I knew that my faithful pastor believed the Bible.
He had never indicated any hesitation about any of it — its propositions, historical accounts, poetry, worldview, miracles, or its statements of the mighty acts of God from creation to resurrection. Neither had any of my church leaders, deacons, or teachers questioned the full truthfulness of the Bible in any area.
From cradle roll through 12th grade Sunday School, from primary to senior high training union, junior choir, youth choir, adult choir, Sunbeams through Royal Ambassadors, and teachers and sponsors at blazing hot summer youth retreats in the pavilions and grimy cabins at Roosevelt State Park, no shadow of doubt had been even insinuated on the full inspiration and perfect truthfulness of the Bible.
So, I believed the Bible — and without sensing it as such — had embraced a few well-argued defenses of its inspiration. Why, Baptists were, above all others, a “People of the Book,” and accepted its truthfulness based on its inspiration from cover to cover.
— Meeting the Skeptics
My experience at higher education introduced some variance to this monolithic witness to an unfissured truthfulness in the biblical text.
Perhaps some of the unstinted supernaturalism of its storyline was inconsistent with science.
Perhaps some of the details in historical parts were not quite accurate or even invented for the sake of teaching a theological idea, an effective tactic developed most notable by Aesop.
Perhaps the overall “message” of the Bible was not dependent on the accuracy of its worldview.
Perhaps its regular insistence on the existence of the singular personhood of Satan — the devil — and demons and angels by the tens of thousands is only the manifestation of a primitive mythology. We can still have an ethically based religion even with Christ at its center apart from a fully inspired, infallible, inerrant text of Scripture. I remember being amusedly shocked at the bold pronouncement in a discussion of Romans 9:21, when the New Testament professor said, “Paul was wrong! We are not clay pots.”
When concepts like “verbal plenary inspiration,” “infallibility,” or “inerrancy” were discussed, we were told that these were not Baptist concepts. An infamous article by a seminary professor/administrator was entitled in the form of a question, “Shall We Call the Bible Infallible?” He answered in the negative from four standpoints — biblically, theologically, historically, and practically. May I be allowed to insert, he was wrong on all four counts.
An author and editor of the Broadman Bible Commentary in 1969 argued against verbal inspiration. He cited eight reasons for counting it as incredible. Some of his objections were embarrassingly simplistic and completely beside the point of arguing for the epistemological necessity of the errorless character of the written text revealed by God and inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Several, however, did reveal the destructively skeptical viewpoint of many Southern Baptist influencers toward Scripture. The author contended that the Bible contained “obvious contradictions or discrepancies.” Amazingly, he cited as a problem that “verbal inspiration tends to place all of the Bible on the same level of divine revelation.” Well, yes it does; and just why is that problematic?
Verbal inspiration, according to this writer’s objections, “seems to attribute to God acts and attitudes out of harmony with His nature as holy love and clearly in conflict with the example and teaching of Jesus.” He listed several extended texts that he viewed as contradictory to his view of God as revealed in Christ. His view of God, regretfully, did not take into account the full biblical text but only those that conformed to an extraneous system of ethical assumptions.
In another objection to verbal inspiration, this Broadman Commentary editor cited the “objective research” fostered by higher critical methodologies as straining “the view of verbal inspiration to the point of unreality.”
— Seminary Presidents Hem and Haw
In an article, a seminary president made the affirmation, “My Bible is True.” He made excellent and encouraging points about the edifying use of any of the translations of Scripture we have, many of which I would unexceptionally confirm. He wanted to assure those untrained in biblical languages or the details of textual criticism that their “faith can survive with the Holy Scriptures available to me today.”
The purpose of his article, however, was not only to give confidence in the trustworthiness of translations as God’s Word. He wanted to minimize the importance of scholarly assertions about the “infallibility of the original autographs.” He wanted to relieve the pressure created by technical discussions of such words as “inerrant,” “infallible,” “verbally inspired” as necessary affirmations in a theological discussion of the doctrine of Scripture.
Another seminary president wrote a book on Scripture, The Doctrine of Biblical Authority, that identified the concern of the inerrancy of the autographs of Scripture as a late 19th century development arising from Princeton theologians and their rationalistic response to liberalism.
This historiography, set forth by Jack Rogers and David McKim of Fuller Theological Seminary, had already been refuted by John Woodbridge and others. This type of historical observation supposedly highlighted a great Baptist strength in the right of private interpretation as fostered by the Baptist commitment to liberty of conscience. In other words, so the argument concluded, the inerrancy of the autographs had never been part of the Baptist commitment to be people of the book.
But surely, we can see that the use of such language and the attempt to give clear definitions is not irrelevant. When the Bible deals with any subject in an extended way throughout the canon of Scripture, it is the necessary stewardship of the people to give a clear, coherent, concise, comprehensive doctrinal statement concerning that subject.
So it is with the doctrine of the Trinity, the person of Christ, the biblical teaching of creation, the nature of sin (original and actual transgression), redemption, resurrection, second coming and final judgment.
The Bible has a lot to say about the reality of God speaking to His prophets, their writing down His words, the apostles as recipients of revelation, the text of Scripture as inspired, and the danger of adding to or detracting from this body of revealed truth. Our stewardship of the Bible is incomplete, dangerous, and deeply flawed if we refuse to move toward clear and precise vocabulary that defines Scripture in a doctrinal way and such a doctrine as a necessary component of a faithful confession of faith.
— Investigating Baptist Beginnings
In working through these issues theologically, I also wanted to learn the view that Baptists had taken historically. I was startled to find that Mr. proto-Baptist, John Smyth, had affirmed that the Scriptures — that is, “the Originalls Hebrew & Greek — are given by Divine Inspiration & in their first donation were without error most perfect & therefore Canonicall.” Okay! So the inerrancy of the autograph was not a product of 19th-century Princetonian response to Liberalism, but was embedded in Baptist life from its modern inception.
Imagine how satisfying my discovery of Benjamin Keach was. In his Preaching from the Types and Metaphors of the Bible, Keach began with an essay entitled “Divine Authority of the Bible.” He intended to defend this proposition: “That the Scripture, or the book called the Bible, is of divine original, inspired by the Spirit of God, and therefore of infallible truth and authority.”
He defended this with a discussion of its “transcendently sublime” and mysterious subject matter.” He pointed to its antiquity and the majesty and authoritativeness of the Spirit of God in speaking in them as evidence of their inspiration.
Also, the consent, agreement, and harmony of all its parts, the great and injurious deceit it would be were it not “dictated to the writers thereof by the Holy Spirit” joined other proofs to create a web of evidence of the divine origin of Scripture. He also defended against several objections such as apparent contradictions (“for they really are no more”), the variations in original language manuscripts, and the necessity of using translations instead of the immediately inspired originals.
This, along with the works of many other Baptists, showed me that Baptists were not unaware of a series of objections to the claim of immediate inspiration and its concomitant implications.
— A South Carolina Heavyweight
J.P. Boyce, a Greenville, S.C. native and founding president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, confirmed these convictions about Scripture in his Abstract of Systematic Theology. One chapter treated the relation between “Reason and revelation.” He set forth five assumptions about revelation from which he did not diverge throughout the text:
One, it comes from God. Two, it must be suited to our present condition confirming known truth. Three, it must be secured from all possibility of error, so that its teachings may be relied on with equal, if not greater authority, confidence than those of reason. Four, it necessarily comes with authority
“claiming and proving its claim to be the word of God.” Five, it will be accompanied with difficulties and mysteries.
In his catechism, Boyce had these exchanges about the Bible: “How came it to be written? God inspired holy men to write it. Did they write it exactly as God wished? Yes, as much as if He had written every word Himself. Ought it, therefore, to be believed and obeyed? Yes, as much so as though God had spoken directly to us.”
Again, my early experience and impressions about Baptists and their acceptance of the Bible as inspired and of indubitable authority were confirmed.
— B.H. Carroll and Fool’s Talk
I was also happy to find, among the many powerful defenses of biblical inspiration, this comment from B.H. Carroll, the founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Counter to the introduction to the Broadman Commentary, Carroll, as if giving a response anticipating six decades, wrote: “It has always been a matter of profound surprise to me that anybody should ever question the verbal inspiration of the Bible. The whole thing had to be written in words … and if the words are not inspired then there is no way of getting at anything in connection with inspiration.”
The idea that the Bible contains the Word of God but is not the Word of God is “fool’s talk,” Carroll insisted. Inspiration makes the Bible’s account of things, even those things derived from contemporary records, “inerrable, not only in idea but in word.”
Many other similar testimonies flood the history of Baptist theology and biblical interpretation. Baptists indeed have been and, by gracious condescension to a rebellious people, are again a people of The Book.
— I Was, and Am, Convinced
I had never entertained any other notion, even when I was a confused, unsaved young person and young adult. That conviction resided because of the preparatory grace of God, using my local church as His faithful instrument. How many times on a Wednesday night have I heard my pastor, Carey E. Cox, say, “As A.T. Robertson says … .” So, I will end with that: as A.T. Robertson says in his introduction to his massive work of scholarship entitled Word Pictures of the New Testament:
“We must never forget that in dealing with the words of Jesus we are dealing with things that have life and breath. That is true of all the New Testament, the most wonderful of all books of all time. One can feel the very throb of the heart of Almighty God in the New Testament if the eyes of his own heart have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. May the Spirit of God take of the things of Christ and make them ours as we muse over the words of life that speak to us out of the New Covenant that we call the New Testament.”
— Tom J. Nettles taught Baptist history and historical theology for more than 38 years in Southern Baptist seminaries, including Southwestern Seminary and Southern Seminary, from which he retired as a full-time professor in 2014. He is the author of many books on Baptist history and theology, including Baptists and the Bible and James Petigru Boyce: A Southern Baptist Statesman.