Chapter 13   Tools of a Takeover: Biblical Inerrancy

The Takeover movement, as is well known, has gained most of its credibility by marching under the banner of “biblical inerrancy.” Inerrancy is the affirmation that the Bible, in each and every part, is free of any error of any kind on any subject, geography, science, and history, as well as in its message of salvation and instruction for life. The Fundamentalist community conceives of the Bible as dictated word-for-word by God. Since God cannot make mistakes, the Bible must therefore be inerrant.

A Moderate Perspective on Inerrancy. Most in the moderate faction conceive the Bible as being composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, with the human writers as active participants with God in the work. Thus the Bible has a human face, but a divinely given heart. God has been at work all throughout the process of both writing and transmitting the Bible through the years, seeing to it that we have everything we need in scripture to hear his message of salvation and Christian life. With that view in mind, most moderates prefer the ancient affirmation that the Bible is “the infallible rule of faith and practice.”

Moderates prefer not to use the term “inerrant” because serious Biblical scholarship clearly proves that the “human face” of scripture contains many a human flaw. Most moderates would agree that none of these flaws affects any Christian doctrine or historical affirmation. Nevertheless, moderates do not consider it wise to claim things for scripture that scripture does not claim for itself, and the Bible does not claim to be humanly inerrant. It claims to be divinely inspired, which should be quite enough.  Moreover, moderates do not consider it honest to claim things for scripture that are simply not true. Moderates believe that the “divine heart” of scripture has ample power to demonstrate the Bible’s inspiration and authority.

Fundamentalist “Unresolved Difficulties.” Fundamentalist scholars confess the existence of human flaws in scripture, but prefer to refer to these as “unresolved difficulties.” They insist that the scholar’s approach to scripture weakens the Bible’s authority and thus weakens the power of Christian preaching. Therefore they have been quick to declare that anyone who will not describe the Bible as “inerrant” is a dangerous liberal who “does not believe the Bible.” Using this rhetoric, Fundamentalist leaders convinced the rank and file Baptists that the seminaries were filled with dangerous liberals who would corrupt the believing heart of the SBC from within. Thousands of frightened believers came to the Conventions from 1979 to 1990 to save the Convention from these evil scholars, when in fact our seminaries were filled with decent, believing professors who refused to lie about the Bible, even when their jobs were threatened by the Fundamentalist movement.

Is Inerrancy the Real Issue? The inerrancy issue has worked as a yes/no question like “Have you stopped beating your wife?” A moderate with any honesty cannot answer that question without appearing to lack faith in scripture’s spiritual perfection, even though he or she believes in the Bible just as much as the Fundamentalist questioner. The battle over inerrancy has also worked to distract people from hidden agendas, mostly regarding national and internal Baptist politics.

What about the inerrancy issue itself? Is it really the core issue that divides the people of the Southern Baptist Convention? Three reasons can be cited to demonstrate that beliefs about “inerrancy” did not divide Southern Baptists until the Fundamentalist movement exaggerated the importance of the issue. These reasons are spelled out by a team of scholars in The Unfettered Word, which was first published in 1987.^[40] These three reasons were also set forward during a “Conference on Biblical Inerrancy” sponsored by the six SBC seminary presidents in 1987.^[41] These three reasons have been set forth with the following arguments:

Inerrancy and Southern Baptists: Three Key Issues. Since the time of Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book The Battle For the Bible, Fundamentalists have wrongly insisted that inerrancy is the definitive view of Southern Baptists.^[42] The sources upon which Takeover people have based this unsound view of “our historic tradition” cannot be trusted at several key points.^[43]

Leaders Have Been Misinterpreted. Three respected shapers of Southern Baptist theology, E. Y. Mullins, A. T. Robertson, and W. T. Conner, have been misinterpreted by Takeover leaders. These three theologians rejected the kind of inerrancy position advocated by the leaders of the Takeover movement,^[44] and Mullins and Conner actively sought to counter such arguments. The Takeover movement has treated these theologians with a mixture of ignorance and distortion that could be called a crime against historical knowledge.^[45] Leon McBeth’s comment about Southern Baptists is apt:  

Their own theologians are almost unknown among them; their earlier confessions unfamiliar. This allows some Southern Baptists to claim recent innovations as “the historic Baptist position” on certain issues.^[46]

“Inerrancy” Lacks Definition. When Fundamentalist leaders have attacked Southern Baptist scholars for not being inerrantists; they have ignored an important fact. They fail to mention that non-Southern Baptist inerrantist scholars carefully qualify what they mean when they say the Bible is without error. Indeed the word “inerrancy” becomes so heavily guarded and qualified that the final position regarding the text of the Bible is nearly the same for both Fundamentalists and moderates.

Inerrantist scholars and leaders admit that “apparent discrepan­cies, verbal differences, seeming contradictions, and so forth”^[47] are in the Bible. But they say these things do not count as “errors,” including events recounted out of chrono­logical order, numbers disagreeing, or divergent accounts of the same events, passages in one part of the Bible quoted loosely in another part of the Bible.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which is being cited with the Baptist Faith and Message by a growing number of current SBC leaders, makes repeated qualifications to its statement on inerrancy. “Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.”^[48] However, these inerrantists unanimously agree these “problems” do not count as “errors.” In another qualification, the
Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy acknowledges “that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free . . . . no translation is or can be perfect . . . .”^[49]

Where SBC Fundamentalists affirm such qualified views of inerrancy, and some of them do,^[50] their hostility toward moderate teachers and preachers is unnecessary.  Men like Jerry Vines, former co-pastor of the First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Florida, and a recent SBC president, say: “I just could not look Southern Baptists in the face and appoint people who believe there are errors in the Bible.”^[51] And yet their qualifications of the word “inerrant” tacitly admit imperfections in the Bible’s text. Still, they contin­ue their vendetta against Southern Baptist scholars whose views on the inspiration and authority of scripture do not differ significantly from these inerrantists’ views.

Although many Takeover leaders have long been aware of how the word “inerrant” is qualified by conservative scholars, they have deceived many sincere rank-and-file Baptist pastors and lay people into believing that their use of the word “inerrant” means exactly what it says: to be without error. One Tennessee pastor who had worked hard in the Takeover effort read parts of The Unfettered Word by Rob James. The next day he said to James: “You told me some things I didn’t know. Some of the people we’ve looked to as leaders have made some qualifications we didn’t know about.”^[52]

Are Southern Baptists Inerrantists? Fundamentalists say that most Southern Baptists are inerrantists, but that certain professors are at odds with the people in the pew. Dr. Clark Pinnock, a conservative Baptist who now teaches theology in Canada , makes a convincing argument that moderate Baptist scholars were never far removed from the Biblical theology of the rank-and-file church members.

Pinnock taught at New Orleans Seminary from 1965 until 1969 and was one of Paige Patterson’s favorite seminary professors. He was a fiery advocate of roughly the position now held by SBC Fundamentalists. Although Pinnock shifted his position on inerrancy in the 1970s,^[53] leaders of the nondenominational inerrancy movement still claim him as one of their own.

At the 1987 inerrancy conference, Pinnock said he believed Southern Baptists’ typical approach to the Bible is not inerrancy in the strictest sense. Rather, it is what he called “simple Biblicism.” Simple biblicism, he said, is a view that “most evangelicals and Baptists hold, whether scholars or not, because the Spirit teaches it to them.” This approach “views the Scriptures as the only place to go if you want to find the words of everlasting life.”^[54]

At the inerrancy conference, Mark Noll, a distinguished historian at Wheaton College,^[55] agreed and explained that in the “Baptist” approach, as he called it, the Bible’s truth and authority are known by inward experience, not by rationalistic arguments about the nature of the Bible.”^[56] This attitude toward the Bible could be called “inerrantist” in a loose, popular sense of the term.^[57] But as Pinnock and Noll suggest, moderate Baptist scholars and many lay persons affirmed a “simple Biblicism” that was always sufficient to unify Baptist churches for missions and evangelism. The “inerrancy controversy” was invented to serve as a political weapon.

In any case, it is not difficult to state what unifies Southern Baptists in their approach to the Bible. As Russell Dilday, former president of Southwestern Seminary, the largest SBC seminary, states it, among Southern Baptists “there is practically total unanimity concerning their commitment to the Bible as the divinely inspired, sufficient, certain, and authori­tative guide for faith and practice.”^[58]

“Undoubtedly, history will record that the controversy was not really about the Bible,” stated Leon McBeth.^[59] However, in order to divide the denomination and mobilize one group for conquest over another, inerrancy has been made an issue. For that reason, “the Bible issue” looms large in the perception of many people. But if one wishes to say where differences lie that are crucial for Southern Baptist denominational life — and that is what inerrantists claim to be talking about — the inerrancy issue is fraudulent.

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