The Healthiest Position

Affirm high Scripture (inspiration, authority, reliability) while being honest about evidence (manuscripts vary, we're blessed with abundance of witnesses, early manuscripts are more reliable).

This gives us genuine confidence in Scripture without false claims we can't prove.

We’ve articulated the evangelical consensus strongly affirm. Evangelicals employ standard textual-critical methodology to determine Scripture’s text, recognizing it as the only viable approach available[1]—and this methodology is fundamentally neutral.

Because conservative Christians place high value on the biblical text, determining its exact reading is very important to them; consequently, evangelical biblical scholars have been leaders in textual criticism[2]. This isn’t a departure from evangelical convictions but an expression of them. Despite evangelicalism’s high view of Scripture, evangelicals have often failed to lead in biblical scholarship, whereas those with similar high views have demonstrated in practice what evangelicals confess in principle—dedicating their lives to understanding biblical languages and text[3].

The crucial distinction we’ve identified is that evangelicals may believe God has remarkably preserved Scripture’s text, but determining the precise text is a problem for scientific criticism—this is the essence of the evangelical position, leaving no place for obscurantism[1]. Mainline evangelicals accept verbal inspiration, divine authority, and inerrancy[4]—but this confidence in Scripture’s reliability coexists with rigorous scholarship examining the evidence.

Our position avoids both extremes: it neither demands false claims about textual perfection nor surrenders confidence in Scripture’s authority and reliability. As Warfield affirmed, “processes that are valid for ascertainment of a secular text are equally valid for ascertainment of a sacred text”[1]. Honest engagement with manuscript evidence strengthens rather than weakens evangelical faith.

[1] Bernard Ramm, “Are We Obscurantists?,” Christianity Today (Washington, D.C.: Christianity Today, 1957), 1:10:14.
[2] Millard J. Erickson, The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), 72.
[3] Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, Volume One: Introduction, Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2002), 362.
[4] Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 180–181.