Inspiration, inerrancy and the authority of Scripture

Every Christian tradition confesses that the Bible is the word of God. But that confession raises three distinct questions, and much confusion comes from blurring them.

• Inspiration asks: where did Scripture come from, and how?
• Inerrancy and infallibility ask: what follows about its truthfulness?
• Authority asks: how does it rule the church, especially in relation to tradition?

The companion article on the doctrine of Scripture covers revelation and Scripture's necessity, clarity and sufficiency. This one stays with the three questions above.

Inspiration: what the key texts claim

"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16).

Three details matter. First, theopneustos — God-breathed — describes Scripture's origin, not its effect on readers. It is not that Scripture is inspiring; it is that it is expired, breathed out by God. Second, what is inspired is the graphē, the writing — not merely the writers or their ideas. Third, "all Scripture" in Paul's context meant the Old Testament. But the New Testament already places apostolic writing alongside it: Peter puts Paul's letters with "the other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:15-16), and 1 Timothy 5:18 quotes Deuteronomy and a saying found in Luke 10:7 together as "the Scripture says".

"No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:20-21).

Despite how it is often quoted, verse 20 is not mainly about readers interpreting privately. In context it is about where prophecy came from: not from the prophet's own reading of events, but from God. The human authors genuinely spoke; the Spirit carried them to the destination he intended.

Theories of inspiration

How does a book have two authors, divine and human, both fully at work? The main answers:

The concursive view is often called plenary verbal inspiration: plenary because all of Scripture is inspired, verbal because inspiration extends to the words and not only the thoughts.

It is worth noting the contrast with Islam, which a Nigerian Christian will often meet. Muslim teaching holds that the Qur'an was revealed word for word to Muhammad, its human channel adding nothing of his own. Christians do not claim that for the Bible. Paul can forget whom he baptised (1 Corinthians 1:16); Luke did research; the psalmists weep and complain. The Christian claim is in one sense more remarkable: God speaks fully through people who remain fully themselves — a pattern that echoes the incarnation itself.

Inerrancy, defined carefully

Inerrancy is the claim that Scripture does not err in anything it affirms. The standard modern definition is the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), produced by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy; J. I. Packer, R. C. Sproul, James Montgomery Boice, Francis Schaeffer and Norman Geisler were among those involved. It consists of a short statement and nineteen articles, each with an affirmation and a denial.

The denials are as important as the affirmations, because they rule out caricatures.

What it affirms

• Scripture is God's word in its entirety, and inspiration extends to every part and to the words themselves.
• Inspiration applies strictly to the original documents (the autographs), which can be ascertained from the manuscripts with great accuracy.
• Scripture is free from falsehood, fraud or deceit, including in its claims about history and the natural world — not only in "spiritual" matters (Article XII).

What it explicitly does not claim

According to Article XIII, inerrancy is not negated by:

• a lack of modern technical precision;
• irregularities of grammar or spelling;
• observational descriptions of nature ("the sun rose");
• the reporting of falsehoods — the Bible accurately records the lies of Satan and the wrong arguments of Job's friends without endorsing them;
• hyperbole and round numbers;
• topical rather than chronological arrangement of material;
• variant selections of material in parallel accounts;
• free citations, such as paraphrased quotations of the Old Testament.

Infallibility

Infallible is the older word. It means that Scripture will not fail or mislead. In the Reformation confessions it was effectively a synonym for full truthfulness; the Lausanne Covenant (1974), drafted under John Stott, uses both, calling Scripture "without error in all that it affirms" and "the only infallible rule of faith and practice".

From the 1960s onwards, however, some evangelicals began using infallibility for a narrower claim: that Scripture is wholly reliable in matters of faith and practice, but may contain incidental errors of history or science. This "limited inerrancy" view is what the Chicago Statement's Article XII was written to reject.

The Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council (1965) taught that the books of Scripture teach "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation". Catholic scholars still debate whether that phrase limits the scope of inerrancy or describes its purpose.

Outside North America, many evangelicals — including in Africa and Asia — have preferred the Lausanne wording to the Chicago Statement, not because they hold a lower view of Scripture but because the Chicago debate arose from a specifically American controversy. The Australian scholar Michael Bird has made that argument. The substance of a high view of Scripture is widely shared even where the vocabulary differs.

Jesus' view of Scripture

The strongest reason Christians hold a high view of the Bible is that Jesus did.

• He treated the Old Testament as final in argument: "It is written" ends his temptation (Matthew 4:4-10).
• He said "Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35) — while building an argument on a single word in a psalm.
• He argued for the resurrection from the present tense of "I am the God of Abraham" (Matthew 22:31-32).
• He attributed words of the Genesis narrator to God himself: "he who created them... said" (Matthew 19:4-5, quoting Genesis 2:24).
• He said not "an iota, not a dot" of the law would pass away until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:18).
• He treated Old Testament people and events — Abel, Noah, Jonah, Sodom — as historical.

At the same time, Jesus fiercely opposed human tradition that displaced Scripture: "thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down" (Mark 7:13). Those two attitudes together — total submission to Scripture, sharp criticism of tradition that overrides it — are the root of the Protestant doctrine of authority.

Handling apparent contradictions

Augustine set the pattern in a letter to Jerome. If he found something in Scripture that seemed contrary to truth, he said, he would conclude that the manuscript was faulty, or the translator had missed the meaning, or he himself had failed to understand — not that the author had erred.

That is not a refusal to think. It is a set of real options to check first. In practice:

1. Check the text. Some differences are copying errors in transmission. 2 Kings 8:26 gives Ahaziah's age at accession as 22; the Hebrew of 2 Chronicles 22:2 gives 42, which would make him older than his father. Many modern translations read 22 in both places, following other ancient evidence.
2. Check the genre and conventions. Ancient historians summarised speeches, arranged material by theme, and simplified complex events.
3. Allow for perspective. Matthew 8:5-13 has a centurion approach Jesus; Luke 7:1-10 has him send elders. Acting through agents was routinely described as acting oneself — as we still say "the President signed a treaty".
4. Allow for selection. Mark and Luke mention one blind man at Jericho (Bartimaeus); Matthew mentions two (Matthew 20:30). Naming the one who was known is not denying the other.
5. Hold the difficult ones honestly. A few cases remain hard, and believing scholars propose differing solutions. A difficulty is not a demonstrated error. Historically, many "errors" once confidently announced — about the Hittites, or Luke's titles for local officials — have been resolved by later evidence.

Authority: Scripture and tradition

All Christians accept that Scripture is authoritative. They differ over how it relates to the church's tradition.

• Roman Catholic teaching holds that Scripture and Tradition flow from the same divine source and form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which the church's teaching office (the Magisterium) authentically interprets. The Magisterium is said to serve the word, not to stand above it.
• Orthodox churches see Scripture as the supreme expression of Holy Tradition, read within the life, liturgy and councils of the church.
• Protestants hold sola scriptura: Scripture alone is the final, infallible authority, and all tradition is tested by it. This was never meant as solo scriptura — the idea that each individual reads the Bible alone, ignoring the creeds and the wisdom of the church. The Reformers quoted the church fathers constantly. Tradition is a real but subordinate authority; Scripture is the rule that rules, tradition the rule that is ruled.

This matters intensely in Nigeria and across Africa, though often not in the form of the Reformation debate. The pressing question is less "Scripture or the Pope?" and more "Scripture or the prophet?" — the founder's revelations, the church constitution, the visions of the prayer leader, or a word received at a vigil. Paul's instruction is to "not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21). And the test is the apostolic word: "even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8).

Thy word is truth.— Jesus, praying for his disciples (John 17:17, KJV)

A high view of inspiration and inerrancy is not an end in itself. Its point is that when Scripture speaks, God speaks — and that no voice, however anointed it claims to be, may overrule him.