05 Inerrancy and the Character of God
Inerrancy and the Character of God
Though most often connected with the doctrine of inspiration, 2 Timothy 3:16 also says something important about inerrancy. The reason ought to be obvious: inspiration and inerrancy are interrelated.
Inspiration wrestles with the question of how God gave us the Bible. Did He dictate it to men? If so, then a correct understanding of inspiration says that God gave us the Bible by dictating it. That is the view that many liberals ascribe to evangelicals, and a few evangelicals do hold it (though denying it is mechanical dictation). “God raised up men, prepared the men and prepared their vocabularies, and God dictated the very words which they would put down in the Scriptures” (John R. Rice, The Sword of the Lord, 10 January, 1975, p. 14). However, most who hold to inerrancy reject dictation, asserting that God guided and guarded the human authors to record His message without dictating it.
Or, on the other end of the scale, did God do nothing more special than give the world men of great genius who produced the Bible just as other geniuses have written great books? That view is labeled natural inspiration. “But the line of demarcation between it and other religious writings … is not so sharp and final as to establish a qualitative difference between all other writings and every part or the canonical Scriptures” (Cecil J. Cadoux, A Pilgrim’s Further Progress [London: Religious Book Club, 1945], p. 11).
Or, more “Christian” than natural inspiration is the view that the writers of the Bible were Spirit-filled in the same manner that believers today can be Spirit-filled and write good books. If God gave us the Bible that way, it was more mystical than natural, though certainly not dictated.
“The inspiration of the books of the Bible does not imply for us the view that they were produced or written in any manner generically different from that of the writing of other great Christian books. There is a wide range of Christian literature from the second to the twentieth century which can with propriety be described as inspired by the Holy Spirit in precisely the same formal sense as were the books of the Bible.” [Alan Richardson, Christian Apologetics (New York: Harper, 1948), p. 207]
Popular today is the idea that inspiration is not so much concerned with the character of the Bible as it is with that moment of existential revelation when something becomes truth to the individual reader. In such a concept, the Bible, of course, does not have to be inerrant. According to that idea, truth is found not in the statements or propositions of the Bible. but in subjective encounter with God’s activities recorded there, often erroneously and even nonhistorically. “It is further to be noted … that, in the Bible, God’s self-revelation is personal rather than propositional. That is to say, ultimately revelation is in relationship, ‘confrontation,’ communion, rather than by the communication of facts” (C . F . D . Moule, “Revelation,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible [Nashville: Abingdon, 1962] 4:55).
Such a view comes close to the neo-orthodox view of the Bible, which sees it not as revelation itself, but as a pointer or witness to revelation. Inspiration, wrote Barth, is the “act of revelation in which the prophets and apostles in their humanity became what they were, and in which alone they in their humanity can also become for us what they are” (Church Dogmatics, 1: 2, 563). That view proposes that the witness, the Bible, is fallible and thus often unreliable, but what it teaches is truth! Not quite so blatant is the very comtemporary idea that the Bible’s fallibility lies only in parts that do not really matter as far as salvation is concerned. It teaches that God’s purpose was to give man the revelation of God in His redemptive love in Christ, and in fulfilling that purpose God saw to it that we had an infallible record. Other areas of biblical revelation, such as creation, history, or geography, which do not directly concern our salvation, may contain errors. Sometimes this view is called partial inspiration.
All those views of inspiration, except dictation, say that God gave us the Bible with errors. Inspiration answers the question, How did He give the Bible? Inerrancy answers the question, Did He give it with or without errors? Obviously, one’s view of inspiration automatically contains an answer to both questions. So inspiration and inerrancy are inseparably linked, and no one can hold a view of inspiration that does not also include some view of inerrancy. But look again to 2 Timothy 3:16. It does speak to both questions. Specifically, what facts does it tell us about the Bible?
1. The entire Bible was God-breathed. The Greek word here translated “Scripture” is used fifty-one times in the New Testament and always refers to some part of the Bible. Sometimes it includes the entire Old Testament (Luke 24:45; John 10:35), sometimes it refers to a particular Old Testament passage (Luke 4:21), sometimes to a particular New Testament passage (1 Timothy 5:18), and sometimes to a larger portion of the New Testament (2 Peter 3:16).
Those last two verses carry a great deal of importance. In 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul joins an Old Testament and a New Testament reference and calls them both Scripture. The Old Testament quoted is Deuteronomy 25:4, and the New Testament is Luke 10:7. It is not remarkable that an Old Testament reference should be cited as Scripture, but to join a New Testament reference with it so soon after it was written is highly significant. Probably only five or six years had elapsed between the writing of Luke and the writing of 2 Timothy, and yet Paul does not hesitate to place a quotation from Luke on the same plane as one from the accepted, canonical Old Testament. In 2 Peter 3:16, Peter said that Paul wrote some things hard to be understood and things that some people distorted as they did other Scripture. Here, too, New Testament writings were designated Scripture and therefore authoritative. In that instance, much more than a single quotation was involved. Here, Paul’s writings were called Scripture. So in 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul must have intended to include all of the Old Testament and as much of the New Testament as had been written to that time. That means that 2 Peter, Hebrews, Jude, and all of John’s writings would not have been included in his understanding of “all Scripture” since they had not yet been written. Nevertheless, because those books were eventually acknowledged as belonging to the new canon of Scripture, we may safely say that the verse teaches something about the entire sixty-six books of the Bible as we know them today. Not any part is excluded; all Scripture is inspired of God.
Most do not debate that the verse includes all of the canon. If someone wishes to reduce the amount of Scripture included in this verse, he translates it: “All Scripture inspired by God is also profitable.” In other words, whatever parts of Scripture that are inspired are profitable, but the other (uninspired) parts are not. Thus by such a translation only part of the Bible is inspired. Is such a translation accurate? The answer is yes. Is such a translation required? The answer is no. Equally correct and preferable is the translation, “All Scripture is inspired of God and is profitable.”
Both translations supply the word “is.” It becomes a question of whether to supply “is” only one time or two times (“Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable,” or, “All Scripture is inspired of God and is profitable”). The preference goes to the latter translation for three reasons: (a) By supplying it two times, both adjectives (“inspired” and “profitable”) are understood the same way, as predicate adjectives. That is more natural. (b) The connective word (“and,” or “also”) is much more frequently translated “and.” (c) A similar construction occurs in 1 Timothy 4:4, where both adjectives are clearly predicate adjectives. The conclusion could not be clearer: the entire Bible is inspired.
2. The entire Bible is God-breathed. “Given by inspiration of God” is a single Greek word, “God-breathed.” The form is passive, meaning that the Bible is the result of the breath of God. If the form were, by contrast, active, then the verse would be saying that all the Bible breathes God; that is, all the Bible exudes or speaks of God. Of course, the Bible does exude God, but it is clear that Paul was saying that God breathed out the Bible. Our English word inspire carries the idea of breathing into something. But here we are told that God breathed out something, namely, the Scripture. In other words, the origin of the Bible is God.
3. The entire Bible is God-breathed. Who is this God who breathed out the entire Bible? He is, among other things, truth. Not only is He true (Romans 3:4), but He is truth itself (John 14:6). Obviously, if He is truth and true, He cannot utter anything false. That is a very important consideration in answering the second question, Did God give us the Bible without errors? How could a true God do anything else? And that is why the Lord could state emphatically and without any exceptions that God’s Word is truth (John 17:17).
Let us put it another way, in the form of a syllogism, a logical argument consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.
Major premise: God is true (Romans 3:4).
Minor premise: God breathed out the Scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16).
Conclusion: Therefore, the Scriptures are true (John 17:17). As any dictionary will confirm, if the premises of a syllogism are true the conclusion must also be true. We know in this syllogism that the premises are true because they are biblical statements. Therefore, the conclusion (which is also a biblical statement) is also true. Furthermore, such a conclusion is not surprising, since inspiration must also say something about inerrancy. A God-breathed Bible must be a true Bible. God’s inspiration requires the product’s accuracy. To sum up: 2 Timothy 3:16 states three important facts about inspiration and inerrancy: (a) All the Bible is included, (b) all the Bible was breathed out from God, and (c) all the Bible is, like God, without any defects.