Explaining Inerrancy by R.C. Sproul

Explaining Inerrancy, by R.C. Sproul

Introduction

This essay was written as part of the application process for becoming an Anglican Mission in America priest. I was asked to read and comment on the "Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy." This statement was produced at an international Summit Conference of evangelical leaders in the fall of 1978. It was signed by nearly 300 noted evangelical scholars, including R. C. Sproul who later wrote a small book explaining the Chicago statement. Although I agree with evangelicals in their emphasis on Scripture as the Word of God, I sometimes feel they miss something very important when reading Scripture. They seem to feel as if they have the full story when they have the biblical history given to them as inerrant facts.

As I read Sproul, I saw that the heart of the matter was what he called the "correspondence theory of truth" as applied to the Bible. This view of truth led to the historical/critical method, the search for the historical Jesus, and ultimately, to the denial of God's power to act since the focus was on historical truth as correspondence rather than God's saving action then and now. For a correspondence theory, the bible gives facts, the words correspond to something that factually happened. In a more dynamic understanding, the biblical words reflect things that happened, but at the same time, the biblical words are types of things that will happen as God continues to act. Theologically, as will be seen below in my essay, the correspondence theory does not reflect a clear understanding of Trinity and Incarnation as applied to biblical interpretation. Specifically, the theory does not place the work of God the Son in the wider context of the work of the Father and the Spirit. This leads to a wooden literalism that fails to grasp the full power of God to redeem his lost and corrupted creation.

The Chicago Statement was composed of a number of articles, and I will begin by quoting all of them. After that, I comment on them one after another. Here is the Chicago Statement.

Article I.
WE AFFIRM that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God.
WE DENY that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source.

Article II.
WE AFFIRM that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture.
WE DENY that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible.

Article III.
WE AFFIRM that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God.
WE DENY that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity.

Article IV.
WE AFFIRM that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.
WE DENY that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration.

Article V.
WE AFFIRM that God's revelation within the Holy Scriptures was progressive.
WE DENY that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings.

Article VI.
WE AFFIRM that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.
WE DENY that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.

Article VII.
WE AFFIRM that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.
WE DENY that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

Article VIII.
WE AFFIRM that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.
WE DENY that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

Article IX.
WE AFFIRM that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.
WE DENY that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God's Word.

Article X.
WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

Article XI.
WE AFFIRM that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.
WE DENY that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated.

Article XII.
WE AFFIRM that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.
WE DENY that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

Article XIII.
WE AFFIRM the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.
WE DENY that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Article XIV.
WE AFFIRM the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.
WE DENY that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the Bible.

Article XV.
WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy is grounded in the teaching of the Bible about inspiration.
WE DENY that Jesus' teaching about Scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity.
Article XVI.
WE AFFIRM that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith throughout its history.
WE DENY that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.

Article XVII.
WE AFFIRM that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the Scriptures, assuring believers of the truthfulness of God's written Word.
WE DENY that this witness of the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against Scripture.

Article XVIII.
WE AFFIRM that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.
WE DENY the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship.

Article XIX.
WE AFFIRM that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ.
WE DENY that such confession is necessary for salvation. However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church.

Comments on the Nineteen Articles
I affirm the first five articles. When in seminary I was taught that Scripture is the "Word of God in the words of men." I eventually came to the conclusion that it is the Word and words of God as the words of men. This affirms the verbal, objective, propositional content of Scripture as God's revelation and that human language through the inspiration of the Spirit is adequate to that revelation.

In regard to Article V, there are commands in the Old Testament that appear to be contradicted by the New. For example, one could notice that God commanded the slaughter of entire cities when Joshua and the Israelites entered Canaan. This, like the killing of the Egyptian firstborn, the slaughter of the Canaanites, the Exile of Israel, is all judgments of God against sin. That judgment was born by Christ on the cross as the means of our salvation. From this perspective, certain Old Testament commands are not contradicted by the New Testament, but they are placed in a wider context. The judgment against sin, however, still holds for those who reject God's saving action in Christ.

Articles VI-XI all make sense to me.

Article XII on the inerrancy of the whole of Scripture doesn't quite make sense to me. I am not sure I understand what is being claimed, even given the explanation by Sproul (pp. 26-27). The article appears to be saying that Scripture is inerrant and infallible in regard to science and that science cannot be used to contradict Scripture. It gives no example of science contradicting Scripture. It gives an example of a "scientific" philosophical perspective contradicting Scripture, as in the idea that the "origin of humanity is the result of a cosmic accident or the product of blind, impersonal forces," but such an idea is not science. The sciences of physics, biology, or chemistry limit themselves to "blind, impersonal forces," but that is more of a definition of their field or study than a scientific claim as to humanity's ultimate origin. By definition science cannot hypothesize anything before the existence of matter, for science assumes matter as its starting point. How matter came to be is not a scientific question.

If the Article was saying that science could not be used to deny the biblical miracles, nor the miraculous creation of the universe, then I would agree with the Article. I believe that God miraculously created the universe and continues to act miraculously within it. But denying miracles is not a scientific claim. Science assumes the regularity of nature, but if something irregular occurs, science doesn't deny that it occurred, but simply states that it cannot account for the irregularity. Sproul mentions as much on page 33.

Further, science assumes that present conditions have always held, at least in the sense of the laws that now govern events. The doctrine of the Fall, however, would teach that the universe is corrupted, that it groans for its liberation (Romans), that there will someday be a new heaven and earth. From this perspective, Genesis one and two describe events prior to a Fall when conditions, including the laws of nature as we now know them, may well have been very different. What the Bible describes as having happened in "the beginning" (Genesis 1:1), and what science describes as having happened long ago as extrapolated from the laws of the present corrupt universe, may well be two different things. For that reason, when science extrapolates backward to a beginning, I am not convinced that this negates what Scripture says happened prior to a Fall. I believe that God created an original cosmos out of nothing and that Genesis one and two narrate God's creative acts. I am not exactly sure of the status of these acts. I tend to believe that Genesis narrates turning points in an historical and miraculous process. I am not convinced that "day" in Genesis one means twenty four hours. Among other things, the sun and moon, which indicate "festivals, days, and years," were not created until the fourth day. At the same time, I do not think Genesis one and two are a myth, that is, an account of the present order given narrative form. I think the accounts are a history of divine acts culminating in a good creation which is now corrupted due to sin and the Fall. For that reason, I don't think science and Genesis one and two are describing exactly the same cosmos. Genesis one and two see human beings at the apex or center of creation, with all of creation ordered for human welfare. Present existence, however, reveals a very different picture. The recent tsunami is an example. This, to my mind, is due to the Fall. Jesus reversed these conditions, placing human beings at the center of creation through his nature miracles and other divine acts.

As an example of science possibly contradicting Scripture, Sproul considers the matter of whether the universe is heliocentric or geocentric. According to Sproul, the church, prior to Galileo, mistakenly adopted the Ptolemaic view that the earth was the center of the universe. Science taught otherwise, and reinvestigation of Scripture led to the conclusion that Scripture did not teach either view. I would agree with this because I do not think the biblical writers were inspired by God to make a scientific pronouncement. As far as I know, the Bible never says the earth is spinning and this is the cause of day and night. It always describes the sun as rising, crossing the sky, and going down. These are accurate observations. They are at the level of data. But science is more than data. It is experiment, observation, data, theory, more experiment, observation, data, revised theory, and so on. In regard to the sun, I do not see the scientific approach being set forth anywhere in the Bible. When Sproul says that Scripture does not teach a geocentric universe, he must be referring to the fact that Scripture does not present a theory about the earth going around the sun. In that regard, I don't see Scripture presenting scientific theories. I see lots of observations in Scripture, but no comprehensive theory organizing data. If that be true, how can science contradict Scripture if Scripture gives no developed theory? Perhaps it could be said that science contradicts Scripture at the level of observation. But science cannot logically deny the validity or prior observations on the basis of present observations. For example, I believe in the empty tomb and bodily resurrection. There are no published scientific observations demonstrating such events today, but that does not imply that it didn't happen. The claim that Christ remained in the tomb could, I suppose, be scientific in the sense that it is an extrapolation from present conditions, and such extrapolation is an aspect of science. But science logically cannot claim that its extrapolations must always occur. In fact, observation is prior to scientific prediction or extrapolation, and science must hold that observation can contradict present theory as applied to events, for it not, there is no need for continued observation.

In short, the article seems to be saying that science cannot be used to contradict Scripture, and I would generally agree with this claim. My sense, however, is that if science is used to deny Scripture, it is not science that is being used, but non-scientific assumptions that appear to be scientific.

Article XII also states that inerrancy applies to the biblical history as well. I would like to comment on this in relation to Article XIII.

Article XIII claims that inerrancy is not violated by the fact that Scripture may lack modern technical precision, that it may use poor grammar, that it presents parallel accounts, that it uses hyperbole, and so forth. I can accept these qualifications to the notion of inerrancy.

The Article also adopts what it calls a "correspondence view of truth" (p. 30). This is directed against those "who would redefine truth to relate merely to redemptive intent, the purely personal or the like, rather than to mean that which corresponds with reality" (p. 31). This doesn't quite make sense to me for theological reasons. Against the gnostics the church adopted the regula, the canon of truth, for interpreting the Scripture. This canon eventually became the Creeds and Anglicanism has affirmed the Creeds as an important guide to truthful interpretation. I believe that the right interpretation of Scripture, beginning with the Old Testament, was taught by Jesus to his early apostles, especially in the resurrection, and this apostolic teaching was handed down in the Church and summarized in the regula.

In this view God is one yet triune, and further, the center of God's revelation is Jesus Christ. Further, I would want to say that Scripture is the Word of God written. As the Word of God, Scripture does not simply correspond to reality. It creates, directs, orders, and recreates reality, which then corresponds to the Word. Scripture shows this to be true. God announced his Word to Moses in the burning bush, and by this Word God liberated Israel and created history. The prophets spoke and created history, Jeremiah's call being a clear example. God made all things through the Word Jesus Christ and is remaking them by his crucifixion and resurrection so that, someday, there will be a new heavens and new earth. To put it simply, the Word does not correspond to reality. Rather, the Word becomes flesh, that is, the Word becomes concrete historical existence. Reality then corresponds to the Word not vice-versa.

Further, God is triune, Father, Son, and Spirit, and each time God speaks all persons are present in the speaking. The persons of the Trinity, by appropriation, have a temporal aspect. The Father corresponds to the beginning (creation), the Son to the event, the present, the moment of God speaking, and the Spirit to the future, to the "life of the world to come" to quote the Creed. Therefore, when God acts or speaks, the event, Word, historical reality, contains all three aspects of Father, Son, and Spirit, past, present, and future. Further, all biblical events lead up to Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Word, and all come from him toward the day when he will return to judge the living and the dead. As the incarnation of God, he is the complete, decisive revelation of God. There God is seen clearly. For that reason, I believe all the stories about Jesus in the gospels that he was born of a virgin, that he did the miracles, that he was crucified, rose again, and ascended. I do not think the gospel writers were worried about getting every story exactly right in every detail, many of the events they describe happened frequently. They reported, summarized, and condensed, but they accurately described what God in Jesus did, is still doing, and will do. Aside from unrepeatable events like birth, death, and resurrection, I believe Jesus is doing today what the New Testament proclaims he did them.

Let me give another example, one taken from the Old Testament, the descriptions of Moses and the plagues. This section of Scripture, Exodus 7-12, is the Word of God written. As such, it is ontologically prior to the events it describes, and further, reflects all three persons of the Trinity. In reference to the Father, it sets forth a critical event in the restoration of God's original creation (Eden) as a place where all are freed from oppressive toil. In reference to the Son, the original events themselves, God acted miraculously to save Israel. I do not believe, however, that one must believe that the text corresponds exactly to what happened historically. This is because the text has a future reference. In reference to the Spirit (the future), it is an eschatological description describing the conquest of the pagan deities associated with social and economic oppression. This conquest was only decisively effected by cross and resurrection, and will only be fully visible in the "life of the world to come." For this reason, I think the accounts use hyperbole, completing toward eternity what actually happened. For example, it may not have actually been the case that the hail "struck down everything in the fields, man and beast. It struck all the crops in the fields, and it shattered every tree in the fields. Only in the land of Goshen where the Hebrews lived, was there no hail." (Exodus 9:25-26) I am not sure that every tree, person, or beast was struck down or shattered. I think there were plagues like the hail, miraculous events done by God, but I do not know their exact extent. The narrative presents the plagues as God's complete and decisive victory over the pagan powers. The revelation of the Old Testament, however, is but a shadow of what is decisively fulfilled in Christ. Only in Christ were the pagan gods decisively defeated, and only when he comes again to judge the living and the dead will that defeat be fully manifest. I believe God acted miraculously in Egypt and at the Red Sea, but I do not necessarily believe that the account corresponds exactly to what originally happened in the time of Moses because the hyperbole in the description points to its fulfillment on the last day. Only at the end of time will God's wrath strike down "everything in the fields, man and beast," those who oppose the will of God revealed in Jesus Christ. That is, the correspondence of the written Word of Exodus 9:25-26 is not simply the original historical events of the plagues, but rather, past, present, and future, the language revealing its fulfillment in the future of Christ. This triune pattern centering in the Incarnation appears to be the pattern of the biblical revelation.

This view differs from the liberal perspective which rejects miraculous accounts and understands Scripture as ordinary events seen through the eyes of faith. Nor does the view set forth here affirm certain types of fundamentalism which, to my mind, accept the correspondence view of reality. This fundamentalist perspective sees history as prior to Word, the Word merely describes events rather than creating them, and further, the referent of the written words are the original events alone rather than these events in relation to the whole of the biblical revelation from creation to eschaton. As a result, it becomes impossible to relate the Old Testament to the New, since the Old cannot refer to Christ except by literal predictions. It also becomes difficult to interpret the text as referring to God�s power to act today. For example, if one is in the midst of a storm at sea and crying out to God for help, it is perfectly possible for God to still the storm since God has authority over nature as seen in the plagues. If the plagues mean anything today, then what God does today cannot exactly duplicate what happened in Egypt because we are at a different point in history. There is no land of Goshen here in America. This means that the biblical text can have relevance for today even if the text does not precisely describe what originally happened since what God does today can not be precisely what he originally did in the time of Moses. The significant point is that the biblical descriptions are saving types or figures which reveal how God acted in the time of Moses and how he can act now. The exact historical rendering of those figures then and now varies from the biblical description of the types. Having said all that, I must emphasize that I believe God acted miraculously in the time of Moses, that something like the plagues did occur, and above all, something astonishing happened at the Red Sea.

In contrast to modern fundamentalism and so much liberal exegesis, the Church Fathers read the Old Testament figurally and christologically. They saw, for example, the Passover lamb as a type of Christ. They loved figural interpretations, which I affirm, and even included allegory, although that makes less sense to me. The figural meaning is what enables the text to become a living reality today, with past events as figures of God's present and future acts. I think, however, that they tended to believe that the events literally happened as narrated even as they referred the events to Christ. The figural meaning, however, does not depend upon the original history being in exact correspondence to the words in every instance. The Fathers, for example, interpret the plagues of Egypt as various vices, the flies represent pride, the gnats heresy, and so forth. This interpretation does not require that every miraculous plague happened exactly as narrated.

Finally, my thinking appears to diverge somewhat from that of the Article as explained by Sproul, and I am probably amiss in certain respects. I do feel strongly, however, that Scripture creates and orders reality rather than simply corresponding to it.

In general, Article XIV makes sense to me. I do not think one part of scripture should be interpreted to contradict another. Inconsistencies, to my mind, are a sign that I do not fully grasp what Scripture is saying.

Article XV claims that the Bible is inspired because Jesus taught it as inspired. I agree with this. The Article then appears to affirm that Jesus thought that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and therefore, since Jesus could not lie, Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Years ago I read by book by Arnold Come entitled Human Spirit, Holy Spirit. He gave a detailed biblical analysis of how Scripture understands corporate personality. He described how biblical peoples understood how a person could live in another, or live in words spoken by others, or live on in words written about them. For example, Mark's gospel begins with the words, "According to Mark," and then the words, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." The idea here is that the words of Mark's gospel are of Jesus Christ he lives as these words, they are of him, they set him forth. But they are also according to Mark. Mark wrote the words, literally, but ultimately they are of Jesus Christ. The same applies to Moses. I am not convinced that Jesus believed that Moses wrote every word in the Pentateuch literally. I do believe that Jesus thought that Moses, the Exodus under the leadership of Moses, and the law as given by God to Moses, was the source of the Pentateuch, and I would agree with this in the sense that Jesus is the source of Mark's gospel. The narrative voice for major portions of the Pentateuch speaks of Moses. It is not the "I" of Moses speaking, just as Mark speaks of Jesus rather than Jesus speaking the whole of Mark's gospel. As for the documentary hypothesis, it has little bearing on my thinking because I think the Pentateuch is God's Word as written, not as reconstructed according to probabilities. I read it as a narrative fulfilled in Christ.

I do not think I have sufficiently studied how the Church has interpreted Scripture throughout history to give a detailed opinion on Article XVI. From what I do know, and I have read on the matter, the literal, historical verbal sense is the first sense of Scripture and the Church has always affirmed this. This is akin to inerrancy as explained by Sproul. At the same time, however, the Fathers seem to have a sense of Scripture that Sproul appears to lack, namely, the typological or figural sense which depends upon God acting as Father, Son, and Spirit, one God. Theologically, to my way of thinking, Sproul appears to emphasize the second person of the Trinity to the neglect of the first and third persons. In my view, Scripture is inerrant in relation to Father, Son, and Spirit, creation, incarnation, and world to come, past, present, and future. That is the locus of the inerrancy, and not simply the present tense of a biblical passage.

I agree with Article XVII and believe that one of the surest signs of receiving the Spirit is a hunger for and understanding of Scripture.

I also agree with articles XVIII and XIX.

In regard to Adam and Eve, I tend to think they were real human beings although I do not fully understand what originally happened. Creating out of nothing is beyond my understanding. Further, I don't really know how Genesis one and two fit together in regard to Adam and Eve. Genesis one speaks of a general creation of human beings, and then in Genesis two, there is a focus on Adam and Eve. The hypothesis of two creation accounts may well be true, but the two accounts are in Scripture, one after another, and I read them in that order. I think they are telling us historical events in some form. If there was a single original couple, I don't see how they could be the progenitors of the human race without incest. Even so, I think they existed somehow. There is also the New Testament witness, I Corinthians and Romans, and that would drive me toward believing in an original couple. Romans 5:14 and I Cor. 15:22 make me think that Adam was a pattern of Christ. As a result, if all died in Adam, Adam's sin could have retroactive effects, the corruption of creation, just as Christ's sinlessness had retroactive effects, the salvation of the elect who lived before Christ. Basically I believe things I do not understand.

I believe in a Fall, a Fall due to sin, a Fall that corrupted everything. In Jesus Christ the Fall was conquered, and when he returns, the old creation will be superseded by a new heavens and earth.

I don't quite know what to think about Jonah. If the literary genre were a story to make certain theological points, then I would not need to believe that there was a man named Jonah who was in the belly of a whale. If the literary genre were history, then I would be inclined to think that something happened along the lines given in the story. In that case, I would read it as a type of how God might well deal with me or others, letting me run into difficulties if I did not do his will, rescuing me as I cry for help, and finally, by grace, enabling me to do his will. I think there have been a goodly number of people who got in trouble and had unusual and miraculous deliverance by the hand of the living God. Even if the literary genre was a fictional story, I would still want to insist that the type of God's action it narrates is a viable historical possibility, then and now.

I must confess that the Bible is a wonderful thing to me, yet at the same time, I do not grasp it in many ways. For that reason I am not fully confident in what I have written here, but am thankful for the light I do have. I do not believe that Scripture is a mystery whose verbal content dissolves into nothing, but rather, it is a mystery because it can be understood. It has verbal content that makes sense, and in the event of making sense, reveals mystery. Thomas could put his hand in Jesus' side, his fingers in the holes made by the nails in Christ's hands. I believe Thomas did that, literally, yet as it happened, Thomas encountered something that was beyond comprehension. That is my sense of the Bible.

The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
April, 2005

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