After Verbal Inspiration

A Writer’s Note on What Got Dislodged—and What Comes Next

Photo by Humble Lamb on Unsplash

I finally wrote the blog I had been avoiding for years—and now I can’t stop thinking about what it dislodged.

It touched the deepest disagreement I have with the Church of God Declaration of Faith. I had recorded podcasts and written drafts, but nothing ever felt complete. Even this one didn’t. But I finally said what I needed to say.

Since then, I’ve been sitting with two things.

First, some of the feedback I received helped me realize that I may have conflated verbal inspiration with biblical inerrancy. In the Church of God tradition, those two ideas are so tightly fused that I never even paused to separate them. I simply assumed that to believe in one was to believe in the other. But now I wonder: did the original writers of the Declaration leave inerrancy out on purpose? Or did they just assume it was understood?

Either way, the conflation is the first problem. Because when verbal inspiration functions as inerrancy, it flattens the Bible in ways that are spiritually and theologically damaging.

Here’s what I mean:

1. It makes all verses equal – as if every line in Leviticus, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, and the Sermon on the Mount should carry the same weight and clarity.

2. It demands a single, monolithic message – collapsing the tensions between authors, genres, and centuries into one voice that never disagrees with itself.

3. It gives the Bible so much authority that it starts to function like an addition to the Trinity – Father, Son, Spirit... and Scripture. The Spirit no longer interprets the text; the text replaces the Spirit because it feels clearer and more certain, the very opposite of how the Spirit manifests in Scripture.

And that’s not just a theological problem. It’s a pastoral one. In Pentecostal circles, we say we’re Spirit-led. But too often, we cling to a rigid interpretation of a proof-text and call it divine. That’s not discernment. That’s dogma. And when that becomes the default, it can create environments where doubt and curiosity feel unsafe. Instead of forming people who can listen for God in complexity, we risk forming people who are only comfortable with certainty. That affects how we preach, how we disciple, and how we walk with others through real questions. It’s not always intentional, but it matters.

Even so, I still believe the Bible is Holy Scripture. I believe holds authority, just not all authority. I no longer believe it needs to be perfect to be sacred. I no longer assume it’s the final version. And I’m more interested in the God it points to than the systems we’ve built around it.

That one shift—letting go of the rigid framework of verbal inspiration—has opened up more questions than answers. But it’s also made some things clearer.

Second, as I prepared to write the next blogs in this series, I moved through the rest of the Declaration of Faith and found myself agreeing with more than I expected. The differences felt smaller. Less urgent. It felt vain to even write about them. But, there are still a few areas where I diverge in ways that matter deeply, and almost every time, the disagreement traces back to the same interpretive starting point: verbal inspiration and inerrancy.

For me, the three doctrines I can no longer hold in the way they’ve traditionally been taught are these:

• Verbal Inspiration – because it demands a brittle view of Scripture, one that denies its humanity, complexity, and sacred tension.

• Premillennialism – because it treats apocalyptic texts like a blueprint for future events, rather than messages of hope for suffering people. It shrinks mystery into timeline.

• Eternal Punishment – because it relies on a selective, literalist reading that emphasizes retribution over restoration. It demands a God whose justice overrides His mercy.

These are not minor disagreements for me. They’re tectonic. And each one has implications that ripple out into how I see the gospel, the Church, and what it means to be human in light of God.

That’s where I’m heading next in this series. I am challenging myself to articulate my defense for the beliefs I retain: such as trinitarianism, the divinity of Christ, the death, resurrection and ascension, and more. However, first, I will address premillennialism and eternal punishment.

This isn’t about discarding the faith that formed me. It’s about being honest about where it no longer fits—and staying open to how Christ still walks with us, even when the road bends and the story breaks open in unfamiliar ways.

More soon.