A Recent Example

Dr. Robert Bratcher was chief translator of the American Bible Society's Good News for Modern Man. A former Southern Baptist missionary, he was invited to speak at the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in March of 1981. He addressed the topic "Biblical Authority for the Church Today." Bratcher said:

Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. No truth-loving, God-respecting, Christ-honoring believer should be guilty of such heresy. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and infallibility is to idolatrize [sic] it, to transform it into a false god . . . . No one seriously claims that all the words of the Bible are the very words of God. If someone does so, it is only because that person is not willing thoroughly to explore its implications . . . . Words spoken by Jesus in Aramaic in the thirties of the first century and preserved in writing in Greek 35 to 50 years later do not necessarily wield compelling or authentic authority over us today. The locus of scriptural authority is not the words themselves. It is Jesus Christ as the Word of God who is the authority for us to be and to do. ("Inerrancy: Clearing Away Confusion," Christianity Today [May 29, 1981], 12)