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Biblical Inerrancy

The doctine of Biblical Inerrancy has been defended by the Fathers of the Church from the earliest stages of Christianity. St. Irenaeus upholds it against the Gnostics, St. Epiphanius against the Anomceans, St. Augustine against the Manichaeans. Origen indeed distinguished between what the apostles and prophets said in their own name and what they said in the name of God; but even Abelard had his doubts as to the legitimacy of this distinction. Erasmus has been charged with admitting slips of memory on the part of the apostles.

When the Fathers speak as if every letter and title of Holy Scriptures were sacred, they merely emphasize the infallibility of the writing resulting from the divine assistance granted to the inspired authors; when they speak of the sacred writers as instruments of the Holy Ghost, they lay stress on the infallible impulse God exerted on the writers' will and God's consequent principal authorship of the Scriptures, without denying to the inspired writers the privilege of co-operating with God's work after the manner of intelligent and free agents; when they represent the inspired authors as composing under the dictation of the Holy Ghost, they express forcibly the fact that every truth contained in Holy Writ was, either mediately or immediately, either by revelation in its strictest sense or by a supernatural comprehensive judgement concerning the truthfulness of facts and principles known by natural means, divinely proposed to the intellect of the same authors, without implying the necessity that the outward force should be divinely infused.

Though the Council of Trent did not expressly insist on the dogma of Biblical inerrancy, it enunciates expressly the dogma on which Biblical inerrancy rests and from which it flows, by proclaiming in distinct terms that God is the author of both the Old and the New Testament. At the time of the Council, Biblical inerrancy was considered as a matter of course.

Pope Leo XIII issued his celebrated Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which he issued on November 18, 1893. "So far is it," says the venerable Pontiff, "from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration is not only essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the Supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church. . . . Hence because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, we cannot therefore say that it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error, and not the primary author. For by supernatural power He so moved and impelled them to write, He was so present to them, that the things which He ordered, and those only, they first rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words, and with infallible truth. Otherwise it could not be said that He was the author of the entire Scripture. Such has always been the persuasion of the Fathers. It follows that those who maintain that error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings, either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration or make God the author of such error."

Supporters of Biblical inerrancy insisted that the vivisection theories of Biblical critics must be discarded. There can be no more thought of a limited inspiration, no more question of partial Inerrancy. Every sentence of the Bible is inspired, every statement of the Bible is inerrant. All this is very simple and very clear; but the application of the formula every statement of the Bible is inerrant is manifold and far-reaching.

The little volume of 128 pages on "The Fundamentals", sent out in 1910 by The Testimony Publishing Company contains seven chapters on the vital, present-day religious and theological issues, and gave name to the religious trend known as Fundamentalism. Canon Dyson Hague's "History of the Higher Criticism" was hardly convinced that the writer of the Pentateuch produced his history out of pre-existing materials, as most historians have done. Rather, according to the faith of the Church, the Five Books of Moses, commonly called the Pentateuch, are by one author: inspired by God; given to us by Moses; and authorized by Jesus Christ, the infallible Teacher, with His imprimatur of Deity. The universal tradition of the Jews and the unchallenged tradition of the Catholic Church is that the beginning, the Divine beginning of the Bible, in the five books of Moses, is from God, through Moses, in the Holy Book called the Bible.

In The Battle for the Bible, respected evangelical leader Harold Lindsell stated, "It is not unfair to allege that among denominations like Episcopal, United Methodist, United Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church U.S. there is not a single theological seminary that takes a stand in favor of biblical infallibility. And there is not a single seminary where there are not faculty members who disavow one or more of the major teachings of the Christian faith."