My fourteen-year-old son is a never-ending source of new words. Well, not all the words he introduces into our household are new—some of them are old words used in a new way. Whereas “sick” used to mean something unpleasant to behold or to refer to someone who is physically ill, now “sick” can be used to describe an amazing soccer move (“That was a sick Rabona”) or to custom wheels on a new truck (“Those rims are sick”). Honestly, it’s hard for me to keep up.
We don’t need to be trained linguists to recognize that the meanings of words do not always remain fixed from one generation to the next. Rather, words may take on slightly different or entirely new meanings over time as they are used in actual communication. A humorous example is the English word “nice,” which used to mean “foolish” or ignorant.” It now means “pleasant” or “agreeable.”
The word “inerrancy” is not immune to these linguistic dynamics. Even today, there are people who would happily call themselves evangelicals who frame the doctrine of inerrancy in a way that is different than how evangelicals have articulated it historically. Yet, unlike the English words I’ve mentioned above, “inerrancy” is not one that we can allow to become reshaped by the vicissitudes of time and culture. Rather, it is a word that speaks directly to the nature of Scripture, and, as we will see, how we define this word will have a direct impact on how we view God’s word, trust it, and use it.
What Is Inerrancy?
In one sense, “inerrancy” is a simple concept.1 The word “inerrancy” has to do with the truth character of a claim or proposition. If a statement is “inerrant,” then it is “without error.” Or, to state the matter positively, if a statement is “inerrant,” then that statement in question is “true.” Once we say this, however, we start to realize that inerrancy requires some effort to rightly understand. For example, someone in the crowd might quickly voice Pilate’s retort: “What is truth” (John 18:38)?
Here and in the following article, when I refer to statements that are “true” or to “truth,” I am referring to statements that correspond with reality.2 Think of it this way: If a statement is “true,” it means that the statement describes the way things really are—the statement “corresponds” with the facts. For example, the statement, “Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States” is true. The statement, “John Adams was the fourth president of the United States” is false. These examples are straightforward—almost rudimentary—because we generally have an intuitive sense of what is meant by “true” and “truth,” even if we don’t have an undergraduate degree in philosophy.
To say that a statement or proposition is “inerrant” is to say that the statement in question is true and therefore without error. Back to our presidents: The claim that Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president describes the way things are. Abraham Lincoln really was our sixteenth president. Starting in 1776 with the election of George Washington and up 1861 when Lincoln took the helm of our nation’s governance, there had been fifteen presidents. Prior to the election of John Adams, however, there had only been one president. The claim, “John Adams was the fourth president,” is false or “errant” because it says something about John Adams that is not really the case.
But even saying that a true statement describes the way things “really are” assumes that that we can judge reality accurately. It also assumes that you and I share a common notion of what constitutes “reality.” Now, some of this may sound a little heady, but stick with me here because, as we will see in later questions, inerrancy is directly related to God, and how we define and understand inerrancy will turn on what we think about God’s nature, character, and engagement with the world.
Theologian and author, J. I. Packer, once wisely observed that Christian theology is like a seamless garment, where every doctrine is vitally connected to every other doctrine.3 If you tinker with one doctrine (like the doctrine of God), you will inevitably affect other doctrines as well (like the doctrine of inerrancy). Inerrancy also relates to our anthropology (doctrine of man), our Christology (our doctrine of Christ), and our Pneumatology (doctrine of the Holy Spirit), among others.
So, as we define inerrancy, we must keep in mind that how we articulate its meaning is vitally related to what we believe about other essential Christian doctrines. This is a helpful principle to remember when you meet someone who believes in Jesus but who has problems with the doctrine of inerrancy. It may be the case that they are not working with a sound definition of inerrancy. It might also be the case that they are not working with a sound doctrine of God, Christ, Spirit, or man, which has, in turn, influenced how they think about revelation, language, truth, and error.
Truth Corresponds to What God Knows
Regarding our doctrine of God, it is best to say that truth corresponds to what God knows. When we say that a true statement “corresponds with reality” or “corresponds with actual states of affairs,” we are speaking of “reality” and “states of affairs” that exist in a universe created by the infinite-personal, Triune God of the Bible. It is not enough to speak of “reality” and “states of affairs” as abstract philosophical concepts disconnected from the Triune God, for it is easy to quickly fill those concepts with ideas that are foreign to the Bible and Christian theology. We must do all our thinking—especially our thinking about the nature of Scripture—in the presence of the Christian God of the Christian Scriptures.
Beginning with God enables us to see that ultimate “reality” is God himself and that we are contingent beings who depend upon God for our knowledge of the created order (Acts 17:25; Rom 11:36). All human knowledge is rooted in the Triune God who knows all things and who has formed a universe in which created reality corresponds with his own mind. Furthermore, God has formed humans in his own image and revealed knowledge to us so we can both know and speak truth to other image-bearers (Gen 1:26; John 8:32; Eph 4:25).4
When we say the Bible is inerrant, we are saying that when it makes statements about the nature of reality, it is describing what is actually the case. In other words, inerrancy means that everything the Bible teaches and affirms is true and contains no errors.5 For example, the Bible teaches that God saves us through Jesus Christ alone, by his grace alone, apart from our works (Rom 4:5; Eph 2:8-9; Titus 3:4-7). This statement is true—it is absolutely the case. It is a statement that corresponds with God’s mind, so there is a quality of objectivity about it, and it is true regardless of how it is received by others.
Given what we’ve said about the nature of truth and interconnectedness of Christian doctrine, we must also say that inerrancy also means that the Bible is wholly coherent. That is, because all of its truth-bearing statements are genuinely true, the whole of Scripture and all it teaches fits together with complete consistency. To say otherwise would be to question God’s internal coherence, for the Bible is his very Word.
Redemptive v. Non-Redemptive Statements?
Over the last sixty years, however, some evangelicals have argued that while the Bible is only inerrant when it makes “theological” or “redemptive” statements (like the one about salvation above), it can error when it makes non-redemptive statements, like claims regarding geography, geology, history, and science.6 In light of these challenges, we must press our definition a little further. When we say the Bible is inerrant, we are saying that every propositional statement in the Bible is inerrant, including historical, geographical, geological, and scientific statements.
Importantly, to claim the Bible is inerrant is not to say the Bible is exhaustive, or that it presents truths about the world that conform to modern-day scientific standards for precision, or that it doesn’t make use of colloquial or perspectival language. Rather, it is to say that in everything Scripture teaches and affirms in whatever category, it will always correspond to the way things are.
Inerrancy and Interpretation
Of course, the question of what Scripture teaches and affirms is a matter of how we interpret the Bible, for inerrancy cannot be tied to wrong interpretations of Scripture. For example, the theological claim, based on a misinterpretation of several Old and New Testament passages, that Jesus is a created being is not inerrant because that is decisively not what the Bible teaches.
Similarly, the scientific claim that the sun revolves around the earth is not inerrant because that is also not what the Bible teaches. The Bible also contains descriptions of false teaching (e.g., 1 Tim 4:1-5), but it doesn’t affirm such false teaching. When we say the Bible is inerrant, we are referring to Scripture rightly interpreted. Theologian Paul Feinberg’s classic definition of inerrancy is still one of the best:
Inerrancy means that when all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.7
When Feinberg says, “When all the facts are known,” he does not mean that we must wait for all the facts to be known to conclude that the Bible is inerrant. Rather, he is showing us that inerrancy is concerned with facts and events that have occurred in time and space and that retain their truth value entirely apart from human observers.
Feinberg also links inerrancy to the original autographs. An “autograph” is the original form of a particular writing. For example, the autograph of Paul’s letter to the Romans is the final draft (if there were multiple drafts) of that document when it was dispatched to the church. Inerrancy is a quality of the original form of the words, not any subsequent copies of those words.8
This is an important aspect of our definition because we know that errors have crept into subsequent copies of Scripture. As the Hebrew books were copied from generation to generation and as the New Testament letters were copied and distributed in the early centuries of church, scribes and copyists made mistakes.
Thankfully, as we will see in greater detail in question nineteen, through the discipline of textual criticism, we’ve been able to reconstruct the original text to a high degree of certainty.9 Even so, it is no argument against the doctrine of inerrancy to point out that copies of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts contain errors or that our modern English Bibles contain a few passages where the original reading may not be discernable. Why? Because inerrancy is not rooted in our ability to reconstruct the original text: it is a quality of the Scripture as it was originally breathed out by God (2 Tim 3:16).10
Finally, Feinberg links inerrancy to every kind of truth claim that Scripture makes, whether that claim is theological, moral, ethical, scientific, or historical. It has been common for those who dislike the doctrine of inerrancy but who still desire to remain tethered to the evangelical tradition to argue that the Bible is only inerrant in its redemptive elements—those statements that relate directly to “faith and practice.” Feinberg’s definition rightly precludes us from drawing a dichotomy between so-called redemptive and non-redemptive elements of Scripture. One reason for the resistance against this false dichotomy is because the Bible’s so-called redemptive elements are so intertwined with what some call “non-redemptive” elements that successfully disentangling one from the other is impossible.
Take, for example, a New Testament text that is utterly basic to rightly understanding the gospel:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve (1 Cor 15:3-4).
Here we find theological truths (“Christ died for our sins”) inexorably interwoven with historical truths (“Christ died…he was buried…he was raised on the third day”) that to dismiss the latter as non-redemptive and thus open to being untrue (errant) would be to undo our salvation. But this is not only the case with this passage—the entire Bible is a harmonious interweaving of theology with history, geography, and scientific statements. God has revealed himself and his salvation in this world in actual time and space. Inerrancy, therefore, must be applied to all of Scripture, not just portions that we deem “redemptive.” As we’ve seen, such bifurcation is practically impossible.
Summary
We’ve seen, then, that while inerrancy is a straightforward concept, it requires us to connect this doctrine with other essential Christian doctrines. Inerrancy refers to the truthfulness of Scripture, and truth refers to that which corresponds with the mind of the Triune God of the Bible. Furthermore, we cannot separate the so-called redemptive and non-redemptive elements of Scripture, for all of it is directly from the mouth of God.
In the next article, we will see that inerrancy is directly linked to the nature and character of God.
NOTES
1Written in 1978, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) sets the doctrine of inerrancy within the context of a full doctrine of Scripture with nineteen articles of affirmation and denial and a nearly 2200-word exposition, but it defines inerrancy with an admirable economy of words: “We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” (Article VII).
2John Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place: The Doctrine of Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 232.
3J. I. Packer, “Encountering Present-Day Views of Scripture,” in Foundations of Biblical Authority, ed. James Montgomery Boice (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 61.
4Stephen J. Wellum, Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, vol. 1 (Brentwood, TN: B & H, 2024), 646.
5Roger Nicole notes that while the biblical concept of “truth” can mean more than correspondence to facts, it never means less. Indeed, “truth” in the Old and New Testaments most often refers to “conformity to facts.” See Roger Nicole, “The Biblical Concept of Truth,” in Scripture and Truth, eds., D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 287-98, esp. 296.
6For example, Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). More recently, see Gregory Boyd, Inspired Imperfection: How the Bible’s Problems Enhance Its Divine Authority (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2020), xvi. The CSBI answers this alleged distinction directly: “We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the field of history and science” (Article XII).
7Paul Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Inerrancy, ed., Norman Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 294.
8See also Greg Bahnsen, “The Inerrancy of the Autographa,” in Inerrancy, 151-93.
9See Robert Plummer, 40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible, second edition (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2021), 55-65; John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry, Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We God the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022).
10Bahnsen, “The Inerrancy of the Autographa,” 190.
