A professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Warfield was the nation’s most noted defender of the Bible’s inerrancy. Warfield defined inerrancy in this way: All the Bible’s statements are true if interpreted according to the sense in which their authors intended them.
In this way of looking at the Bible, the truth of Genesis 1 (the truth that the authors wanted to communicate) was not that the world was created in six twenty-four-hour days, but that God purposefully made all things for His pleasure, including man. In matters of faith and morals, the Bible’s truths are “absolutely errorless, and binding the faith and obedience of men.”
Conservative as he was, Warfield believed his view of the Bible could accommodate the theory of evolution. He wrote, “I do not think there is any general statement in the Bible . . . that need be opposed to evolution.”
