Biblical Inerrancy

As the Word of God, Scripture possesses several attributes that necessarily follow from its having been inspired by the Lord. Infallibility pertains to what Scripture is capable of—it is incapable of leading people into error and it was impossible that God should inspire falsehood, for God cannot lie (Heb. 6:18). Inerrancy speaks of Scripture as it exists. Biblical inerrancy means that the original text of Scripture contains no errors in what it intends to teach. Since whatever God says is true, the text produced under His inspiration must be free of error. “The words of the Lord are pure words” (Ps. 12:6).

Note the qualifiers “original text” and “intends to teach.” First, by “original text” we mean the so-called autographs, or the actual manuscripts that the prophets and Apostles themselves penned and not the copies of these manuscripts. We possess thousands of copies of the original text of the Bible, and each of these may contain errors because the original text is inspired, not each copy thereof. These errors are for the most part easily recognized through the science of textual criticism, such that we can be confident that we have the actual words of the Apostles and prophets even if we do not have the original parchments that they wrote on.

Second, inerrancy applies to what the Bible “intends to teach.” Here we recognize that the Bible can make use of numerical approximations and poetic devices without teaching error. For example, Isaiah 11:12 refers to the “four corners of the earth.” Opponents of inerrancy might point to this and say that the Bible teaches error because to talk about four corners of the earth is to imply that the earth is flat. That Isaiah uses such an expression does not mean that he is teaching a flat earth, however. He is simply using a common poetic expression that means “the whole earth” and not commenting on the geometric properties of the planet. Furthermore, the Bible can use approximate numbers without teaching error because human beings commonly use estimates and reserve precise measurements for exacting scientific observations. Scripture has much to say about science, but it is not a science book in the sense of modern science, so we should not expect it to follow modern standards of scientific precision.

In the end, the point of defending biblical inerrancy is to safeguard what must be true if God actually inspired Scripture. He cannot lie or err, so Scripture does not err in anything that it affirms.