, the primary Author (for example, Calvin’s comments on Acts 1:16, 4:26, 11:24, 17:2, 20:37-38). Paul Helm, in his groundbreaking work on Calvin’s ideas, is surely correct when he concludes, in connection with Calvin’s doctrine of divine accommodation, that “the idea of textual error in the Bible, or of Jesus including erroneous material in his teaching for pedagogic pur­poses, would have been abhorrent to Calvin.”

Apologetically, some suggest that the term “infallibility” is better than “inerrancy”. Traditionally the former term has included the latter. However, at a time when some evangelicals want to drop the idea and the term inerrancy it does seem judicious to retain both terms. Infallibility will then define the trustwor­thiness of the teaching of Scripture while inerrancy will guarantee the truthfulness of the historical and human information in which that teaching is rooted. Otherwise the content of Scripture will part company from its form with increas­ingly disastrous results for the defence and credibility of the Christian faith. Infallible teaching will not last long with­out the support of inerrant narratives that we can implicitly believe.

Pastorally and spiritually, inerrancy is not without its relevance either. Without a confident belief in the full truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture, “epistemic instability” (J. I. Packer) results for the ordinary Christian. This means that his or her knowledge of God and the Gospel will suffer from creeping uncertainty which, in turn, must hinder Christian maturity and usefulness. In the final analysis, perhaps belief in biblical inerrancy should be thought of as an axiom of saving faith, a belief that opens the way to Christian joy, fellowship with likeminded Christians, confidence in prayer, effective Bible-study, authoritative preaching and a sure looking forward to the Christian hope. For the churches, the loss or denial of biblical inerrancy will not proceed alone, but the removal of this strand of biblical theology will progressively unravel the whole fabric of truth until retrieval is too late and the supernaturalism of Scripture will be lost.