Inspiration and Criticism: The Nineteenth-Century Crisis

Abstract

The 19th century witnessed a fundamental shift in the way in which the Christian church saw the Bible. The rising impact of "criticism" destroyed the assumption that the Bible was infallible in the eyes of the majority of scholars. This article unravels the logic of this process, using debate within Britain as an example and adopting S Toulmin's "candid" method of laying out arguments as an analytical tool. In order to shift from infallibilism to a "critical" understanding of Scripture it was necessary first to abandon the priority of dogmatic considerations and to adopt the historical-critical criteria of the "critics". As soon as conservative scholars took this course the end of the old infallibilism was inevitable.