Inerrancy of Scripture

Inerrancy is the idea that something is completely true and without any falsehood. 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that "all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness". While the latter parts are important, I want to focus on the former part which is what I think enables the latter parts. Scripture that is God-breathed means that it comes from the very mouth of God. It is, in essence, the word of God. We know that God is perfect, God cannot sin. Sin is missing the standard that God sets out and thus it is not possible for him to not attain that standard. Because God cannot sin, God also cannot lie and everything that God speaks therefore must be the truth.

When reading the bible, there are times when we see the literal words of God being spoken (sometimes it's even in red text!). For example, when God is giving instruction to Moses on the mountain we see the words and rules as he is stating them. And we also see the words of God verbatim in the gospels, when Jesus is speaking. But there is a significant portion of the bible which is not the direct words of God, it's a description of what is happening to a people, or instruction on how to live our lives, or prophecy about what will happen. How do we know that these things also add up to an inerrant bible? I believe that the Holy Spirit inspired individual men while writing the bible and that the things that they wrote were wholly truthful because they were being directed by the spirit. 2 Peter 1:21 supports this when Peter says quite plainly that "no prophecy was ever borne of human impulse; rather, men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." So while human men did the work of putting the pen to paper to make the bible, and human men are certainly capable of sin and telling lies and making things up that are not truth, these human men who wrote the bible were "carried along" by the Spirit in such a way that they were writing on behalf of God himself.

Across the thousands of years of human history that the bible covers, everything remains consistent and in tact, which is one of the things that you would expect if there was an outside force (namely the Spirit) coordinating all of these men in their writings. If these men wrote on their own you would probably see some form of "correction" on previous writings or updates to instruction. Instead we see consistent historical accounts of the Israel kings and prophecy that was provided to them. We see similar accounts in the gospels of what Jesus's time on earth was like. And the whole thrust of the bible fits together, you see the foundation for God's plan for humanity laid in Genesis and the completion of that plan in Revelation. It was prophesied very early on that after man's fall, God would bring a savior to the earth. He spent the entire old testament preparing the way for that man to come. When he came, he taught people who he was and ultimately died on the cross for our sins. When we trust that he paid for our sins, God forgives us and it restores the relationship that we had with God in the very beginning of the bible.

For any ancient text like the bible we have to ask the question if the words that the Spirit-inspired men wrote are the same words we're reading today. Has the text been faithfully preserved over time. In a literal sense, no, we're not reading their words because they are in Hebrew and Greek while we read in English. However, we have manuscripts dating back all the way to 250 BC of the contents of the bible. What we find whenever we unearth new manuscripts is very little changing between the copies. In other words, manuscripts from hundreds or thousands of years apart are in agreement on what the original words of the bible were. We as Christians today can have confidence that what we are reading is a (translated) copy of what the authors of the bible wrote.

If we said the bible was not inerrant then I think we would have to start asking ourselves some questions. Is it still God breathed, but God lied? Or do we just not have the words that God actually spoke? In both cases, we wind up turning the bible into a patchwork of beliefs we can say yes and no individually to. If something makes us uncomfortable we can just say "that is not what God actually said". When the bible is inerrant, it becomes a standard to judge our actions and lives by, however if it is not inerrant than we are judging our actions and thoughts by our own feelings. And as the bible says "the heart is deceitful above all else".

While we can see that the bible is the word of God, and that we know it's also externally consistent, there is one thing that we still have to contend with. That is that everything we read from the bible is filtered through our own brain and biases, which we spoke of before, into "what we think the bible means". The bible can be inerrant, but our interpretations of what the bible says can very much not be inerrant. In medieval times there was very much a thought in the church (aligning with what science taught at the time) that the sun revolved around the earth. You could look in the bible and see verses that supported this argument (Joshua 10:12 commanding the sun to stand still). But Copernicus came along and had thoughts about a heliocentric universe. The church was not immediately willing to switch over but eventually did largely come to accept the science and (most importantly) reevaluate how they were interpreting some passages in scripture and what it meant for the physical world.

I believe this can happen on a much smaller scale all of the time. We can accept that specific portions of scripture are teaching a certain thing because they align with the interpretation we already have or the preconceived notions that we have. In essence, we know the conclusion we want to come to and we read that into the bible. But it's important to remember that the word of God is God breathed and is the ultimate truth. It explains all reality and all science, even if we don't know how it explains that yet. And the bible is not there to make us "correct", it's there to reveal the word of God to us.