We can submit to Scripture with confidence because of our Lord. Jesus was consistently clear that what Scripture says, God says.
For example, conversing with the Pharisees, he said: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matt. 19:4–6)
Jesus is quoting Genesis 2:24, which in context is a statement attributed not to God but to the narrator. Yet Jesus sees these as the very words of “he who created them”. For Jesus, Scripture is the word of God, and as such He could teach that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).
Some have suggested that because of Scripture’s dual authorship – the fact that God speaks through His prophets and apostles – it does contain mistakes. But that is not the case: Adam was not originally sinful, nor was the man Jesus. As God perfectly revealed Himself through the humanity of Jesus, so He perfectly speaks through the human authors of Scripture.
Evangelicals can therefore say with the apostle Paul, “Let God be true though every one were a liar” (Rom. 3:4). Every word of Scripture is breathed out by a trustworthy God, and we can therefore trust it as Jesus did. None of which is to say that anyone is saved by belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture.
You may be a Christian and still believe the Bible faulty, but it is not evangelical to say that Scripture is untrustworthy.
None of this is an eccentric, modern spin on mainstream Christianity. This is what Irenaeus taught in the second century: “The Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and His Spirit” (Against Heresies 2.28.2). It is what Augustine taught concerning “the canonical books of Scripture”: “of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error” (Letter 132.3).
Yet in the last century, following the lead of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth in particular, the charge has been made that this view is nothing but a bit of modernist rationalism. In his Church Dogmatics, Barth called it a “new understanding of Biblical inspiration”. His fear was that Protestant orthodoxy wanted to put the Bible in a box to bring it under human control. Or to put it another way, we have created the doctrine of Scripture’s trustworthiness so that we might trust the word of God.
If our allegiance to the word of God depends on some prior allegiance to a human doctrine, then we must come clean and admit we are mistaken. But that is absolutely not the evangelical intention. Evangelicals do not believe Scripture is trustworthy because of some doctrine of inspiration or inerrancy or infallibility. They believe it is trustworthy because Jesus teaches it and Scripture proves itself to be so.
We can still manage to misunderstand or distort the Biblical message. We can hold the highest view of Scripture and use bad interpretation, bad harmonising, bad apologetics, bad theology. It helps here to read the careful way in which the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy speaks: “Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.”
“It is to be believed … in all that it affirms.” So a belief in the complete trustworthiness of Scripture does not mean, for example, that we can read Psalm 14:1 out of context and hold that “there is no God”. We must read God’s word with sensitivity to context and genre.
But with that caution in place, evangelicals can gladly affirm that Scripture is not just true and trustworthy in its overall purpose or when it speaks of spiritual matters. It is of “infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches”.
To be clear, it is not that authentic evangelicalism depends simply upon our articulation of some impeccable formula about the Bible. All too easily, we can hold our beliefs in the ether and not act on them. Authentic evangelicalism depends upon our submission to God’s word as our supreme authority. Where God has spoken, we obey.
