From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part five of a series. Read part four.

The Auburn liberals denied that the men God inspired to write Scripture were "kept from error".

The third false principle propagated via the Auburn Affirmation was that Scripture is not inerrant, nor is it subject to fixed, self-derived rules of interpretation. Therefore, they said, men can teach whatever they want from Scripture so long as they claim that they do so under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The signers of the Auburn Affirmation attacked the doctrine of inerrancy head-on:

There is no assertion in the Scriptures that their writers were kept "from error." The Confession of Faith[1] does not make this assertion; and it is significant that this assertion is not to be found in the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed or in any of the great Reformation confessions. The doctrine of inerrancy, intended to enhance the authority of the Scriptures, in fact impairs their supreme authority for faith and life, and weakens the testimony of the church to the power of God unto salvation through Jesus Christ. We hold that the General Assembly of 1923, in asserting that "the Holy Spirit did so inspire, guide and move the writers of Holy Scripture as to keep them from error," spoke without warrant of the Scriptures or of the Confession of Faith. We hold rather to the words of the Confession of Faith, that the Scriptures "are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life" (Conf. I, ii).[2]

Dr. George A. Buttrick, a leading liberal of the PCUSA in the 1930s:

The Old Testament...at its best [is] the reverent attempt of a primitive mind to explain in story-form the encompassing and indwelling Mystery. Whence came different languages? Impious men built a tower, intending to reach heaven and dispute the throne with God; so He broke their tower, and for penalty laid on them confusion of tongues. Only a dull mind could try to find history or science in that story, but only a dead mind could miss its moral and spiritual truth.[3]

The spiritually dead minds of George Buttrick, and those who agreed with him, missed every aspect of the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel - both its factual reality and its place in the unfolding plan of God for the ages. Those same unregenerated, unenlightened minds led millions of church members to the gates of Hell.

In later generations, institutions such as Fuller Theological Seminary would promote the falsehood that Scripture is only inerrant in "spiritual matters" and making sinful man the arbiter of the alleged distinctions between the spiritual, the historical, and the scientific. The ungodly spiritual descendants of the Auburn liberals love to make such alleged distinctions because of their love of the term "nuance". They think that they they are smart enough, and Christians who trust their Bibles are just too dumb, to appreciate it.

The dictionary defines nuance as "a refined or subtle distinction in ideas." Liberals are in love with the concept of nuance because they believe it puts them in the position with which Satan first tempted Eve: "Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). The etymology of the word describes the liberal mindset perfectly: "Nuance" comes from the Indo-European word for "fog" which later became a French verb meaning "to cloud."

Liberals love to place fogs and clouds of doubt over the Bible and theology. Certitude, they say, is unsophisticated. The truly erudite Christian admits that he really does not know anything for certain. After all, they say, doctrine is complex, because God and the Bible are paradoxical. The "thinking Christian" broad-mindedly embraces these contradictions. We must carefully chart our course through the fogs of nuance, lest (horror of horrors) our ship of theological ambiguity should run aground on the solid rocks of Biblical logic. It was bad enough when such fuzzy-headed thinking existed mainly in liberal seminaries and mainline churches. But today, the fogs of nuance surround and confound much of the Evangelical church.

But let us be clear, just as Scripture is clear: Because Holy Scripture is the instrument of God's eternal decree for all the operations of the created order, it is inerrant in all its aspects. The Word of God is just as free from error as the God who gave it.[4]

References:

1. Here they refer to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which at that time was the doctrinal standard of the Presbyterian Church USA. As we have already noted, the WCF itself had already been revised in 1903 to introduce the seeds of liberalism. The WCF would be superseded by the liberalized Confession of 1967, a long-term result of the Auburn liberals' victory in 1924.

2. The full text of the Auburn Affirmation appears here.

3. George A. Buttrick, The Christian Fact and Modern Doubt (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), 176.

4. For a more detailed discussion of this vital fact, see our series that begins with the article titled Holy Scripture: A Declaration of God's Eternal Decree.

Next: Denying That Any Doctrine Is Essential

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