Written by Rev. Joshua Tomalin
Many theological disagreements find their root in disagreements on scripture. It is fairly common to hear in theological circles an argument that sounds something like – “We don’t need to pay attention to that part of the bible anymore” or “we know the bible contradicts itself, so it can’t all be true!”
It makes sense that if I believe that Paul’s writings are the inspired word of God, but the person I am talking to doesn’t, we’re going to come to some pretty different conclusions on issues that come up in his letters!
In this article, I write my best short understanding of 3 areas of the doctrine of scripture, they are by no means exhaustive, and there are other areas within the doctrine of scripture I will not cover, such as perspicuity.
The three doctrinal areas I’ll be looking at are:
- The Inspiration of scripture – How can we call the bible the “Word of God”?
- The Inerrancy of scripture – Can the bible make mistakes?
- Sola Scriptura – How does the bible have authority over what we believe?
I’ll end with a brief excursus on authorial intent, it’s not part of the doctrine of scripture, but hermeneutics, the interpretation of scripture. However, I’ve included my argument for understanding intent, as it will come up either implicitly or explicitly when getting to grips with alternate views and interpretations of scripture.
Inspiration – Is the Bible the Word of God?
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” – 2 Timothy 3:16
Inspiration is a claim about the origin of Scripture: that God is its author. We come to that word by the old translation of theopneustos – it used to be translated as “inspired by God”, but is better understood “God-breathed”, or “breathed out by God”. (In a way, ex-spiration, not in-spiration!)
The key conclusion is that – in the words of B.B. Warfield – Scripture is ‘a book which may be frankly appealed to at any point with the assurance that whatever it may be found to say, that is the Word of God’ [1] or to put it more shortly, what Scripture says, God says.
There are two keywords used to clarify this – Plenary and verbal inspiration:
– plenary: the whole of Scripture (not just one part or theme of it) is breathed out by God;
– verbal: the words (and not just the overall ‘spirit’ or ‘gist’) are breathed out by God.
However, it’s helpful to address what inspiration is not strictly about, again quoting from Warfield:
theopneustos ‘is primarily expressive of the origination of Scripture, not of its nature and much less of its effects’ [1] Using this understanding of inspiration, we can say that 2 Timothy 3.16 asserts that all of scripture, as we have received it, without exception, is fully a Divine product, as well as a human one.
The doctrine of inspiration does not address the question of the precise way in which God worked in and through the various Bible writers, such that what they wrote in ordinary words of human language would be also fully God’s words.
The orthodox view has sometimes been criticized as believing in ‘dictation theory’: i.e. the Bible writers are being portrayed as entirely passive. But it’s fairly easy to show that that view would not be a good one.
The claim of the orthodox doctrine is that Scripture is as fully God’s word as it would be if he had in fact delivered it by direct dictation; The claim of the orthodox doctrine is not that this is how God did in fact cause Scripture to come about.
We know something from within Scripture of how the Spirit acted to cause certain parts of Scripture to be written. And it’s clear that he acted in a variety of ways at different times, sometimes through prophecy, visions, hearing the voice of the Lord, or using existing written sources. But this clearly doesn’t cover everything.
One possible description for how God worked is “concursive operation”. That through the supreme divine providence of God, he worked to prepare the biblical writers to write scripture and the writers he brought to the task were the writers who would spontaneously write just such scripture.
The orthodox doctrine itself does take proper account of the full humanity of the Bible writers.
What it denies is that a recognition of the full humanity of Scripture is in competition with a recognition of its full divinity.
Scripture is 100% divine.
It is also 100% human.
Inerrancy – Does the bible make mistakes?
The view of inerrancy that is most commonly accepted amongst those who hold to it is summed up in the Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy – I’ll quote it here and explain:
‘Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises …
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, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.’ [2]
It’s important to note here that inerrancy rests on inspiration, there’s no point debating inerrancy with someone who does not believe in the full, plenary and verbal inspiration of scripture. If they differ on inspiration, they will always differ on inerrancy.
But what does the Chicago statement tell us about inerrancy?
There’s a key phrase in the second line of the Chicago statement: Scripture is to be believed ‘in all that it affirms’. Therefore, where proper interpretation tells us that Scripture intends to make assertions about (e.g.) events in history, that assertion must be taken to be historically true.
However, don’t misunderstand the phrase in the second part of that quote from the Chicago Statement about ‘God’s acts in creation’: it’s not arguing for or against 6-day YE creationism; the question is, ‘what does God intend to affirm about space-time events in Gen 1?’, and inerrantists can and do disagree about that while still remaining firmly agreed about inerrancy.
Within the doctrine of inerrancy, there are two key clarifications for what counts or doesn’t count as an error.
1. Factual details – Let’s say an OT author writes that there were 10,000 men in an army, when actually in fact if you had a time machine and counted them all you’d have discovered that there were 14,999. The author has not made an error – his text remains inerrant – if in fact his intention is to round numbers to the nearest 10,000, and in his cultural context that is a perfectly reasonable and expected thing to do. Where statements of numerical or other similar factual details are given, such as genealogies where various generations have been intentionally left out, there will be differing modern standards on what remains “factually correct”, but these were never errors in the text and do not undermine inerrancy.
2. Literary genre – Let’s say one of the NT Gospel-writers gives us a sermon of Jesus in a form that is a translation and highly abbreviated summary of a much longer sermon given originally in a different language (which is what Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount may well be) – that is, the writer gives us at that point not Jesus’ actual words (Latin: ipsissima verba) but his real message (Latin: ipsissima vox). This point is easier to understand once you play out the scenario of the sermon on the mount specifically – we’re told Jesus taught for hours, but you can read aloud the whole sermon on the mount in a matter of minutes – we’re not given everything he said literally! Also, we’re not given his exact words, as Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, not Greek. But neither of these points undermine that Matthew’s account of the sermon can be considered truly inerrant.
And let’s say too that a Gospel writer openly and knowingly changes the actual chronology of events in his writing, in order to highlight a true theological meaning of those events (as must be going on somewhere in the accounts of Jesus’ temptations, since the second and third temptations appear in a different order in Matthew and Luke). The Gospel-writer hasn’t made an error – i.e. his text remains inerrant – if in fact he is writing in a literary form, conforming to a set of accepted literary conventions, which allow such authorial practices in order to express the meanings of real events.
(Of course, if someone said that Jesus never actually raised Lazarus from the dead even though John says he did, that would be very different – that would be claiming that John made an error in that he intended to assert a fact that is not true.)
I’d also want to say that debates over inerrancy have raged so fiercely at times in the last century, (especially within evangelical circles) that inerrancy seemed to be the one crucial thing that evangelicals wanted to affirm about Scripture in order to defend it as the Word of God. But that can lead to a misuse of inerrancy as itself the foundation of a high view of Scripture. Scripture is not the inspired Word of God because it’s inerrant; it’s inerrant because it’s inspired. Inerrancy is a consequence of, not a basis for, Scripture’s identity as the Word of God.
To those of us who strongly hold to inerrancy, I would argue that in the words of Al Mohler: “inerrancy isn’t a test of evangelical integrity but of evangelical inconsistency.”[3] You may encounter people who differ on inerrancy – but this alone is not the watermark of the integrity of their faith.
On Sola scriptura – How does Scripture relate to doctrine?
The doctrine of Sola scripture can be described as this – there is, a basic ontological difference between Scripture (God’s Word) and any creaturely words. Scripture is metaphysically unique. Scripture is to be interpreted in and by the church, and it is to be interpreted within the hermeneutical context of the rule of faith.
The historic position of those who hold to sola scriptura does not reject tradition, reason, or experience, but rather holds them as subordinate authorities to scripture. They will be creaturely words, maybe in response to divine revelation, but they are themselves not divine. Therefore they must always be considered subordinate.
We can absolutely use all that is good and right in our traditions, in our reason, and from our experience, however we can only use all three to the extent that they are in harmony with the Bible. Only scripture has ultimate authority in matters of faith and doctrine, and all the other authorities directly stem from and relate to scripture. We use reason not purely of itself, but to understand scripture, likewise, tradition is used to engage with scripture, and through experience, we see scriptural truths lived out.
Prima Scriptura is slightly different from this and is not historically Anglican, Reformed, or Lutheran as far as I know. It holds that Scripture is the first among authorities, but would not necessarily say that those other authorities derive their authority from Scripture. Scripture in this way is seen as the first among equals. However, if scripture is truly divine, this cannot be true. This is a less common argument these days, but you may see it at some point!
The idea of sola scriptura that is becoming common, especially in evangelical circles should better be called “solo scriptura”. This is often articulated as “No creed, but Christ” or “I have everything I need in my bible, I don’t need my church!” This view assumes that with scripture a believer has all they need to understand everything of faith, removed from tradition, reason, and experience. This is a corruption of Sola Scriptura that is prominent in some American, mostly evangelical circles – but it is not sola scriptura, regardless of what they might call it.
The historic doctrine we hold to might best be described as scripture being our only sufficient, final, inerrant, ultimate authority. Sola Scriptura is therefore not ‘Scripture in isolation’ but ‘Scripture supreme’.
Authorial intent
On the issue of intent, I said at the start it’d be helpful to look at – but this is not doctrine, and there is much more room for reasonable disagreement here! However, in debating issues around inspiration and inerrancy the word “intent” will come up, but different people can use it in different ways, so I thought I’d lay out some of the differences here.
One of the most commonly held views in authorial intent is what is known as the expressivist view. That is, roughly: in this view, the ‘authorial intention’ of a text is what the author would have said to you when they were writing if you’d asked them, “Why are you writing this?”.
The implication of this view is that the intention of a text never goes beyond what the author was thinking about when they wrote it. The intention is limited to the content of the author’s head.
However, this view fell under a lot of criticism in the 20th century in academics, in both theological and secular circles around the study of literature and art. The two main objections are that the mental intention of the author is unknowable, we cannot get inside someone’s head – even if they outright tell us their intention, we cannot know how honest they are being, or how well they know their own intention. Going down this path can lead people to psychoanalyze the author, rather than focus on the piece of work at hand. The second objection is even if we did know the true mental intent, that is not the only thing that gives meaning – after all, don’t people all the time actually put meanings in their words that they didn’t consciously intend?
The more accepted view of intent is that of communicative action. That is, the ‘authorial intention’ of a text is what the text is actually saying and doing, as far as that can be discerned by studying the text itself carefully.
So, as we’re reading Mark’s Gospel, we can’t peer into Mark’s head, and he’s not around for us to ask him, “What were you thinking of when you wrote this?”
All we’ve got is Mark’s words, so the only question we can ask is about the communicative action he’s performed by writing these words. So we ask: ‘What do his words seem intended to communicate and to do to the readers of his Gospel?’
Now usually we should presume that the intention we find embodied in the words we’re reading bears some relation to the author’s conscious mental intention – that is, what they’d have said if you asked them, “Why are you writing this?”. In the right sense, we usually presume that authors knew what they were doing.
But all the time when we use language, we communicate things and do things that go beyond what we consciously intend.
If you and I are talking and I say some insulting words to you, the fact is that I have performed the action of insulting you, regardless of what I intended and what was consciously going on in my head at that moment.
In regards to biblical interpretation, there’s an old rule, that scripture can have 2 senses, the literal meaning of the words being one – and the spiritual sense being another. Sometimes you see the spiritual sense being broken up into allegorical, moral, and anagogical (Focusing on the future). I think this view is a fair one, even if I may disagree with how it is sometimes applied in theology and preaching (looking at you Origen!)
Now, sometimes it is reasonable to assume that the human author of scripture was aware of the multiple meaning that the text they were writing had. I would guess that the writers of the Psalms were aware that they were communicating truths that went beyond the simple meaning of the poems and songs they wrote, It’s entirely reasonable to say that David for example had some sort of insight in God’s plan of salvation even if he didn’t know the exact specifics!
But would we expect the compliers of Exodus, for example, to realize the meaning the paschal lamb had in pointing to Christ? No, that would be a little silly, but it doesn’t mean that the meaning is not truly there – it just wasn’t in the intention of the author’s writing.
But because we believe in inspiration, we believe that the Spirit is at work in the writing of scripture, and so human authorial intent is not the only thing we take into account. Thomas Aquinas, himself quoting Augustine put it nicely:
“Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and since the author of Holy Writ is God, Who by one act comprehends all things by His intellect, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says (Confess. xii), if, even according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses.” [4]
Conclusion
I hope this article has been helpful as you think about the nature of the wonderful gift we have in God’s word! I pray that you will never lose sight of how amazing this is, but remember that my words here are neither inerrant or inspired! I have tried to articulate what I believe to be true as well as I am able, but I hope I and you hold whatever truth that is contained here in trembling hands, recognizing our own limits. When you engage with those who disagree do so humbly but boldly, charitably but clearly, but above all lovingly, recognizing that those with whom we disagree are equally image bearers of God and need that they need salvation just as much as we do!
References
[1] B.B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), 106
[2] The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy’, 1978 – The Full Statement can be found here https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-chicago-statement-on-biblical-inerrancy/
[3] R. Albert Mohler, Jr “When the Bible Speaks, God Speaks: The Classic Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy” (Zondervan 2013)
[4] Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 1.1.10 – response to obj 3
