The importance of scriptural inerrancy

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2001.

Thank you very much indeed for letting me see the letter which you recently wrote to the chairman of the college board on the question of inerrancy.

As you rightly point out in your letter, having let go of the objective fact of inerrancy, they make everything depend on the expositor's ability to interpret Scripture, which ultimately is an uncertain thing to start with.

Then they tell us that, since different expositors disagree on the interpretation, that inevitably raises a second degree of uncertainty; and what that does, as you point out in your letter, is to give the lecturers at the college permission to proceed in their thinking and in their lecturing as if inerrancy were not necessarily true at all. That is a slippery slope down which many a college has allowed its lecturers to tread, and we all have seen where it leads to in the end.

As Jim Packer long ago pointed out, the question of inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture is not to be settled by first deciding the meaning of every verse, or by investigating every possible difficulty. There would be no end to such an inductive procedure.

Inspiration and inerrancy are deducible from the basic statements of Scripture itself that tell us that all Scripture is inspired of God.

With love in the Lord,