Is Biblical Inerrancy New?

The Bible has come under attack in the last half century. Well, longer, I suppose. Beginning in the late 19th century with "higher criticism", many have moved away from any sort of "reliable Scripture" to "a nice book that has some really good things in it" or something like that. Liberalism had come upon the Bible. Of course, a counter response was forthcoming and two groups, the Fundamentalists and the Evangelicals followed, standing firmly on the inerrancy of Scripture. That concept, that the Bible is without error, has really come across hard times at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. In the 70's, the "conservative" Fuller Seminary moved from "the Bible is the Word of God" to "the Bible contains the Word of God". Today, the whole concept of inerrancy is considered silly by liberal Christianity and questioned by those who still call themselves "Evangelicals". "You know," they tell us, "the inerrancy of the Bible is a new idea. It was never held before you fundamentalists held it" because, you see, only one who is a fundamentalist (whacko, although that descriptive is usually implied, not spoken) would hold that doctrine.

John D. Woodbridge is a research professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He has written an interesting article on the topic that denies this accusation. Rather than being a new doctrine, Woodbridge says that it has been the case since the beginning.

The accusation was that A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield were feeling the press of higher criticism and responded in 1881 with a new concept -- biblical inerrancy. The accuser, Ernest Sandeen, back in 1970 claimed that the doctrine didn't exist before them. Hodge and Warfield, on the other hand, claimed that their view had been the standard view of the Church since the early church fathers. So, who was right?

Augustine was not unknown, nor was he unknown for his statements on the subject. In a response to the suggestion from St. Jerome that Paul wasn't being completely honest when he wrote Gal 2:14, Augustine said, "It seems to me that the most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in these books anything false." He went on to say, "If you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement ... , there will not be left a single sentence of those books which, if appearing to any one difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away, as a statement in which, intentionally, ... the author declared what was not true." Now, you may disagree with Augustine (as many have disagreed with me when I've made similar claims), but what you cannot disagree with is the claim that this idea of biblical inerrancy is new, or that the concern about the outcome of denying that doctrine would be dangerous to Christianity was a product of modern silliness. Augustine went on from there. He wrote The Harmony of the Gospels and said, "in order to carry out this design to a successful conclusion, we must prove that the writers in question do not stand in any antagonism to each other." The Gospels, he assured us, did not contradict each other. Augustine's approach to Scripture was that the original documents were perfectly inerrant and reliable. Regarding translations of the originals, he said, "If in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand." What was not in question was the actual text.

Woodbridge goes on to cite a string of "witnesses", including Johannes Eck (1496-1543), a contemporary of Martin Luther, and Richard Simon (1638-1712). Eck warned Erasmus, "Do you suppose any Christian will patiently endure to be told that the evangelists in their Gospel made mistakes?" (Is that a claim that only false Christians would endure such an accusation regarding mistakes in Scripture?) Simon is considered by many to be "the Father of Higher Criticism." Simon wrote about the belief of the Jews and Christians regarding biblical inerrancy, "One is not able to doubt that the truths contained in Holy Scripture are infallible and of a divine authority, since they come immediately from God, who in doing this used the ministry of men as his interpreters." Thus, the Father of Higher Criticism confirmed that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy preceded higher criticism as well as Hodge and Warfield or modern Evangelicalism.

Well, there is a lot more in there and it's a good read. Woodbridge goes far in dispelling the myth that the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy is a new thing, but demonstrates that it has always been the case for the Church. From Augustine through modern times, the doctrine has been maintained by the orthodox and revived repeatedly when opposition forces tried to take it down. It was held up in Augustine's day as an assault on the reliability of Scripture, repeated through the Roman Catholic period when some would claim otherwise, agreed upon by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers, sustained in the 19th century when higher criticism and the new god, science, attempted to tear it down, and continued to be one of the premier marks of Evangelicalism. So, I suppose I'm not entirely accurate when I say that the Bible has come under attack lately. But you can certainly set aside that tired old argument that "no one believed that before the 19th century" or the like. Lies, all lies. The Church has always believed it.