A Theological Case for Inerrancy (1)

The battle over the inerrancy of Scripture hasn’t and isn’t going away.  We must decide how we will approach the Bible – what our working assumptions will be.  If “all Scripture is God-breathed” then all Scripture has the insignia of God upon it.  This would be the bare-bones theological deduction from the relationship between the two.  For the human element to be lifted above the Divine element so as to enjoy equal ultimacy over the resultant production of Scripture requires an alteration to Scripture’s own self-witness.  This is the reason why those who reject the idea of inerrancy (and I am far from rejecting all their work on account of their error), often plead in the vacuum of unaided reason.

Taking one prominent broadly evangelical theologian as an example, Donald Bloesch wrote,

While we grant that in one sense the Bible is the revelation of God to men, this revelation is in the form of human witness and is therefore to a degree hidden from the sight and understanding. The bane of much of modern evangelicalism is rationalism which presupposes that the Word of God is directly available to human reason. It is fashionable to refer to the biblical revelation as propositional and in one sense this is true. The Bible is not directly the revelation of God, but indirectly in that God’s Word comes to us through the mode of human instrumentality. – Donald G. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology – Volume I, 75-76.

This quotation shows us how the human element can be stressed so as to compete with the Divine element.  To wit, the doctrine of inspiration must be accommodated to include the “human witness.”  This means that the claim to “direct revelation” from God to man is excluded (or, at the very least, camouflaged).  And then we are laid open to the philosophy of God’s free action reaching us through the Bible but only by His choice to employ it as His Word.

What we must say… is that in the case of Scripture just as surely as in preaching, ‘fallible men speak the word of God in fallible human words’ – Trevor Hart, Regarding Karl Barth, 38.

Taking this tack immediately places one on the horns of a dilemma.  For the Bible stresses many many times its God-givenness.  If it is produced by the combination of God’s out-breathing and the Spirit’s direction, and if every word of God is true, then unless we are prepared to engage in the futile task of separating God’s words from man’s words we shall have to decide to be those who accept a form of inerrancy, or else those who fail to find God’s prints on the Bible at all.