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What do you do when you're reading the Bible and you come across something that just seems like a blatant error? For Christians, this can create anxiety. For non Christians considering Christianity, this can seem like a barrier. But what if a lot of the tension that we feel in these situations is because we've misunderstood what it means to say that the Bible is inerrant or without error. Let's work through this in this video with four questions. First, what biblical inerrancy does mean. Second, what it doesn't mean, and that'll be the heart of it. Third and fourth, we'll consider, do some triage and then get some historical perspective. Is this a first rank doctrine? Is it a modern doctrine? At the end we'll do a test case and this will be where the rubber meets the road. That's in some ways the most important part of the video. Got to talk about the Flood and what biblical inerrancy means when we're interpreting issues related to creation and science and things like that. The goal of this video is two things held together. One, humility before God and second, humility as interpreters. Because we tend to emphasize one of these more than the other. A healthy doctrine of Scripture means we need both. We need both humility and just hard work. And we'll explain that as we go. First, what does biblical inerrancy mean? I hope this video will serve you, by the way. I hope especially like if you're a Christian following Jesus, you're trying to figure out how do I relate to the Bible in a healthy way. Hope this video would just be an encouragement to you. So we can say biblical inerrancy, we can say negatively it means the Bible doesn't have errors. Or we can say positively that the Bible is fully true and therefore fully trustworthy. But what does that really mean? We need to unpack that a little bit and kind of consider where does this idea come from. And so let's start by just identifying the value behind the idea of biblical inerrancy. And that essentially lies in the character of God by virtue of who he is. God is omniscient, meaning all knowing he is perfect, he is good, and therefore he is a fully trustworthy communicator. For example, he is infallible, meaning he never makes mistakes, he never gets something wrong. He also is never going to lie and deceive us. His speech is fully trustworthy. So if we understand that Scripture is divine revelation, then the same characteristics that apply to God will apply to Scripture because a person's Speech is a reflection of their own character. For example, I would never say, well, my neighbor is a trustworthy and truthful person, but his speech isn't trustworthy and truthful. It's like, no, if he's trustworthy, then what he says will be trustworthy. That's how it works. So what we can see here is that the key link between the doctrine of God and the idea of biblical inerrancy is this idea of biblical inspiration. Biblical inerrancy is a logical entailment of biblical inspiration. Biblical inspiration is, of course, the idea that the human authors of Scripture are inspired by God. Putting it more shorthand, God spoke through them. We'll define that more as we go. So lots of complicated questions are going to come up here. But we're just trying to start by understanding kind of why this doctrine is valued, where this comes from. Why would someone think along these lines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy? And a good place to start here is to look at Jesus attitude toward the Bible. Jesus speaks very highly of Scripture, what we call the Old Testament. In John 10, you get this sense that there's this sort of binding nature to biblical prophecy. I have a whole video on this passage that he's quoting from there in my review of the Alex o' Connor David Wood debate. But I just want you to see these simple words. The Scripture cannot be broken. What a fascinating statement. Or consider Matthew 26. You know, Jesus is facing the cross. He saying, I could summon legions of angels to get out of this situation. But his rationale for not doing so is, how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled? Oh, I like that word, fulfilled. We'll talk about this. It cannot be broken. It must be fulfilled. So Jesus is saying, I'm going to the cross, not only because it's the will of the Father, not only because I love those whom I will save, but also the Scripture must be fulfilled. Now, of course, in many passages, Jesus teaches that the Old Testament is pointing ahead to him. So Jesus has this idea that biblical prophecies must come to pass. They cannot be broken. And you get this sense in other passages of scripture that it's good to note the nuances. Here the truthfulness of Scripture is connected to its kind of endurance and insistence that it must come to pass. It's not going to miss the target. Psalm 119:60. The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. See, truth and endurance, they are connected. So don't think of the truth of the Bible as a purely Abstract idea that doesn't affect things. It's connected to its coming to pass. The truth of the biblical text is like a missile that's going to hit the target. I was struggling to find metaphors as I sat in my backyard this morning reviewing this video script. How do you. And it's hard to find a metaphor for this because so many other things in our world are not guaranteed to come to pass. You know, how do you find a metaphor for this? Something that's etched in stone that just can never fail, and yet so many other things in this world. You know, you etch it in stone and the stone will fade away. But the word of God endures forever. The truthfulness of Scripture is connected to its binding nature. It's inexorable. It's like a law fixed, more certain than the rising of the sun. And here's a fascinating text. In Matthew 5, we see that for Jesus, this conviction about the sort of unbreakability of scripture, so to speak, is not just about the big picture, the motifs and the themes and the general patterns. Jesus is not stepping way back, looking at the entire range of what we call the Old Testament, squinting big picture and saying, well, that's unbreakable. No, he's saying, this applies down to the minute details. He says, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until it is all accomplished. So for Jesus, reverence toward the Word of God is unbreakable as it's going to come to pass, it's going to be accomplished, it's going to be fulfilled. Applies to the tiniest of the markings and dots on the page. The practical consequence of that, that he drew there in verse 19, I'll put this first back up on screen, is obey all the commandments. Don't relax even the least of them. Even the most obscure verse in the Bible shouldn't be shrugged at. We take it all seriously. We receive it all as from God. So these are statements Jesus makes about scripture. You also see his attitude to the Scripture in how he uses it. In his theological argumentation, Jesus frequently appeals to the Scripture's binding truthfulness to establish his claims. You think of Mark 12, for example. He's quoting Psalm 110. And this little phrase is fascinating, describing the nature of David's writing. Says David himself in the Holy Spirit, declared, now that's really getting at the idea of biblical inspiration. But, you know, you wouldn't get it just from this verse because it's kind of ambiguous in that phrase. But certainly you see this sense that for Jesus, the authority behind this psalm isn't just David. David's writing here is in the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere, Jesus will confront people for being ignorant of what Scripture teaches as the basis for their error, which assumes that the Bible is a trustworthy and necessary source of knowledge. So for the Sadducees, for example, their view of the resurrection is wrong because they're ignorant of scripture. Mark 12, you err because you don't know the Scriptures. And the Pharisees on divorce are wrong because apparently they didn't read the Bible carefully enough. Jesus says in Matthew 19, have you? What a fascinating rebuke from Christ. Haven't you read your Bible? You know, and what's interesting about that verse is that he's quoting Genesis. And he's quoting Genesis as God's speech. God says according to Jesus. But he's not citing something that God said in the narrative of Genesis. He's citing the narrative itself. Very significant. The text of Scripture according to that verse is divine speech according to what Jesus says about it. Now, these rebukes, the last one I'll cover here. I know this is a lot right out of the gate, but it helps to start here with the attitude of Christ, because when the Pharisees make up their own traditions and are saying they're binding and authoritative, Jesus responds by saying, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. That rebuke presupposes a kind of uniqueness to Scripture. When we add to Scripture, we actually are subtracting from it. Scripture trumps all of our human traditions. And I've said more about that passage elsewhere. So all this is very significant because if we're a Christian, the first thing that means is you submit your life to Christ amidst everything else that that means. It means you listen to his teaching. And part of that teaching is this very elevated view of Scripture. Of course, we also want to look at what the apostles taught, what the Old Testament teaches about the nature of Scripture. There's so many passages we could go to here. 2 Timothy 3, 16 is the famous one where Scripture is called breathed out by God. And I've said more about that in other contexts here for the sake of time. Just one passage we can note. Peter's teaching that when it comes to the Old Testament prophets, they spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:21. So that fleshes out what we saw from Christ earlier, that David spoke in the Holy Spirit. This is getting a little more nuance here. Carried along by the Holy Spirit. I've said more about that verse in my videos. That's 2 Peter 1:21 there in my videos on Sola Scriptura. But what we want to capture here is this sense of the Holy Spirit's active role in the writing, carrying along the author. This is what we're getting at with the idea of biblical inspiration. Here's how B.B. warfield defined the notion of biblical inspiration. The Bible is the word of God in such a sense that its words, though written by men and bearing indelibly impressed upon them the marks of their human origin, were written nevertheless under such an influence of the Holy Ghost as to be also the words of God, the adequate expression of his mind and will. Maybe an important word there to highlight is just the word human and divine both. And you can see why people want to go Christological on this and compare this to Chalcedon and both human and divine natures and so forth. We're not really going to get into that here, but I just want us to see. Okay, so the inspiration of Scripture doesn't take away the human elements. We'll come back to that. Before moving on though, to the second question which is the heart of this video, two quick applications. First, gratitude. I hope when we consider the nature of Scripture. I've got the Bible I use here on my desk here. An ESV study Bible. Great resource. I thought about this when I made my video on William Tyndale. Just to be grateful for the sacrifices that have got us such a rich resource. And grateful to God himself. Imagine if we didn't have divine revelation. We were just stumbling around this world. Where would we be if God had not spoken? Second, we should have a reverent spirit before Scripture. So we should be grateful for it. And then we should have a reverence. You know, I love the passage in Isaiah 66 where the Lord says, this is the one to whom I look. He who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. We need more trembling before the word of God today. We'd be so much more courageous in our public life and words if we had fear of God before the Scripture. Think of this. I mean, think of that opening the Bible and you're literally trembling, saying, what is God going to say to me? This should be our disposition to the Scripture. If a king is talking to you, you listen carefully. When the king of the universe is communicating with us, all the more so and so. We can think of scripture as, first, it's an authority over us. Second, it's A bedrock and foundation underneath our feet. But thirdly, in our hearts, it should be a treasure. Think of the attitude of Psalm 119, which gives us emotional categories for what we should feel toward divine revelation. Therefore, I love your commandments above gold, even fine gold. I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil. Verse 131. I open my mouth and pant because I long for your commandments. You know, think, does this help flesh out our attitude toward the Scripture? I just watched the Count of Monte Cristo with my kids recently. When he finds the great treasure, we should regard the Bible as greater than any earthly treasure. You should rather have the text of Scripture on your desk like I do and like you may, than you should be to be a billionaire. This is a treasure that God has given us. Second, and this is where it gets tricky, what biblical inerrancy doesn't mean. Okay, this is why I wanted to make this video. I think we gotta wrestle with this. Let me make the point like this. Having a healthy doctrine of Scripture requires more than just theological categories. It requires literary categories. We need more than just theological courage. We need literary sensitivity. We need the humility before Scripture as divine revelation. We're trembling before it. We also need skill and labor and painstaking patience and sophistication in working to understand it. And sometimes Christians gravitate toward one of these or the other. The healthy Christian posture toward the Scriptures going to involve both. And the simple reason for this is that the Bible comes to us in written texts, in human language. And therefore there's no way around the hard work of cultivating wisdom and how to understand how literature works and how language works. And do we underestimate the difficulty of that? Oh, yes, we do. This is a huge issue that we need to wrestle with. It's a problem when we only think, oh, well, it's divine, and we kind of forget, well, it's also literature. So you need to think about how to interpret it. And that's hard work. Sometimes we stay up in the clouds and we say, well, this is the word of God. And we don't really appreciate the diverse genres, the rich rhetoric and cultural idiom. I'm going to call them the earthy qualities of Scripture. And we might even feel a tension here between the divine qualities and this sort of groundedness in human life. That's what I mean by earthy. But this is real. The Bible is a book full of dust and blood and love and tears and politics and food. This is not like a philosophical treatise floating up in the air. This is a very human and narratival book and very concrete. I have a whole video on how that affects our devotional reading of it. You might be interested in it. I mean, just already, when you consider you've got in our holy texts, books like Leviticus and Song of Songs and Zechariah, you already immediately realize, wow, this is maybe not what we would have expected. And when we recognize the sort of colorful genres of Scripture, we are not impugning its divine qualities. The human and divine qualities of scripture are not in tension with each other, fighting against one another. Rather, God's humility and love is such that he came to communicate to us in these concrete languages, Greek and Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic. He spoke at a particular time in particular ways, in ways that most human beings can really relate to in a human and honest way. It's amazing his love and condescension to do that for us. He could have given us a much more kind of highfalutin book, but he gave us this very direct kind of book. And there's so much we could say about this. My other video gets into that more. Let me just highlight one principle here, which is the main point of this video. We must let the Bible itself determine how it conveys truth, rather than import modern standards of truth back onto it. This is the relevant point for the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, where we're trying to say, this is what inerrancy doesn't mean. Here's how it's put by the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which is an influential and conservative evangelical document in the late 20th century. Listen to this. This is amazing. We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by biblical phenomena such as lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations. You could go through each one of those things and think that through very carefully. But this is an important point to emphasize because I think Christians often miss this. For example, sometimes we assume that historical books in the Bible should be judged by the standards of modern historiography. And you can find these elaborate attempts to harmonize every discrepancy in ways that I don't think the author would have even wanted us to do. That because ancient historiography frequently functions with a little more shaping and looseness than modern journalistic precision. Biblical books are concerned with accuracy, but they work in their own distinctive ways. And I'm just inviting you to consider this with me. I affirm biblical inerrancy. And in everything we're saying here, we're going to talk about affirming that, but also I'm trying to ward us away from overextending it. I think this is a big problem now. If we want to grow in our understanding of sort of sophisticated biblical hermeneutics, learning how hermeneutics means the science of interpretation, we want to grow in understanding how literature works. I think Jack Collins book Reading Genesis well is a great starting point because it's not just relevant to Genesis. What he's doing in that book is helping us, from the insights of C.S. lewis, to understand how literature works and how human language more generally works, which is not so simple as we often assume. For example, I mean, even, you know, just on the point of diverse literary genres, have we considered that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are actually different in how they function? I mean, we know Proverbs and Ruth are different, but even Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, each book has its particular way of communicating. And so the point is, for this video, when it comes to alleged errors in the Bible that make Christians nervous and make us wonder about biblical inerrancy, there is one simple issue that addresses many, if not most of the perceived problems, and that is literary genre. In other words, what kind of literature is this? Many genres of Holy Scripture employ various kinds of literary shaping that are not understood as error by the author or by the audience at that time. So narrative compression, for example, spotlighting discharnology, meaning putting things in a different order. Now, I know this makes people nervous because to them it might feel like an error, but again, we have to submit our understanding of what's an error to what the text is attempting to do, cooperating with the text. I remember Jack Collins using that language when I had him as a seminary professor. And I still think of it, right? We want to cooperate with the text. We don't want to see. You can reject Scripture by rejecting its divine status, but you can also, in a different sort of way, reject Scripture by failing to submit to how it wants to communicate with us. And the simple observation we want to make here is that truth has to do with authorial intent. And so if these literary conventions are accepted within the literary genre being written, the author would by no means have seen them as error, nor would the audience, and nor should we. Now, I'm not trying to settle every question here. There's so many things we're not going to get into in this video. I guess I'm just trying to alert especially evangelical Christians to this principle and give more consideration of this. Sometimes when you're doing apologetics, you realize the more fine grained questions are down there at the end of the tunnel and we got to get to them eventually. And they're interesting and the scholarship is wrestling with those. But at the street level there's this pastoral burden. Like we're just, we need the basics at the street level. And so let's really think about this because we need to be alert to this. When we're reading the Bible, like discharnology, for example, it's undeniable that sometimes biblical authors will put events in a different order for a theological purpose. A clear example would be the temptations of Christ in Matthew and Luke. They're put in different orders. 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2. Like that. But that's not an error if you wanted to say that. Well, therefore the Bible contradicts itself. You'd need to prove that that's contrary to authorial intent. But well in advance of higher biblical criticism in the modern era, many, many theologians recognized this is not necessarily contrary to authorial intent. Even John Calvin said the evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates. Now a lot of people today are going to come along and say, oh, John Calvin is such a liberal, right? No, Calvin is not a liberal. He's paying attention to how the biblical texts really function and what are their aims. And so just hoping that is clear what we're saying there. Many pre modern Christians did this, by the way. The church fathers, for example, were not fundamentalists. You can see my book on Augustine and creation and just going through. It's amazing how sophisticated and restrained and flexible he is in his biblical hermeneutics. So what we're saying is, is that biblical inerrancy doesn't mean that it can be overextended. There's a lot that it doesn't mean, and we can summarize this first point is that it doesn't mean the Bible will always accord with our standards of truth that we import onto it or retroject back onto it. Rather, it's true in its own intended claims. And that means we do need careful humility to work at understanding literature. Let me give a second example, affirming biblical inerrancy does not commit you to a particular mode of biblical inspiration. So, for example, even the CSBI Chicago statement, which again is very conservative, says the mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. But critics often assume, again, we're speaking to these popular level things at the street that we see. Critics of biblical inerrancy often assume that dictation is necessary to inspiration, as though if God inspired the text, then he's sort of manually dictating it. Think of Isaiah writing in Isaiah, chapter 40, comfort, comfort my people. And God says, oh, Isaiah, make sure you've got two comforts in there, right? And it's like, no, no, you don't have to think like this. God can use means. Perhaps the means that God used to inspire Isaiah to write two comforts are Isaiah's own thoughts. Divine inspiration does not override the human elements of the text. In fact, just to be careful with this, the claim of preservation from error is a very specific claim. So we want to distinguish error and finitude. The biblical authors are finite. They are not omniscient. They are communicating with real human languages embedded in a cultural framework. And that's fine. We can communicate truth in finite terms. And so nothing about inerrancy means we deny these sort of human and cultural qualities to the text. In fact, according to the Chicago statement, the personalities of the biblical authors are not only not bypassed, they're actually employed in the process of inspiration. Quote, God in his work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of, of the writers whom he had chosen and prepared. I mean, just think about this. Amazing. You know, I like personality tests like the Myers, Briggs and all these other Someone's a feeler, someone's a thinker. Well, that's going to come out in the writing, and inspiration is not going to override that and make them all thinkers. Peter is more outspoken, John is more reserved. That's going to come out in their respective letters. That's fine. Isaiah has a different style of writing than Ezekiel, and that's going to come out in the text, and that's fine. Inspiration doesn't unmake our humanity. And when you think about this, the more you reflect on this again, the more gratitude it gives you. And you say, divine revelation is such an incredible act of divine humility and love. These little tiny Hebrew and Greek markings on a page are the words of the Almighty. And he's not sort of smashing them down on us with a hammer. He's speaking through human beings. Amazing. Now there's so much more we could say this video has limited scope and purpose, but but let me just develop one simple application point from this and it's been implicit in what we've said already. It's not unspiritual to study the Bible carefully over long periods of time, learning the original languages, looking at the original cultural context, looking at the history of interpretation, and so many other things. Those efforts are not contrary to prayerful and devotional use of the Bible. We wouldn't say that, but sometimes we act like that. And I'm in this video wanting to call us toward both humble trust before Scripture as divine revelation, but also curious and painstaking study. A healthy posture toward Scripture will never exalt us up into a position of ease. It will humble us under the text. If your attitude toward the Bible is a godly one, you won't feel like you've just got a hammer in your hand that you can complacently use to go hurt people. Rather, you'll feel like you're climbing up a tall mountain and you can't see the top of the mountain, but the views are glorious around you. Alright, third question. These will be real fast. We'll get to the case study Is inerrancy a first rank doctrine? A lot of people want to say yes to this. Let's be careful here. On the one hand, we want to affirm the basic instinct in the heart of a Christian to receive the Bible as the Word of God. One mark of a regenerate heart is to love what God says. We think of Psalm 119 for example. However, Christians can and do disagree on the vocabulary and on the understanding of how Scripture functions as divine revelation. And there is room for difference on these points among legitimate Christians. We have to make a distinction here between a total rejection of the divine qualities of the Bible on the one hand, versus disagreements among Christians about proper vocabulary and understanding and these more specific questions. And there are many godly Christians who don't use the term inerrancy. C.S. lewis as an example. Leslie Newbegin, many others. Here's how Jay Gracia Machen put this. Of course, he devoted his whole life to opposing liberal attacks on Christianity. At the same time, he recognized, it must be admitted that there are many Christians who do not accept the doctrine of plenary inspiration. Plenary just means full. That doctrine is denied not only by liberal opponents of Christianity but also by many true Christian men. Note the distinction that he's going to draw next and ask yourself, is this how we use the term liberal today? There are many who believe that the Bible is right at the central point in its account of the redeeming work of Christ and yet believe that it contains many errors. Such men are not really liberals, but Christians because they have accepted as true the message upon which Christianity depends. A great gulf separates them from those who reject the supernatural act of God which with which Christianity stands or falls. You see, Machen is this bulwark against theological liberalism. If you look up theological conservative in the dictionary, you see Machen, so to speak. But even for him, the term liberal was used carefully to refer to that which is fully non Christian, not necessarily to those who reject inerrancy. Now you might disagree with Machen, but still, I think we can recognize today that we need to be careful in how we bandy a about the term liberal. And this just grieves me to see. I mean, sometimes I just look at our discourse online and I say, don't you fear God? We're so uncareful compared to the fundamentalists of a century ago. And the lack of charity in our polemics in all directions is just a scandal. Nevertheless, we also need to recognize, as Machen also maintained, that the authority of Scripture is foundational for healthy Christianity and healthy ministry. Why is that? Because if we reject the authority of Scripture, we inevitably have some other kind of authority that will take over. And we might even quote positively from the Bible, but we've got some other greater authority, some frame of ideological commitments or personal views or cultural framework, whatever, that's functioning as our ultimate authority, filtering out which parts of the Bible correct us. The ultimate test for biblical authority is this. How do we respond when it confronts us? Put it like this. When you get into a fight with the Bible, who wins? And the mark of a regenerate heart, a born again heart, is you want to say, lord, teach me according to your word, and you actually learn to delight in submitting to the word of God. And so the point we're making is that even if in a judgment of charity, we want to allow for enough nuance to say, yeah, people who this is not a first rank issue. That does not mean biblical inerrancy is unimportant. All right? Fourth, is inerrancy a modern innovation? Sometimes people argue that biblical inerrancy is a Protestant scholastic invention just constructed up in response to higher critical biblical scholarship in the modern era. And then others respond by saying, oh no, no, no, this is nothing other than what the church has always believed. What I'd like to propose is that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy though it has come into new territory in a sense in the modern era, as there's been new attacks against it, is in its core claim a very much historical and lowercase C Catholic doctrine. I've done a lot of reading on this that I won't go into here. I would just recommend to you this book by John Woodbridge, who amasses a huge amount of data, that the basic idea that the Bible is without error is an ancient Christian instinct, pretty consistent throughout the tradition. And we can also agree that sort of technical formulations of this doctrine have taken on a new range of associations and significance as it's come under fire. Nonetheless, this is a historic Christian posture before Scripture. Let me give an example from Augustine. I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture. Of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And he's going on to say, when I'm reading other books, I have to use my judgment and distinguish the errors from the truth. But the Bible? No, no, no. It's all true. And so you can see the core idea of Biblical inerrancy right there, and you see many such ideas throughout the history of the Church. However, it is true that the debate about inerrancy has sort of tightened in the modern era, especially in America, and it's played out in certain ways. So one of the debates is, should we use the term inerrant or the term infallible? And sometimes you'll hear the idea that infallible is held to be the stronger word meaning incapable of error, whereas inerrant means simply without error. There's a difference between saying it doesn't err and it cannot err. But that distinction. The terms are used in a little different ways, too. That's a little fuzzy. Nonetheless, you can appreciate the distinction there. And we're asking, okay, what term should we use? Infallible or inerrant or both? Infallibility is the more classical term. Even J.I. packer, who's one of the framers of the Chicago Statement, acknowledges evangelicals are accustomed to speak of the word of God as infallible and inerrant. The former has a long pedigree among the reformers. Cranmer and Jewell spoke of God's word as infallible and the Westminster Confession of the infallible truth of Holy Scripture. The latter, however, seems not to have been regularly used in this connection before the 19th century. However, the argument that many make is that in our context, the word infallible has been Watered down. And therefore you need the term inerrant as well. And so this is an example of the debate kind of moving into new territory, because before the modern era, these terms wouldn't have had this kind of dialectic between them. And so one of the dynamics you see is that sometimes the word inerrancy functions as kind of a litmus test for the good guys versus the bad guys, especially in the United States. And as one who affirms inerrancy and wants to say, let's use both these terms because we want to affirm the full truthfulness of Scripture without ambiguity, it's also worth getting global perspective on this point and being careful and charitable in how we function and interact with others. You know, just the simple task of really drawing someone out and asking, well, tell me more about what you mean by these terms when we're in conversation. For example, in the Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy book, it came out in 2013, 2013, Mike Bird makes this point about sort of giving global perspective on the terminology issue. He says this quote, the 60 million Anglicans in the Global south hold to the 39 articles with its reference to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, leaving open how Scripture relates to history and science. The 75 million Presbyterians around the world, with major concentrations in Brazil and Korea, hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which affirms the infallible truth and divine authority of scripture. The 2 million members of the Church of Southern India believe that the Scriptures are the ultimate standard of faith and practice. The Baptist World alliance, representing some 41 million Baptists in their Centenary Congress of 2005, declared that the divinely inspired Old and New Testament Scriptures have supreme authority as the written word of God and are fully trustworthy for faith and contact. Now, look, so what I would propose from that. Don't want people to run wild with this. I would say I think both terms are helpful to use at the current moment because we care about the full truthfulness of Scripture being unambiguously affirmed, but we need to do so with historical awareness and with careful definitions. And so the point that I would make is sometimes it's like, do you use the word inerrant? Say yes or no, and then you're the good guy or the bad guy. And it's very sort of a little bit tribal in how we're thinking. What I would want to encourage is more charity to make distinctions. Okay. There's lots of people have a very high view of Scripture and maybe their vocabulary is a little different. And so it actually requires getting into the nuances of that and really listening. Simple way to make the point. I don't want to treat CS Lewis the same way we treat like a full blown liberal who denies miracles or anything supernatural in the Bible. So I'm trying to create a little bit of space there for charitable judgments. All right, let's close with a test case. This really ties it all together because this is an example of overextending what inerrancy requires. And this is one of the big areas where I have a concern. We see this issues related to creation and science versus faith conversations. And if you know my work, you're probably aware this has come up for me a couple different times, especially in connection to the flood of Noah, sometimes also in connection to creation. And this is one of those areas where I think there can be an overextended and unwise deployment of biblical inerrancy. Because you'll often hear people say this, you know, I hear this all the time. Gavin is choosing man's science over God's truth and this kind of thing. And what I often point out is that figureheads of defending conservative Protestantism in the modern era didn't think like this. They allowed for a diversity of views on something like the interpretation of Genesis 1, for example. And I give examples like J. Grisham Machen and B.B. warfield and Charles Hodge and so many others. I have a whole video. The video am I a Liberal? Is where I kind of give probably the most examples, even like the Scofield reference Bible and so many other things that are outside of Young Earth creationism. And a lot of times people are not aware of that today. But again, the appeal here is humility about how literature works, the humility in both directions, humility towards God to receive this and submit to it, but also humility toward how literature works to work hard at interpreting it. Both are needed. So on the Flood, for example, it's funny, somebody made a Wikipedia page about me and so I was reading through it and it says, it's kind of humorous that the flood issue would come up. Ortlin has defended the view that the flood of Noah was a regional event and not a global event, arguing that such a position is consistent with an effort to take seriously the meaning of the text, which involves what the original author meant, the original readers to take from it in its original context. This claim has caused controversy within evangelicalism and ignited accusations of theological liberalism, which he has denied. Yes, so apparently the conversations happening on X do make it out There beyond X. Yes, I am denying that that is theologically liberal. And this is relevant to the point of this video. I want to encourage people to think about this. If we could just slow down and think this through together, boy, that would be better. If somebody says a regional flood is incorrect, that's fine. We just keep talking. But there are a lot, and this is a good test case. So many conservative evangelicals will go further than that and say the regional flood view is liberal. And with all love and respect in my heart, I want to suggest that that kind of language indicates an ignorance on the history of interpretation. It comes across as though people who say this have never read a book on the topic and are simply unaware of the bandwidth on this issue historically, from the church fathers up to the modern fundamentalists of the 19th and 20th centuries. And I keep trying to make the case for this because I think it really damages the body of Christ when we have this more impulsive thinking in this video that I put up. If you want to document what I'm saying right now, I work through Herman Bovink's summary of this point as one reference point in this discussion, to see the history of interpretation of this. It's really never been thought of as like the liberal view. I mean, it's been controversial, but the way it's spoken of today is eccentric. And the reason for that is that among those who agree on the truthfulness of the story, there's a legitimate question of interpretation about what language like all the earth means, because ancient readers would not have thought of the phrase all the earth in the way modern readers do, like planet Earth, the round object, or orbiting the sun between Venus and Mars. Rather, for ancient readers, all the Earth would have arguably meant all the known Earth, which is a very sensible way to use the language. And the way we see that is we just look at the rest of the Old Testament and also actually the New Testament, because you've got all the earth coming to get grain from Joseph later in Genesis. But we don't think that the ancient Mayans sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to get grain from Joseph. And we have all the earth coming to hear Solomon's wisdom. But we don't think that the aboriginal Australians traveled to the Middle east to court with Solomon. And I give dozens of examples of this. It's all over the Hebrew Bible. They use the language of all the Earth, every nation under heaven, to describe what they knew as all the earth. And that's the argument there. Now, suppose that that's totally wrong. That is a legitimate question of interpreting the language. And I'm trying to make a plea for more humility to really have some patience to look at that and consider it at least before a judgment is given. And then we want to triage this carefully so that we're not going way beyond the fundamentalists of a century ago. So I'm going to keep advocating for this, that we have this. I hope you feel the dual pronged goals here, humility before the word of God, no cleverness, no standing above the text, judging it humble, receiving God's revelation, and at the very same time, painstaking care to interpret, to listen, to read books about the history of interpretation, to read books about the ancient context and how language was used and so on and so forth. We need both. A healthy Christian witness today needs both. And I feel like we're getting worse on this issue in many circles today here in 2026. So I hope this video could be helpful just for reflection on all this. Let's keep the conversation going. There's so many things we didn't cover in this video. If there's a particular problem passage that's toughest for you, put it in the comments. And if you stayed to the end of this video, let me know. I really appreciate you watching. Don't forget to like subscribe, all that stuff. I always forget to say that, but that does help. But if you put a passage in the comments, I might do a follow up video saying toughest Bible passages and we'll take like the top five or 10 and try to tackle them and work through them, hoping that could help you as well. Thanks for watching everybody. May the Lord bless you.