What "Biblical Inerrancy" Means

Al Mohler does a knockout job of explaining what it means to believe that the Bible is literally true.

Christians, on the other hand, look to the Bible as the word of God, but acknowledge the human dimension of Scripture as well as its divine inspiration. Of course, nothing should be taken for granted in these postmodern times, so let me identify myself as one who believes in the inerrancy, infallibility, authority, and sufficiency of the Bible. Further, I believe and teach what is known as the "verbal plenary" understanding of the Bible's inspiration -- a model which holds that the very words of the Bible are inspired, and that every word (in the original manuscripts) was fully inspired. Yet, this is not the equivalent of divine dictation. We believe that God inspired the human authors of Scripture so that they desired to write exactly what God wanted them to write, and that God used the different personalities of the human authors to help us to understand His message, even as what they wrote was fully inspired.

So, even as I am now preaching through the book of Romans, Paul's first-century letter to the Christians in Rome, I often talk about "what Paul tells us" and speak of Paul's own life experiences as related to the specific text from the letter. Of course, I believe and teach that every single word Paul wrote was fully inspired by the Holy Spirit. I follow that evangelicals have long called the "historical-grammatical" method of biblical interpretation, a method that gives attention to the historical circumstances revealed in the text (these circumstances are indeed part of the revelation of God) and a careful grammatical interpretation of the text.

For Muslim interpreters of the Qur'an, the first part of that method is irrelevant, and the second is based on something far closer to a dictation model of inspiration...

One final thought: The rise of modern historical-critical methods of interpreting the Bible, common among theological liberals, represents an effort to use various interpretive devices in order to revise the Bible's message or deny it's authority. This violates the historic Christian understanding of the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

You see the mention of Islam in there. Mohler is answering a question by Hugh Hewitt on the blog called One True God, where Hewitt raises questions and has Christian theologian friends answer. The interview with Father Joseph D. Fessio, who is the Provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and knows the pope personally, mentioned and linked to in Hewitt's question, is a fascinating interview about Europe and the future of Islam.