Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

The Pure and Clear Fountain of Israel: The Necessity of Inerrancy

Through providence and the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, men collected God’s auditory words into the written word of the Bible.  Contrary to common belief, pre-modern Christian orthodoxy consistently affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible as God’s Word.1   Sadly, modern Fundamentalist trajectories in theology have distorted this doctrine. Their attempts to wield inerrancy as a weapon against post-Cartesian forms of philosophical Foundationalism have only degenerated orthodox teaching.2 

A Sacramental Medium, not an Epistemic Foundation

Today, many conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist theologians seem to hold that the Bible must provide its own indubitable “clear and distinct ideas”3 to build a foundation for further knowledge. From this perspective, the biblical “foundation” could counteract modern claims of autonomous knowledge. The Bible, however, is not primarily a tool of philosophers, but a channel of God’s creative, redemptive, and sanctifying Word.  

It is, indeed, important to affirm the absolute truthfulness of God’s auditory/written words. However, there are better and worse ways to employ the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.  As noted, many modern conservative Christian theologians have conceptualized the doctrine of inerrancy in ways that largely reflect modernist and Foundationalist presuppositions.4  Rather, Christians must see the Word of God as a sacramental medium that facilitates both the creational and redemptive exchange between God and his creatures.  God speaks and thereby activates the response of his creatures through his auditory words.  As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer writes:   

The covenant relation [between God and his people] would not exist were it not for these texts [the Bible]—God’s law and promises fixed in writing—that constitute it.  This is how the Law and the Prophets present themselves: as part and parcel of the communicative relation between God and his people, not some independently observed record of alleged divine activity.  Scripture is the means whereby God interacts socially (covenantally) through messages.5

In creation, this exchange takes the form of God bestowing his created gifts upon humans and their reception of these gifts. Christians faithfully respond to God’s good gifts with a “living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1) that offers up the right use of created mediums in obedience and gratitude to the creator who gave them.  In redemption, the Word facilitates the redemptive exchange of God and his people.  The Word of God binds the very divine being to his people throughout the Old Testament. This deep solidarity eventually becomes so great that the Lord literally assumes our humanity and dies under the judgment of sin that his people deserved. 

Luther saw justification as an exchange of realities and called it the “happy exchange” (der fröhlicher wechsel, admirabile commercium).5   As we have already seen, when God speaks his auditory word (recorded as his written word in the Bible), he always attaches it to some physical object, whether creational or historical.  The Bible’s call-words describe the states of affairs in the world to which God attaches his do-words.  

Hence, Christians must affirm scriptural inerrancy. However, inerrancy is not a necessary doctrine because of the needs of a Foundationalist construal of epistemology. Rather, if the created objects and historical events (visible words) to which God has attached his auditory words are unreal, then the commands and promises that affect the creational or redemptive exchange would also be false.  In the same manner, a pastor who said: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” in relationship to an empty font would make a meaningless statement.  The words: “This is my body, this is my blood” would also be meaningless without a referent in the form of bread and wine. 

How to Understand Inerrancy

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) on the absolute truthfulness of Scripture

Of course, all the ways Lutheran scholastic-orthodoxy qualified the doctrine of the inerrancy of the written Word apply.  In essence, the doctrine of inerrancy is that Scripture must be treated as categorically truthful. Obviously, this teaching does not preclude figures of speech, hyperbole, and poetic expression.6  Indeed, there is many genres of literature in Scripture. Thus, inerrancy does not demand strict literalism, or perhaps “letterism.”  Saying the Lord is our rock does not mean God is literally a stone.  

Confessional Lutheran theologian Hermann Sasse came to affirm inerrancy in his old age and probably wrote the most succinct summary of qualifications of inerrancy.  Sasse stated that we should make three main qualifications when we assert the inerrancy of Scripture: recognition of the more literary nature of ancient historiography, recognition that statements about God in himself are metaphorical/analogical due to the limitations of our finitude, and the recognition that in inspiring Scripture, God accommodated himself to the limitations of pre-scientific human knowledge.7  

All three qualifications of inerrancy are valid, although the final one can receive only partial approval.  Here, Sasse seems to wish to say that God wanted to accommodate humans’ inaccurate understandings of the cosmos.  Although the Bible does often use the language of ancient cosmology,8 it never actually directly affirms inaccurate pre-scientific conceptions of the cosmos.  The authors of Scripture undoubtedly had inaccurate ideas about the structure of the universe. However, God found it inessential to his message of salvation to correct them. Therefore, we ought to see the Holy Spirit as restricting the authors of Scripture to use of cosmological language in an almost purely poetical fashion, which teaches nothing positive about the empirical structure of the universe. 

Atheist and liberal Christian attempts to argue otherwise are much like trying to discern twentieth-century American cosmology from the nature references found in a Robert Frost poem.  Ultimately, it is difficult to argue that the Bible possesses a specific cosmology beyond the affirmation that whatever the structure of the universe might be, God made it as it is.  Indeed, throughout history, Christians have accepted whatever provisional cosmology contemporary natural philosophy / science had to offer with negligible effects to their doctrinal formulations.  The Bible is primarily concerned with God’s acts in human history for salvation, not with outlining the physical constitution of the universe.9     

The Communicatio Idiomatum and the Word of God

God’s Word is more significant than a physics textbook. It is uncreated and powerful.  It is sacramentally present in the very human words of the prophets and apostles. Today it is still sacramentally present in the mouths of pastors, the successors to the apostles.  To use a Christological analogy,10 because of the Lutheran capax (finitum capax infiniti), there is a communicatio idiomatum between the human words through which God has promised to speak and the uncreated divine Word. 

God’s visible and auditory words are sacramental. God’s eternal and uncreated Word is present in, under, and with the very human word or created medium that addresses the human subject.  As Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustaf Wingren observes: “[e]ven in the passage and even in preaching, the communicatio idiomatum holds sway.”11 Theologian Johann Gerhard writes similarly: “The Holy Spirit speaks to us in and through Scripture.  The voice and way of speaking of the Holy Spirit, therefore, sounds in those very words of Scripture.”12 Finally, for pastor Valerius Herberger, the proclaimed and preached Word conveys the very Blood of Jesus for our salvation: “Your blood is proclaimed to me in the Gospel and presented to me in the Sacraments. Oh, help me hear the preaching of the Gospel eagerly, that my heart may be sprinkled with your blood!”13

  1. See: Robert Preus, “The View of the Bible held by the Church: The Early Church through Luther,” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 357-384.  Also see, John Hannah, ed., Inerrancy and the Church (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984). ↩︎
  2. See similar critique in: Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2001).  This work does not meet with our full approval since we do not hold that inerrancy is identical with a kind of hard Foundationalism. ↩︎
  3. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993). ↩︎
  4. Acceptance of inerrancy is therefore not identical with Foundationalism as some claim.  See: Mark Boone, “Inerrancy is Not Strong or Classical Foundationalism,” Themelios 44, no. 3 (2019): 530-547. ↩︎
  5. Freedom of a Christian (1520).  LW 31:351. ↩︎
  6. Robert Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970-1972), 1:339-362.  Also see: Robert Preus “Notes on the Inerrancy of Scripture,” Concordia Theological Monthly 38 (June, 1967): 365-375.  One finds a similar set of provisos within various Reformed theologians: See A.A. Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979). ↩︎
  7. Hermann Sasse, “Additional Notes Concerning Holy Scripture,” in Scripture and the Church: Selected Essays of Hermann Sasse, ed. Jeffrey Kloha and Ronald Feuerhahn (St. Louis: Concordia Seminary, 1995), 167. ↩︎
  8. See: John Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011).  Walton shows interesting parallels with the language of ancient cosmology.  Of course, we do not fully endorse all of the content of this book. ↩︎
  9. See comment: Benjamin Smith, Genesis, Science, and the Beginning: Evaluating Interpretations of Genesis One on the Age of the Earth (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 208. ↩︎
  10. See Christological analogy for inspiration of the Bible in: Elling Hove, Christian Doctrine (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1930), 18-19; Charles Porterfield Krauth, The Bible a Perfect Book (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Henry C. Neinstedt, 1857), 10-13; U. V. Koren, “The Inspiration of Holy Scripture,” in Truth Unchanged, Unchanging (Lake Mills, IA: Graphic Publishing Company, Inc., 1978), 149-150; Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 1: 234; George Henry Gerberding, Lutheran Fundamentals (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Book Concern, 1925), 63; Conrad Emil Lindberg, Christian Dogmatics (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Book Concern, 1928), 388-389; Robert Kolb, The Christian Faith: A Lutheran Exposition (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1993), 197-198;  Hermann Sasse, “Concerning the Bible’s Inerrancy” (1966) in Scripture and the Church: Selected Essays of Hermann Sasse, 335-336.   ↩︎
  11. Gustaf Wingren, The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church, trans. Victor C. Pogue (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), 208. ↩︎
  12. Johann Gerhard, On the Legitimate Interpretation of Holy Scripture, trans. Richard Dinda (Malone, TX: Repristination Press, 2015), 20. ↩︎
  13. Valerius Herberger, Horoscopia Passionis Domini: Timetable of the Lord’s Passion, trans. Matthew Carver (Matthew Carver, 2023), 24. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from David M. Wendel, “NALC Commission on Theology and Doctrine releases letter on Holy Scripture,” North American Lutheran Church, accessed June 19, 2024, https://thenalc.org/projects/nalc-commission-on-theology-and-doctrine-releases-pastoral-and-educational-letter-on-holy-scripture/; other images from “Augustine on Biblical Inerrancy,” [Letters 82.3] Reddit, accessed June 24, 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/eformed/comments/vsnn1h/augustine_on_biblical_inerrancy/; and “Catholic Quotes,” Pinterest, accessed June 24, 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/eformed/comments/vsnn1h/augustine_on_biblical_inerrancy/.