Carl F. H. Henry, Biblical Inerrancy, and the Pursuit of a Consistently Evangelical Identity

Evangelicals have always been a people of the Book. In his much-discussed “quadrilateral” of evangelical distinctives, David Bebbington argues that biblicism, which he defines as “a particular regard for the Bible,” has been a defining characteristic of modern evangelicalism.¹ This evangelical commitment to Scripture actually predates the spiritual awakenings of the early 1700s.² Evangelicals are heirs of the Protestant Reformation and various post-Reformation movements, and as such we are committed to a bibliology that is rooted in the reformational principle of sola Scriptura. We care deeply for the Scriptures, believing that they are God’s written words for humanity.

Though all evangelicals profess a high view of Scripture, and nearly all sincerely mean it, the devil is in the details—some would say literally! Evangelicals debate the finer points of biblical inspiration, authority, perspicuity, sufficiency, and reliability, not to mention biblical translation, interpretation, and application. For purposes of this article, our focus is on the theme of biblical reliability. American evangelicals often convey our belief that the Bible is reliable, or truthful, or trustworthy with the terms “infallibility” and “inerrancy.” However, those terms are themselves the subject of considerable controversy. Some evangelicals view inerrancy and infallibility as near synonyms while others believe they represent two rival understandings of the Bible’s reliability. Furthermore, debates over how best to articulate the truthfulness of Scripture often overlap with the equally contested notion of evangelical identity.³

My purpose in this article is to engage this contested topic from a historical perspective. However, because I serve in contexts that are confessionally committed to a particular view, I think it appropriate to state my position up front. I affirm biblical inerrancy, and I do not pit that concept against biblical infallibility. In fact, I argue that infallibility is actually the stronger of the two concepts and is foundational to inerrancy. Scripture is without error, and thus inerrant, because Scripture is infallible, and is thus incapable of erring.⁴ I understand that some evangelicals who share a quite similar understanding of Scripture might be hesitant about the language of inerrancy. I agree with David S. Dockery and Malcolm B. Yarnell: “While the term ‘inerrancy’ continues to be subject to misunderstanding, even after so many carefully stated works on the subject, it remains, when thoughtfully defined, a helpful and informative theological term to describe the results of biblical inspiration.”⁵ I do not feign some sort of value-neutral historical objectivity in this article. However, Ido attempt to be as even-handed as I can by treating all parties with respect and framing their beliefs in such a way that they would recognize themselves in this historical narrative.⁶

Carl F. H. Henry offers an influential voice from the recent past who addressed the relationship between biblical inerrancy and evangelical identity. Henry was arguably the most consequential postwar evangelical theologian and was akey shaper of modern evangelicalism in America. Albert Mohler argues Henry’s influence “extended through his voluminous writings and public exposure, has shaped the evangelical movement to a degree unmatched by any otherevangelical theologian of the period.”⁷ In 1977, the year following the “Year of the Evangelical,” TIME magazine identified Henry as the leading theologian in the most influential Christian movement in America.⁸ After Henry’s death in 2003, his obituary in the New York Times suggested he was “a theologian who helped move evangelical Christianity from the sidelines to a central place in American religion.”⁹

Over the course of six decades, Henry wrote regularly and substantively about the doctrine of Scripture. He believed in the authority, inspiration, and inerrancy of Scripture, self-consciously framing his own views in continuity with the Princeton theological tradition represented by Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823–1886), and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield (1851–1921).¹⁰ Many of Henry’s most noteworthy writings on this topic were published in the quarter-century between 1960 and 1985, which is when intra-evangelical debates over biblical reliability were “running hot” in ways that continue to reverberate across the wider evangelical movement. This article contextualizes those inerrancy debates, summarizes Henry’s articulation of inerrancy, and recounts how Henry understood the relationship between biblical inerrancy and evangelical identity. My hope is that greater familiarity with Henry’s views will help contemporary evangelicals to navigate faithfully our own ongoing discussions about the same issues Henry and his contemporaries were debating a half-century ago.

The Year of the Evangelical

By the mid-1970s, the Gallup Organization had been polling Americans for four decades. In nearly all those years, Gallup pollsters had asked questions about religion, tracking such matters as belief in God, church attendance, and religious preferences. In 1976, George Gallup Jr. added a new question. The younger Gallup was the son of the organization’s founder and a devout Episcopal layman. The poll indicated that 34 percent of Americans—about half of the nation’s Protestants—claimed to have had a born-again experience. In response, Gallup Jr. famously dubbed 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical,” a claim that was echoed in a famous cover story for Newsweek about the growing influence of born-again Christianity.¹¹

Evangelicalism had been steadily increasing its profile in the wider culture since the end of World War II. The most famous example was Billy Graham, who had been a household name for decades and was a staple of Gallup’s Top 10 “Most Admired Men” list since 1948.¹² However, evangelical momentum was really starting to peak in the 1970s. The bestseller lists included books such as James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1970), Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman (1973), and Charles Colson’s Born Again (1976), all written by evangelicals. Noted entertainers such as Pat Boone, Anita Bryant, and Johnny Cash—all of whom were raised in devout homes—became more vocal about their personal relationships with Jesus Christ. Other noteworthy individuals, such as former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, convicted Watergate conspirator Colson, and folk singer Bob Dylan, were all famous recent converts to born-again Christianity. But most importantly—and certainly the reason for Gallup’s interest in the question—was Jimmy Carter’s meteoric rise from former governor of Georgia to President of the United States. Carter was a lifelong Southern Baptist and the first President to self-identify as an evangelical.¹³

The Evangelical Battle for the Bible

At exactly the same time that evangelicalism was becoming more mainstream in American culture, a controversy over the nature of Scripture was dividing evangelical clergy and scholars. Since at least the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s and 1930s, most American evangelical biblical scholars and theologians had identified with the bibliology of the aforementioned Princeton theological tradition. Key claims included a plenary-verbal view of inspiration and belief that the original biblical autographs were without error. The latter view was called “inerrancy” or “infallibility,” and the two terms were used interchangeably by evangelicals who affirmed the Princeton bibliology.¹⁴

However, a minority of American evangelical scholars had always been uncomfortable, or at least ambivalent, concerning the Princeton position.¹⁵ By the 1960s, that minority was growing, especially among younger scholars who were more amenable to the views of British and Continental theologians who championed biblical authority but rejected both plenary-verbal inspiration and inerrancy. These evangelicals preferred to speak of the Bible’s infallibility rather than its inerrancy, and they tended to identify infallibility with Scripture’s message, especially pertaining to salvation and ethics, rather than the actual words of the biblical text.¹⁶

For the sake of space, I will focus on five key moments in the American evangelical inerrancy controversy that developed between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s. These moments were by no means self-contained disputes that were independent from the others. Rather, each subsequent controversy built upon one or more of its predecessors, resulting in a compounding effect. These inerrancy debates might be compared to a massive storm system that blew across American evangelicalism. Each of these moments constituted a single tornado that inflicted considerable damage in a particular locale. For those affected by each twister, it might seem like the storm was only impacting their ecclesial “neighborhood.” But if we zoom out, we see that the various funnel clouds eventually blew into one other, creating larger whirlwinds that multiplied the total damage across the evangelical landscape.

The first moment finds us at Fuller Theological Seminary in the decade between 1962 and 1972.¹⁷ Fuller Seminary was founded in 1947 as postwar evangelicalism’s flagship theological institution. The early faculty included a mix of established evangelical scholars and younger theological luminaries. The founding president, the respected Boston pastor-theologian Harold John Ockenga, led the school in absentia. Carl Henry agreed to serve as the interim academic dean, a position he held for two years. Though the faculty was denominationally diverse, in their understanding of Scripture they self-consciously taught within the framework of the Princeton theological tradition. The seminary’s first statement of faith was drawn up in 1949 by Edward John Carnell, who later served as the seminary’s second president. According to that statement, “the original Scriptures are plenarily inspired and free from error in the whole and in the part.” Interestingly, this statement was adopted because earlier that same year Fuller had hired a European theologian named Bela Vassady whose views of Scripture were more influenced by Neo-Orthodoxy than Old Princeton.

By the mid-1960s, Fuller no longer had a consensus on the trustworthiness of Scripture. Many newer faculty hires believed the Bible to be trustworthy in matters of faith and practice but also claimed Scripture includes errors related to history, geography, and science. Notably, the more progressive faction included Daniel Fuller and David Allan Hubbard. Fuller was the son of the seminary’s founding benefactor, the famed evangelist Charles Fuller, and became academic dean in 1962. Hubbard became the school’s third president in 1963. Tensions ran high throughout the 1960s, with several of the older, more conservative faculty members departing, and some alumni raising alarms about theological drift among the faculty. During this time, the seminary made several minor adjustments to its statement of faith and catalog revisions in an effort to accommodate the diversity of views among faculty. In 1972, Fuller adopted a revised confession that deleted the reference to plenary inspiration and replaced the earlier phrase “free from error” with the word “infallible,” the latter of which was a rule for faith and practice rather than an affirmation concerning the actual text of Scripture.

Our second moment takes us to the “Year of the Evangelical” itself, Harold Lindsell, who was the editor of Christianity Today magazine, published a bombshell of a book titled The Battle for the Bible. Prior to coming to Christianity Today, where he replaced Carl Henry as editor, Lindsell had been a founding faculty member at Fuller Seminary and part of the faction that wanted to retain the language of biblical inerrancy. He dedicated a chapter in The Battle for the Bible to “The Strange Case of Fuller Theological Seminary,” wherein he provided a narrative recounting of the debate from an inerrantist perspective.¹⁸ He also warned that the faculty was already moving in a more liberal direction that contradicted even the revised confession.

Lindsell did not limit his criticisms to his former employer. He also raised concerns about other instances of evangelical scholars either rejecting or redefining biblical inerrancy, most notably within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and the Southern Baptist Convention. The Battle for the Bible provoked considerable controversy. Lindsell was editor of arguably the most influential evangelical periodical which aspired to represent the consensus of mainstream evangelicalism. Furthermore, Lindsell did not make vague accusations, but he named names and outed institutions where he believed historic evangelical bibliology was being undermined. Published reviews of The Battle for the Bible proved mixed, even from his fellow evangelicals.¹⁹

The third moment was the publication of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. Evangelical scholars had long been concerned with liberal and even Neo-Orthodox understandings of Scripture, and they regularly produced works intended to buttress evangelical bibliology, including inerrancy. A number of noteworthy books were published in the two decades between 1958 and 1978, including: J. I. Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958); E. J. Young’s Thy Word Is Truth (1963); John Gerstner’s Biblical Inerrancy Primer (1963); W. A. Criswell’s Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True (1969); Clark Pinnock’s Biblical Revelation (1971); Laird Harris’s Inspiration and Canonicity of Scripture (1971); and Francis Schaeffer’s No Final Conflict (1975). Evangelical scholars also published at least four important compilations: The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, edited by Ned Stonehouse and Paul Wooley; Revelation and the Bible (1958), edited by Carl F. H. Henry; God’s Inerrant Word (1974), edited by John Warwick Montgomery; and The Foundations of Biblical Authority (1978), edited by James Montgomery Boice.

Following informal conversations among concerned evangelicals, a group of about fifteen scholars formed the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI) in 1977.²⁰ They subsequently invited another fifty or so scholars and pastors to join an advisory board. In 1978, the ICBI held a summit in Chicago, which resulted in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which was subsequently affirmed by 330 leaders from across the denominational spectrum. The key architects of the statement and subsequent commentary included Presbyterians R. C. Sproul and James Montgomery Boice, Anglican J. I. Packer, Baptists Roger Nicole and Norman Geisler, and Lutheran Robert Preus. The Chicago Statement included a short summary of biblical inerrancy, followed by nineteen affirmations and denials to help provide appropriate scholarly nuance. The Chicago Statement soon became the dominant understanding of inerrancy among most evangelical theologians committed to continuity with the Princeton theological tradition, especially in North America, resulting in a coherent Princeton-Chicago tradition that continues to endure.²¹

The fourth moment came just one year later with the 1979 publication of Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s book The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach.²² Both men were evangelical scholars who also moved within mainline Presbyterian circles, and Rogers was a faculty member at Fuller Seminary. In 1977, Rogers had previously edited a collection of essays titled Biblical Authority wherein the contributors, all of whom were infallibilists rather than inerrantists, responded to Lindsell. The Rogers and McKim volume built on that earlier work in the aftermath of the Chicago Statement. The authors argued that plenary-verbal inspiration and inerrancy—as understood in the Princeton-Chicago tradition—are not faithful expressions of the historic Christian consensus, but rather are rationalistic innovations developed by the Princeton theologians.²³ What became known as the Rogers-McKim Thesis was representative of many evangelicals who emphasized the truthfulness of Scripture’s teachings related to salvation and ethics rather than the reliability of the actual words themselves. The Bible’s message is infallible, but the biblical text is errant.

The Rogers-McKim Thesis received a number of critiques throughout the 1980s from inerrantist scholars who affirmed the Chicago Statement. Three book-length responses bear mentioning. John Woodbridge, a church historian at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, wrote Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982) to critique the historical narrative put forward by Rogers and McKim. A year later, Woodbridge and his Trinity colleague D. A. Carson, a New Testament scholar, edited Scripture and Truth (1983), which offered a comprehensive defense of the Princeton–Chicago tradition over against the Rogers-McKim approach to Scripture. In 1984, Dallas Theological Seminary theologian John Hannah edited Inerrancy and the Church, which focused on the place of inerrancy historically within various ecclesial traditions.

The final moment also overlapped chronologically with the publication of the Chicago Statement and the debates over the Rogers-McKim Thesis. The year 1979 marked the beginning of the Inerrancy Controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).²⁴ Tensions had been growing for many years. During the decade between 1961 and 1971, roughly the same timeframe as the Fuller Seminary conflict, the SBC was enduring periodic controversies in response to progressive views of Scripture being advanced within the convention’s seminaries and in denominational publications. As noted previously, Lindsell’s Battle for the Bible dedicated a chapter to these matters.²⁵

In 1979, a group of conservative activists put a plan into place to gain control of the convention’s ministries by electing a series of inerrantist presidents, who in turn would appoint inerrantist committees to fill vacancies on the various trustee boards with committed inerrantists. The plan worked, and by the early 1990s the conservative faction was firmly in control of the denomination. Southern Baptist moderates, who either denied inerrancy or argued it should not be required for faithful cooperation, increasingly disengaged from the convention between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. The controversy was never merely a debate over inerrancy; but it was never less than an inerrancy debate, either.²⁶ Interestingly, during the very same years that conservatives were seeking to gain control of the SBC, many were also abandoning the convention’s historic isolationism by developing closer ties with inerrantists within the wider evangelical movement.²⁷ One noteworthy example was Carl Henry. Though Henry was a member of a Southern Baptist church in Washington DC, he had identified more as an American Baptist evangelical throughout his career.²⁸

Carl Henry and Biblical Inerrancy

The doctrine of Scripture was a central theme in Carl Henry’s thought and his wider ministry. He wrote widely on the topic, and he was involved in numerous initiatives that promoted what he believed to be the historic evangelical understanding of Scripture. Across his many writings on this subject, Henry’s major focus was normally the nature of divine revelation. His view of revelation is best summarized in his tenth Thesis, found in volume III of God, Revelation and Authority: “God’s revelation is rational communication conveyed in intelligible ideas and meaningful words that is, in conceptual-verbal form.”²⁹ Henry argued that God reveals propositional truths through the very words of Scripture. Because those words are not just the words of men but also the words of God, they are fully trustworthy and without error. For Henry, inspiration was a form of revelation, and inerrancy was an implication of inspiration.

Henry held these views throughout his career. In one of his earliest academic books, The Protestant Dilemma (1948), Henry devoted a chapter to an extended critique of Emil Brunner’s view of divine revelation, including his bibliology. Henry took Brunner to task for rejecting verbal inspiration, defaulting to the conclusions of higher criticism, downplaying any significant unity across the Scriptures, rejecting biblical infallibility, claiming Scripture is only a witness to divine revelation rather than a form of revelation itself, and identifying the historic evangelical position with an idolatrous posture towards the Bible. In a forerunner to later debates over the Rogers-McKim Thesis, Henry rejected Brunner’s claim that the Protestant Reformers also affirmed an errant biblical text. He also dismissed as insufficient the view of turn-of-the-century evangelical James Orr, which limited inerrancy to the message of Scripture.³⁰ Orr’s position also anticipated later evangelical debates. At every point along the way, Henry explicitly sided with the Princeton tradition in commending plenary-verbal inspiration and the inerrancy of the original autographs of Scripture, and he ended the chapter with an apologetic defense of a trustworthy biblical text. Though Henry used the term “infallibility” to describe the historic evangelical position, it is clear he meant by this that the text of Scripture is without error.³¹

A year later, in 1949, Henry attended the inaugural meeting in Chicago of what became the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). During the gathering, Henry both suggested the name for the society and delivered the post-banquet plenary address.³² ETS adopted a brief statement of faith that was to be affirmed annually by all members. Notably, the statement focused on evangelical bibliology: “The Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs.”³³ From early in his career, Henry was committed to biblical inerrancy personally, willing to defend inerrancy against its critics, and engaged in efforts to promote the scholarship of evangelical inerrantists.

In 1956, Henry left his faculty post at Fuller Theological Seminary to become the founding editor of Christianity Today. For the next dozen years, he limited most of his academic writing to shorter articles (many revised from public lectures) and to editing collections of essays. Some of this material focused on Scripture. Space precludes more than just a few examples.³⁴ In 1957, Henry contributed a substantive chapter on “Divine Revelation and the Bible” to a collection of essays titled Inspiration and Interpretation. In that chapter, he echoed many of the same arguments he first advanced in The Protestant Dilemma. But notably, he also spoke of both inerrancy and infallibility, treating the concepts as synonyms, and applied them to the original autographs of the Scripture. He also critiqued common objections to the evangelical view of biblical reliability.³⁵

Three years later, in 1960, Henry contributed the entry on biblical inspiration to the Baker Dictionary of Theology. Though inerrancy was not his focus, Henry affirmed the trustworthiness of the biblical text on the basis of God’s verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.³⁶ Under the auspices of Christianity Today, Henry also edited a five-volume series of collected essays titled “Contemporary Christian Thought.”³⁷ Four of the volumes included one or more chapters on Scripture, and one entire volume, Revelation and the Bible (1959), was dedicated to the topic. Henry noted in the preface to Revelation and the Bible that all the contributors affirmed “the fact that the Bible is a God-breathed book is the foundation of scriptural trustworthiness and reliability.”³⁸

After Henry left Christianity Today, he was able to focus again on his own academic writing. He began working in earnest on what would eventually become God, Revelation and Authority, a six-volume magnum opus published in three parts between 1976 and 1983. Henry wrote extensively about the truthfulness of Scripture in volume IV of God, Revelation and Authority, which was published in 1979. Two points are worth noting. First, in terms of its historical context, the book appeared a year after the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was drafted. In fact, Henry reproduced the entirety of the Chicago Statement as a supplemental note following two chapters that focused on inerrancy.³⁹ Henry understood that inerrancy was a timely topic among evangelicals. Second, within the context of volume IV itself, Henry did not discuss inerrancy until after he had written on biblical authority and inspiration. This ordering indicates how Henry thought about inerrancy in relation to other aspects of bibliology. Henry argued early in the volume that “The first claim to be made for Scriptures is not its inerrancy, or even its inspiration, but its authority.”⁴⁰

As noted at the beginning of this article, Henry self-consciously identified his own bibliology, and that of historic evangelicalism, with the Princeton theological tradition. Henry regularly referenced Charles Hodge and especially B. B. Warfield throughout volume IV, particularly concerning the relationship between plenary-verbal inspiration and inerrancy.⁴¹ Henry’s most frequent recurring foils included James Barr and Karl Barth, both of whom were critiqued throughout the volume.⁴² Henry also interacted with numerous evangelical scholars who represented a variety of perspectives related to inerrancy and related topics within the doctrine of Scripture.

In chapter 7, Henry began to focus sustained attention on inerrancy. He surveyed a range of views among evangelicals on such matters as whether Scripture teaches inerrancy, is an implication of inspiration, or is theological speculation; whether inerrancy is complete or limited; whether “inerrancy” or “infallibility” is the best term to use for the reliability of Scripture; whether inerrancy applies to the text of Scripture or its teachings; and how best to reconcile the trustworthiness of Scripture with the historical-critical method. Henry was critical of those whom he considered mediating theologians who professed evangelical faith but were overly influenced by critical views of Scripture and/or Neo-Orthodox bibliology. These revisionists were well-represented within recent evangelical scholarship, but they were out-of-step with historical evangelicalism. Henry maintained that “The prevailing evangelical view affirms a special activity of divine inspiration whereby the Holy Spirit superintended the scriptural writers in communicating the biblical message in ways consistent with their differing personalities, literary styles and cultural background, while safeguarding them from error.”⁴³ For Henry, inerrancy “is implicitly taught, is logically deducible, and is a necessary correlate of Scripture as the inspired Word of God.”⁴⁴

In chapter 8, Henry advanced his own understanding of inerrancy via a series of denials and affirmations. He offered the following five denials.

1. Inerrancy does not imply that modern technological precision in reporting statistics and measurements, that conformity to modern historiographic method in reporting genealogies and other historical data, or that conformity to modern scientific method in reporting cosmological matters, can be expected from the biblical writers.⁴⁵
2. Inerrancy does not imply that only nonmetaphorical or nonsymbolic language can convey religious truth. Scripture employs a wide range of figurative language and many literary forms, such as parable, poetry and proverb. All are capable of serving appropriately as vehicles to communicate truth.⁴⁶
3. Inerrancy does not imply that verbal exactitude is required in New Testament quotation and use of Old Testament passages.⁴⁷
4. Inerrancy does not imply that personal faith in Christ is dispensable since evangelicals have an inerrant book they can trust.⁴⁸
5. Scriptural inerrancy does not imply that evangelical orthodoxy follows as a necessary consequence of accepting this doctrine.⁴⁹

Henry then provided a list of four positive implications concerning inerrancy, which were followed by the text of the Chicago Statement.

1. Verbal inerrancy implies that truth attaches not only to the theological and ethical teaching of the Bible, but also to historical and scientific matters insofar as they are part of the express message of the inspired writings.⁵⁰
2. Verbal inerrancy implies that God’s truth inheres in the very words of Scripture, that is, in the propositions or sentences of the Bible, and not merely in the concepts and thoughts of the writers.⁵¹
3. Verbal inerrancy implies that the original writings or prophetic-apostolic autographs alone are error-free. The theopneustic quality attaches directly to the autographs, and only indirectly to the copies.⁵²
4. Verbal inerrancy of the autographs implies that evangelicals must not attach finality to contemporary versions or translations, least of all to mere paraphrases, but must earnestly pursue and honor the best text.⁵³

In Chapter 9, Henry made the case that while the original autographs were inerrant, subsequent copies of those texts are infallible. Here Henry makes his own distinction between these terms, albeit not the same as the mediating theologians. In a footnote, he suggested that inerrancy means “without error” whereas infallibility means “not prone to error.” This linguistic distinction allows for minor errors that found their way into biblical manuscripts over time as texts were copied, but without resorting to the language of “partial inerrancy,” which Henry believed to be as incoherent as “partial virginity.”⁵⁴ Henry wanted to defend the trustworthiness of Scripture, including modern translations, without claiming more about extant manuscripts than is warranted. For Henry,

The original manuscripts have a theopneustic quality because of their divinely given rational and verbal content and because of the Spirit’s superintendence of the prophets and apostles in the process of writing; copies of the originals, and copies of the copies, on the other hand, share in the theopneustic quality of the originals only to the extent that they faithfully reproduce the autographs.⁵⁵

In chapter 10, Henry further elaborated on the meaning of infallibility, in dialogue with a variety of scholars from both within and outside of evangelicalism. For Henry, “The efficacy of Scripture is a consequence of the inerrancy of the autographs and an implicate of the infallibility of the transcripts.”⁵⁶

Subsequent chapters further fleshed out Henry’s understanding of the reliability of the Scriptures. Chapter 14 made the case that affirmation of biblical inerrancy and infallibility do not guarantee accurate exegesis because no student or scholar of the Scriptures is infallible. Most of this chapter is an extended critique of James Barr, who savaged conservative views of Scripture in his influential 1977 book Fundamentalism. Henry did not see this concession of fallible interpretation as undermining an evangelical view of Scripture. He argued,

Judeo-Christian religion sets the exegete’s fallibility in a revelatory framework that brackets the epistemic consequences of human revolt, even if finite and sinful man can and does in some respects cloud the content of revelation. Scripture, moreover, not only gives us divine revelation in objective propositional-verbal form, but also sets before us the normative prophetic-apostolic explanation and proclamation of that very revelation.⁵⁷

Unlike higher critics, evangelicals believed divine inspiration entailed the historicity of the Scriptures. That affirmation did not assure correct exegesis and interpretation, but it was a safeguard against the “hermeneutical nihilism” that Henry critiqued in the previous chapter.⁵⁸

In chapter 15, Henry addressed the reality of so-called problem passages that are often considered defeaters for biblical inerrancy. He offered plausible responses to many of the most common criticisms advanced by higher critics, and he took those critics to task for their outdated, exaggerated, inaccurate, or simplistic critiques about the biblical text. Henry argued that “Evangelical scholars do not insist that historical realities conform to all their proposals for harmonization; their intent, rather, is to show that their premises do not cancel the logical possibility of reconciling apparently divergent reports.”⁵⁹ Notably, Henry also pushed back on how some evangelicals treat inerrancy, which is the topic of the next section. In Chapter 16, Henry argued that inerrancy was not a recent invention of the Princeton theologians but rather is consistent with the majority view throughout church history that God inspired the biblical text and thus the text is without error. In making his historical case, Henry anticipated the later work of John Woodbridge in critiquing Rogers and McKim; Rogers had already advanced an earlier version of their view in a chapter in Biblical Authority.⁶⁰

Henry was clearly a strong advocate for biblical inerrancy and a critic of mediating evangelical views that shifted the reliability of Scripture away from the text itself. Thus, it should come as no surprise that many conservative evangelicals have continued to resonate with his views.⁶¹ In a 1990 chapter on Henry’s thought, Albert Mohler argued that “Henry’s defense of biblical inerrancy is one of the most thorough treatments in the evangelical literature.”⁶² In a 2004 journal article, Paul House commended Henry’s theological vision, including his strong commitment to biblical inerrancy, to a new generation of evangelicals, some of whom were embarrassed by inerrancy.⁶³ In a 2013 book-length engagement with Henry’s thought, Gregory Thornbury suggested that Henry’s commitment to inerrancy should be recovered among evangelicals who were still waffling on whether or not the Bible is fully trustworthy.Gregory Alan Thornbury, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and
Vision of Carl F. H. Henry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 116–58.⁶⁴ In a 2015 monograph, William Roach commended Henry’s faithful evangelical bibliology as representative of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as well as a wider “Chicago School” that champions propositional revelation, plenary-verbal inspiration, and grammatical-historical hermeneutics.⁶⁵

Biblical Inerrancy and Evangelical Identity

The conservative evangelical praise for Henry’s scholarly defense of inerrancy is noteworthy for at least one other reason. While Henry was deeply committed to biblical inerrancy, and he believed other evangelicals ought to share his views, he also did not consider consensus on inerrancy to be essential to evangelicalism. This represented an important distinction between the respective views of Henry and Lindsell. While both men affirmed biblical inerrancy and lamented the growing popularity of mediating positions among evangelical scholars, they had differing opinions about where inerrancy fit into the cluster of beliefs that should define evangelical identity. Lindsell believed inerrancy was a test of evangelical authenticity, while Henry believed the doctrine to be a matter of evangelical consistency.

Henry first wrote about his views of this matter in 1976, the “Year of the Evangelical” and the same year the Battle for the Bible appeared. Henry wrote a series of monthly columns for Christianity Today between January and October 1976 that were subsequently collected into a small book titled Evangelicals in Search of Identity. Henry was concerned that the evangelical movement was beset by internal tensions related to two themes: concerns that the movement was too conservative politically and debates over the doctrine of Scripture.⁶⁶ Our concern in this article is with the latter issue.

Henry dedicated a chapter to the inerrancy controversy, lamenting that the issue was dividing evangelicals into competitive camps. He referenced recent tensions at conferences, controversial publications, and denominational disputes. Younger scholars were distancing themselves from inerrancy, especially the so-called domino theory that inerrancy was a necessary bulwark against wider doctrinal drift. Henry referenced the recently published Battle for the Bible and noted that both Lindsell and Francis Schaeffer considered affirmation of inerrancy to be a mark of genuine evangelicalism. Henry’s approach was different. He affirmed biblical inerrancy and conceded that its loss can certainly lead to other doctrinal errors. However, he also warned against weaponizing inerrancy and thus refusing to neglect the legitimate contributions of mediating scholars who had a somewhat looser understanding of biblical reliability.⁶⁷ Henry also believed the debates could be a distraction. He warned, “The somewhat reactionary elevation of inerrancy as the superbadge of evangelical orthodoxy deploys energies to this controversy that evangelicals might better apply to producing comprehensive theological works so desperately needed in a time of national and civilizational crisis.”⁶⁸

Henry further developed his views in chapter 15 of volume IV of God, Revelation and Authority. Henry began by noting that “some evangelicals are focusing all discussion of divine revelation almost entirely on the inerrancy issue; some writers have declared biblical inerrancy to be the one criterion for distinguishing true from false evangelicals.”⁶⁹ He clearly had Lindsell in mind. Henry’s verdict? “Unbalanced preoccupation with inerrancy can be a costly evangelical diversion.”⁷⁰ Henry suggested that some institutions treated inerrancy as a marketing tool to solicit funds and engaged in polemics to question the evangelical bona fides of other institutions. Ironically, evangelicals with a disordered commitment to inerrancy frequently ceded the ground of serious scholarly inquiry to the very mediating scholars they were so quick to criticize. For Henry, “Whenever unbalanced preoccupation with inerrancy preempts the energies of evangelical institutions to the neglect of comprehensive exposition of the Christian revelation, and of a powerful apologetic addressed to the world, sub-evangelical and nonevangelical spokesmen take over and objectionably fill these theological vacuums.”⁷¹

Henry argued that inerrancy was not a first-order doctrine in apostolic preaching. Rather, the heart of the Christian message was the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, adherence to which is the true mark of evangelical authenticity. But this does not mean that bibliology is a matter of indifference. The apostles taught the full authority and inspiration of God’s inscripturated words, and to deny these beliefs betrays an unbiblical bias. For Henry, inerrancy is a necessary corollary of inspiration. Thus, his concern was not to downplay inerrancy, but rather to put inerrancy in its proper place within the hierarchy of evangelical doctrines.

To say that biblical inerrancy is not the first thing to be declared is not to deny its importance; it is integral to a Christian apologetic that presents evangelical theology in its totality. The search for a biblical authority that accommodates errancy has tragically eroded theological energies, and has been as fruitless and even more so than has a fixation on inerrancy.⁷²

Henry contrasted his posture with that of Lindsell. For Lindsell, an affirmation of errancy necessarily leads to apostasy. Henry thought this slippery slope argument lacked appropriate nuance. He conceded that some who had first rejected inerrancy later rejected other more central doctrines. Be he also noted that belief in inerrancy is no guarantee of orthodoxy in other matters. Thus, evangelical authenticity should not be determined solely on the basis of one’s view of inerrancy; not all who reject inerrancy are enemies of evangelicalism. After all, Henry observed that “The term evangelical as used historically has designated commitment to justification by faith alone and to the authority of Scripture alone.”⁷³ Biblical authority is thus more foundational to evangelical identity than inerrancy. However, Henry’s moderate posture toward non-inerrantists should not be confused with indifference toward their position. Evangelicals who believe in an errant text “are left with an unstable religious epistemology that is difficult to reconcile with the teaching of both Jesus and the biblical writers.”⁷⁴ Though inerrancy is no guarantee of sound hermeneutics, errancy fosters an unhealthy interpretive pluralism.

Henry also observed that some evangelical scholars had not necessarily conceded errancy but were nevertheless non-committal towards inerrancy. In some cases, these scholars simply did not believe that the Bible explicitly teaches its own inerrancy, and so they were hesitant to say anything more than inerrancy is an inference from inspiration. Henry considered this position, which described some of the infallibilists, to be far better than assuming the biblical text has errors. However, Henry also believed there were too many weaknesses with this ambivalent posture toward inerrancy to commend it. But his response to evangelicals in this camp was not to write them out of the movement like Lindsell had done. Ever the apologist, Henry believed that the better response “is to prod them toward an inerrancy commitment by means of rational considerations.”⁷⁵ After all, “Inerrancy is the evangelical heritage, the historic commitment of the Christian church.”⁷⁶ As such, while not all evangelicals affirmed inerrancy, the most consistently faithful evangelicals were biblical inerrantists.

Scholars have advanced a variety of perspectives on Henry’s understanding of the relationship between inerrancy and evangelical identity. Gary Dorrien suggests Henry opened the door for mediating and even revisionist theology to flourish. He contends that “Henry’s posture gave comfort and legitimacy to a theological perspective that he otherwise described as mistaken, contrary to historic orthodoxy, and harmful to evangelicalism.”⁷⁷ Mohler’s view is more descriptive, observing that “A reading of Henry’s writings on inerrancy, and especially the relevant sections of God, Revelation and Authority, reveal the depth of Henry’s passionate commitment to the concept—and indeed to the Word itself—and yet also indicates that Henry is unwilling to allow the Word to become a weapon of theological warfare.”⁷⁸ Ryan Reed offers three reasons for Henry’s posture. First, Henry argued evangelicals should be chiefly concerned with biblical authority. Second, he wanted to build a coalition of evangelical intellectuals who were committed to a biblical world-and-life view, and he knew some of evangelicalism’s sharpest scholars were not committed to verbal inerrancy. Finally, Henry doubted whether inerrancy could meaningfully unite evangelicals beyond a common affirmation of that doctrine.⁷⁹

For Henry’s part, God, Revelation and Authority was not his final word on this topic. In his 1986 autobiography, Henry returned to the relationship between inerrancy and evangelicalism. He did not mince words. He referenced the “amazing short-sightedness” of an intra-evangelical war over inerrancy at the very moment the mainstream press was attuned to the “Year of the Evangelical.” This should have been an opportunity to rally all evangelicals to engage the culture for the sake of the kingdom. Instead “evangelicals indulged in the luxury of internal conflict and channeled theological energies” into the inerrancy controversy—to the great delight of the skeptical secular media. To be clear, Henry believed evangelicals must remain committed to the comprehensive reliability of Scripture, for the sake of ensuring orthodoxy and fulfilling the Great Commission. But he believed that internal evangelical debates were best left out of the public eye, lest evangelicalism’s cultural witness be hindered.⁸⁰

Conclusion

In a grand historical irony, the “Year of the Evangelical” was also a moment when evangelicalism was fracturing over how best to articulate biblical reliability. As anyone who is an observer of American evangelicalism will readily concede, debates over this doctrine and its implications have only heightened over the past five decades. Every theological perspective that was present among evangelicals in the mid-1970s remains part of the movement in the mid-2020s. At times, these differences fly under the radar. However, the fault lines become evident whenever controversy erupts over whether or not certain hermeneutical strategies or doctrinal commitments are compatible with inerrancy or undermine biblical reliability.⁸¹

My goal in this article has not been to settle these debates, but to remind evangelicals that such tensions are not of recent vintage and to commend Carl F. H. Henry as a thoughtful conversation partner in our ongoing disputes. Some contemporary evangelicals, like Jack Rogers in a previous generation, believe older views of biblical reliability need to be rejected, or at least revised, in light of observable phenomena within Scripture and the best of modern scholarship.⁸² Most of these evangelicals avoid the term “inerrancy” to describe their views. Others, in the spirit of Harold Lindsell, believe that inerrancy remains a core feature of evangelicalism, and they are committed to policing the boundaries for the sake of evangelical purity.⁸³ These scholars insist on the language of inerrancy and default to the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy (and subsequent related statements) as the definitive interpretation of the concept. Still others, much like Henry, affirm biblical inerrancy, commend it to others, and even defend it against its critics, yet also conceive of evangelicalism as a big enough tent to accommodate some diversity of opinion.⁸⁴ These scholars desire a more expansive rather than restrictive definition of inerrancy, but unlike Henry, they prefer inductive rather than deductive defenses of the doctrine.

I close by acknowledging my own sympathies, which very much lie with Henry, at least in spirit. However, I also believe that some self-confessed evangelicals champion methodologies and advance interpretations that so stretch the truthfulness of Scripture so as to render the concept virtually meaningless. While inerrancy does not always require a particular interpretation of a text, surely it rules at least some interpretations out of bounds. The hard task of faithful evangelical scholarship is determining when there is room for debate among those who affirm biblical reliability and when an interpretation cannot be reconciled with a full-throated affirmation that Scripture is a trustworthy word from the Lord. Biblical inerrancy is an important part of our evangelical heritage, and the Princeton-Chicago tradition of bibliology has deeply shaped evangelical faith and practice. We cannot be afraid of controversy when truth really is at stake. Our rightly ordered pursuit of evangelical consistency should always be in service to greater evangelical authenticity. I believe that Carl Henry would agree.

1. David S. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. ↩︎
2. See Kenneth J. Stewart, “The Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture, 1650–1850: A Reexamination of David Bebbington’s Theory,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nottingham, UK: Apollos, 2008), 394–413. ↩︎
3. Debating evangelical identity is a cottage industry among scholars, especially those nurtured in evangelical contexts. See Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). ↩︎
4. See David S. Dockery and Malcolm B. Yarnell III, Special Revelation and Scripture, Theology for the People of God (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2025), 222. ↩︎
5. Dockery and Yarnell, Special Revelation and Scripture, 227. See also J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken: Revelation and the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 126–31. ↩︎
6. This sort of historical empathy is rooted in the second greatest commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:39). In this case, our neighbors arehistorical actors and those contemporary individuals who resonate with their positions. See Nathan A. Finn, History: A Student’s Guide, Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), 22. ↩︎
7. R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Carl F. H. Henry,” in Theologians of the Baptist Tradition, eds. Timothy George and David S. Dockery (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2001), 291. ↩︎
8. Richard Ostling, “Religion: Theology for the Tent Meeting,” Time Magazine (February 14, 1977), https://time.com/archive/6848576/religion-theology-for-the-tent-meeting/. ↩︎
9. Laurie Goodstein, “Rev. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, 90, Brain of Evangelical Movement,” New York Times (December 13, 2003), https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/13/us/rev-dr-carl-f-h-henry-90-brain-of-evangelical-movement.html. ↩︎
10. For more on the Princeton theological tradition, see David F. Wells, ed., The Princeton Theology, Reformed Theology in America (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989); Mark A. Noll,ed., The Princeton Theology 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,2001); Bradley Seeman, “The ‘Old Princetonians’ on Biblical Authority,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016),195–237. ↩︎
11. See Kenneth L. Woodward et al., “Born Again! The Year of the Evangelicals,” Newsweek (October 25, 1976): 68–78. The Gallup poll was also reported in othermajor news outlets, both secular and religious. For example, see Kenneth Briggs, “Gallup Poll Finds New Evidence of the Religious Character of U.S.,” New York Times (September 12, 1976): 26, and David Kucharsky, “The Year of the Evangelical ’76,” Christianity Today (October 22, 1976): 12–13. ↩︎
12. Frank Newport, “In the News: Billy Graham on ‘Most Admired’ List 61 Times,” Gallup (February 21, 2018), available online: https://news.gallup.com/poll/228089/news-billy-gra-ham-admired-list-times.aspx#:~:text=The%20Rev.,11. Graham holds the record for most appearances on the list. ↩︎
13. For more on Carter’s evangelicalism and the wider cultural impact of evangelicalism during the mid-1970s, see Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9–31; Randall Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (New York: Basic, 2014), 137–58; Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical, 116–20; Daniel K. Williams, The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 202–07. ↩︎
14. John S. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place: The Doctrine of Scripture, Foundations for Evangelical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 264–66. ↩︎
15. Molly Worthen argues that most evangelicals in Wesleyan, Holiness, Pentecostal, and Anabaptist contexts were ambivalent about Princeton bibliology (as well as Christian worldview language), except for scholars in those traditions who were influenced by fundamentalism and/or Reformed theology. See Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩︎
16. The British context was somewhat different because of the influence of Romanticism on British Christianity. Evangelicals long preferred infallibility to inerrancy, except in contexts influenced by American fundamentalism, even though many British evangelicals who used the term “infallible” meant the same thing as their American counterparts who preferred the term “inerrancy.” See Stephen R. Holmes, “Evangelical Doctrines of Scripture inTransatlantic Perspective,” in Evangelical Quarterly 81.1 (2009): 38–63. ↩︎
17. My discussion of Fuller Seminary draws upon George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformed Theological Seminary, 1995), 172–219, and Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster-John Knox, 1998), 95–101. ↩︎
18. Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 106–21. ↩︎
19. For examples of positive reviews, see Charles C. Ryrie, review of The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell, Bibliotheca Sacra 133.532 (1976): 356–57, and David H. Linden, review of The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell, Presbyterion 3.1 (1977): 46–48. For negative reviews, see Bernard Ramm, “Misplaced Battle Lines,” review of The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell, Reformed Journal 26.6 (1976): 37–38, and Donald W. Dayton, “‘The Battle for the Bible’: Renewing the Inerrancy Debate,” review of The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell, Christian Century (November 10, 1976), 976–980. For his part, Lindsell published a follow-up title three years later. See Harold Lindsell, The Bible in the Balance: A Further Look at the Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979). ↩︎
20. For historical reflections on ICBI and the Chicago Statement, see Woodbridge, “The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy: A Fundamentalist Gambit?” Presbyterion 48.1 (Spring 2022): 37–59. For a collection of primary source documents from the ICBI and commentary, see R. C. Sproul and Norman L. Geisler, Explaining Biblical Inerrancy: The Chicago Statements on Biblical Inerrancy, Hermeneutics, and Application with Official ICBI Commentary (Arlington, TX: Bastion Books, 2013). ↩︎
21. I make this case more fully in Nathan A. Finn, “Inerrancy and Evangelicals: The Challenge for a New Generation,” The Gospel Coalition (August 21, 2020), available online: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/inerrancy-evangelicals/. ↩︎
22. For a helpful summary of this controversy, see Kenneth Or tiz, “Iner rancy, Infallibility, and the Rogers/McKim Proposal,” Theology for the Rest of Us (January 15, 2023), available online: https://www.theologyfortherestofus.com/inerrancy-infallibility-and-the-rogers-mckim-proposal. ↩︎
23. Ernest Sandeen made a similar argument in his groundbreaking study The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). For a thorough critique of Sandeen, see John D. Woodbridge and Randall H. Balmer, “The Princetonians and Biblical Authority: An Assessment of the Ernest Sandeen Proposal,” in Scripture and Truth, eds. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983): 251–79. ↩︎
24. For an overview of the SBC Inerrancy Controversy and its historical precursors, see Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn, and Michael A. G. Haykin, The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement, 2nd ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2025), 398–418. ↩︎
25. Though he identified more with various evangelical parachurch ministries throughout his career, Lindsell himself was a longtime Southern Baptist, including when he wrote The Battle for the Bible. See Art Toalston, “Harold Lindsell Dies at 84; Authored ‘Battle for the Bible,’” Baptist Press (January 22, 1998), available online: https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/harold-lindsell-dies-at-84-authored-battle-for-the-bible/. ↩︎
26. See Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), and Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002). ↩︎
27. For more on the relationship between Southern Baptists and evangelicalism, see James Leo Garrett Jr., E. Glenn Hinson, and James E. Tull, Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals? (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982); David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists & American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville: Broadman, 1993); Glenn T. Miller, “Baptists and Neo-Evangelical Theology,” Baptist History and Heritage 35.1 (2000): 20–39; Malcolm B. Yarnell III, “Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals? A Second Decadal Reassessment,” Ecclesiology 2.2 (2006): 195–212; David S. Dockery, Ray Van Neste, and Jerry Tidwell, eds., Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Future of Denominationalism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011); see also the contributions to the themed issue “Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 65.2 (Spring 2023). ↩︎
28. Mohler, “Carl F. H. Henry,” 292–93. The name of the church when Henry joined was Metropolitan Baptist Church, which remained the church’s name until 1963, when it became Capitol Hill Metropolitan Baptist Church. In 1995, the name was changed again to Capitol Hill Baptist Church. See Caleb Morell, A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capital Influenced Evangelicalism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), 5. ↩︎
29. Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (Dallas: Word, 1976–1983; reprint, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1999), 3:248. ↩︎
30. James Orr, Revelation and Inspiration (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 212–18. ↩︎
31. Carl F. H. Henry, The Protestant Dilemma (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 43–121. ↩︎
32. Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian: An Autobiography (Dallas: Word, 1986), 123. ↩︎
33. This statement was updated in 1990 to include an affirmation of the Trinity. In 2006, a bylaw was approved that referred ETS members to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as an interpretive guide to the ETS statement of faith. The change followed years of internal debate over the society’s boundaries. See Ray Van Neste, “The Glaring Inadequacy of the ETS Doctrinal Statement,” in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 8.4 (Winter 2004): 74–81. ↩︎
34. Some of Henry’s writings on Scripture during this time were either eventually incorporated into God, Revelation and Authority, or they summarized his arguments in the larger work. For example, see Carl F. H. Henry, “Interpretation of the Scriptures: Are We Doomed to Hermeneutical Nihilism?” Review and Expositor 71.2 (1974): 197–216; Carl F. H. Henry, “Theology and Biblical Authority: A Review Article of The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology by D. H. Kelsey,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 19.4 (1976): 315–323; Carl F. H. Henry, “The Authority and Inspiration of the Bible,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 1, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979), 3–35. ↩︎
35. Carl F. H. Henry, “Divine Revelation and the Bible,” in Inspiration and Interpretation, ed. John F. Walvoord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 253–78. ↩︎
36. Henry’s entry has been included in all three editions of this dictionary. For the most recent edition, see Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell, eds., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), s.v. “Bible, Inspiration of.” Henry’s entry followed Paul Feinberg’s entry on biblical inerrancy. ↩︎
37. Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Contemporary Evangelical Thought (New York: Channel Press, 1957), Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959), Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Basic Christian Doctrines (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1962), Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Christian Faith and Modern Theology (New York: Channel Press, 1964), and Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Jesus of Nazareth: Saviour and Lord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966). ↩︎
38. Henry, Revelation and the Bible, 9. Interestingly, several of the contributors, including Paul Jewett and Bernard Ramm, would later identify with the more progressive evangelical faction that preferred infallibility as an alternative to inerrancy. ↩︎
39. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:211–219. ↩︎
40. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:24. ↩︎
41. George Coon agrees that Henry was an heir to the Princeton tradition, but he makes a distinction between the “Old Princeton” views of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield and the later views of J. Gresham Machen. While Machen agreed with his predecessors concerning both plenary-verbal inspiration and inerrancy, he thought the latter view was less central to bibliology than the former. Coon argues Henry followed Machen in this regard, leading Henry to both champion inerrancy and deemphasized the place inerrancy holds within evangelical bibliology. See George Michael Coon, “Recasting Inerrancy: The Doctrine of Scripture in Carl Henry and the Old Princeton School” (PhD diss., University of St. Michael’s College, 2009), 187–99. ↩︎
42. Henry also included a supplemental note critiquing Barth’s view that the Bible is inspired even though the original autographs included errors (196–200). For an extended discussion of Henry’s interactions with Barth over the years, including in God, Revelation and Authority, see Richard Albert Mohler Jr., “Evangelical Theology and Karl Barth: Representative Models of Response” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989), 107–34. ↩︎
43. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:166–67. ↩︎
44. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:168. ↩︎
45. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:201. ↩︎
46. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:202. ↩︎
47. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:202. ↩︎
48. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:203. ↩︎
49. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:204. ↩︎
50. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:205. ↩︎
51. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:205. ↩︎
52. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:207. ↩︎
53. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:209–10. ↩︎
54. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:220. John Feinberg notes that Henry’s distinction between inerrancy and infallibility in this section is novel. See Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place, 268–69. It is also a departure from his earlier use of the terms as synonyms to describe the errorless character of the original scriptural autographs. ↩︎
55. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:233. ↩︎
56. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:249. ↩︎
57. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:351. ↩︎
58. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:296–315. ↩︎
59. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:364. ↩︎
60. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:368–84. See also Jack Rogers, “The Church Doctrine of Biblical Authority,” in Biblical Authority, ed. Jack Rogers (Dallas: Word, 1977), 15–46. Both volume IV of God, Revelation and Authority and Rogers and McKim’s The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible were published in 1979, but the books appeared too close to one another for Henry to interact with the latter. ↩︎
61. Evangelicals who do not share Henry’s commitment to biblical inerrancy have been appreciative of Henry’s scholarly gifts while remaining more critical of his bibliology. For two representatives of this posture, see Bob Patterson, Carl F. H. Henry, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983), 123–24, and Roger Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 629–630. ↩︎
62. Mohler, “Carl F. H. Henry,” 289. ↩︎
63. Paul R. House, “Remaking the Modern Mind: Revisiting Carl Henry’s Theological Vision,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 8 (2004): 4–24. See especially pages 19 and 21. ↩︎
64. Gregory Alan Thornbury, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 116–58. ↩︎
65. William C. Roach, Hermeneutics as Epistemology: A Critical Assessment of Carl F. H. Henry’s Epistemological Approach to Hermeneutics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015). ↩︎
66. Carl F. H. Henry, Evangelicals in Search of Identity (Dallas: Word, 1976), 46. ↩︎
67. Henry, Evangelicals in Search of Identity, 48–56. ↩︎
68. Henry, Evangelicals in Search of Identity, 67. ↩︎
69. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:365. ↩︎
70. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:365. ↩︎
71. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:365. ↩︎
72. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:366. ↩︎
73. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:366. ↩︎
74. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:367. ↩︎
75. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:367. ↩︎
76. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4:367. ↩︎
77. Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 120. ↩︎
78. Mohler, “Carl F. H. Henry,” 289. ↩︎
79. Ryan Reed, “The House Divided: An Assessment of the American Neo-Evangelicals’ Doctrine of Scripture,” Themelios 49.1 (April 2024): 152–53. ↩︎
80. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian, 389. ↩︎
81. See J. Merrick and Stephen M. Garrett, eds., Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2013), and Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds., Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 1–18. ↩︎
82. See Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 10th anniversary ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), and Michael R. Licona, Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024). ↩︎
83. See Gregory K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008); Norman L. Geisler and William C. Roach, Defending Inerrancy: Affirming the Accuracy of Scripture for a New Generation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012); John MacArthur, ed., The Inerrant Word: Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspectives (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020). ↩︎
84. See Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014), and Daniel B. Wallace, “My Take on Inerrancy,” Bible.org (August 10, 2006), available online: https://bible.org/article/my-take-inerrancy. This is not to suggest that Henry would necessarily affirm all the conclusions, or draw precisely the same boundaries, as Blomberg or Wallace. ↩︎