Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy

sentences and the propositions they convey.
Whereas Henry thinks that the basic function of language is to transfer information, I believe that God gives us language to communicate, which is a broader category: “Language never exists simply to state propositions: its primary role is a means by which one person acts in relation to others.”52 If we attend to all that the Bible depicts God as doing to engage human persons by means of language—if we give a well-versed account—we will see that both God and Scripture do more with propositions than teach or impart information

In linking biblical authority with propositional revelation, Henry carries on a venerable theological tradition. I do not wish to be heard as affirming anything less, though I do want to say something more. While Henry is right to emphasize the cognitive nature of biblical revelation (that is, that it conveys content that can be thought about and assented to), he tends to treat declarative sentences as “the privileged class” of biblical discourse.51 By way of contrast, the words of Truth incarnate privilege “the poor” (that is, forms of discourse that traditional philosophers and theologians typically neglect): the bulk of Jesus’ earthly teaching consists of figures of speech, enigmatic sayings, and parables. To be sure, these forms too are cognitive, though it is harder to draw a straight line between individual sentences and the propositions they convey.
Whereas

What is language for? Carl Henry was right to protest against the neoorthodox attempt to avoid the cognitive nature of divine revelation. Yet he goes too far in saying of language that “its basic function is cognitive,”46 that “the minimal unit of meaningful expression is a proposition,”47 that only propositions can be true or false,48 and that most of the sentences in Scripture “are historical assertions or explanations of such assertions.”49 Given his view of the nature of language and truth, it is not surprising that he concludes that the Bible is propositional revelation, that is, that the Scriptures “contain a body of divinely given information actually expressed or capable of being expressed in propositions.”50
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