The concept of the inerrancy of Scripture was a discussion that didn’t really begin until the 1970s. The Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy over Scripture had been going on since the turn of the century; before that American Christianity was dominated by Protestants; Catholics really didn’t have a voice in American Christianity until then.
The Modernists embraced modern, liberal philosophy of Christianity based on the Universal Fatherhood of God/Universal Brotherhood of Man. All humans are brothers; being Christian or churchgoing did not set you apart from your unbelieving brothers. Modernists believed in the basic ethical rightness of Scripture, but not necessarily the miracles or the deity of Christ.
The Fundamentalists got their name from a series of pamphlets called “The Fundamentals” published 1910-1915 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. They affirmed conservative Protestant beliefs and attacked liberal theology, modernism, and evolutionism, among others.
American Christianity began to split between 2 camps: “Mainline” Protestants and “Evangelical” Protestants. (Interesting side note: The “Mainline” Protestants got their name from the main train line in Chicago!) The mainline Protestants included Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, etc. They tended to separate themselves from ‘the world,’ so there was a rise of evangelistic denominations, which were more conservative, but tried to take the faith back into society. The Evangelistic movement also began to split into 2 factions, the more liberal holding that scripture is a revelation from God but it has errors in it and is only a guide. (Neo-orthodoxy was the movement within liberal Protestantism that sought to recover the centrality of the Gospel and the uniqueness of Christ; while they affirmed Scripture is a revelation [or witness to Revelation] they believed that it could have historical and scientific mistakes).
The conservative faction put together a manifesto called The Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy. This Statement’s formal definition of scriptural inerrancy was based on the inerrancy of the ‘original, autographed manuscripts’ of the biblical books. “Original” means the original language that the bible was written in: Hebrew. “Autographed” means the actual manuscript in the actual handwriting of the author. Which of course begs the question of the entire Old Testament, for which we have no manuscripts in the original author’s hand, and many books of the OT were passed on orally for generations before they were written down.
Standard objections to inerrancy:
- Scientific objection: The bible seem to contradict known scientific fact: the story of creation has no basis in scientific fact; the statement that the heavens are a ‘dome’ and the stars are fixed permanently in the dome, the story of the earth standing still, etc.
- The Gospels objection: the 4 Gospels contradict each other (e.g., Jesus’ two seemingly inconsistent genealogies, Judas’ death, who came to the tomb first on Easter, how many angels were there, etc.)
- Is it all allegory or all literal? Doesn’t it have to be one or the other? And how can humans, who are fallible, interpret it correctly when it is so ambiguous?
