Theology · Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium

Is the Bible Inspired and Without Error? What the Church Means by Inerrancy

Two Questions

Two questions are often asked about the Bible. Is it really the Word of God? And if it is, how can it contain things that seem scientifically or historically mistaken?

The Catholic Church answers the first question with a firm yes. She teaches that Scripture is inspired by God and free from error. But her understanding of what this means is subtle, and it allows Catholics to read the Bible both faithfully and intelligently.

What Inspiration Means

St Paul writes that “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Greek word is theopneustos, literally “God-breathed.”

The Church teaches that God is the author of Sacred Scripture. But the Second Vatican Council adds that God chose human beings to write it, and “made use of their powers and abilities,” so that they were true authors (Dei Verbum 11; CCC 106).

This is crucial. Inspiration is not dictation. The human writers were not stenographers taking down words from heaven. They wrote with their own personalities, styles, vocabularies, sources and limitations. Mark writes rough, vivid Greek; Luke writes polished literary prose; Paul argues, digresses and loses his temper. All of this is genuinely theirs.

At the same time, God so worked in and through them that they wrote everything He wanted written, and only that. The closest analogy is the Incarnation itself. Just as the Word of God became flesh in Christ, fully divine and fully human, so the Word of God took on human language in Scripture (Dei Verbum 13).

What Inerrancy Means

Because God is its author, the Church teaches that Scripture teaches the truth without error. Dei Verbum 11 states:

Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.

Two phrases need attention.

“Everything asserted.” Inerrancy applies to what the writers actually assert, that is, what they intend to teach. Not every sentence in Scripture is an assertion. When the Psalmist says that the hills skip like lambs (Psalm 114:4), he is not making a geological claim.

“For the sake of salvation.” The Bible’s purpose is to teach the truth that leads to salvation. This phrase does not mean that only the “religious bits” of the Bible are true and the rest may be false. Pope Leo XIII, in Providentissimus Deus (1893), rejected the idea of limiting inspiration to matters of faith and morals. Rather, the phrase tells us why Scripture was written, and so helps us understand what its authors were actually asserting.

Literary Forms

The key to reading Scripture well is understanding literary forms. Pope Pius XII made this central in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), which encouraged Catholic biblical scholarship.

The Bible is not one book but a library, containing history, law, poetry, prophecy, proverbs, letters, apocalyptic visions and parables. Each form communicates truth in its own way. A parable does not assert that a particular Samaritan once helped a particular traveller. A poem does not assert that God literally has wings. To read them as if they did is not respect for Scripture; it is misreading it.

Dei Verbum tells the interpreter to look for “the intention of the sacred writers,” paying attention to the literary forms, the customary ways of speaking, and the culture of the time (Dei Verbum 12; CCC 109–110).

Science and the Bible

This approach dissolves many apparent conflicts with science. The biblical authors described the natural world as it appeared to them, in the language of their time. Pope Leo XIII noted that they did not intend to teach science, but spoke of things “in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time” (Providentissimus Deus 18).

St Augustine had warned long before against Christians making foolish claims about nature on the basis of Scripture, which only bring the faith into ridicule.

Reading Scripture as a Whole

The Catechism gives three rules for interpreting Scripture in the Spirit in which it was written (CCC 112–114):

Read Scripture as a unity. The Bible has one divine author and one central subject, Christ. Each passage should be read in light of the whole.
Read Scripture within the living Tradition of the Church. The Church is the community in which Scripture was written, collected and has always been read.
Pay attention to the analogy of faith, the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves.

The Senses of Scripture

The Church also recognises that Scripture has more than one level of meaning (CCC 115–119).

The literal sense is the meaning intended by the human author, discovered by careful study. All other senses are based on it.

The spiritual senses are the further meanings God gives to the realities described:

The allegorical sense: how events point to Christ. The crossing of the Red Sea is a sign of Baptism.
The moral sense: how the text teaches us to act.
The anagogical sense: how it points to our eternal destiny. Jerusalem on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

A medieval rhyme summed these up: the letter teaches what happened; allegory, what to believe; the moral sense, what to do; the anagogical sense, where we are going.

Difficult Passages

What about passages that seem contradictory, or that seem to show God commanding violence? The Church does not pretend these are easy. But she offers a way of approaching them: understand the literary form and context; read the passage in light of the whole of Scripture and its fulfilment in Christ; recognise that God’s revelation unfolded gradually, as He educated His people (CCC 122).

Catholic scholars are free, and encouraged, to study such questions with every tool of history and language, confident that genuine truth will never contradict the Word of God.

The Word Made Present

Ultimately, the Church reveres Scripture because through it Christ Himself speaks to us. As Dei Verbum says, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Body of the Lord (Dei Verbum 21). St Jerome put it most memorably: “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ” (CCC 133).