BIBLE-INERRANCY
If Jesus knew
that Scripture contained human error yet never made this fact known to His
followers, misleading them rather by His insistently positive attitude toward
it, He can hardly qualify as a great moral teacher and the incarnate God of
truth.
Hermeneutics, Baker, 1981, p. 37.
Can God
reveal himself to humanity? And, to be more specific, can he reveal
himself in language, the specifics of which become normative for Christian
faith and action? With an inerrant Bible these things are possible. Without it, theology inevitably enters a
wasteland of human speculation. The
church, which needs a sure Word of God, flounders. Without an inerrant
revelation, theology is not only adrift, it is meaningless. Having
repudiated its right to speak on the basis of Scripture, it forfeits its right
to speak on any other issue as well.
James Montgomery Boice
Taken from "Foundations of the
Christian Faith-Book I" by James Montgomery Boice, page 72.
(c)1986 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the USA,
Revised edition. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400,
Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi ivpress/book.pl/code=991.
God’s
truth always agrees with itself.
A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 37.
Many of us
would agree with Peter when he says that parts of Paul’s letters are hard to
understand! And there are difficulties and apparent discrepancies in other
parts of the Bible too. On this matter of discrepancies, I remember reading
something written by an old seventeenth-century Puritan named William Bridge.
He said that harping on discrepancies shows a very bad heart, adding: “For a
godly man, it should be as it was with Moses. When a godly man sees the Bible
and secular data apparently at odds, well, he does as Moses did when he saw an
Egyptian fighting an Israelite: he kills the Egyptian. He discounts the secular
testimony, knowing God’s Word to be true. But when he sees an apparent
inconsistency between two passages of Scripture, he does as Moses did when he
found two Israelites quarreling: he tries to reconcile them. He says, ‘Aha,
these are brethren, I must make peace between them.’ And that’s what the godly
man does.”
Your Father Loves You, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1986, page for June 21.
Only in the
context of a firm belief in Scripture’s inerrancy has expository preaching
thrived.
Feed My Sheep, Soli Deo Gloria Ministries, 2002, p. 71.
We do not
possess the original writings of any biblical author. But modern translations
of the Bible are taken from manuscripts that were carefully, meticulously
copied from these flawless originals. When we find the near-perfect agreement
between these thousands of preserved manuscripts, despite their being copied
and re-copied over hundreds of years and in a variety of countries and
languages, we can rest assured that what we have today is a faithful
representation of the actual words of God.
Daryl Wingerd
The Bible
is God's Special Revelation,
Christian
Communicators Worldwide, www.CCWtoday.org. Used by Permission.
Being wholly
and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its
teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the
events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in
its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.
A Short Statement, n. 4.
The authority
of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any
way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the
Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the
church.
A Short Statement, n. 5.
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.
Articles of Affirmation and Denial, Article XIX.