Infallibility: Can we trust the Bible?

In my last post, I offered thoughts about what Christians mean when they refer to the Bible as the “Word of God.” While discussing the role of human authorship in the scriptures, we must confront this question: Can we trust a book written by sinful people.

Because God was actively involved in the creation of the scriptures, I believe that we can completely trust the scriptures when they speak on certain matters. These matters would be doctrine and ethics. Doctrine is a collection of beliefs (usually in the form of statements) about God and humanity. We develop doctrinal statements through the process of theology, which is the study of God. Ethics are beliefs about what is right and wrong, and by extension Biblical ethics are beliefs about what is right and wrong according to the Bible.

Christian theology must rely primarily on the scriptures to develop our doctrine; they are the most reliable resource available for understanding God. No mere man could fathom the reality of God. So through the centuries, God gave insight and wisdom to the authors of scripture so they could write truthfully about the character, attributes, and values of God. When Jesus Christ walked the earth, those qualities became manifest in the man who was “the image of the invisible God.”

The Bible should be important to Christians because it is our most valuable resource for understanding the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship with him. In his series “What is at the center of Christianity,” Joe writes that Jesus Christ is the center of our religion, and the Bible points us towards him. The greater purpose of every book of the Bible is to draw the reader closer to Jesus Christ.

My simple thought on Biblical ethics goes like this: a Christian’s beliefs about right and wrong should be based on God’s beliefs about right and wrong, which we learn through studying the character, attributes, and values of God found in the scriptures, and direct statements about right and wrong found in the scriptures reveal aspects of God’s character and values. The Bible is not a set of rules or instructions, but it does help us understand the character and values of the God we are called to emulate. It is written in Leviticus, “Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy."

So as we come to the Bible with a desire to understand and know Jesus Christ better, I believe that the scriptures will not fail to guild us into a greater understanding and deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. This is the explicit purpose of the scriptures, and it is the matter on which they are infallible. But what about questions of history, chronology, and science? In my next post, I will discuss the issue of inerrancy.