In the last post we began to look at the Nicene Creed's confession of the Holy Spirit as "who spoke by the prophets." I noted that three important points needed consideration as we approached this important clause in the Nicene Creed.
1. First, what was going through the minds of those who attended the Council of Constantinople when they agreed upon this part of the Creed? 1
2. The second point about the confession of the Spirit's role in the Divine revelation of the Scripture was this: did the Council of Constantinople, and thus their update to the original Creed of Nicaea in 325 reflect the prevailing view of the early church's stance on the Scripture? Did their position of the nature of Scripture match that of Jesus and the Apostles? It is this second point we will aim to answer in today's post. Then for sake of completion of thought...
3. The third point regarding the Holy Spirit "who spoke by the prophets" had to do then with what ought the church confess about the Scriptures today? We'll look at this next post.
The claim that the doctrine of inerrancy was invented by conservative theologians in the 19th century.
Before we get to what the early church taught about the nature of sacred Scripture, the Bible, I need to address what is often a claim from critics of Biblical inerrancy - that the doctrine of inerrancy was invented by conservative theologians in the 19th century. This claim is worth taking a quick sidebar so that we can see in what follows why such a statement is preposterous.2 In short, two scholars, Jack Rogers and Donald McKim proposed that the doctrine of inerrancy was a novel doctrine developed by conservatives in the nineteenth century (readers may dive deeper into a good article summarizing the entire history of their proposal and the critiques thereof here Inerrancy, Infallibility, and the Rogers/McKim Proposal – Theology For the Rest of Us.)
Why bring this up? The Rogers/McKim thesis influenced a whole generation of scholarship, critical and conservative alike. I vividly recall reading their book and the books that responded to it. In my seminary days, I saw firsthand how such thinking made the "battle for the Bible" so difficult. Even though good conservative evangelical scholars would soundly show the weakness of this argument, it still had shaped the minds of many budding theologians in the 1980's and 1990's. As I'll show below the high view of Scripture that affirms Biblical inerrancy is not a modern invention but represents the historic view of the Christian church. 3
One more point before we move forward. I will say from the offset that not one church father espoused the view of radical Biblical criticism or the above Rogers and McKim thesis I just mentioned. Critics today will allege the Scriptures came about through an evolutionary process of editors and a time-bound religious consciousness of men. If for anything, it is theological liberalism and scholars such as Rogers and McKim who are the innovators of views that support a non-inerrantist view of the Bible.4
Considering the first four centuries of church history's view of the Scripture.
What was the view of the larger early church in the first four centuries? Did the church fathers consider the doctrine of Divine inspiration as not needing belief in Biblical inerrancy? Or did they hold that Biblical inerrancy and infallibility are necessary entailments of Divine inspiration of the original documents of Scripture? To get our bearings before presenting the evidence of the early church fathers, a definition of Biblical inerrancy is in order. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy ["Short Statement #4] defines Biblical inerrancy as follows:
"Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives." Microsoft Word - Chicago Statement.doc
First century church fathers
Clement of Rome's letter "1 Clement" is considered the earliest Christian work written outside of the canonical New Testament. As he deals with various issues going on at the same church of Corinth to whom the Apostle Paul wrote, we get some striking statements about how high a view of Scripture these early church fathers had. In 1 Clement 44, Clement explains the Holy Spirit's work of Divine inspiration that enabled the Apostles: "For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect fore-knowledge."
Clement addressed how the Apostles knew that doctrinal and moral drift would occur in the churches to whom they wrote. His argument was this: The Holy Spirit equipped them to know about such things beforehand. Clement then makes this comment about the by-product of the Spirit's working through these otherwise fallible men, namely inerrant, infallible Scripture:
"Look carefully into the Scriptures, which are the true utterances of the Holy Spirit. Observe that nothing of an unjust or counterfeit character is written in them."
The doctrine of Divine inspiration necessarily entails inerrancy and infallibility in the original manuscripts penned by the Prophets and Apostles. This cornerstone truth was argued for by a church father who knew the Apostles firsthand.
Second century church fathers.
Justin Martyr's "Dialogue With Trypho" is among the earliest apologetic works writing in the mid 100's A.D. As he responded to objections by his Jewish interlocutor Trypho, we find Trypho struggling to grasp something that the Prophet Isaiah wrote. As Justin Martyr attempted to explain Isaiah's words to Trypho, we find him holding to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy:
"I replied, 'Trypho, if you quoted that with no intent to twist it—leaving out what comes before and after—then it’s understandable. But if your aim is to create confusion, as if to suggest the Scriptures contradict themselves, then you’re mistaken. I will never say Scripture contradicts itself. If any passage seems difficult or unclear, I’d rather admit I don’t fully understand it than assume it clashes with others. I encourage you—and anyone who thinks otherwise—to adopt that same mindset."
Third and fourth century church fathers.
As we round out our survey of the early church's view of Scripture, we arrive at the 300's and 400's A.D. I would refer readers to Athanasius and Clement of Alexandria, whom I cited in the last post, as those who represented how theologians viewed Scripture at that time. We noted in that last post that they affirmed the inerrancy of Scripture.
Perhaps the foremost example of all the church fathers was Augustine of Hippo. At the end of the fourth and beginning in the fifth centuries, Augustine maintained correspondence with another famous church father, Jerome. The letters they wrote back and forth are worth studying, since the reader gets insight into how the Scriptures were viewed. In letter 82, Augustine wrote this statement in his letter to Jerome which blatantly affirms Biblical inerrancy and infallibility:
"At the same time, as I have said already, it is to the canonical Scriptures alone that I am bound to yield such implicit subjection as to follow their teaching, without admitting the slightest suspicion that in them any mistake or any statement intended to mislead could find a place."
Augustine not only affirms the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, but also the even stronger doctrine of Biblical infallibility - namely that the words of Scripture can never fail in their accuracy at any time.
Closing thoughts for today
Augustine's statement and the others cited proves that the early church had always maintained a high view of Scripture. As we close today's post, we now have grounds to claim that the early church and the councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) held to an inerrantist view of sacred Scripture.
As we reflect once again on the Nicene Creed's confession of the Holy Spirit as He "who spoke by the prophets", we can rest assured that inerrancy and infallibility was a working assumption in the thinking of the early church. In the next post we will look at the most important of all considerations: what was the view of Jesus and the Apostles on the nature of Scripture.
Endnotes:
1. It was this point we studied and concluded that those present at the Council of Nicaea held to the high view of Scripture advocated by conservative, Bible believing Christians, namely it as inerrant and infallible. We also saw too that the sufficiency of Scripture in establishing doctrine and maintaining it against all error was embraced.
2. I recall in my seminary days reading all the books and journal articles associated with the "Battle for the Bible" in the 1970's and 1980's. One book that was required reading was by two men, Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, entitled "The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible". Their main point was that the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy was a modern invention of conservative theologians a generation after the Reformation period. These conservative theologians, known as "The Reformed Scholastics", argued a high view of Scripture. Per Rogers and McKim, this line of reasoning became refined by nineteenth century conservatives B.B. Warfield and Charles Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary in its conservative hey-day.
This proposal by Rogers and McKim then claimed that when we arrived in the twentieth century, conservative, fundamentalists used inerrancy to wage its battles with theological liberalism or modernists. In the concluding pages of their book, Rogers and McKim assert what they call a "third alternative" or "third way" of understanding Biblical authority, that neither goes the way of rigid, orthodox, inerrancy that ignores the tools and advances of science on the one hand, nor advocates retreat to a subjective, allegorizing method of Scripture on the other hand. Instead,
Rogers and McKim propose we hold to Scripture as authoritative on matters of life and salvation while feeling free to use the tools of Biblical criticism that were developed in the 18th, 19th, and twentieth centuries. On page 462 they note this: "Most thought evangelicals, for example, accept the usefulness of responsible Biblical criticism."
The term "criticism" refers to analyzing the Biblical text in the same way as one would any piece of literature. Included in such methodology is approaching the Biblical text not as inspired, inerrant literature, but rather as a byproduct of human authors who were prone to make mistakes just like anyone else. Biblical criticism employs the tools of form criticism, redaction criticism, source criticism, comparative religion, and a naturalistic worldview that would deem miracles and possibly symbolic unless otherwise indicated. Roger's and McKim's books was written with the intent to recover what they deemed to be the original Reformed view of Scripture. Sadly, their analysis of the United Presbyterian Church failed to see the fruits born by the regular use of Historical Critical studies in the study of Scripture. Such fruits included decline in missions, spiritual vitality in the churches, and erosion of confidence in the Scriptures in both pulpit and pew.
3. As I showed in the last post, those at the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. would have affirmed inerrancy. Jesus and the Apostles held to this same high view of Scripture, which we shall see in the next post.
4. That school of thinking only began in earnest in the late eighteenth century with the early forms of the documentary hypothesis. What we will see below is that the sufficiency, necessity, inerrancy, infallibility, and clarity of Scripture was the view of the early, orthodox Christian church.
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