This drives us to the next point, and explains why this point must hold. If, in fact, the Scriptures are the direct result of heavenly revelation, if they are those things which God has expressed, through His chosen human agents, by way of declaring Himself to us, then they must necessarily bear the stamp of His essential character. Here, you may begin to recognize the reason for my choices in laying out these initial baseline matters. God, to be God, cannot but be true to Himself. Those things which define His essence are unchanging as He is unchanging. They do not shift or fluctuate. If He is True, He is always True.
On that basis, we have our sole reason to value Truth. Indeed, on that basis, we have our sole means of defining Truth. Without the absolute of God to back it, Truth, as I have observed, devolves to mere opinion, and serves no useful purpose for us. We are left adrift in our own myriad views with no hope of arriving at anything definitive ever.
Now we take the next step. If God is True, and because He is True, Truth is unchanging and non-contradictory, then surely these same things must apply to those Scriptures in which we find His Truth revealed – to the extent that He chooses to reveal Truth to us. Again, there is that guardrail beyond which we do not force ourselves if we are wise. What God chooses to retain as His own secret knowledge is His to keep. It is not for us to pry, as if we could cajole Him into letting us in on His secrets. But, so far as He has opted to declare Truth to us, that Truth must of necessity be self-consistent, non-contradictory and unchanging, for that Truth He declares to us expresses His unchanging essence. That being the case, the Scriptures in which we find that revealed Truth recorded must likewise be consistent, non-contradictory and unchanging.
This, I have to say, is a critical point for our understanding and assessment of doctrinal claims. If the doctrines posited to us require that we somehow hold two opposites to be equally and simultaneously true, or if they require us to hold that this is true but only on occasion, we have a problem. If we are advised that while you may hold this doctrine, I may hold the opposite and we’re both equally right, then I must insist that the only way we can be equally right is by being entirely wrong.
So, then, if the Scriptures are to be of any value to us whatsoever beyond being an interesting read they must be inerrant. They cannot contain error, for they contain the revelation of God, who is perfect in knowledge and Truth; God who cannot lie because He IS Truth. This holds in spite of those fallible human authors through whose efforts He caused the texts to be written. The authority of Scripture does not rest on their piety or perfection. It rests wholly and solely upon the perfection of God Who oversaw and inspired the writing.
This is not to say, I should note, that the process by which those first writings have been preserved down through the ages has resulted in a perfect transmission of the original writings. That is clearly not the case, as one can see from the marginal notes in any edition of the Bible. Those scribes and translators and publishers who have been involved in the process of transmission were, after all, merely human. They were not imbued with the apostolic gift, so as to write as the apostles wrote, under the full authority and inspiration of inerrant God Himself. Yet, so great is the body of manuscript evidence that we discover a truly amazing degree of consistency in the text as transmitted, and can, in general, recognize the scribal errors for what they are. Further, those errors or points of debate are not such as bear on matters of doctrine, by and large. The bulk of the questions concern variation in numerical values which are pretty clearly approximate values in the first place, or questions of the exact word used, because perhaps a particular vowel or pointing is unclear in the manuscripts. In those cases, we find that most often the meaning is either unaffected by the choice of readings, or very clearly marks one as authentic, and the other as erroneous.
As to the claims of contradiction leveled against the text, I would maintain that the majority of such claims are brought by those who have no interest in discovering the truth of the matter in the first place, but rather seek any excuse they can find to disregard the authoritative nature of the texts. That is not to say that there are not many places where we may see what appear to be contradictory points in the text. It has been my experience, however, that those apparent contradictions do not reflect a problem with the text, but rather a problem with our understanding. They are not, as the skeptic would insist, reason to reject the authority of Scripture, but rather cause for seeking greater understanding of the wisdom God has revealed. They are, in short, evidence of our own short-comings.
