infallible. The word appears only once in scripture, and where it does appear, it addresses one of man's deepest needs under the sun, as the fallen sons of Adam, namely our need for assurance. Lord Jesus Christ, in his kindness, offered many assurances to his disciples during his earthly ministry. He assured them that truly, he was the Son of God. Truly, he would save his people from their sins. More specifically, he told them, in no uncertain terms, how exactly he would accomplish so great salvation. He must suffer He must die. He must rise again on the third day, all according to the Scriptures. However, when these things were finally fulfilled, we do not find the disciples filled with assurance. We find them rather, and sadly, filled with fear. So Christ came to them and visited them. And this is where the word infallible then appears in our New Testament, Acts chapter one and the verse number three. He showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them 40 days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. What exactly were these infallible proofs? Well, he appeared to them, physically, in the body. He walked with them. He talked with them. He ate and drank with them. He showed to them his wounds in his hands, in his feet, and in his side. And he did this, as Scripture says, not only once, but for 40 days. That is, until his disciples arrived at a place of absolute, even infallible certainty of faith. And this, I would suggest, is where God wants all of his disciples to be. He wants us to experience a certain unshakable confidence in things pertaining to the kingdom of God. And that is why he has revealed to us his infallible truth. Here in this lecture, I'm going to describe man's need for such and man's search for such in terms of a quest today. Namely, man's quest for infallibility. But first, I would like us to define our terms, and fair warning, this will take a while, but it will also enable us, then, to trace man's quest without being interrupted by definitional detours and the like. There are four words that I would like you to learn today, and the first is this, infallibility. Infallibility. The etymological root of the word infallible might sound like it's fall, but it's not. It's actually fail. This word appears to have first entered our English language in the 12th century, and it had this basic meaning, to be unsuccessful in accomplishing a purpose. to fail. And you know what it means to fail. That's essentially what the word means today. Your plans fail. Your crops fail. Your computer backup fails. You, yourself, fail a test. Again, fail means you are unsuccessful in accomplishing some purpose. You, by the way, can't help but fail. It's part of what it means to be human, at least on occasion. We are all fallible by nature. Men are weak. Men are prone to fail. That's where we find ourselves in the root of this word, infallible. We all fail on occasion. But back to the word, when you add the negative prefix in to the root, The meaning is immediately reversed. To be infallible is to be incapable of failing. And that is what we believe and confess concerning the Holy Scriptures. It is not capable of failing. The Scriptures are not capable of failing when it comes to accomplishing their purpose. Proven from Isaiah, in chapter 55, For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be, that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. Doctrine, God's word, cannot fail. It always accomplishes its appointed end and purpose. This is the most basic meaning of the word infallible, but there's also another aspect of the word that deserves due attention. After a couple centuries of use in our language, the word fallible took on more of a moral flavor. It came to mean liable to err, or even deceitful. And again, when you add the negative prefix to the word, you have the opposite, as in being incapable of erring. And this too is something that we believe and confess concerning the word of God. As Moses said in Numbers chapter three and verse 19, God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent. Hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? This verse actually ties both meanings together. Namely, God's Word never fails to accomplish its purpose, because it is not liable to err. That's the word infallible, and we rightly apply it to the Word of God. Scripture cannot fail, because it is not liable to err. The next vocabulary word is similar but distinct in its meaning, and that would be inerrancy, moving from infallibility to inerrancy. And here, we have to admit that many use these words interchangeably, infallible, inerrant, but this should not be done. These words are distinct in their meaning and intent. Infallibility is an essential or internal attribute of scripture, while inerrancy is an observed or external quality of scripture. And this is easily demonstrated by way of illustration. There are many documents in this world that are inerrant, but that does not make them infallible. To be inerrant simply means they are free from errors, and I myself have produced documents that meet that standard. For example, I run a small business for my home, and every month I must prepare a record of financial transactions. Thanks to computer technology and software, the errors appear in red, so I can go back and fix them. And if I did not fix them, if those documents were not inerrant when they were finally filed, I would undoubtedly get a visit from an unhappy taxman. But back to the distinction here, if I as a person was infallible, there would never be any red numbers. I wouldn't be making mistakes because I would be incapable of erring. You see the difference. Now, while we do distinguish these terms from one another, we still believe that both are true about the Holy Bible. When it comes to the Bible's external form, we confess that it is indeed inerrant, without errors. Observably, and demonstrably so, there are no errors in the Holy Bible. But again, the reason there are no errors in the Bible is because of that more essential and more internal attribute of infallibility. which makes the scriptures inherently and essentially incapable of error. Infallibility, then, if we can speak this way, is the greater attribute, the greater attribute than inerrancy. Now, we have two more words that require definition. and they relate to where we can find, or where we can expect to find, these perfections of infallibility and inerrancy. The next two words are autografa and apografa. Autografa and apografa. First, autografa. The word autografa refers to the original documents of scripture that were immediately inspired by God. To aid your memory with a foreign-sounding word, please note that the word autographer sounds very much like our English word autograph. That should probably help you remember it well enough. Also illustrated from scripture, at the close of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, he wrote, the salutation of me, Paul, with mine own hand. That means he wrote the letter himself. He even put his signature to it, as it were. And that's what we mean by autografa. They are the originally inspired documents of scripture. And just to make it perhaps a little more real, if we discovered those documents today, the autografa, Forensic experts could probably find DNA from the apostles upon those documents. That's how real the autographa were. We never will find them, by the way, and that's God's good design. Think of it, what would men do if we found the actual letter written by the actual Apostle Paul signed by his own hand? What if it was discovered today? You know what men would do? They would build a shrine and they would put it behind glass and they would probably charge men to come and adore the holy relic. And knowing this, God in his goodness and God in his good providence allowed the originals to be lost. leaving us only with copies, of copies, of copies, of what the prophets and apostles originally wrote. That then leads to our final term that deserves definition. We call these copies the Autographer. Not the Autographer, but the Autographer. And this refers to the accurate or authentic copies that were made from the originally inspired writings. And for those who struggle, a memory aid might be, think of the word P in alpographer and tie it to our word copy, and you'll be able to remember it well enough. Now, we do know that such copies, authentic and accurate, do exist, because we have many of them today. We can hold them in our hands. They still exist. As copies, they were not penned by the apostles themselves. That would make them autographa. They are copies, autographa. And understanding the difference between the two, it's not a matter of tedium here, understanding the difference between the two is key. when it comes to locating the previously defined doctrines of infallibility and inerrancy. When most scholars today When most pastors today speak of the infallible or inerrant Word of God, they are in fact speaking only of the autographa. They are referring only to the originals. And again, here's the problem with speaking that way. Here's the problem with that kind of a reference. The originals don't exist and they will never be found. And the modern scholars and pastors, by the way, are fine with that, and so am I, but here's the difference. I believe that the attributes of infallibility and inerrancy apply not only to the lost autographa, but also to the extant or existing autographa, that is, the authentic copies, the accurate copies that still exist today. Such copies are therefore to be received as faithful reproductions of the inspired original. That concludes our time of defining terms. I would thank you for your patience and also assure you such time is never wasted because those who define well and distinguish well, think well. Now, here in the next section of my paper, we'll consider the importance of these definitions and doctrines from an admittedly more historical perspective So come, let us now survey, as it were, man's quest for infallibility. We'll begin, of course, where we should begin, at the very beginning. The quest for infallible truth. In the beginning, technically speaking, there was no need for such a quest, because man was made, created, as it were, at his destination. Paradise, where he could hear the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The voice that our parents, our first parents heard was perfectly infallible. And if they had trusted it, they would have lived forever and ever in the presence and paradise of the Lord. However, and lest that happen, Satan, our great foe, introduced a fallible word, remembering now our definition, a word that was liable to err, a word that was even deceitful. And man, we know, believed the lie. He was banished from paradise and then began that long and wandering quest that we call world history. And much of it, much of world history, was marked by man running away from God, But some of it was marked by attempts by man, albeit ill-advised, to build his way back to God, you might say. The Tower of Babel is a prime example. Remember, you will, how men boasted, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven. God, of course, did not permit that. He confused man's tongues and there scattered man throughout the earth. But even this divine judgment was intended at least in part to urge man on in his quest. Acts 17 and verse 27 says that God scattered man and appointed those boundaries that established our nations with a redemptive purpose, namely that they should seek the Lord. Many did, most in vain, because it was only unto one nation that infallible truth was entrusted. It was to the elect nation of Israel that was committed the oracles of God. Now, when it came time to safeguarding That truth, Israel was faithful as a steward. Her scribes were perfectly meticulous in their work. Even scholars today marvel at their ability. But when it came to spreading this truth, the nation of Israel failed miserably. And that is why in the fullness of time, truth came down from heaven. in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who himself said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. And by God's grace and through the work of his spirit, many believed his words. We can rejoice in that, but we can also admit belief isn't always easy. Remember, as the man once said with tears, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief. That then is what I'll call the quest for infallible assurance. I mentioned in my introduction how Christ offered this kind of assurance to his disciples after his death, after his resurrection. But try here to realize how needful, try to appreciate how needful that truly was. I mean, the claims of Christ were truly remarkable. Never man spake like this man. More than that, he also modeled to his disciples a personal assurance in the truth of scripture that was perfectly unflinching and unapologetic. Jesus simply assumed that every word of the Bible was absolutely and infallibly true. Examples, he believed that in the beginning, God made us male and female. He believed that Noah built and entered an ark to save his family from a global flood and catastrophe. He believed that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt. He believed the commandments as given and written by Moses. He believed the history of King David, and before that, David and his mighty men. He believed that the Queen of Sheba visited David's son. He believed the Psalms. He believed Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Jesus believed all these things implicitly and unflinchingly. And I could give you more examples, but these should be sufficient to prove that your Lord Jesus Christ had an infallible assurance in the Word of God. Proven even further in this, whenever he or his teaching was challenged, he would simply say, have ye not read? Or, it is written. And here now is where we can remember those important words that we learned at the start. Was it the autographa or the apographa that the Lord Jesus held in his hands while teaching in synagogue? It was, of course, the latter. Which is to say this, Jesus, your Lord, believed that the copies of the originals were just as authoritative and infallible as the originals themselves. His apostles needed that assurance. They needed that same level of assurance. So did those who followed them and their teaching, especially as persecution arose. And here we can think back to our ancient and most formidable foe. Seeing the growth and blessing of the early church, the devil sought to destroy it at its very foundation. He first tried to destroy the Lord Jesus himself, the Lord of glory, but having failed in that, he then sought to destroy the scriptures, which testify to him. And sometimes literally, emperors like Diocletian issued royal decrees that the churches be leveled to the ground and the scriptures destroyed by fire. And here we could say from the beginning, Satan has sought man's destruction. This is obvious to us in times of outward persecution, but we must also remember that he is described, even from the very beginning, as subtle, like a serpent. Sometimes his efforts to destroy, therefore, take on a subtle form. Not so much destruction, but the work of deception. And I'll now speak to that under the title, The Quest for Infallible Authority. Authority. Seeing that the Apostolic Church could not be destroyed through outward persecution, the subtle enemy changed tactics and he infiltrated it. Then, through the slow rise of the Roman Antichrist, he systematically stole man's assurance He did this through false doctrines, traditions, and ceremonies, but here, I would suggest, was his greatest act of genius. He allowed the doctrine of infallibility to stand and simply reassigned it from the inspired scriptures to the institutional church. Here, if you wonder, is what the Church of Rome teaches concerning infallibility. It is, quote, the supernatural prerogative by which the Church of Christ is, by a special divine assistance, preserved from liability to error in her definitive dogmatic teaching regarding matters of faith and morals, end quote. The phrase liability to error proves that they knew and know exactly what the word means. But notice how it's now the Church of Christ that is endowed with that supernatural attribute. This is very different from what the Bible teaches us. The Church of Rome, for example, would own Peter as its first pope and head of the church, but we know from reading the Bible that he himself was anything but infallible. Peter once proved himself so fallible that the Lord Jesus said to him, get thee behind me, Satan. Thou art an offense unto me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. More relevant, however, to our topic at hand is how this shift from an infallible word to an infallible church then culminated in the times of the Blessed Reformation. While there were many causes for the Reformation, the formal cause was definitely the authority of Scripture. Many debates were at hand, many doctrines were being debated at the time, and in the end of the day it always came down to a single question, by what authority? By what authority? And here's the choice, that of the Church or that of Scripture? Deeper even than that question, however, was another, and which edition of Scripture? The Church of Rome, you see, had an official Bible at the time. It was called the Latin Vulgate, and it had been in use for over a thousand years. It was a generally reliable translation, but it definitely contained errors. One glaring example is found In the so-called Proto-Evangelion, the first prophecy of Christ's work of redemption, Genesis 3, and the verse 15, I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Clearly, this is a reference to the promised seed, the Lord Jesus Christ. The translators of the Vulgate, however, either ignored or were ignorant of the third person singular masculine pronoun in the Hebrew text, because it renders it, she shall crush thy head. Now that might be fine if you pray to Mary, but it is most certainly not biblical. It is not the gospel. And this is just one example of many of why the reformers desired a new translation of the word of God made directly from the originally inspired Hebrew and Greek texts. But the papists rejected this idea, maintaining that the Hebrew and Greek editions had been, and I quote, foully corrupted by Jews and heretics, unquote. They also maintained that their Latin edition was, quote, far better conserved, end quote. And on this point, it needs to be said by way of modern application, we still disagree. we still disagree. And while the Latin onlyists might point back to a thousand years of common use in the church, we are able to point back to something better than mere longevity, namely this, that the translations which came out of the Reformation era, translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek texts, transformed the known world Europe, then America, Christianized. Western civilization was born. It truly was the best of times. And sadly, today, those days are gone. We now live in a post-Christian world, and I want to remind you today that it did not happen overnight. A religious and philosophical shift began soon after the Reformation that we call the Enlightenment. As a philosophical movement, most people did not know about it until the effects thereof hit the streets, as it were, and this is simply how paradigm shifts work. So my next chapter of Man's Quest might sound, admittedly, a bit out of chronological order, but I think it'll help you understand how paradigm shifts work in general, and also how we got where we are today. Next heading, the quest for an infallible record. About a hundred years ago, the fruits of the Enlightenment became fully manifest to all in the so-called Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy, and it was literally front-page news in the Western world. The Modernists denied biblical authority, and the Fundamentalists sought to defend it, and a lot of the debate had to do with the historical record contained in scripture, the record of the world. One of the bastard children of the Enlightenment was the theory of evolution coming from Mr. Darwin. It had led many to deny the creation account as found in Genesis, and also the account of Noah and the great flood of his day. And this controversy, this debate, was not simply an in-house discussion amongst religious people. Updates, weekly updates from the Scopes trial, for example, made front page news, literally. Stage plays came from it. Movies came from it. People wanted to know, or at very least had some genuine interest in the question, do we have in scripture an infallible record of the history of the world or not? Those who said no, were way ahead of the game. They had already been working overtime for decades, compiling lists of every apparent discrepancy in the Bible. The archeologists were also way ahead and their work was well underway. The archeologists were the people who, as they say today, had the receipts and they could show people, look, your printed Bible says this, But this obviously very ancient manuscript says that, so what are you going to do? Sadly, some simply responded, well, I just don't care. And they were therefore dismissed as anti-intellectual zealots. This, by the way, is how the word fundamentalist earned a negative connotation. But many believers, we admit, did care. And they honestly and earnestly sought to defend the testimony of Scripture through more intellectual means. And it's at that time that the word inerrancy became very important. Even, I would suggest, more important than the word infallibility. And this forever changed how men saw and spoke of the Holy Scriptures. I'll describe this significant shift in academia as the quest for an infallible text. The quest for an infallible text. Remember how the papacy alleged that the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts had been hopelessly corrupted? Well, that accusation actually stuck and led many people on actual quests even expeditions, to discover as many manuscripts as they possibly could. The scholars then compared and collated them to mark every variation amongst them, and they then published their findings in scholarly handbooks that we call critical editions. Now, remember here the dynamics of paradigmatic shifts. As this work was happening in the universities, most Christians did not know about it, and it did not matter to most Christians. The versions printed in the Reformation era, it was all they knew. But behind the scenes, you see, in the halls of the archaeologists and in the halls of academia, there was a true quest being undertaken to discover if it was possible, the original, the infallible text. And here's the problem that the Accommoditions faced. If scripture truly was infallible, then how do we account for all the variations? How do we account for all the apparent contradictions that can be observed right there in the manuscripts that are being discovered year after year? How do we account for it? You can't. That is the dead end. The dead end tragedy of a purely evidentialist and purely restorationist approach to defending the integrity of Holy Scripture. Because the variants do exist. They are there. The contradictions do exist. They are there. So what are we supposed to do as believers? Let me tell you what we don't do. We don't then go back and redefine what we mean by the terms infallibility and inerrancy. But sadly, this is exactly what the church's best scholars did. And it sounds like this. A quote from the 1978 Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy. We affirm that inspiration strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which, in the providence of God, can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. While that statement may warm the heart of many an evangelical, it is essentially meaningless. Because we do not have the autographic text, and we never will. So all a statement like that can leave us with is vague terms like, to the extent, and with great accuracy, And this may have seemed like a good solution at the time. A good solution to godly men like B.B. Warfield, who seems to have been the inspiration, maybe even architect, of this theory. It may have seemed like a good idea and a good solution even to the signers of the Chicago Statement. Nearly a century later, They too were godly men whom I would never disrespect, like James Boyce, and J.I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, the late R.C. Sproul. But there is a better solution, namely this. Remember how Jesus assumed the infallibility of the Apographa in his day, and in remembering that, realize that you can too. Which leads us to where we now stand, the quest for an infallible answer. The question, of course, being this, where today if at all, where today can we find the infallible and inerrant words of the living God? And when it comes to answering that question, man is currently standing at his crossroads. Most people, by the way, would suggest probably that we're standing at a three-way intersection because there are essentially three textual bases from which translations are made today. Quick review, listed chronologically, Option one, you have the received text. This is the text that came out of the Protestant Reformation. It reflects over a century's worth of international scholarship. The editors did their work under the assumption that the scriptures were infallible and had been kept pure by God through his special care and providence. The resulting text base was then received by all, hence the name, and it enjoyed unchallenged acceptance in the churches and use in the churches for nearly four centuries. As I already said, the received text is the text of Protestant Christianity and the text of Western civilization. Option two, the critical text. After the Enlightenment, And after that era of archaeological discovery, there was an effort made to displace the received text by two scholars surnamed Westcott and Hort. Wherever variant readings appeared in the extant manuscripts, these men preferred two ancient Alexandrian sources, namely Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Though these two manuscripts disagreed with one another, literally in thousands of places, the scholars preferred them. These two witnesses above the thousands of others. That is why I sometimes refer to this as the minority text. But do be aware that that's my nickname. It's most commonly referred to as the eclectic text. and it's most popularly found in the printed versions of Nestle-Alland edition and United Bible Society's edition. These editions, by the way, will soon be displaced by a forthcoming major edition. It's called the Editio Critica Maior, and it's being edited right now as we speak under a different methodology than previously employed by the critics. It's now computer-assisted. Third option, the majority text. And this text was produced by conservatives and evangelicals in more recent days who saw through the hopelessness of the old eclectic method. Rather than giving preference only to a handful of ancient witnesses, they argued that more weight should be given to the reading supported by the majority of extant manuscripts, hence the name majority text. And the resulting text base is very similar to that of the Textus Receptus, but they differed enough to be distinguished one from the other. This text base, majority text, is also sometimes called the Byzantine priority position, or Byzantine text. But back to the crossroads. Though I list three options for a text base, technically speaking, there are not three options, but two. And here is the choice men have to make. When it comes to identifying the infallible and inerrant words of God, do we receive or reconstruct? Do we accept or do we amend? That is the question. And here is my proposed answer to close under the heading, The Quest for Infallible Certainty. Do we have God's word or not? That is the question, and all Christians want an answer. All Christians deserve an answer, but in seeking for an answer, Christians settle for different levels of certainty. Those, for example, who accept the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy are content to have a level of certainty that includes qualifiers. like, to the extent, or with great accuracy. And that apparently is good enough for some, and here we have to say it is certainly much better than unbelief, it is much better than skepticism, but there are many Christians in the world who want something more. They want a higher level of certainty. They even want a level of certainty that is, as we discussed, not liable to err. nor to deceit. And this desire of theirs does not arise from some unwarranted presumption on their part. Rather, it comes from a plain reading of Holy Scripture. They read what the Bible says, they read what the Bible says more particularly about itself, and they want it to be true. Psalm 119, verse 89, Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. John 10 and verse 35, the scripture cannot be broken. Matthew 5 and verse 18, for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Mark 13, verse 31, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. 1 Peter 1, verses 24 to 25, the grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever. These are just a few examples which offer full certainty to the believer. And no, the true believer may never experience that certainty in a way that is perfectly infallible, but that is due to no defect in scripture. It is due only to the weakness of our understanding and the weakness of our faith. Nevertheless, the true believer will find these statements persuasive, and fully convincing, especially as he remembers this, the disposition that Christ had toward the copies of the copies of the copies that he held, that he read, that he taught in the synagogue so long ago. Again, Jesus simply assumed that all of it, even, yes, jot and tittle, was infallibly true. And that, brothers and sisters, is where we need to be. And trust me, it is a safe place to be. Will it answer all of the questions and all of the objections that the critics constantly raise? No. And I will be the first to admit it, but I will also never be ashamed by my inability to answer every critic when God has called me to more. and when God has called me to something more important, namely to believe his word with implicit faith. Join me, if you will, in that commitment today, and your quest for certainty will come to a quick end. As you rest your weary soul upon God's divinely inspired inherently infallible and demonstrably inerrant word. Amen.