The Inerrancy of Scripture
The other day I was out and got into a conversation with someone. I explained that I was not a priest but a seminarian, and he asked me whether we studied a lot of the Bible. I replied that we did, and he asked whether I thought a lot of it “was true.” A friend of mine asked him what he meant by “true,” which was a good question. He meant “actual fact,” which I thought was still ambiguous, but I responded that whatever the sacred writers intended to mean by what they wrote is accurate in the way they intended it.
Later, I started thinking about the word ‘inerrancy.’ It comes from Latin, of course, and it means “the quality of not going astray.” The idea of “going astray” expresses that there is an intended path from which one has wandered. Thus, the idea of intention is essential to the idea of error.
So, keep in mind the following:
- Whatever is inspired has the Holy Spirit as its author.
- Inspired writing, however, also has human writers.
- The human writers wrote all those things and only those things which the Holy Spirit intended (Dei verbum 11).
- Therefore, whatever is asserted in inspired writing is asserted by the Holy Spirit (DV 11b).
So, not everything described in the Bible happened in the sense of a purely factual historical account. For instance, most of the Church Fathers do not interpret the “six days” of creation to be six periods of twenty-four hours each.
However, there are no mistakes in the Bible–there may be mistakes made by copyists though. If the intention of the text is really to make a factual claim–such as the accounts of the Resurrection–then this must be true in the factual sense. If the intention of the text is to make a moral claim, then it must be an accurate moral claim.
This is not in any way limiting the inerrancy of Scripture. Errancy is “missing the mark,” i.e. intending one thing and getting a different result. Whatever the writer of the text asserts is asserted by the Holy Spirit, and he is the God of Truth who can neither deceive nor be deceived. He does not go astray.
The question that my friend asked–which Pontius Pilate asked first–was therefore a good one.
For a better understanding of issues of inerrancy, check out the following:
- Dei verbum
- Divino afflante Spiritu
- Providentissimus Deus
- The Historicity of the Gospels an instruction of the Pontifical Biblical Commission
Oh, and if anyone tells you that the Church forbade the study of the Bible before the Second Vatican Council, check the dates on some of these documents. Better yet, ask them to show you the instructions to keep the Bible from the laity.
