R.C. Sproul

that are not God's Word.

That is why St.

Augustine, in a letter to Jerome, has put down a fine axiom that only holy Scripture is to be considered inerrant.

So, we see that Luther hardly hedges.

Another passage I could quote from Luther in which he says, the Scriptures never err.

Now, I don't know that Luther ever used the word inerrancy.

He just used the word inerrant and said that the Bible never errs, which is the very essence of the concept of inerrancy.

So I think it's a fool's errand to try to argue that the Reformers of the 16th century were strangers and foreigners to the idea of the inspiration and the authority and the infallibility

and the inerrancy of sacred Scripture.

But one of the other important points of sola scriptura in the 16th century, which has become a very important principle for historic evangelicalism, was a hermeneutical principle.

The Reformers not only confessed their view of what the Scriptures are and where they came from, but they also expressed their views on how the Bible is to be interpreted and who has the right and responsibility to read it.

One of the radical things that happened in the Reformation was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, taking it out of the hands of those who were able to read Latin or Greek or Hebrew and putting it in the hands of people who could only read in their native tongues.

as Luther translated the Bible into German and Wycliffe translated the Bible into English and so on.

And in some cases, the people who did that paid for it with their lives because the principle that was asserted in historic evangelicalism was the principle, first of all, of private interpretation.

meaning that every Christian has the right and the responsibility to read the Bible for themselves, and they have the right to interpret it for themselves.

Now, that was heard by Rome, as witnessed in the fourth session of Trent, to mean that the Protestants were giving license to the rank-and-file church member not only to read the Bible for themselves, but to distort it at will.

And of course, the Reformers were horrified at that idea.

They said every Christian has the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, but no Christian ever has the right to misinterpret it or to distort it according to their own whims or their own prejudices.

But the principle of private interpretation was based upon another principle, which was the principle of the perspicuity of Scripture, which is a $3 word for clarity.

Now, Luther said there are many parts of Scripture that are difficult to handle, and that's why we need teachers in the church and commentaries and all of that.