Biblical Inerrancy and Higher Criticism

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at Higher Criticism and the flowering of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in American conservative Christian circles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dating back to at least the third century ce, Christians believed the Bible to be inspired by a God that could utter no falsehood, and thus his words to humanity were by necessity without error. The rise of ever more sophisticated and codified views of inerrancy began largely with the sixteenth century’s Protestant Reformation, but a belief in biblical inerrancy reached new levels of importance and influence in nineteenth and twentieth-century American Christianity. The rising importance of the doctrine of inerrancy grew out of American Christianity’s engagement with German philosophy and Higher Criticism, but it was also shaped by Christian responses to new scientific advances in both geology (dating the earth) and biology (evolution and natural selection).