Ryle: Inerrancy 

                                                                                                                   Vol. VIII, No. 6, June/July 1995

     This selection is an exception to our general rule of quoting Southern Baptists, for here our writer is John Charles Ryle (1816-1900), an Anglican minister who became bishop of Liverpool in 1880. He has been chosen because of the clarity with which he addressed scriptural inerrancy at a meeting with fellow ministers in August 1858. He was preaching on II Corinthians 2:17 "For we are not as many, which corrupt the Word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ." The following paragraphs include his comments about corrupting the word of God.

     “We corrupt the word of God most dangerously when we throw any doubt on the plenary inspiration of any part of the holy Scripture. This is not merely a corrupting the cup, but the whole fountain. This is not merely corrupting the bucket of living water, which we profess to present to our people, but poisoning the whole well. Once wrong on this point, the whole substance of our religion is in danger. It is a flaw in the foundation. It is a worm at the root of our theology. Once allow the worm to gnaw the root, and we must not be surprised if the branches, the leaves, and the fruit, little by little decay.

     "Secondly, we corrupt the Word of God when we make defective statements of doctrine. We do so when we add to the Bible the opinions of the Church, or of the Fathers, as if they were of equal authority. We do so when we take away from the Bible, for the sake of pleasing men; or, from a feeling of false liberty, keep back any statement which seems narrow and harsh or hard. We do so when we try to soften down anything that is taught about eternal punishment or the reality of hell. We do so when we bring forward doctrines in their wrong proportions. We have all our favorite doctrines and our minds are so constituted that it is hard to see one truth very clearly without forgetting that there are other truths equally important. We must not forget the exhortation of Paul to minister 'according to the proportion of faith.' We do so when we exhibit an excessive anxiety to fence and guard and qualify such doctrines as justification by faith without the deeds of the law, for fear of the charge of antinomianism; or when we flinch from strong statements about holiness, for fear of being thought legal. We do so, not least, when we shrink from the use of Bible language in giving an account of doctrines. We are apt to keep back such expressions as 'born again,' 'election,' 'adoption,' 'conversion,' 'assurance,' and to use roundabout phraseology, as if we were ashamed of plain Bible words."

[Excerpted from Christianity Yesterday, Mar/Apr 1995, p. 5.]