As a Protestant and an Evangelical, the view of the Bible is especially crucial to my faith traditions. We throw around a lot of technical terms and then debate their definitions. A traditional split has been to say whether the Bible is inerrant or infallible, and each of those terms has several definitions (see this debate in the comments of the A-Team’s blog for an example).

While I appreciate the discussion about whether the Bible is inerrant, infallible, or something else altogether, I wonder if we miss something in our conversation, namely history. (First, a disclaimer that I do not want to take our important, but contextual terms of inerrant or infallible and place them incorrectly into a time period where these terms were not used.) What I mean by history is that the Bible as a collection of various writings has a long, rich, and varied history. When the New Testament was written, the Hebrew Scriptures were pretty well established. But let us remember that the Church did not close the New Testament canon until around 397 at the Synod of Carthage. Until that point, and even afterward, vast amounts of debate surrounded which early Church texts should be considered Scripture and which should not. Books like The Shepherd of Hermas and 1 and 2 Clement did not make the cut. Many church leaders argued that other books that were canonized should have been left out, such as 2 Peter, Hebrews, and Revelation. While some criteria for determining whether a text should be considered Scripture emerged, the early Church never agreed upon a formal set of measures.

I wonder do the facts that a) there was debate over what the NT would look like, and b) that the process of canonization took several centuries to complete, now inform our debates about whether the Bible is inerrant, infallible, etc.? Systematic theology—the area of theology that would deal with matters of biblical inspiration—does address the history of the texts, but usually at the moment of their creation. That is, theologians debate how much the texts are the works of divine action versus how much they are human products. I have seen little that discusses how the fact that the Church put together the NT relates to whether the texts should be considered infallible, inerrant, authoritative, inspired, etc. Peter Kreeft argues that in order for the Bible to be infallible that we would need an infallible Church (his argument is in his talk for the Veritas Forum on why he became a Catholic after growing up as a Protestant Evangelical). Kreeft’s assertion is helpful in the conversation. While as a Protestant, I don’t buy into the idea of an infallible Church, Kreeft at least does address the canonization process of Scripture.

I wonder what people think of this issue. If you are a Christian, how do you view the biblical texts? What brought you to that conclusion? How does the process of canonization inform your view?