Behind the
centrality of expositional preaching is the assumption of the
authority and truthfulness of God’s Word. At a recent meeting
with the pastoral assistants here at Capitol Hill Baptist
Church, I gave a quick bibliography of the history of the
controversy over inerrancy. I thought it might be
useful for you, too.
Many of these books will be well known to those of you
who are my age and older, but many may not be known to those
of you who are younger.
Here, then, are some resources for you about the matter
of biblical inerrancy.
Of the making of books on inerrancy, there is no
end. Ours has not
been the first generation to deal with the questions at the
root of it, and, if the Lord tarries, ours will not be the
last. Though the
discussion changes—now we’ve largely moved on to discussions
of epistemology, hermenuetics, postmodernism and biblical
theology—we continue to assume what we have learned,
particularly in the massive amount of reflection that went on
in the 20th century among evangelicals about this
issue.
The roots of this discussion are, of course,
ancient. Passing
by Psalm 119, Our Lord’s use of scripture, early citations and
the discussions of Aquinas and the Reformers, let’s begin our
modern bibliography with the work of Francis Turretin
(1623-1687).
Turretin’s work influenced generations of theologians
and ministers both in Europe and North America. The section on
Scripture was translated, edited and printed by John W.
Beardslee III (Baker, 1981). This volume—in its
Latin original—exercised great influence upon generations of
evangelical ministers trained at Princeton and other
evangelical institutions.
The Nineteenth Century
The classic work on this in the first half of the
19th century, which really acts as a backdrop to
all the discussion to come was by L. Gaussen, professor of
systematic theology in Geneva, Switzerland. It was translated into
English in 1841 as Theopneustia: The Plenary
Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, and has been reprinted
many times.
Additionally, Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853) , a
celebrated professor of legal evidence at Harvard, had
lectured on the reliability of the gospels. These lectures were
published posthumously as The Testimony of the
Evangelists: The
Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence in 1874 and have
been re-printed many times. In some ways, the
arguments here are the grandparents of those which have been
recycled many times by people from the late Sir Norman
Anderson to Josh McDowell and other apologists.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic,
the historian and archaeologist Sir William Ramsay was
publishing a series of works which, among other things,
established the historical veracity of the accounts of Luke
and Paul in the New Testament. Among this series of
works are
The Church in
the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (Hodder and Stoughton,
1894)
St. Paul the
Traveller and Roman Citizen (Hodder and Stoughton,
1895)
Pauline and
Other Studies in Early Church History (Hodder and
Stoughton,
1906)
The Cities of
St. Paul (Hodder and Stoughton, 1907).
This series of
volumes—10 in all—have often been reprinted, and they have
continuing historical value.
Princeton & Westminster
At the same time in the late 19th century
systematic theological reflection was represented by works
from scholars at Princeton and Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary. In
1881, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield co-wrote an influential
article on Inspiration (later reprinted under the title Inspiration, with an
introduction and appendices by Roger Nicole [Baker, 1979]). A few years
later, Basil Manly, Jr., published his little volume The Bible Doctrine of
Inspiration (A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1888). This volume grew out
of the controversies at Southern Seminary regarding the
theological apostasy of an Old Testament professor there, C.
H. Toy.
Throughout his career at Princeton, B. B. Warfield
published articles on the doctrines of the nature, inspiration
and inerrancy of Scripture. After his death, they
were brought together in what has become perhaps the most
influential book among conservative evangelicals on the
topic—certainly the most often-cited: B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and
Authority of the Bible (Presbyterian and Reformed,
1948). The book
is really a collection of articles by Warfield written in the
late 19th century. These articles are
often referenced, but too rarely read. They are dismissed by
caricatures when they are in fact models of careful exegetical
work. More could
be said, but let me simply commend them to the reader.
Of course, this issue was at the heart of the creation
of Westminster Seminary from the orthodox remains of
Princeton. J.
Gresham Machen argued out that Christianity and liberalism are
really two different religions. In 1923 he published
these arguments as Christianity and
Liberalism (reprinted by Eerdmans). This argument would be
picked up again by J. I. Packer forty years later in his “Fundamentalism” and the
Word of God.
Bradley Longfield has provided an excellent historical
overview of the Princeton struggle, with some reference to the
theological issues in his book The Presbyterian
Controversy:
Fundamentalists, Modernists & Moderates
(Oxford, 1991).
Mid-Century America
In the middle decades of the 20th century,
the battle for inerrancy seemed over in the mainline and
irrelevant for the convinced conservatives, the
evangelicals.
There were, nevertheless some more North American and
British publications which continued to explore the
issues.
On the North American side, a colloquium of the faculty
at Westminster Seminary published its papers in a volume
entitled The Infallible
Word, edited by Ned Stonehouse and Paul Woolley
(Westminster Theological Seminary, 1946). Undertaken to
celebrate the tercentennary of the Westminster Confession of
Faith, this was the first of many edited collections of essays
on the topic to be forthcoming over the next forty years. The Westminster
faculty continued to be helpful. Ned Stonehouse
encouraged Norval Geldenhuys, a South African minister, to
publish Supreme
Authority (1953).
In 1957, Westminster Professor of Old Testament E. J.
Young published his quite substantial volume, Thy Word is Truth
(Eerdmans, 1957), perhaps the most significant work on the
topic to that date by an evangelical in the 20th
century. Also in
1957, R. Laird Harris published his careful work on the Inspirtation and
Canonicity of the Bible (reprinted as Inspiration and Canonicity
of the Scriptures, 1995). In 1958 Carl F.
H. Henry, the editor of the new magazine, Christianity Today
edited a large collection of essays, Revelation and the
Bible, (Baker [US]; Tyndale [UK] 1958), in which many of
the leading evangelicals of the day summarized Christian
teaching. Henry’s
wide scope was a foreshadowing of what was to come from him
later.
British Resources
In the United Kingdom, other resources were coming to
help with the inerrancy controversy. In 1958, J. I. Packer
published “Fundamentalism” and the
Word of God (IVCF, 1958) in response to high churchman
Gabriel Hebert’s Fundamentalism and the
Church of God, and to liberal criticism of the recent
Billy Graham crusades in Cambridge and London. Packer’s concise
summaries and arguments were powerful and influential. He immediately became
something of a spokesman for the conservative evangelicals in
the Church of England and beyond. His book used some of
the same arguments as Machen’s earlier volume, but somewhat
refined—less polemic, more taxonomy. In 1965 the
Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion published
another work of Packer’s, even more focused on Scripture,
called God Speaks to
Man. It
was expanded and reissued by IVP in 1979 as God Has Spoken, and
then published by Baker in 1988 (this time
including the Chicago Statements) and came out in a third
edition with a new foreword in 1993. It is an excellent
introduction to the whole discussion.
On a more academic level (largely ignored in this
article) our British friends were making further contributions
to maintaining the inerrancy of Scripture. F. F. Bruce had first
written The New
Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? in 1943
(IVP). The book
has gone through numerous editions and some expansion since
then, never going out of print or losing its concise
usefulness. These
are 120 pages worth reading. In the same
“reliability” genre, though out of chronological order, let me
simply mention a couple of other books: Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability
of the Gospels (IVP, 1987) with a foreword by F. F. Bruce,
and Walter Kaiser’s The
Old Testament Documents:
Are They Reliable and Relevant? (IVP, 2001). F. F. Bruce’s
contributions to the field of New Testament studies are many,
but for the purposes of this topic, the one other book you
should be aware of is his book The Canon of Scripture
(Chapter House, 1988).
Two stalwarts in the academic trenches that were
helpful to evangelical students from their publication in the
1960’s until the present day were more technical introductions
that helped students to sort through knotty questions of
dating and authorship.
They were the introductions written by Donald Guthrie
and R. K. Harrison.
Throughout the 1960’s the Anglican clergyman Donald
Guthrie was teaching at London Bible College and publishing
his introductions to various portions of the New
Testament. They
were finally brought together and published as one volume in
1970 (IVP) and have remained in print sense then, with a
final, fourth revised edition appearing in 1990. And in 1969, Professor
R. K. Harrison of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto,
Canada, published his magnum opus, Introduction to the Old
Testament (Eerdmans, 1969).
The Change at Fuller
All of this academic work took place against the
background of shifting currents inside evangelicalism. The most significant
change was the dropping in the early 1960’s of Fuller
Theological Seminary’s commitment to the inerrancy of the
Bible. George
Marsden has given us a clear history of this in his book Reforming
Fundamentalism:
Fuller Seminary
and the New Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1987). This, read in
conjunction with Longfield, makes particularly interesting
reading.
The late 1960’s and 1970’s found evangelicalism
digesting the changes that were happening. Clark Pinnock, a young
Canadian professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
stoutly defended inerrancy. He had studied with F.
F. Bruce, and in 1966 gave the Tyndale Lecture in Biblical
Theology which was published the next year as A Defense of Biblical
Infallibility (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967). For the next few
years, Pinnock continued to ably defend this view. He did so most
extensively in his book Biblical Revelation: The Foundation of
Christian Theology (Moody, 1971; reissued with
introduction by J. I. Packer, Presbyterian and Reformed,
1985). Throughout this period, Francis Schaeffer was
exercising a strong influence on the rising generation of
evangelicals.
Many of his works presumed the importance of
inerrancy. A good
example of this would be in his little 1968 IVP book, Escape from
Reason.
By 1973 more conservative evangelicals were
understanding that significant shifts were underway and were
wanting to respond to them. Popular teacher R. C.
Sproul assembled a group of conservative leaders—John Frame,
John Gerstner, John Warwick Montgomery, J. I. Packer, Clark
Pinnock—to frame “The Ligonier Statement” affirming biblical
inerrancy. They
presented papers and published them in an informative volume,
John Warwick Montgomery, ed., God’s Inerrant Word
(Bethany Fellowship, 1974). (Pinnock, of course,
would later disown this position in his book, The Scripture
Principle, [Harper & Row, 1984]).
Lindsell v.
Rogers & McKim
“The book that rocked the evangelical world” as its
been called (even by its own publisher) was published in
1976. That year
Harold Lindsell, part of the losing faculty at Fuller ten
years earlier, published his expose of the theological
slippage on the issue of inerrancy. He named names. The book—The Battle for the
Bible (Zondervan, 1976)—is a must-read for understanding
the whole controversy over inerrancy. He pinpointed problems
in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, in the Southern Baptist
Convention, and in Fuller Theological Seminary, among
others. To some
the book was infamous; to others it was a clarion call to
action. To it,
more than any other, we probably owe the torrent of literature
on the topic that was about to be written. (Francis Schaeffer did
publish a rather similar, though more wide-ranging critique,
The Great Evangelical
Disaster [Crossway, 1984].)
One thing Lindsell’s book did was to stir up open
opposition among evangelicals to inerrancy. The leader of these
was perhaps Jack Rogers (still active in the PCUSA). In 1977, Rogers edited
a volume, published by Word, called Biblical Authority in
which he got various leading and respected evangelicals to
question the clarity of Lindsell’s vision. He and Donald McKim
then followed up two years later with what has become the
Bible of the anti-inerrantists—Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s
The Authority and
Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical
Approach (Harper and Row, 1979), in which they suggest
that the history of the church revealed that the current
conservative evangelical position on the inerrancy of the
Bible was an historical novelty and simply a rationalist
philosophical position wrongly obtruded on believers. Warfield was their
chief bogeyman and old Princeton their chief target.
Their work was subjected to a number of critical
reviews, none more searching than John Woodbridge’s Biblical Authority: A Critique of the
Rogers/McKim Proposal (Zondervan, 1982). If you haven’t read
them, suffice it to say that Woodbridge, a more careful
historian than Rogers and McKim, absolutely disassembles their
thesis.
Woodbridge’s book, however, is rarely read by
non-evangelicals and so has not served to stop the myth that
Rogers and McKim have rather successfully sold to an
uncritical audience that wants to agree with them.
The ICBI and its Progeny
One of the unwitting results of Lindsell’s book, along
with Rogers and McKim’s thesis, was to galvanize conservative
evangelicals into reflection and writing. And so the
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was formed and
operated from 1977 to 1987. The plan, all along,
was to have a limited life, so as not to form another
institution which could go astray. It’s purpose was to
hold conferences and publish books to the end of championing
the traditional position on the inerrancy of Scripture. And their efforts—and
those of their friends at the time—have left us one of the
richest stores of literature on inerrancy. Here is an incomplete
list, but perhaps comprising the most important productions of
the period:
James Montgomery Boice, ed., The Foundations of
Biblical Authority (Zondervan, 1978). This was the first of
the ICBI productions.
Norman Geisler, ed., Inerrancy (Zondervan,
1980). Another
ICBI production, the collection of some of the papers from
their first “summit”, the conference which produced the
Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
Roger Nicole and J. Ramsey Michaels, eds., Inerrancy and Common
Sense (Baker, 1980).
This was a festschrift in honor
of Harold John Ockenga, and served as a manifesto that the
Gordon-Conwell faculty (which its authors mainly were) were
supporters of inerrancy.
D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., Scripture and Truth
(Zondervan, 1983).
This may be the best in all this series of edited
volumes, it’s papers seeming to break through to a longer and
somewhat more formidable level of scholarship. That’s a good
thing!
Ronald Youngblood, ed., Evangelicals and
Inerrancy (Nelson, 1984). This is a highly
interesting selection of articles published in the Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society in the previous 30 years
on the topic of inerrancy.
Earl Radmacker and Robert Preus, eds., Hermeneutics, Inerrancy
and the Bible (Zondervan, 1984). This was the
collection of papers from the second ICBI summit. This is one of the
best of all of these collections.
John Hannah, ed., Inerrancy and the
Church (Moody, 1984). This is another ICBI
production, this time focusing on the history of the church’s
discussion of the issue.
D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge, eds., Hermeutics, Authority and
Canon (Zondervan, 1986). This is a companion
volume to the other Carson and Woodbridge volume, again not an
official ICBI product, but sympathetic and with papers of a
high academic quality.
The final chapter in this volume is an excellent essay
on the canon by David Dunbar.
Kenneth Kantzer, ed., Applying the
Scriptures (Zondervan, 1987). This is the series of
papers from the third and final ICBI summit.
Harvie Conn, ed., Inerrancy and
Hermeneutic (Baker, 1988). This is a good
collection of papers from the faculty of Westminster
Theological Seminary.
Kenneth Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry, eds., Evanglelical
Affirmations (Zondervan, 1990). These are papers from
a conference not primarily on inerrancy, but it is interesting
to see how the topic continues to be worked out in the papers
of David Wells and others.
It should be mentioned during all this time that
individual authors were also putting out volumes on the topic
of the Bible and its inerrant nature. J. I. Packer in 1980
brought out a series of his articles on the topic, under the
title Beyond the Battle
for the Bible (Crossway). Ronald Nash did a fine
little piece of popularized systematic theology on the issue,
The Word of God and the
Mind of Man (Zondervan, 1982).
Most notable of all was Carl F. H. Henry’s 6-volume
series God, Revelation
and Authority (Word 1976-1983; rpt. Crossway, 1999). As we near
twenty years from Henry’s completion of his massive work, it
looks clearly dated, but arguably even more important. Philosophical issues
of epistemology and meaning have dominated the discussions
during the intervening years, discussions which Henry was
already engaging at a high level. More recently, David
Wells’ No Place for
Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology
(Eerdmans, 1993), does some of the same kind of work in a more
applied and contemporary manner. The implications of
inerrancy and truthfulness are carefully considered and
well-illustrated.
The Southern Baptists
Though some of the authors just mentioned are Southern
Baptists (e.g., Carl Henry, Ronald Nash, Roger Nicole), I want
to give special attention to what was happening among
them. Lindsell
targeted the Southern Baptist Convention specially with one
chapter in his Battle
for the Bible, but all he did was help to ignite a
controversy that had been going publicly, though
intermittently, since the early 1960’s. W. A. Criswell’s Why I Preach That the
Bible is Literally True (Broadman, 1969) was The text
about the whole issue for many Baptists. In 1980, Russ Bush and
Tom Nettles, at the time both professors at Southwestern
Seminary, did some historical excavations among Baptist
theologians of the past and produced their own,
denomination-specific rebuttal of Rogers and McKim. No suggestion that
inerrancy was alien to the Baptist tradition could well
survive this 400-plus-page survey—Baptists and the
Bible, (Moody, 1980).
As the ICBI wound down, the heat was boiling in the
SBC. In 1987,
Duane Garrett and Richard Melick, Jr., edited Authority and
Interpretation: A
Baptist Perspective (Baker, 1987). Official
denominational authorities produced an ICBI-like conference at
Ridgecrest, called “The Conference on Biblical
Inerrancy.” In
many ways, this was a command performance by many of the main
“northern evangelicals” with responses by a liberal, and also
by a conservative Southern Baptist leader. The speakers included
historian Mark Noll, Lutheran theologian Robert Preus, and
many others, including J. I. Packer, Kenneth Kantzer, Millard
Erickson and Clark Pinnock. The papers were
published as The
Proceedings of the Conference on Biblical Inerrancy 1987
(Broadman, 1987). No editor is
listed. The
papers are of varying quality, of course, but of great
interest historically.
An odd combination of an historical and theological
collection of essays is Beyond the Impasse? Scripture,
Interpretation & Theology in Baptist Life, edited by
Robison B. James and David S. Dockery (Broadman, 1992). A number of the
leading figures on both sides of the controversy contributed
essays to this volume.
On a purely historical note, the pointed question of
inerrancy raised the even larger question of Baptist
identity. It was
all part of the struggle going on to define the denomination
and its agencies.
One piece done so early that it became a part of the
struggle was Nancy Ammerman’s Baptist Battles
(Rutgers, 1990).
This is the work that demonstrated (to those still
doubting it) that the struggle in the SBC was not just about
power—but it was, as the conservatives had maintained—about
theology. David
Dockery edited an interesting volume, Southern Baptists and
American Evangelicals (Broadman & Holman, 1993), which
show the depth of the questions that the inerrancy controversy
had raised. Two
notable recent recountings of the struggles are Paul
Pressler’s A Hill on
Which to Die (Broadman & Holman, 1999) and Jerry
Sutton’s The Baptist
Reformation (Broadman & Holman, 2000).
That’s not
all folks . . . .
Many other books could be mentioned. Let me simply give you
one more related category. Questions of inerrancy
often arise from particular difficulties that seem to arise
from reading—something that seems hard to understand, or even
a discrepancy.
There is a genre of books which deal with just such
passages in the Bible.
A few of them are John W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies of
the Bible (1874; rpt. Baker, 1977); Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982); Norman Geisler and Thomas
Howe, When Critics
Ask: A Popular
Handbook on Bible Difficulties (Victor, 1992); Walter C.
Kaiser, Jr., and others, Hard Sayings of the
Bible (IVP, 1996).
Too, a number of Josh McDowell’s books would fit in
this category.
There have also been fresh efforts to examine and
consider the sufficiency of Scripture. Don Kistler has edited
Sola Scriptura! The Protestant
Position on the Bible (1995) with contributions by Robert
Godfrey, Sinclair Ferguson, John MacArthur and others. David King and William
Webster have collaborated to produce, Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar
of Our Faith (3 vols., 2001), a careful look at biblical
and historical evidence for the sufficiency of Scripture.
Three very different books remain to be mentioned. One book which is not
written by an evangelical Christian, but which has proved to
be good medicine when first encountering various literary
criticisms is Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex (E.
P. Dutton, 1965).
In this book, Crews carefully, sarcastically and
humorously “proves” that the Winnie the Pooh stories actually
have multiple authors.
There could hardly be a more enjoyable send-up and
devastating critique of many kinds of literary criticism, not
to mention an expose of the arbitrariness of any such studies
“assured results.”
One particularly important area of controversy about
inerrancy has been the renewed controversies surrounding the
life of Jesus.
Legions of books have been published about this. Perhaps the best one
volume to get to introduce the whole topic is a volume
composed, in part, of a debate between William Lane Craig and
John Dominic Crossan.
It is called Will the Real Jesus Please
Stand Up? ed., Paul Copan (Baker, 1998). It is engaging, sharp,
makes reference to other contemporary literature, and is
presented with additional sections which help the reader with
particular concerns.
I’ve saved the best for last. If I could just
recommend one book on the inerrancy of the Bible it would
undoubtedly be this one—John Wenham, Christ and the Bible
(Tyndale Press, 1972 [UK]; IVP, 1973 [US]). It’s been through
three editions and makes the simple point that our trust in
Scripture is to be a part of our following Christ, because
that is the way that He treated Scripture—as true, and
therefore authoritative.
Wenham, who taught Greek for many years at Oxford, an
Anglican evangelical, has done us all a great service in
providing us with a book which understands that we do not come
by our adherence to Scripture fundamentally from the inductive
resolutions of discrepancies, but from the teaching of the
Lord Jesus. Only
because of the Living Word may we finally know to trust the
Written Word. May
God use these resources of those who’ve gone before us to
equip and encourage us in so trusting.
To get up to speed on this issue, and to help you with
your ministry, consider the following recommendations.
MUST READŕ Wenham
SHOULD READŕ Warfield, Packer’s “Fundamentalism” and the
Word of
God, Lindsell, any one of the edited volumes of
your choosing!