Natalia M.

Martínez Encarnación

Covenant Theology
Midterm Essay
Newbigin—Warfield—Ward—Williams on Inerrancy

The doctrine of inerrancy has been a point of debate in North American Christian circles
close to a century now. For many, this doctrine is a cornerstone for the structure that holds the
authority and the trustworthiness of the Bible standing. For others it is a doctrine that is not
necessary for trustworthiness and authority to stand.
In his book Proper Confidence, British scholar Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) shows
concern with what he calls the fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy. In his view, certain types of
fundamentalists treat the Bible as a collection of inerrant, quasi scientific statements instead of a
story that locates reliable truth. 1 He explains that this treatment of the Scriptures by the
fundamentalists finds its roots in an Enlightenment epistemology. In the first chapters of his
book, Newbigin explains this objectivist/modernist way of knowing by tracing the interactions of
Protestantism with the birth and life of the Enlightenment. He points to and criticizes Descartes
as a key figure in the establishment of Enlightenment based religion, both liberal and
conservative. For both of these, a dichotomy was constructed between faith and doubt,
materiality and spirituality, objectivity and subjectivity, empirical and experiential knowledge.2
Because of this they rooted themselves in a scientific and confessional approach towards the
Bible that turns the Scriptures primarily into propositional statements. Both, Newbigin criticizes,
imposed Enlightenment historical-critical methods and standards on a text that was alien to
these.3 Each’s adherence to this Enlightenment imposition resulted in two different strands
within the ecclesial community. For the liberals, doubt was to be favored over faith. Everything
in the arts and the Bible were then dubbed as subjective products of men. The liberals were then
led to the commitment that it is impossible to make any truth claims. Consequently the Bible
couldn’t be authoritative or absolute because it could never be proved as objective, as inerrant. In
contrast, for the conservatives, to be able to obtain absolute truths led them to make the
modernist commitment of trusting only scientifically provable facts. The Scriptures then had to
be airtight, free from doubt, inerrant in all matters for it to be authoritative and absolute. The
question then becomes, ‘must the Bible be inerrant to be authoritative?’ Newbigin argues for not.
Now to be fair, it is of great importance to mention that Newbigin does hold a high view
of Scripture and does not negate its trustworthiness. He understands that wherever Scripture
speaks about the story of redemption, it is accurate and trustworthy. However he separates this
trustworthiness from inerrancy. In his understanding, inerrancy denies the Bible’s humanity and
disbelieves in its human messengers’ ability to err when pertaining to Scriptures. He thinks it
absurd to hold to an inerrancy that ignores the “existence of discrepancies in matters of fact” 4
and that “draws a line in the long story of transmission before which everything is divine word
and after which everything is human judgment.”5 Newbigin never parts with or even attempts to
part from the view that all approaches to knowledge and all claims to knowledge are purely
subjective enterprises and must begin with a faith commitment.6 So, the key to understanding

1
Newbigin, Lesslie. Proper Confidence. Cambridge: WM.B. Eerdmans, 1995, p. 79
2
Ibid. p.22
3
Ibid. p.99
4
Ibid. p.85
5
Ibid. p.86
6
Ibid.
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Natalia M. Martínez Encarnación

Newbigin’s epistemology is that belief, not doubt, is the necessary starting point for knowledge
acquisition.7
Consequently what Newbigin does attempt to do is to try and let the Bible “provide us
with its own account of what it means to speak the word of God.” He proposes then that the
concept of narrative, as opposed to the doctrine of inerrancy, has the potential to re-interpret and
regain the Bible's authority. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”8 is fundamental to
Newbigin’s location of reliable truth.9 This is where the faith commitment must rest; in
humankind’s response to God’s speech-acts as related to his story and his incarnation in Jesus.
However, some might argue that he debilitates his location of truth by undermining the
witnesses’ Jesus himself entrusted to recount and embody his story. The human witnesses are
sinful, fallible interpreters of the story. However, Newbigin seems to have no problem with this
argument. He believes that the role of the Holy Spirit is to interpret for the recipients the
meaning of Jesus’ words and deeds and leads them to the truth as a whole.10
Newbigin, as we’ve seen treats inerrancy simply as the result of Enlightenment
rationalism. B.B. Warfield (1851 – 1921) approaches the doctrine of inerrancy differently.
Warfield first addresses the issue of inspiration. He looks at what the Bible says of its own nature
and comments on the word used for “God-breathed” theopneustos. From this he explains that the
Scriptures are more to do with “expiration” the act of breathing out than “inspiration”, the act of
breathing into. The source, character and content of Scripture are wholly divine.11 To be divine is
to not err and God, because of his divine essence does not lie, does not err. Revelation lies solely
in the God’s breathed words as recorded by the human authors. In Proper Confidence, Newbigin
seems to place the arrival of the truth, the revelation, in the original and contemporary recipient’s
subjective experience after he or she approaches the Scriptures and relies on the Holy Spirit to
lead them into the truth as a whole.12 In his book Words of Life, Timothy Ward in some way
coincides with Newbigin in regards to illumination, but adds that necessary to the equation are
“inspiration, preservation and illumination”.13 These elements are divine and simultaneous to the
action of humans being inspired to write, preserving and being illuminated to understand the
Scriptures. Both Warfield and Ward recognize the overlap of human and divine action in
Scripture and are critical of the argument that the human aspect of Scripture diminishes the
divine one. Newbigin, although also critical of this, makes little or no mention of Scripture’s own
statements about its divinity, its “God-breathed” inspiration and as seen earlier, appears to think
it meaningless to affirm divinity when humanity is involved.14 But Ward, in his chapter on the
relationship between the Scriptures and the Trinity reminds us of a similar paradox, where
humanity coexist with divinity. The person of Jesus as God made flesh, was Word made flesh
hints to us the divine/human nature of the Scriptures also.
On their thoughts on Warfield, Michael D. Williams as well as Timothy Ward agree that
undeniably B.B. Warfield was a man of his time and his objectivity and external evidences did
overshadow the internal testimony and actions of God through Scripture.15 This is precisely what

7
Ibid. p.25
8
Jn. 1:14 (ESV)
9
Newbigin. p.97
10
Ibid. p.90
11
Williams, Michael D. "The Church, A Pillar of Truth: B.B. Warfield's Church Doctrine of Inspiration."
Presbyterion, Fall 2011: 65-84. p.68
12
Newbigin. p.90
13
Ward, Timothy. Words of Life. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009. p.79
14
Newbigin. p.86
15
Williams. p.71
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Natalia M. Martínez Encarnación

Newbigin was so forcefully after. But Williams and Ward make clear that Warfield is completely
grounded and dependent upon the Spirit’s working with and through our subjective knowing.
Moreover Warfield himself argues that through “Spirit-led instinct”16 the universal church held
the doctrine of Scriptures infallibility. Now, church tradition is never to trump Scripture, but as
Warfield argued, church doctrine comes from biblical doctrine that comes from breathed-out
Word of God.
Also according to Ward, “to encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in
action”.17 God’s words and actions are so intertwined with who he is that to deny his Word as
revelation would be to deny that he ever revealed himself. The Father’s covenant words, the Son
as Word made flesh, the Spirit’s breathed words are God’s chosen way of revealing Himself to
us and it is in the Holy Scriptures where these are recorded. The Spirit, through the inspiration of
the authorized witnesses, the preservation of the authenticated testimony and the illumination of
its recipients guards and ensures the transmission of the inerrant, infallible, true words of God.
There are many places where Newbigin might have continued to disagree with the
Warfield, Ward and Williams perhaps the first of these being the definition of inerrancy.
Newbigin’s recounting of the origins of the doctrine of inerrancy is the basis for his whole
argument on rejecting it. His definition of inerrancy rests on this. Ward accepts that the term
“inerrancy” was coined in recent years but rejects that the idea was. By “inerrancy” Ward means
that Scripture, being one in the same with and the means God’s speech-acts, cannot lie or err. In
this way the Bible is the objectively inerrant as the word of God.
On the other hand, Warfield and Ward agree with Newbigin that human’s interpretation
of the Bible will always be subjective, and that God’s speech-acts in the story are true and
objective. However they disagree in the way the Spirit lead the witness to record these. For
Newbigin, they are not authorized witnesses in the sense that, though they witnesses truth, they
could not record objectivity.
Another thing they might have continued to debate about was on where our location of
truths lies. Newbigin seemed to have located the trustworthiness of the Scriptures solely on the
Holy Spirit’s illumination subsequent to the person’s subjective faith commitment to the Grand
Narrative. Warfield and Ward would locate the trustworthiness of the Scriptures in the Holy
Spirit’s prior inspiration, preservation and illumination of the Scriptures. They would continue to
agree though on the nature of knowledge and the Spirit’s working with and through it. All
though would agree in the Holy Spirit’s guidance to truth.
In conclusion, although these men might disagree with what inerrancy means or does not
mean as it refers to humankind’s pursuit of the knowledge of the objective speech-acts of God,
they would agree that in response to the inescapability of humankind’s subjective approach, we
would have to commit and rely in faith on the Spirit’s guidance to true and saving knowledge
that Scripture reveals.

16
Ibid. p. 73
17
Ward. p.48
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