My Introduction
The content below is taken from chapter 3 of the essay Biblical Authority, Hermeneutics and Inerrancy by J.I.Packer. I will just give an overview of the first two chapters.
Chapter 1 expounds the principle of the authority of the Scripture as understood by the evangelicals, as a complex construction of 7 elements: Inspiration, Canonicity, Witness of the Spirit, Sufficiency and Clarity, Mystery of the Scripture, Obedience to intellectual and ethical rule of the Scripture.
The second chapter expounds on hermeneutics as consisting of 3 parts: exegesis, synthesis and application, revealing at the same time the presupposition behind each part, namely, the full humanity of inspired writing, the organic character of the Scripture, and the consistency of God in all ages respectively. This chapter also talks about how one’s hermeneutics is influenced by one’s doctrine of the Scripture like a exegetical spiral that moves upward. The paragraph below is taken from chapter 2 of the essay.
Thus he travels round the exegetical circle, or up the exegetical spiral. If his exegetical procedure is challenged, he defends it from his hermeneutic; if his hermeneutic is challenged, he defends it from his doctrine of biblical authority; and if his doctrine of biblical authority is challenged, he defends it from the texts. The circle thus appears as a one-way system: from texts to doctrine, from doctrine to hermeneutic, from hermeneutic to texts again.
So we cannot escape the fact that our view of the Scripture affects our hermeneutics and vice versa. Such realization is important if we are to do hermeneutics responsibly. What then are the presuppositions the historic evangelicals have? Here the author also freely admits what presuppositions bound the hermeneutics of the evangelicals. First, the exegete is bound to grammatico-historical method. This must be understood from the inspiration as expounded in chapter one. That is both the full humanity and the divine inspiration in the writing. So what the human writer means, God means. God might mean more, but no less. Secondly, the exegete is bound by the principle of harmony. That is that there is One Divine Author of the Scripture, so Scripture interprets Scripture, Scripture cannot be set against Scripture and finally, what is secondary or obscure must be interpreted in light of what is primary and clear.
I want to focus the content of this entry on inerrancy, but I have summarized the first two chapters above on authority (which includes another 7 huge topics) and hermeneutics (its meaning, scope, presuppositions and implications) because inerrancy cannot be separated from them. Hence I think the overview will set the context better when chapter 3 is read below.
Since it is not very long, and the content is quite a compact and precise one, I do not re-summarize but I just copy and paste here only the introduction paragraph of the essay, and then all the content of chapter 3 on inerrancy. I have not modified the content at all, except to add little subtitles highlighted in bold for better readability to catch the main points of the author.
Introductory Paragraph
The importance of reflecting on the relation between biblical authority and hermeneutics appears from the single consideration that biblical authority is an empty notion unless we know how to determine what the Bible means. It appears also from the fact that every hermeneutic implies a theology, just as every theology involves a hermeneutic, so that where a false hermeneutic operates the Bible will not in fact have authority, whatever is claimed to the contrary. The importance of reflecting on the question of biblical inerrancy in relation to these two subjects is that the evangelical view of both assumes it, and that any denial of it afflicts both with unsteadiness, inducing collapse. To show the link between these three matters is the main aim of the present essay.
3. Inerrancy
The Recent Attacks and Misunderstanding on Inerrancy
How does all this relate to the question of the inerrancy of Scripture? The concept has come under heavy fire in recent years, from professed evangelicals no less than from others. It has been dismissed as speculative, unnecessary, and unprofitable. It has been attacked as viciously rationalistic, in the sense of expressing a concern to show that one “has the answers” to all seeming contradictions and difficulties in the biblical text, and a belief that by showing this one can “prove” that the Bible is the Word of God. It has been accused of betokening the kind of exegetical arbitrariness which we ourselves have been censuring, in such matters as allegorizing, wresting prophetic scriptures unhistorically, and making the Bible teach science in the modern sense and with modern precision. It has been linked in the minds of some critics with the pietistic mistakes of supposing that if one’s approach to Scripture is reverent enough, no problem of interpretation will remain, so that he who adoringly proclaims an inerrant Bible will emerge an inerrant interpreter. In face of this array of misunderstandings (for such they all are) it is necessary to begin by stating explicitly what the assertion of inerrancy does and does not mean.
What Inerrancy Is and Is Not
Inerrancy is a word that has been in common use since only the last century, though the idea itself goes back through seventeenth century orthodoxy, the Reformers and the Schoolmen, to the Fathers, and, behind them, to our Lord’s own statements, “the scriptures cannot be broken,” “thy word is truth” (Jn 10:35; 17:17). The word has a negative form and a positive function. It is comparable with the four negative adverbs with which the Chalcedonian definition fenced the truth of the incarnation. Its function, like theirs, is not to explain anything in a positive way, but to safeguard a mystery by excluding current mistakes about it. It, like them, has obvious meaning only in the context of the particular debates that have caused it to be used; apart from that context, it, like they, may well seem esoteric and unhelpful. The idea it expresses—namely, that all Scripture assertions are true and trustworthy in all that they assert—is not a speculation, but is directly entailed by the fact of inspiration, which, as we saw, asserts direct identity between man’s word and God’s.
Logically, the function of the assertion of inerrancy has been to express a double commitment: first, an advance commitment to receive as truth from God all that Scripture is found on inspection actually to teach; second, a methodological commitment to interpret Scripture according to the principle of harmony which we analyzed above. It thus represents not so much a lapse into rationalism as a bulwark against rationalism—namely, that kind of rationalism which throws overboard the principle of harmony.
What it expresses is not an irreligious interest in “proving the Bible” but a retention of reverence for the sacred text which some were irreverently expounding as if it were in places self-contradictory and false. To assert biblical inerrancy is not, however, to prejudge any questions about the literary genre, range, and content of particular biblical passages; these things must in every case be determined inductively and a posteriori, by grammatico-historical exegesis. The assertion, in other words, does not function as an exegetical short cut! Nor does it imply a blanket claim to have up one’s sleeve a convincing solution, here and now, of all puzzling biblical phenomena of detail, or an expectation of not having to leave any of these problems open as one advances in one’s earthly pilgrimage of Bible study. He who asserts inerrancy with understanding expects, rather, to have to live with such problems all his days, perhaps in quite acute form, simply because he will not settle for anything less than a convincing harmonization, and declines to cut any knots by saying flatly that the Bible errs.
Extent of Inerrancy
It has been proposed to limit the confession of inerrancy to biblical doctrine as distinct from biblical history, or, more precisely, to doctrinally significant facts as opposed to other facts. But this is impossible: by what method of enquiry could one hope to determine which biblical facts have no doctrinal significance? Also, the proposal is unsound: for as students of history-writing now recognize, all facts presented by historians are, willy-nilly, interpreted facts, and if that is so, then the doctrine of inspiration, which posits that man’s witness to God in the Bible is identical with God’s witness of himself, obliges us to assign to all facts reported in Scripture the status of God-interpreted facts. It is true that careful distinctions must be drawn between the form and the content of the biblical revelation (i.e., between concepts used for making an assertion and the assertion itself); also, between the varying strengths of human affirmation (absolute certainty, non-committal reporting of sources, voicing of hopes, guesses, provisional beliefs, etc.). But the sole purpose of these distinctions is to help us discern how much the writers are actually, in the logical sense, asserting, i.e., asking their readers to accept as true. When this has become clear, our part is to accept the assertions as not simply human, but divine instruction, guaranteed to us by the veracity of God.
The Importance of Inerrancy
The significance of the confession of inerrancy in relation to the evangelical understanding of hermeneutics and biblical authority is now plain. By making explicit the identity of man’s witness to God and God’s witness to himself in the Bible, it undergirds the maxim that a harmonistic synthesis of the fruits of grammatico-historical exegesis is the sure and only way into God’s mind; and thus it establishes the further proposition, basic to sound theology in a fallen world, that if biblical teaching and my own thoughts clash, it is my thoughts that are wrong every time!
Furthermore, its insistence on the divine authority of all that the biblical writers assert safeguards, first, the identity of the Christ of faith with the Jesus of the gospels, the “Jesus of history,” and, second, the covenantal continuity and correspondence of God’s saving acts in history under both Testaments—the two foundation-principles apart from which the contents of the Bible cannot exert their due authority at any point. To the weaknesses of its hold on these principles the theological malaise of modern Protestantism is directly due. The fact is that inerrancy, as we have defined it, is not merely a truth, but an essential and fundamental truth. Surrender it, and neither the authority of the Bible nor the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and God’s grace in him, can remain intact.
