Inspiration, Inerrancy and Infallibility

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is January 15th, 2021.
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On yesterday's program, I talked about Sovereign Grace Academy, which is the teaching ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church, where I am the pastor.
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And last night we had our first class of the first term of 2021.
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This term is Survey of Bible Doctrines.
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And I thought it would be a good opportunity for those of you who did not get to join us last night to let you hear a portion of last night's class.
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We began talking about the Doctrine of Revelation and we looked at the concepts of inspiration and errancy and infallibility.
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So here's a section of last night's class.
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We're going to spend the last portion of tonight talking about inspiration and authority of scripture.
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I want to make mention right out of the gate that what little bit of time we have to devote to this subject is not in any way, shape or form going to be sufficient.
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We could spend weeks and months looking at the inspiration and authority of scripture.
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But for the sake of this class and for the weeks ahead, I want to go ahead and express some assumptions that are going to be made in this class.
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First, it is going to be assumed that if you are in this class, that you accept the doctrines of inspiration, inerrancy and infallibility.
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So because it's going to be assumed that you accept that, I want to explain at least the basic definitions of those things.
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Inspiration comes from the Greek word theopneustos, which is found in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, where it says all scripture is given by or is God-breathed.
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Some texts say given by inspiration.
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In fact, it was the King James Bible that says that all scripture is inspired.
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And so I think the word inspire is actually a poor choice of words, especially in our modern context, because you'll hear people say, well, that song inspired me, or that book inspired me, or this person is my inspiration.
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But that's not what the Bible means when we say all scripture is inspired.
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All scripture is inspired means that we believe that all scripture comes from the mouth of God.
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And you say, but wait a minute, it came from the came from the Apostle Paul or it came from Peter or it came from Luke or Moses.
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Yes, but as we said in 1 Peter 121, it says that these men spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit of God.
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The Holy Spirit of God is the ultimate author of scripture.
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This is why if you took hermeneutics with us, which only a few of you did.
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But when we took the class on how to interpret the Bible, we said one of the things that we rely on in biblical interpretation is when we read, we ask God that through the Holy Spirit, he would help us to understand what it means.
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Because if he wrote it, then he knows what it means.
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If the Holy Spirit is the author, then he understands his meaning.
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Oftentimes in hermeneutics, the goal or actually all the time in hermeneutics, the goal is to determine what the author intended.
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And so ultimately, the goal of hermeneutics or the science of interpreting the Bible is to know what did the Holy Spirit mean when he had these words written down? And this is why sometimes you might read.
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And I don't know if you do.
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I know I have read the Apostle Paul given interpretation of the Old Testament and say that seems odd to me that that's the way he's interpreting that.
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But that's the Holy Spirit's interpreting.
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For instance, in the book of Galatians, Paul makes a really big deal about the grammar of seed versus seeds, the plural seed and the singular seeds or the backwards of that the plural seeds and the singular seeds.
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Remember what the argument he makes? He says the promise given to Abraham is not to the seeds plural, but to the seed singular who is Christ.
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And you might say, wait a minute, seed can be plural, say scattered seed that that's that can be plural.
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Yeah.
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But the Spirit's interpreting it through the Apostle Paul, and therefore we know that it's meant to be taken to look toward one seed who is Christ.
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And so when we talk about inspiration, we first are dealing with where the Bible came from.
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Yes, it came from the pen of Paul.
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Yes, it came from the pen of Moses.
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Yes, it came from these men.
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But ultimately, it comes from God.
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Its source is God.
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I like this is from the Moody Handbook of Theology.
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I like this definition.
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Inspiration may be defined as the Holy Spirit superintending over the writers of Scripture so that while writing according to their own styles and personalities, the result was God's word written, authoritative, trustworthy and free from error in the original autographs.
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I would say that's probably one of the best definitions of inspiration I've read, simple and direct.
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And I do want to make a note of something that it said, though.
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It says inspired and inerrant in the original autographs.
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So when we use that term, autographs, what are we referring to? The original documents.
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When we talk about the Scripture as inerrant and infallible, what we are saying is that when we say it's inerrant, that means it does not contain any error.
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When we say it's infallible, that's saying it cannot err.
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There's a difference between being inerrant and infallible.
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For instance, if I gave you all a test and you all scored a hundred, that would be an inerrant test.
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You all got it right.
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But it doesn't mean that the next time I give you a test, you might not get it wrong.
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I may give you a test next time and everybody miss one or two answers because you're not infallible.
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Inerrancy says something does not err.
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Infallibility says something cannot err.
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So inerrancy speaks to the quality of the document, and infallibility speaks to the quality of the author.
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It is infallible because it comes from an infallible God.
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Now, the reason why we point out the autographs as the inerrant scripture is because what we possess today is copies of the inerrant scripture.
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And our copies, unfortunately, are subject to error.
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And so, for instance, we have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, and they are handwritten, some of them going back to papyri fragments that reach all the way back to the earliest part of the second century.
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That would be the 120s, 130s.
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We have papyri fragments that go all the way back to then, within one to two generations of the original.
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We have full codices, full manuscripts of the Bible dating to the third and fourth centuries.
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Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus are just a few that we would cite.
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But there are differences in those manuscripts.
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And so, there is something called textual criticism, which seeks to determine the original reading of the manuscript.
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Take out your Bibles with me and turn to John chapter 7 and look at verse 53.
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What do you see when you get to John 7 and verse 53? What? It doesn't say anything? Yes.
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If you see, you'll probably see an asterisk or a bracket of some sort, which brackets off John 7.53 through 8.11.
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And if you look at the notes of your Bible, even if you don't have a study Bible, the notes of the Bible will say something to this effect.
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John 7.53 through 8.11 is not contained in the earliest and best manuscripts and was almost certainly not an original part of the Gospel of John.
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One group of manuscripts places it in Luke 21.38.
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So, this is what we refer to as a movable text.
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Not only is it not in John, but sometimes it's other places, which means that it is liable to be a very early extra-biblical narrative, which was included among the manuscripts as a textual or a scribal note, which would later find its way into the tradition of the manuscripts.
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And that's why it moves and that's why it's different.
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Huh? Mine actually has it.
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Well, it's in mine, but it's bracketed.
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Is it bracketed in your...
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It's in there.
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It's in...
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Yeah.
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Right there.
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Yeah.
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And so the point is simply this.
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Is John 7.53 through 8.11 Scripture or not? I am convinced that it is probably not.
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I think it was D.A.
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Carson who said it is the greatest story that's not in the Bible.
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It's the greatest story that's not in the Bible.
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What he meant was it is a wonderful story.
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It's the story of the woman caught in adultery, but it's probably not part of John's original writing.
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And so how do we treat it? Well, we treat it with a question mark.
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We don't know if it was part of the original manuscript.
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And so when I preach through the New Testament, when I preach through any of these texts, and I come to a variant, what's known as a textual variant, especially a major textual variant, I take the time in my preaching to stop, to explain why we have textual variation, and to say that this does not in any way in my heart and mind make me question the validity or the truthfulness of the text, but to understand that when we say the Bible is inerrant and infallible, we are referring primarily to the original manuscripts.
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And therefore, we must consider what we have in our hand.
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Is it the Word of God? Yes, but there are parts of it that we have to consider whether or not it was part of the original.
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So some people get very uncomfortable with that.
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Some people get really uncomfortable with the NIV, because the NIV just takes parts out, doesn't even leave them in there at certain points.
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But then again, so does your ESV.
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There are certain verses where it goes right from verse 4 to verse 5, and there's nothing there.
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Why do they keep the verse numbers? Why not just replace it? Well, because they want to agree with other Bibles that do have that verse.
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There's a, I forget which gospel it's in, I think it's in Mark, where the angel would come down and stir the waters at the pool of Bethesda.
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That whole section of the narrative is not likely original to Mark, and so it's just not in the modern translations.
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It's just the whole verse is gone.
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And so this causes a lot of people to say, well, we have to take the King James then, because the King James is the standard.
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Can't be the standard.
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King James cannot be the standard.
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Why? Why? Yeah.
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And it's only 400 years old.
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It can't be the standard.
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It's only been around for 400 years.
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I mean, you say, well, 400 years is a long time.
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Not really.
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The only reason why we think 400 years is a long time is because we live in America.
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I'm not kidding.
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They got houses in England that are a lot older than our whole country.
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The difference between Europeans and Americans is Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
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100 miles with us ain't nothing.
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That's a good afternoon drive.
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But to a European, 100 miles takes you from one country to another.
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Yeah.
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So we think 100 years is a long time, but it really ain't.
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400 years ain't really that long, especially in God's day as 1,000 years.
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So the King James Bible is not the standard.
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The King James Bible is certainly a wonderful translation, but it does create a big issue because you have people who are King James only, and therefore they hold to a particular view of inspiration that is unique.
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They believe that God not only has inspired the Bible, but that he has preserved a line which was codified in the 1611 King James Bible, and therefore the 1611 King James Bible becomes almost a new work of inspiration.
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And if you ever want to study that further, I would recommend a couple of texts to you, but primarily the King James only controversy by James White is very helpful.
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So I kind of got off a little bit on that, but the point is we should not allow textual variation to cause us to say we don't believe the Bible is infallible or inerrant.
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We simply must remember that when we talk about those words, we're referring to the autographs primarily.
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How many of you were in the last? Well, maybe it wasn't last class.
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One or two classes back, I mentioned the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
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Remember that? Okay, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was a statement that was made by a group of scholars back in the 70s.
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R.C.
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Sproul was one of them.
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By the way, he just happens to be the writer of our textbook, so I keep mentioning his name.
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R.C.
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Sproul was with James Montgomery Boyce and several other noted theologians gathered together in the 70s to define what was meant by inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility.
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They came up with what is known as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
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My recommendation to you is if you want a very clear definition of what we mean by inerrant and infallible, to look that up and read it.
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It's free.
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It's available online.
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As we have only a few minutes left, let me ask you a question.
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Do you have questions of your own regarding biblical inerrancy and infallibility or even inspiration? Come on.
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I can't be that good a teacher.
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Somebody's got to ask something.
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Inspiration refers to the source as coming from God.
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The word inspired is the translation of the word theopneustos, which is the Greek word for God-breathed.
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So inspiration means the source is God, comes from God.
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And if you said it in like a real, it is not and it cannot err, you know what I mean? That's right, yeah.
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Say that again.
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Inerrancy means something does not err.
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Infallibility means something cannot err.
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Inerrancy regards to the document itself.
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It doesn't err.
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Infallibility says it can't because of the author.
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So one speaks to what you possess as an inerrant Bible because it comes from an infallible source.
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See, the Roman Catholic Church argues that it is infallible, that it makes infallible proclamations through the magisterium, which is the teaching arm of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope being the vicar of Christ or the one who sits in the place of Christ who makes those infallible proclamations.
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The problem is the popes have often contradicted one another, and so what do you do with that? Well, you say, well, in that moment he wasn't speaking infallibly.
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And I'm not being ugly, that really is the answer because what they argue is that the pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, meaning from the seat or from the chair, and the chair being the seat of Peter.
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They believe he sits in the seat of Peter.
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Therefore, when he speaks on behalf of the apostolic succession, the line of apostolic succession, then he's speaking on behalf of God, but that very rarely happens.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.