A Brief Recap Before the Final Post This is the last post in our series on inerrancy and McGowan’s book The Divine Authenticity of Scripture before a brief conclusion. I’m spending a considerable amount of time critiquing McGowan’s work because, well, ultimately, if the Scriptures aren’t inerrant, we’re toast as believers who seek knowledge of [...]

Time to get back to McGowan… Theses Without Clarity I shall argue in this chapter that there is an older and better way to defend a ‘high’ view of Scripture: the ‘infallibilist’ view. I shall argue that this is a stronger, more sustainable and, above all, more biblical view of Scripture than the inerrantist view. [...]

In 2004, John Brogan of Northwestern University published the essay “Can I Have Your Autographa? Uses and Abuses of Textual Criticism in Formulating an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture” in the book Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics. In my opinion, Brogan’s essay is worth reading since it brings up some of the most controversial [...]

Introduction: Some New Action on the Debate on Inerrancy As soon as I finished the rough draft of my conference paper, “Calvin, Bavinck, and 21st Century Views of Inerrancy,” I became aware of the 2010 March/April edition of Modern Reformation Journal, “Inspiration and Inerrancy.” Fortunately, the majority of the essays are more or less revisions [...]

As we plow ahead in our series on inerrancy, it’s important not only to uphold the truth in the face of opposition, but to see where improvements – or at least fuller understandings – can be cultivated for our own position as Christians. None of us as apologists have “arrived.” Kevin Vanhoozer is one particular [...]

“Perhaps the most striking problem with the rationalistic implication concerning inerrancy is that it limits God. It assumes that God can only act in a way that conforms to our expectations, based on our human assessment of his character.” – McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture, 118 James W. Scott really couldn’t have responded to [...]

The Inerrancy of the Autographa? I refused to support the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy for a number of years because A) I hadn’t looked into it enough, and B) I didn’t understand why the inerrancy of the autographa (original manuscripts of the Bible) really mattered, since we don’t have them anyway. And, wasn’t “inerrancy” just [...]