The Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture

Conservative biblical exegesis begins with a settled conviction: Scripture is the very Word of God, truthful in all that it affirms and therefore absolutely authoritative. Paul writes, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be fully competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). If every part of Scripture is God-breathed and sufficient to equip the believer for “every good work,” then no other authority can stand above it—neither church tradition, nor academic fashion, nor private religious experience.

Conservative exegesis therefore approaches the Bible not as raw material to be reshaped by modern theory, but as a finished, inerrant revelation to be understood and obeyed. The task of the interpreter is to discover what God has said through the human authors, not to decide what He should have said.

This immediately sets conservative exegesis over against liberal-moderate criticism, which routinely questions the reliability, unity, and divine authority of Scripture. Where such criticism treats the Bible as a fallible human book to be dissected and corrected, conservative exegesis receives it as the inerrant Word of God, whose meaning must be carefully uncovered and faithfully proclaimed.

Conservative Exegesis and the Historical-Grammatical Method

The central tool of conservative exegesis is the historical-grammatical method. This is not an exotic technique but a disciplined way of reading that asks three simple questions:

1. What did this text mean in its original historical situation?

2. How do the words and grammar actually work in the sentence?

3. What kind of writing (genre) am I dealing with?

The goal is always the same: to arrive at the author’s intended meaning as the original readers would have understood it. Only after that work is done can we make valid application to today.

This method is not neutral. It is rooted in the conviction that the same God who inspired Scripture also placed it in real history, in real languages, and in real literary forms. Because He chose to reveal Himself in that way, we honor Him by taking history, grammar, and genre seriously.

Historical Context: Hearing the Text in Its Own World

Conservative exegesis insists that a text cannot be rightly interpreted if it is ripped out of its historical setting. God did not deliver Scripture as a timeless stack of abstract propositions; He spoke in specific times, cultures, and situations.

When Isaiah records, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1), that date is not a decorative detail. Uzziah’s death marked a moment of political uncertainty and moral decay in Judah. Isaiah’s vision of Jehovah’s holiness and sovereign rule comes in the middle of national instability. A conservative interpreter therefore asks:

• What was happening in Judah at that time?

• How would Isaiah’s contemporaries have heard this vision?

• How does the historical crisis sharpen the force of the call, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

The same principle applies to New Testament letters. Romans, for example, was written to a mixed community of Jewish and Gentile believers in the capital of the Empire. Tensions about the Law, circumcision, and the place of Israel are everywhere in the background. When Paul says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16), a conservative exegete hears that sentence against the background of real ethnic tensions and real questions about how Jews and Gentiles stand before God on equal footing.

Without historical context, interpretation slides quickly into imagination. With it, we hear the text as those first hearers did.

Grammatical Analysis: Letting the Words Speak

Conservative exegesis also insists that words, tenses, and syntax matter. The Holy Spirit did not inspire vague impressions but concrete sentences in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. To respect His work, we must respect how language functions.

Consider John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Grammatical attention shows:

• The repeated verb “was” (imperfect tense) points to continual existence. The Word did not come into being at the beginning; the Word already was.

• The phrase “the Word was with God” uses a preposition that conveys personal relationship and face-to-face nearness, not mere proximity.

• The phrase “the Word was God” asserts full deity without collapsing the distinction between the Word and God mentioned just before.

A conservative interpreter does not rush past these details. He recognizes that the doctrine of Christ’s eternal deity rests, in part, on careful, grammatical reading of this verse and others like it.

In the same way, careless or agenda-driven handling of grammar can distort doctrine. For example, statements about the Spirit “dwelling in” believers (such as Romans 8:9–11; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19) are often wrenched from context and pressed into service of a mystical, quasi-automatic “indwelling” doctrine detached from the Spirit’s own chosen instrument: the inspired Word. A conservative, historical-grammatical reading keeps Paul’s argument intact: he contrasts a fleshly mindset with a Spirit-governed, Word-shaped mindset, and he anchors believers’ future bodily resurrection in the same divine power that raised Christ. The passage offers no support for modern charismatic notions of an inner voice or ongoing, extra-biblical impressions.

In other words, grammar guards us from reading into the text what we want to find there.

Literary Genre: Reading Each Text as It Was Written

The Bible is not one flat genre. It contains law codes, narratives, psalms, wisdom sayings, prophetic oracles, parables, letters, and apocalyptic visions. Conservative exegesis takes those differences seriously.

• A psalm frequently uses poetry, parallelism, and vivid imagery. “Jehovah is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1) is not teaching that God literally carries a staff and tends literal sheep. The genre signals metaphor from the start.

• A parable is a story with a point, not a puzzle inviting us to assign symbolic meaning to every detail. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the main thrust is clear: “Go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

• Apocalyptic passages, such as parts of Daniel or Revelation, are saturated with symbols. A conservative interpreter does not flatten those symbols into newspaper-level predictions, but neither does he dissolve them into mystical vagueness. He allows the genre itself to shape what “literal” faithfulness looks like in each case.

Conservative exegesis refuses to treat poetry as if it were a lab report or to read parables as if they were coded historical chronologies. Genre sensitivity guards us both from naïve literalism and from liberal allegorizing that dissolves concrete meaning.

Why Conservative Exegesis Rejects Modern Critical Approaches

Modern biblical criticism operates under a very different set of assumptions. Even when technical tools overlap (word studies, historical research, attention to genre), liberal-moderate approaches often proceed as if:

• Scripture is fundamentally a human product,

• the text is riddled with error, contradiction, and confusion, and

• the interpreter stands as judge over the text.

Conservative exegesis exposes several core problems in these approaches.

Historical Criticism and Fragmented Scripture

Historical criticism often treats biblical books as anonymous compilations of conflicting traditions, stitched together by unknown redactors. The Pentateuch becomes a patchwork of sources; the Gospels become competing community narratives; the letters of Paul are sorted into “authentic,” “disputed,” and “pseudonymous” piles based on shifting scholarly fashions.

The result is a Bible with no coherent voice, no unified Author, and no stable authority. Conservative exegesis resists this fragmentation. It takes seriously what the books claim about themselves (for example, Mosaic authorship of the Law, Pauline authorship of the letters that bear his name) unless there are overwhelming textual reasons to conclude otherwise. It recognizes that the Holy Spirit can superintend real historical processes without producing chaos or contradiction.

Form and Redaction Criticism: Speculation Without Evidence

Form criticism and redaction criticism seek to peel back layers of supposed oral tradition and editorial shaping behind the canonical text. The Gospels, for instance, are reimagined as collections of small units that floated in the life of the church for decades before being stitched together. The supposed “prehistory” of these units is then reconstructed with very little hard evidence.

Conservative exegesis notes that such reconstructions are largely speculative and often driven by philosophical commitments rather than by the actual text. The canonical form of Scripture is treated as a problem to be solved instead of the God-given object of interpretation. Rather than chasing hypothetical earlier forms, conservative exegesis concentrates on the inspired form we actually possess.

Literary and Postmodern Approaches Detached from Truth

Some modern literary approaches focus almost exclusively on how a text “functions” for readers, while postmodern theories treat meaning as open-ended and endlessly negotiable. In practice, this can mean that the authority of the text is replaced by the creativity of the interpreter.

Conservative exegesis refuses that move. While it gladly uses sound literary observations (structure, repetition, themes), it insists that the biblical text has a real, determinate meaning rooted in the author’s intent and in God’s own purpose. The question is not, “What can this text be made to mean?” but “What did God say here, and how must I respond?”

Core Theological Commitments Underlying Conservative Exegesis

Conservative exegesis is not a bare technique; it rests on clear theological commitments.

Scripture’s Authority

Because men “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21), the Bible carries God’s own authority. Conservative exegesis therefore refuses to place any external standard over Scripture—whether academic consensus, cultural sensibilities, or church tradition. Everything else must be tested by the Word, not the other way around.

Scripture’s Clarity

The essential message of Scripture is clear enough that ordinary believers, using ordinary means, can understand what God requires. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Conservative exegesis does not pretend that all texts are equally easy, but it rejects the idea that only a guild of specialists can know what God has said. The historical-grammatical method is simply careful common sense applied with reverence.

Scripture’s Sufficiency

Because all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable “so that the man of God may be fully competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17), the Bible is sufficient for faith and life. Conservative exegesis therefore does not chase fresh revelations, inner whispers, or mystical impressions. It sees such pursuits as undermining the Spirit’s own work in the inspired text. Claims about the “indwelling” Spirit that move beyond or against Scripture are not signs of deeper spirituality; they are signs of drifting from sufficiency.

Practical Shape of Conservative Exegesis

These convictions must translate into habits. Conservative exegesis shapes how believers study, teach, and defend Scripture in daily practice.

For Personal Bible Study

A conservative, historical-grammatical approach to personal study involves:

1. Context First: Read the paragraph, chapter, and book, not stray verses ripped out of place.

2. Historical Awareness: Use good tools (introductions, atlases, background works) to understand the setting, but never let speculative theories overturn the plain sense of the text.

3. Grammatical Attention: Notice repeated words, commands, contrasts, conjunctions (“for,” “therefore,” “but”), and the flow of the argument.

4. Genre Sensitivity: Read psalms as poetry, proverbs as general wisdom sayings, parables as illustrative stories with main points, and letters as carefully argued instruction.

When a verse like Romans 8:11 is studied in that way, the reader is guarded from mystical misreadings. He sees that Paul is grounding the believer’s future bodily resurrection in the objective historical fact of Christ’s resurrection and in the same divine power that worked in Christ—not teaching a mysterious, inner, extra-biblical voice of the Spirit.

For Teaching and Preaching

In the pulpit and classroom, conservative exegesis commits to:

• preach the text in context,

• explain what the author meant before applying it,

• resist the temptation to twist passages to fit current trends (whether charismatic, psychological, or academic), and

• let Scripture critique our systems rather than forcing Scripture under them.

A sermon on the Beatitudes, for example, must first clarify what “poor in spirit” meant in Jesus’ setting and how those hearers would have understood “the kingdom of heaven,” before attempting to draw modern applications.

For Theological Construction

When developing doctrine—on the Holy Spirit, justification, sanctification, or anything else—conservative exegesis:

• gathers all relevant texts,

• interprets each historically and grammatically,

• allows clearer passages to shed light on more difficult ones, and

• refuses to build doctrines on obscure phrases or disputed readings.

This disciplined method is precisely what keeps a work on the Holy Spirit from sliding into the errors of literal “indwelling,” ongoing revelation, or the idea that God sends trials as deliberate personal tests. Instead, doctrine is anchored in carefully interpreted texts that speak plainly when read in their own context.

Exposing the Biases Behind Modern Criticism

Conservative exegesis also pulls back the curtain on the philosophical currents driving much modern critical work. Many “neutral” methods rest on assumptions such as:

• Secular humanism: Human reason is the final authority; therefore, miracles and prophecy must be re-interpreted or explained away.

• Enlightenment skepticism: Ancient texts are guilty until proven innocent; traditional attributions of authorship or unity are treated with suspicion by default.

• Idealist and postmodern philosophies: The interpreter’s consciousness or community shapes reality; therefore, meaning is fluid and open-ended.

Once these assumptions are exposed, it becomes clear why modern criticism so often attacks the authority, coherence, and inerrancy of Scripture. Conservative exegesis refuses these foundations outright. It is not impressed by the aura of “scholarship” when that scholarship is built on a worldview that denies or marginalizes God’s self-revelation.

Conservative Exegesis as Protection and Provision

In the end, conservative biblical exegesis is both a shield and a gift.

• As a shield, it protects the church from fashionable but destructive errors—whether liberal denials of inerrancy, speculative reconstructions of the text’s “prehistory,” or popular spiritualities that claim the Holy Spirit still speaks apart from the written Word.

• As a gift, it provides believers with a clear, disciplined, God-honoring way to hear what He has actually said in Scripture and to build their lives on that unshakable foundation.

To interpret the Bible conservatively, then, is not to be stubbornly traditional for its own sake. It is to take seriously that Jehovah has spoken, that His Spirit has breathed out an inerrant Word, and that our proper place is not over that Word as judges, but under it as grateful hearers and obedient servants.

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