According to Mark Noll:
Most Christians in most churches since the founding of Christianity have believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. Or at least they have believed that the Scriptures are inspired by God, and so are the words of eternal life. The term inerrancy was not common until the nineteeth century. But the conviction that God communicates in Scripture a revelation of himself and of his deeds, and that this revelation is entirely truthful, has always been the common belief of most Catholics, most Protestants, most Orthodox, and even most of the sects of the fringe of Christianity.
Mark Noll, ‘A Brief History of Inerrancy, Mostly in
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3 comments:
Oh, that's slippery... the whole debate about inerrancy, at least between conservative evangelicals, is to do with terminology. Is inerrancy a good word, fit for purpose?
I am with McGowan on this one. I struggle to see how it can do anything but distort what we want to say about Scripture.
I've not read all of McGowan's book but if we want to say that Scripture as orginally given is without error in all that it affirms (as I do) then inerrancy seems to me to be a jolly good term.
Infalibility becomes a slippery term if people want to define it to mean that the Bible achieves God's purposes. A liberal could say that and then have a good old wriggle about what God's purposes are!
I'm with Michael. Most of the bad press about Andy's book has come from those who are card carrying Inerrantists or Free Church people or people who haven't read the book but have read their negative reviews. McGowan is no crypto-Barthian or liberal. He affirms everything written in the Westminster Confession. It's a pity the Inerrancy debate has overshadowed his more useful discussions in the book about Presuppositionalism v evidentialism, developing an evangelical theology of tradition, and so on.
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