It’s fascinating how many arguments have been around for centuries, or even millennia, and yet they continue to crop up as some new discovery by those who have been ‘enlightened’. The problem comes from where that assumed enlightenment comes.

There’s a strong push among many Christians to reimagine, or redefine what biblical infallibility is, or to deny it wholly or in part. Of course there’s a driver behind this, the desire to accept only what such Christians want to believe, and to have a basis for invalidating those things in Scripture that they don’t wish to believe.

In the 19th century there were a couple of things going on: first of all there was the publishing of Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” (although few like to dwell too long on the full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life); secondly, there was a push among biblical scholars to deny the historicity or scientific accuracy of the Bible.

Both of those things were attacking the same thing, the veracity of God’s Word. It is the same old question that the Serpent asked Eve in Eden. “Did God really say?” Over many conversations on this matter it has struck me time and again that those who wholly believe that every word of Scripture is true and God breathed are considered somehow naïve, uneducated, and simplistic, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. How do people make that distinction? On the basis of their own supposed superior reason, education, and understanding.

In a book that I’ve been reading on those who question biblical infallibility and their basis for doing so I came across a wonderful and pithy quote:

“C. F. Walther, an early leader among nineteenth-century Lutherans, understood that if one finds errors in Scriptures he establishes his reason above God’s Word. Walther declared in 1858:

He who imagines that he finds in the Holy Scripture even only one error, believes not in Scripture but in himself; for even if he accepted everything else as truth, he would believe it not because Scripture says so, but because it agrees with his reason or with his heart. ‘Dear fellow,’ writes Luther, ‘God’s Word is God’s Word, and won’t tolerate much doctoring.’”

The logic is inescapable. So, are you willing to take your (naturally impeccable) logic and reason and make that the arbiter of truth and error in Scripture? Either all of it is God’s Word, or none of it, which is it to be?

Quote taken from book below, p. 125 – Biblical Authority by John D Woodbridge