When I was part of a charismatic, Bible-believing church, I was taught — and I believed — that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God.
God the Holy Spirit, I was told, had inspired men to write down exactly what He wanted them to say. As proof, our teachers would point to 2 Timothy 3:16:
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
Only recently did I realise that “Scripture” here refers to the Old Testament — as it does in the other fifty places the New Testament writers use the term. We were taught, largely on the shaky basis of 2 Peter 3:16, that the New Testament was also “Scripture,” and therefore equally God-breathed and inerrant. Hence, everything in our Bibles was presented as authoritative beyond question.
Life Inside the Sect
When you live inside a sect, you accept such propositions because:
-
you love and respect your leaders,
-
you fear rejection by friends,
-
and above all, you dread God’s wrath lest you “distort the truth to your own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).
But once you leave that environment and begin to research the topics never addressed by preachers, the cracks appear quickly.
The Chaotic Canon
First: the New Testament canon itself.
The books and letters included were chosen during the three centuries after Jesus’ death through arguments, compromises, and confusion. To call that process “inerrant” is impossible.
If you believe instead that God guided the church flawlessly through this chaos, then the church itself becomes higher in authority than Scripture. That is precisely the Roman Catholic position — long condemned as heresy by Protestants since Luther separated the apocryphal writings.
A Flawed Text
Second: Erasmus (1466–1536) showed clearly that the church lived for over a thousand years with a New Testament full of errors and omissions.
So how can the Bible be the inerrant Word of God if millions of Christians were following the wrong Bible for centuries?
Arrogant Certainty
Third: in the sect where I spent twenty years, there prevailed an arrogant certainty that “our” interpretation was the only correct one.
Historical and cultural context was dismissed as irrelevant. The Holy Spirit, we were told, would simply provide our preachers with flawless understanding.
So, if Acts 10 describes baptism in the Spirit with tongues, miracles, and prophecy, then this must be the norm for every Christian, forever. Anyone who preached otherwise was a heretic — including the entire Baptist Church. I actually believed this.
And yet I never questioned why women in our services didn’t wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), or why they were allowed to speak and prophesy when Paul wrote that women should remain silent and it was “disgraceful” for them to speak in church (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).
Selective Literalism
The same inconsistencies plague the Old Testament.
-
Why do fathers no longer present disobedient sons to be stoned to death?
-
Why are women not excluded from worship during their periods?
-
Why are practising homosexuals not “annihilated” as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — a story which, in fact, has nothing to do with homosexuality?
This selective literalism always comes down to the same thing: an abuse of authority cloaked in divine certainty.
The Bible and Its Abusers
The Bible is an extraordinary piece of inspired literature. For many, it is genuinely a revelation of God.
But those who wield claims of inerrancy as a weapon — to bolster their arrogance, to demand obedience, to silence dissent — should be ashamed. For centuries, such misuse has caused division, pain, and even death in the name of Christ.
“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
— Desmond Tutu