The Inspiration, Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture in the History of Christian Thought (original) (raw)

Inerrancy of Scripture: Evangelical and Catholic Perspectives

P. De Mey and W. François (eds) Ecclesia Semper Reformanda: Renewal and Reform Beyond Polemics, Peeters Publishers, 2020

Published in P. De Mey and W. François (eds) Ecclesia Semper Reformanda: Renewal and Reform Beyond Polemics, Peeters Publishers, 2020.pp. 79-109. This article studies the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, more particularly its development in Roman Catholic and evangelical theologies since the end of the nineteenth century up till today. The focus, though, is not primarily historical, but doctrinal and ecumenical. We show that looking at this doctrine from both theological traditions helps in establishing crucial issues. It equally makes possible the cross-fertilization of theological development. Finally, we hope that it can help to foster ecumenical rapprochement precisely in an area where Protestants and Catholics have long been divided – their doctrine of Scripture.

A Case for the Inerrancy of the Bible

Over the years, certain attacks have been launched incessantly against the Bible with the specific intent of undermining the authority of the Scriptures and calling to question claims to its divine origin. One of the notable areas of contention and a constant target for attack particularly for the last two centuries has been the inerrancy of the Bible. This paper seeks to give some consideration to both sides of the debate but with an eventual bent towards making a good case for the inerrancy of the Bible.

The Bible in Modern European Thought

Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (eds. Adams, Pattison, Ward, OUP, 2013), 2013

"The period from 1800 to 1945 saw some of the most turbulent changes to approaches to the Bible in modern European thought. It is a period of dramatic contrasts and unresolved contradictions. The contrasts arise because of the increasing divergence between experts and lay persons: the historical and philological studies of Biblical scholars contrasted more and more strongly with performative and traditional figural reading of the Bible in Christian worship. Contradictions arise as a consequence of this. The question of whether and to what extent the Bible is like other books invites new, distinctively modern, attempts to account for the Bible’s status – and these attempts appeal to a broad range of criteria which are not necessarily in harmony with each other, such as the quality of the text, the use of the text in communities, and understandings of divine revelation. There is one repeated failed attempt to resolve the contradictions thrown up by competing criteria: the quest for a single framework within which to place the practices of expert Biblical scholarship and the practices of worshippers in churches – the most famous of these attempts being the quest for the historical Jesus. This essay approaches these issues by engaging with a series of classic texts, taking them chronologically, in three sections. The first section considers the work of Hegel and Schleiermacher, and connects aspects of their philosophies to issues in Biblical interpretation. Hegel’s contribution to a range of topics is vast: here one small part will be treated, namely, the relation between ‘representation’ and ‘conceptual thinking’. Schleiermacher’s development of hermeneutics deserves its own essay as a contribution to theology and modern European thought. The remarks here will be restricted to the relation between the rule-bound nature of language and the spontaneous nature of the language-user, which come together in style and interpretation. The second section considers three classic essays on the Bible (one German, one French and one English) by Strauss, Renan and Jowett. These essays articulate significant nineteenth-century cultural contradictions vis-à-vis the Bible, many of which persist in our own time. These include the increasing specialisation and professional expertise that is brought to bear on the Bible by scholars, and the increasing distance between scholars and laypersons that is a consequence of this; it also includes various failed attempts to find a single intellectual framework within which to place historical-critical inquiries into the plain sense of scripture, on the one hand, and into habitable narratives for worship, on the other, usually with the consequence that narrative is eclipsed (to echo Hans Frei’s felicitous phrase) in favour of the plain sense. The third section considers two contrasting influential twentieth century approaches to the Bible: Barth’s expressionist commentary on Romans and Bultmann’s existentialist programme of ‘demythologization’."

The Scriptures as God-breathed: Implication for the Authority of the Scriptures

2021

The doctrine of biblical inspiration is the view that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the sacred texts so that the resultant Scripture is the word of God. To say that Scripture is “Godbreathed” does not mean that the scrolls fell down from the sky. Inspiration, in this sense, is the supernatural force that moved the sacred writers to transmit what God has revealed using, human language. How does one understand the Bible as the inspired word of God despite the apparent and sometimes manifest inconsistencies that one finds in the Scriptures? Does inspiration imply divine dictation, as taught by the Augustinian school of thought? Is the Bible purely a product of human ingenuity as held by some humanists? Or are we dealing with a confluence of divine will and human ability? This is the problem that this article intends to address. This will be done by applying an exegetical study of the relevant Scriptural passages dealing on this subject.