The error of abandoning inerrancy

I’m not sure this is really what I ought to be getting on with this morning if I want to get my PhD before I retire, but I’ve been browsing in McGowan, A. T. B., The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging evangelical perspectives (Nottingham, Apollos, 2007) (which could be of some relevance to the Grand Project!).

One of his proposals is that we prefer the term “infallibility” to “inerrancy”.

He argues:

In recent years,… there has been a growing dominance of the use of the word ‘inerrancy’ (a word rarely used in Europe) and this, in some of its forms, has represented a turn towards a somewhat mechanical and even rationalistic approach to Scripture, basing its authority on a set of inerrant manuscripts. The argument for ‘infallibility’ is that the final authority for the Christian is the authority of God speaking in and through his Word and that the Holy Spirit infallibly uses God’s Word to achieve all he intends to achieve. It is, therefore, a more dynamic (or organic) and less mechanical view of authority. It also avoids a number of serious problems related to the word ‘inerrancy’… (pp48-49)

Well, perhaps. I’m not so sure.

The Europe / America point seems to get made a few time and I’m not sure its terribly valuable. There seems to be general agreement that originally the terms infallible and inerrant were used interchangeably.

I can’t see that the term inerrancy is necessarily inherently mechanistic.

It seems to me that there is a danger in McGowan’s shift (though perhaps some see it as a merit) of bypassing questions of truth and focussing on questions of effect. Sure, we need a doctrine of the efficacy of God’s word. We need to understand its purposes, but that’s not all the word inerrancy was meant to do. God’s Word is about more than stating true propositions, but it includes that. Surely one of God’s purposes in Scripture was to state truths and where the Bible attempts to do that it is infallible or inerrant in all that it affirms – the traditional doctrine!

I reckon it might be better to say that God speaks his Word or words, rather than that he speaks in and through it. God uses the Bible according to its nature so we shouldn’t expect strange private messages out of the Bible understood apart from the context of what the words mean. A mention of “the west” in Scripture that for some reason seems to stand out to me in my quiet time is not the Holy Spirit telling me to move to Bristol, as if God speaks “through” his word in an arbitrary or magical way.

Neither is the term inerrancy inimical to scholarship. It could be thought to helpfully flag up that it is Scripture as originally given that is inerrant. Strictly speaking the developed doctrine of inerrancy is a reminder that the claim of inerrancy is not being made of any extant version or translation and therefore emphasises the tasks of textual criticism and translation.