A More Excellent Way: Wesley, Scripture, and the Limits of Inerrancy Language

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What the Global Methodist Church (GMC) is doing is as rare as it is important. How often does a Christian denomination have the opportunity to engage in serious conversation about its core beliefs? The recent exchange between Scott Kisker and Matt O’Reilly over Article VIII on Holy Scripture is exactly the kind of conversation a new denomination should be having. Clearly, both writers care deeply about a high view of Scripture. Both want the GMC to stand on solid ground. Both deserve to be heard generously.

My reading of that exchange, however, is that Kisker’s instincts are basically right and O’Reilly’s response, for all its apparent historical interest, misses the deeper point. On the two questions that matter most—whether the proposed language is genuinely Wesleyan, and whether the inerrancy/infallibility framework is coherent and useful—Kisker has the better of the argument. And, as Kisker observes, a more genuinely Wesleyan doctrine of Scripture is available.

What Wesley Cared About—And What He Didn’t

O’Reilly’s most interesting move is his citation of Wesley: “If there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth” (John Wesley, Journal, 24 July 1776). That’s a striking statement, and O’Reilly is right that it shouldn’t be dismissed. Clearly, Wesley held a high view of Scripture.

But there’s a difference between a polemical remark made in theological debate and a codified, systematic doctrine of the text’s metaphysical properties. Wesley never developed a theory of what we might call inerrancy. Anyone who has spent time with his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament—those dense, practical, pastorally oriented annotations prepared for ordinary Methodist readers—will notice immediately that his concerns lie elsewhere. He attends to the Greek text, follows the analogy of faith, moves with ease across the whole canon, and ever presses toward one question: What does this text do in and for readers and hearers who receive it in faith? Defenses of historical precision are not his mode. He is, in Ken Collins’s careful analysis, treating Scripture as a means of grace (Kenneth J. Collins, “Scripture as a Means of Grace,” in Wesley, Wesleyans, and Reading Bible as Scripture, ed. Joel B. Green and David F. Watson)--  uniquely positioned both as a channel of divine presence (like prayer or the Eucharist) and as the norm by which all claims to grace must be rightly comprehended, holding together in one instrument both the Holy Spirit’s transforming presence and the law’s illuminating function.

Wesley put this most plainly in his Preface to the Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament: “Scripture can only be understood through the same Spirit whereby it was given.” His doctrine of Scripture is irreducibly pneumatological. The same Spirit who animated the composition of these texts is dynamically at work in their faithful interpretation. A Wesleyan account of Scripture’s authority begins and ends there—not with a theory of errorlessness but with the living work of the Spirit in a community being formed toward holiness. The telos of all scriptural reading, for Wesley, is entire sanctification. Any reading that does not bend in that direction has taken a wrong turn.

O’Reilly supplements his citation of Wesley with a roster of nineteenth-century Methodist theologians—Ralston, Wakefield, Pope, Foster—all of whom used language affirming Scripture’s freedom from error. As interesting as this historical evidence might be, this roster must also give us pause. On the one hand, all of these figures wrote in the context of the inerrancy debates catalyzed by Hodge, Warfield, and their kin—the same tradition that Kisker correctly identifies as the origin of formal inerrancy doctrine in its modern form. On the other hand, the question O’Reilly leaves unanswered is whether these Methodist theologians represent an authentic development of Wesley’s own hermeneutical instincts or a nineteenth-century echo of or accommodation to a Reformed theological culture that was increasingly setting the terms for accredited orthodox discourse in American Protestantism. That isn’t a trivial question, and appealing to the existence of those figures doesn’t by itself settle it.

To call Wesley an inerrantist avant la lettre, as O’Reilly apparently wants to do, is to read Wesley through a framework that Wesley’s own practice neither requires nor supports. Wesley’s high view of Scripture rests on a functional ontology: Scripture is the sole, binding norm of faith and life because it is the Spirit-animated instrument through which God creates and forms the people of the way of salvation. That is a genuinely high view—arguably a higher view than inerrancy since it makes Scripture consequential in a more challenging sense. The question it poses isn’t: Does this text contain errors? Instead, the central question is this: How does this text, animated by God’s Spirit and received in faith, form us in holiness?

The Problem with “Without Error in All It Affirms”

O’Reilly defends the proposed language—specifically “without error in all it affirms”— on the grounds that it represents classical Christian consensus, is not specifically Reformed, and is well at home in the Wesleyan tradition. He also argues that progressives like Bishop Karen Oliveto would not in fact assent to it. I myself have witnessed a United Methodist bishop calling for a clergy gathering to discern patterns of Christian faith and life in areas where, she judged, the Bible is plainly wrong. Kisker, I think, is right to suggest that anyone could affirm such language, but he has moved into the land of hyperbole were he to imagine that they might do so.

There is something to O’Reilly’s rejoinder on that last point, but Kisker has a deeper concern. The question isn’t really who would sign such a document but whether the formula does the theological work it claims to do.

It’s worth reflecting on Robert Johnston’s penetrating analysis of this matter from almost a half-century ago, in his book Evangelicals at an Impasse: Biblical Authority in Practice. His diagnosis centered on what he regarded then as the evangelical crisis over Scripture, and his remarkably clear-eyed account continues to exercise explanatory power today. Johnston observed that figures like Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) and Harold Lindsell (1913–1998) had conflated three distinct commitments, namely, biblical authority, inspiration, and a particular secondary theory about the result of inspiration. By treating the third commitment as the test of the first one, these evangelicals reversed the proper order. “Inspiration” is the theological tenet that grounds scriptural authority; the claim of “without error” is a potential inference from inspiration, not its foundation. To make errorlessness the watershed is therefore to confuse a possible test of evangelical consistency with the test of evangelical authenticity.

But Johnston’s more penetrating observation is that the entire inerrancy debate, precisely because it focused on a theory about the text’s properties, masked the real crisis, which was hermeneutical. The pressing question was never: Is the Bible without error? The question, instead, was: How do we interpret the Bible faithfully and consistently? Drawing on Geoffrey Bromiley’s (1915–2009) work, Johnston poses the problem with disarming simplicity: If the Bible is infallible and authoritative, but there are different possibilities of interpretation, where is one to find that which is infallible and absolute?

This is exactly the problem with the phrase “without error in all it affirms.” This formulation shifts the entire weight of the claim onto the qualifier—and that qualifier is entirely hermeneutical: What does the text affirm? O’Reilly explains what the language is meant to convey: Texts must be interpreted according to their genre, literary form, and ancient conventions. He rules out wooden literalism and the anachronistic application of modern standards to ancient texts. As interesting and significant as such caveats might be, we shouldn’t miss what has happened here. The actual regulatory work in the formula now rests on hermeneutical principles, not on property claims about errorlessness. The formula turns out to mean something like this: When you interpret the text correctly, it says what is true. That is a substantive claim, but it’s hermeneutical in nature (even if it comes to us dressed up as a property claim about the text). As Johnston saw clearly, once the hermeneutical questions are fully in view, the property claim isn’t doing much work, and only seems to have eclipsed the harder, more consequential work of faithful interpretation and reception.

Moreover, Kisker is right when he observes that the formula is susceptible to the inflation that Lausanne-style big-tent language invites. O’Reilly inadvertently confirms this by arguing simultaneously that the language is specifically endorsed by Asbury Theological Seminary and by Wesley Biblical Seminary as distinctively Wesleyan and embraced as a broadly catholic statement by Pope Paul VI in Dei Verbum. That is a remarkably wide tent. The reason the language fits both contexts is precisely because its operative content is interpretive, and interpretive communities and interpreters differ. An article of faith whose regulatory content is determined by each tradition’s hermeneutical commitments is not a common confession but a common form with variable content, and that’s exactly what Kisker worried about.

O’Reilly charges Kisker with self-contradiction for saying the language is both “Reformed” and “big-tent,” but both things can be true. The formal language originated in a specifically Reformed problematic, found a strong foothold in the creationist debates of the fundamentalist-modernist battles, was subsequently adopted as a lowest-common-denominator formula for broad evangelical coalitions—and in that process became susceptible to the very vagueness that Kisker identifies. The Reformed pedigree and the big-tent function aren’t two incompatible descriptions but two stages of the same history.

There is a further issue with the “infallibility” language that often accompanies or substitutes for “without error.” The distinction between the two is, in practice, narrow at best. Both locate Scripture’s authority primarily in a claim about the text's properties—its freedom from error and/or its inability to mislead. Both invite a posture of apologetic defense: Establish that the text is reliable and authority follows. This is almost precisely the inverse of Wesley’s own posture toward Scripture, which began not with defense but with receptive formation, not with the text’s properties but with what the Spirit does through the text in the life of the believer and the praying community.

There’s a reason why Johnston concluded that the real crisis in evangelical theology was not theoretical but practical. It was the inability to translate an ontological theory of Scripture’s authority into the concrete practices of faithful communal interpretation. For Wesleyans, what is needed is not a better property claim but a better account of how the community of faith reads Scripture under the guidance of the Spirit toward the end of salvation. Wesley had that account.

Toward a More Genuinely Wesleyan Position

If “without error in all it affirms” is not the most illuminating or most Wesleyan way to express a high view of Scripture, what is? Two suggestions may help.

The first follows from taking Wesley’s own categories seriously. The modified Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) language that Kisker proposes—that the Holy Scriptures “contain all things necessary for full salvation”—frames authority in functional-soteriological terms. Again, this is not a weaker claim but, in important respects, a more demanding one. It commits Wesleyans to the position that, in the hands of the Holy Spirit and received in faith, Scripture genuinely forms and governs the community’s life toward integral (that is, all-encompassing) salvation, not merely that it happens to be free of error. It grounds authority where Wesley grounded it, in Scripture’s unique sufficiency as the Spirit-animated means through which God accomplishes the work of redemption and sanctification. It also has the enormous advantage of being broadly methodist language, reminiscent of the Articles of Religion, rather than language borrowed—whether from Princeton or from Lausanne—that is, from traditions whose accounts of grace, human agency, and the Spirit’s work differ in sometimes consequential ways from our own.

Second, Johnston’s constructive proposal in Evangelicals at an Impasse invites further reflection. He argued that evangelical theology at its best is a dynamic, prayerful, communal engagement of Scripture, tradition, and contemporary witness—with Scripture as the decisive authority but tradition and contemporary insight as contributing partners in interpretation. That is, in fact, reminiscent of Wesley's own practice. (Does Johnston, a member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, sound like an anonymous methodist?) He read Scripture through the analogy of faith, in conference with the church fathers and the Reformers, in conversation with the natural sciences, with a constant pastoral eye toward the spiritual conditions of his own time. A Wesleyan statement that captured this spirit—speaking of Scripture’s unique authority and sufficiency in the way of salvation, the ongoing work of the Spirit in illumining it for the believing community, and the necessity of faithful communal interpretation and reception—would be more distinctive, more demanding, and more theologically honest than an article organized around a vocabulary of errorlessness.

Something along the lines of what Kisker proposes, perhaps supplemented by a recognition of the necessity of the Spirit’s ongoing illuminating work in the church’s reading, would serve Wesleyans of all kinds far better than language that feels borrowed from Chicago in 1978 rather than from Wesley’s own study or early methodist conferencing.

Conclusion

The GMC has a genuine opportunity here. A new denomination articulating its doctrinal foundations need not simply inherit the evangelical culture wars of the late-twentieth century, themselves reflective of the earlier fundamentalist-modernist debates. It can, instead, draw on the depth of its own tradition: a Wesley who read Scripture with care and intimacy, who held it as the sole norm of faith and life, who submitted everything—including experience, reason, tradition, and his own pastoral instincts—to its authority, and who understood that authority as fundamentally functional and pneumatological, oriented toward the formation of a holy people.

That is a high view of Scripture, a view that makes the Bible consequential in the most serious sense—not a book to be defended but a living instrument of grace through which the Spirit of God forms and reforms the community of disciples. Johnston was right to insist that what we need is the concrete working out of biblical authority in the practice of communal interpretation, formation, and discernment. Wesley knew and practiced this.

The question before Wesleyans is not whether we should hold Scripture in high esteem. This almost goes without saying. The question is whether “without error in all it affirms” is the best, most coherent, most Wesleyan way to express that esteem. I think the answer is no—and, further, I believe our tradition offers something richer. That richer thing isn’t a doctrine centered on Scripture’s properties but an account affirming Scripture’s power: the power, through the Spirit, to cultivate holiness, to propel the faithful along the way of salvation that finds its telos in God’s redemption of God’s people and, indeed, the whole cosmos.

Joel B. Green is Senior Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Fuller Theological Seminary and Affiliate Faculty in New Testament Interpretation at United Theological Seminary.