Evangelical Self-Identity and the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy John D. Woodbridge | Sep 5, 2011 .http://thegospelcoalition.org/resources/a/evangelical_self-identity_and_the_doctrine_of_biblical_inerrancy Portions of the article a copied below to provide a summary and bolded for emphasis: Summary by T.J. Tofflemire
Carl Henry was one of the prime architects of the post–World War II evangelical resurgence. He had penned the landmark book The Uneasy Conscience of American Fundamentalism. He had challenged the fundamentalist movement to reflect on “the social implications of its message for the non-Christian world.” In 1976, he had published the book Evangelicals in Search of Identity.3Consequently, when an evangelical scholar called Dr. Henry a fundamentalist, he had good reason to be nonplussed. By the early 1990s, a powerful historiography had emerged that portrayed the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as “fundamentalist” and not as an “evangelical” doctrine. Do our beliefs about scriptural authority, for example, reside within identifiable central teachings of the historic Christian church? If they do not, we may have become doctrinal innovators regarding our views of Scripture despite our intentions to uphold orthodox Christian teaching.
Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School, describes well the value of statements of faith: For the Christian there is only one road. Jesus said, “I am the way [road] and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Or, as Augustine put it, Christ is “both our native country and himself also the road to that country.” This analogy is not a perfect one, of course; still, we might push it a little further to say that the Bible is our road map, a divinely given and indispensable resource that helps us to find the road and keeps us on it while the Holy Spirit helps us to see both the road and the guardrails [statements of faith] and to keep both in proper perspective.”
In this essay, I will reiterate the thesis that biblical inerrancy has been a church doctrine or Augustinian central teaching of the Western Christian churches, including evangelical Protestant churches. Consequently, evangelicals who affirm the doctrine of biblical inerrancy are by no means doctrinal innovators. By biblical inerrancy, I mean in shorthand the doctrine that the Bible is infallible for faith and practice as well as for matters of history and science.5 By the expression church doctrine, I am referring to a widespread shared belief of Christian churches that have had a historical existence in the West.
As already observed, not all theologians and church historians are agreed that biblical inerrancy has in point of fact been a central church teaching among Western churches. Indeed, during the past forty years an influential historiography has emerged arguing that biblical inerrancy is a doctrinal innovation—the provenance of which is American fundamentalism, itself portrayed as a doctrinally innovative movement and thus suspect. As late as the 1970s, most evangelicals assumed that biblical inerrancy was one of their nonnegotiable fundamental beliefs. For example, in 1975, in a book David Wells and I edited, The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing, Martin Marty of the University of Chicago indicated that evangelicals and fundamentalists shared a belief in the doctrine of biblical inerrancy: “Both evangelicals and fundamentalists insist on the ‘inerrancy of scripture’ as being the most basic of all their fundamentals.”7 But under the influence of the new historiography, a good number of historians and theologians later balked at accepting the validity of Professor Marty’s assessment. They claimed only fundamentalists uphold biblical inerrancy, not evangelicals. By the 1980s, Marty himself identified the doctrine of biblical inerrancy more as a fundamentalist doctrine than as a “most basic” doctrine of evangelicals.
To this latter endeavor, I now turn. First, I will propose (citing initially particular Roman Catholics) that in fact a number of leading churchmen in the West affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture for matters of faith and practice as well as history and “science.” They thereby contributed to an Augustinian tradition regarding biblical inerrancy. To demonstrate this point, I will offer a brief reception-history sketch of the way biblical inerrancy was perceived by these churchmen. By reception history, I mean the reconstruction of a history of the perceptions of individuals regarding a particular idea, an event, a phenomenon, or material objects.12
Second, we will revisit the same history of biblical authority from the Patristic era until the late nineteenth century, but this time we will call to the witness stand an essentially different set of witnesses and authorities who will testify in the main about the views of Protestants. Some of these witnesses were not themselves partisans of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that such was a central church doctrine of the Western churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Frequently, testimonies of nonpartisans are of special worth, issuing as they do from witnesses not suspected of making claims about biblical inerrancy owing to ecclesiastical or confessional loyalties
Augustine clearly affirmed as a nonnegotiable church doctrine that there are no errors in sacred Scripture. Such was a working premise for him, an essential guardrail if you will. When St. Jerome in his commentary on Galatians 2:14 intimated that Paul had relied upon a “white lie,” Augustine delivered a sharp if not alarmist rejoinder:
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. . . . 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.14
A further claim of Augustine became a salient component of a church doctrine about the truthfulness of Scripture. In his AD 405 letter to Faustus the Manichean, Augustine provided an explanation regarding the ways a reader may have supposed there are “errors” in the extant copies of Scripture. He wrote:
“I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And 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.”16
14^Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine 28.3.
15^Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.7.10.
16^Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine 82.3
In sum, Augustine proposed a threefold explanation of the provenance of supposed errors within Scripture. If you believed you had spotted one, it was because you had encountered a manuscript error, or the translator of your text had engaged in a faulty translation, or you had simply misunderstood what Scripture was saying. By Augustine’s day, some Christian scholars were practicing a form of lower scriptural criticism, that is, attempting to remove copyists’ errors from extant copies of the Scripture.
Augustine also argued that Scripture is written in a language accommodated to the weakness of our understanding. 17This gracious divine accommodation helps us with our frail minds to understand Scripture. Some passages of Scripture are written in the language of appearance— how things appear to us. Scripture is not written in a way to render it as a “scientific” textbook. Rather, when it describes the natural world, it does so truthfully (without error) but not necessarily in exhaustive and overly precise terms.
17.^For Augustine’s view of accommodation, see Polman, Word of God according to St. Augustine; Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 94
Johannes Eck (1496–1543), a Roman Catholic contemporary of Martin Luther.21 In 1518, Eck became alarmed that Erasmus, the brilliant Roman Catholic classicist and competent biblical scholar, had indicated that Matthew had made a mistake in substituting one word for another. Richard Simon (1638–1712).28 An Oratorian priest, Simon is often hailed as the “Father of Higher Criticism.” In the years spanned by Paul Hazard’s famous “Crisis of the European Mind” (1680–1715), Simon was probably the most erudite biblical expert in all Europe.29 He had a profound knowledge of Rabbinics as well as the theology and liturgies of the Eastern churches, gained in part while he served as the librarian at the Oratorian Order’s House on Rue St. Honoré in Paris. He had read and cataloged precious manuscripts, both Western and Eastern. On the very first page of his epochal Critical History of the Old Testament, Simon generalized about the current belief of Christians and Jews concerning the Bible’s infallibility in 1678: see below:
“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. Is there anyone, either Jew or Christian, who does not recognize that this Scripture being the pure Word of God, is at the same time the first principle and the foundation of Religion. But in that men have been the depositories of Sacred Books, as well as all other books, and that the first Originals [les premiers Originaux] had been lost; it was in some measure impossible that a number of changes occurred, due as much to the length of time passing, as to the negligence of copyists. It is for this reason St. Augustine recommends before all things to those who wish to study Scripture to apply themselves to the Criticism of the Bible and to correct the mistakes [fautes] of their copies.”
In Providentissimus Deus: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture (Nov. 18, 1893), Leo XIII indicated that the Roman Catholic Church affirmed that Holy Scripture is without error not only for matters of faith and practice but also for matters of history and science (a core entailment of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy). He chastised those who limited the inerrancy of Scripture to matters of faith and morals.
“But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it—this system cannot be tolerated.”39
38.^Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture, November 18, 1893, sec. 20. Concerning Monseigneur d’Hulst’s limitation on the extent of infallibility’s purview, see James Tunstead Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810: A Review and Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 220.
39.^Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, sec. 18
“We have to contend against those who, making an evil use of physical science, minutely scrutinize the Sacred Book in order to detect the writers in a mistake, and to take occasion to vilify its contents. Attacks of this kind, bearing as they do on matters of sensible experience, are peculiarly dangerous to the masses, and also to the young who are beginning literary studies.”40.
Toward the end of his encyclical (sec. 21), Leo XIII summarized Catholic teaching regarding biblical inerrancy. He referred to a passage from Augustine we have already cited as the warrant for this church doctrine.
In 1910, the papacy tried to rein in the teachings of so-called “Catholic modernists” (a term first used in 1905) by stipulating that all members of the clergy must swear an antimodernist oath.44 Catholic “modernists” such as Alfred Loisy at the Catholic Institute in Paris had earlier attempted to make teachings of higher criticism and evolution more acceptable within the Roman Catholic Church.45 They denied the inerrancy of Scripture. The papacy categorically rejected the modernists’ initiatives and continued to affirm the church doctrine of biblical inerrancy.46
Some years later, Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) once again condemned the limited inerrancy position (that is, the exclusion of history and science from an inerrancy definition).47 The pope wrote that when some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine [at Trent], by which such divine authority is claimed for the “entire books with all their parts” as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as “obiter dicta” and—as they contended—in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter “Providentissimus Deus” . . . justly and rightly condemned these errors.48
46.^Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu on Promoting Biblical Studies, Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Providentissimus Deus.
47.^Ibid., sec. 1. Citing Leo XIII and St. Augustine, Pius XII wrote: “Finally, it is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain passages of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred, since the divine inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it 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 constant faith of the Church” (sec. 3).
48.^Ibid., sec. 3
Nevertheless, in the final edition (Nov. 18, 1965) of Dei Verbum (the Constitution on Divine Revelation, art. 11), the Roman Catholic Church at vatican II apparently broke with its own Augustinian definition of inerrancy and affirmed, “We must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to Sacred Scriptures.” Thus for Catholics the bible became no longer inerrant on matters of science and history.
Protestant Views:
But did the Augustinian church doctrine of Scripture’s inerrancy also constitute a commonly held church belief for Protestants in the West? To address this question, we will again pursue a reception-history sketch of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as it relates to Protestants.
Protestant Reformers from Martin Luther to Thomas Cranmer believed that the Christian church during the Patristic era and beyond, until 1200 or so, had remained basically orthodox and thus belonged to them. The Reformers believed they were recovering church doctrine, not inventing it. Our first witness is James L. Kugel, a specialist in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation.
From 1982 to 2003, Professor Kugel, now living in Israel, served as the Starr Professor of Hebrew at Harvard. His class on the Bible attracted up to nine hundred students—one of the most popular classes at the university.
In his recent book How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, Kugel argues that the church fathers believed Scripture is without error and engaged in harmonization efforts to demonstrate that such is the case.57 Kugel writes, “It is a striking fact that all ancient interpreters seem to have shared very much the same set of expectations about the biblical text.”
Then Kugel outlines four assumptions held in common by ancient interpreters. According to the third assumption in his listing, the church fathers upheld the perfect truthfulness of Scripture. Assumption 3 reads: “Interpreters also assumed that the Bible contained no contradictions or mistakes. It is perfectly harmonious, despite its being an anthology. . . .”60 Kugel further observes:
“And of course the Bible ought not to contradict itself or even seem to repeat itself needlessly, so that if it said “and the two of them walked together” twice, the second occurrence cannot be merely repetitive; it must mean something different from the first. In short, the Bible, they felt, is an utterly consistent, seamless, perfect book.”
Now, Professor Kugel is by no means an advocate of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. His testimony, therefore, cannot be easily impugned as if it stems from a partisan spirit.
Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant Orthodox
In 1983, Dr. Reinitzer published Biblia deutsch: Luthers Bibelübersetzung und ihre Tradition in celebration of Luther’s five hundredth birthday.63 In researching this book, Reinitzer, a historian, had studied the history of various editions of the Luther Bible (1534) and the Reformer’s views of scriptural authority and interpretation. Reinitzer ranks among the leading experts in the world regarding Luther’s view of biblical authority. I asked Reinitzer what he thought Luther’s view of biblical authority might be. Did Luther believe in biblical inerrancy, for example? Reinitzer’s answer was straightforward: “Of course,” he replied. He then proceeded to give me an unsolicited brief history lesson regarding how the idea had gained such currency that Luther did not believe in biblical inerrancy. From his perspective, it was in particular neoorthodox historians and theologians who created and promoted this misleading historiography. They often argued that a disjunction existed between Luther’s view of biblical authority, with its christological focus, and views of later Lutherans called “Scholastics” or “Protestant Orthodox.”
Olivier Fatio of the University of Geneva has made the same case in reference to the existence of continuity of belief between John Calvin and the Reformed Orthodox. He and others, such as Jill Raitt, have specifically challenged the neoorthodox historiography of Ernst Bizer, who had claimed that Lambert Daneau was the first Reformed theologian to betray Calvin’s views by introducing a rationalistic approach to doing theology and by including the natural world under the purview of the Bible’s authority.66
Interestingly enough, Richard Muller also argues in agreement with Reinitzer and Fatio that a continuity of thought about the Bible’s infallibility existed between Luther and Calvin and the Protestant orthodox of the seventeenth century. Muller adds the further point that Catholic theologians before the Reformation also upheld the same doctrine. In his encyclopedic study Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1720.
In his Disputation on Holy Scripture, against the Papists, especially Bellarmine and Stapleton (1588), Whitaker indicated that Protestants upheld as church doctrine the inerrancy of Scripture: “But, say they [Roman Catholics], the church never errs; the pope never errs. We shall shew both assertions to be false in the proper place. We say that scripture never errs, and therefore judge that interpretation to be the truest which agrees with scripture. What have we to do with churches, or councils, or popes, unless they can show that what they define is in harmony with the scriptures.” Like Catholics before him, the Protestant Whitaker claimed Augustine’s teaching on Scripture as one essential warrant for his belief in inerrancy. In his Critical History of the Old Testament (1678), Richard Simon described Whitaker’s Disputation on Holy Scripture as a “key” Protestant apologetic regarding biblical authority. In other words, Simon indicated that as late as 1678, most self-identifying Christians and Jews affirmed, and I quote the priest, “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.”
But during Paul Hazard’s so-called “Crisis of the European Mind” (1680–1715), a good number of prominent participants in the Republic of Letters began to question the inerrancy position, as had some skeptics, deists, Socinians, and others before them.
In his posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1841), Coleridge, who was intent upon overthrowing belief in the Bible’s infallibility, quoted a skeptic’s claim to the effect that most English Protestants, whether Methodist, Calvinist, Quaker, or other, believed in biblical infallibility. Coleridge responded, “What could I reply to this?—I could neither deny the fact, nor evade the conclusion—namely, that such is at present the popular belief.”88 According to Coleridge, a commitment to the Bible’s infallibility remained an important church doctrine for most English Protestants until at least the 1830s.
Reflections: Evangelical Self-Identity and the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is no late imaginative creation of A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield in 1881 or of twentieth-century American fundamentalism. Rather, it is an essential evangelical belief based upon a biblical warrant. It resides squarely within the Augustinian tradition regarding the Bible’s truthfulness. Both Roman Catholics and the Protestant Reformers affirmed the church doctrine. It is not questionable that the great historic churches have held these creed definitions in the sense of affirming the errorless infallibility of the Word. This is everywhere shown by the way in which all the great bodies of Protestant theologians have handled Scripture in their commentaries, systems of theology, catechisms and sermons. All the great world-moving men, as Luther, Calvin, Knox, Wesley, Whitefield and Chalmers, and proportionately those most like them, have so handled the Divine Word.95
Among the confessions upholding “errorless infallibility,” they cited the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, the Westminster Confession, and the Second Helvetic Confession.96 Our reception histories lend credence to their claims.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy was not being created. Rather, as we saw, European Catholic modernists and Protestants such as the ones Sabatier and Huxley referenced were attempting to modify or jettison the doctrine.
In the very first fascicle of Christianity Today (1956), Graham wrote a remarkable article entitled “Biblical Authority in Evangelism”— a piece well worth reading even today. In the article (and in his autobiography, Just As I Am), he described how one evening, troubled by his doubts about scriptural authority, he went out into the woods near Forest Home camp up in the mountains around Los Angeles. Graham placed his open Bible on a stump and he prayed. “There are many things in this book I do not understand. . . . I can’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.” I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it: “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith!” . . . I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months. Not all my questions were answered, but a major bridge had been crossed. In my heart and mind, I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.”102
Graham then indicated that this renewed commitment to the authority of Scripture constituted the “secret” of his ministry. He reminds us that God’s Holy Word has great power to transform people’s lives. We can sometimes study Scripture in an academic fashion and, paradoxically enough, lose our sense of its power as the very Word of God
And finally, Carl F. H. Henry, one of the prime movers in the evangelical resurgence after World War II, wrote an elegant piece in 1991, in which he too encouraged evangelical Christians to uphold a high view of biblical authority. Dr. Henry reminds us that we do not serve any Christ but the Christ according to Holy Scripture.John D. Woodbridge is research professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois