Every Nazarene pastor will eventually face a moment in which someone in their congregation pushes back against something the Bible teaches. The pushback will not always be hostile. Sometimes it will come from a thoughtful person who has read widely, encountered contradictions, or wrestled with a text they cannot reconcile with their experience. How you respond in that moment will depend entirely on what you believe about Scripture.
Article 4 is the shortest of our Articles of Faith, but its implications run through everything else we believe. If Scripture is what we say it is, our theology has a foundation. If it is not, our Articles of Faith are just a tradition we happen to prefer. This lecture is about understanding what we claim, why those claims are defensible, and how they shape your practice as a pastor.
Every phrase in that statement is doing theological work. Before we explore what the article means, we need to understand each piece of it, because people often assume they know what words like “plenary” and “inerrantly” mean, even though their working definitions may differ from what the article intends.
We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.
Plenary means full or complete. Plenary inspiration means that the inspiration of Scripture is not partial or selective. It does not mean that some books are inspired and others are useful literature. It does not mean that the theological content is inspired, but the historical details are guesswork. It means that all 66 books, in all their content, are given by divine inspiration.
This is a high claim. It does not, however, require that every sentence in Scripture carries the same kind of weight or functions the same way. A genealogy is not a doctrinal statement. A lament psalm is not a legal code. Understanding what kind of literature you are reading is essential to understanding what it means to say that literature is inspired. Plenary inspiration does not eliminate the need for careful interpretation. It establishes that there is something worth interpreting in all of it.
The article uses the phrase “given by divine inspiration,” which directly connects with 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed.” The Greek word is theopneustos, meaning breathed out by God. Scripture does not just contain reports about God. It is, in some sense, the product of God’s own action.
The Wesleyan tradition has generally understood this as a process that worked through human authors, not around them. The writers of Scripture were not passive dictation machines. They wrote from their own contexts, in their own styles, with their own concerns. God used those contexts, styles, and concerns as the vehicle for his revelation. This is why Paul sounds like Paul and John sounds like John, and why reading them well requires understanding who they are and what their worlds are like.
This is the phrase that most often creates confusion. The article does not say that Scripture is inerrant in all historical, geographical, and scientific detail. It says Scripture inerrantly reveals the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation.
That qualifying phrase, in all things necessary to our salvation, is doing significant work. The Church of the Nazarene’s doctrine of Scripture is not a claim that the Bible is a perfect textbook in every field of human inquiry. It is a claim that Scripture faithfully accomplishes its stated purpose: revealing who God is, what God has done in Christ, what has gone wrong with the human condition, and how we are restored to God. Scripture was given for that work, and it is fully trustworthy for it.
This is a more modest and more defensible claim than an assertion that every detail in Scripture is scientifically or historically precise. It is also a more honest reading of what Scripture claims about itself.
The final clause is a Reformation principle carried forward into Nazarene theology: Scripture is the final authority for what Christians are required to believe. No creed, tradition, denominational manual, or pastoral opinion can add a new article of faith beyond what Scripture contains. This protects the church from the accumulation of doctrinal requirements that exceed Scripture, a tendency that has repeatedly plagued Christian history.
For pastors, this clause carries weight. You may have strong opinions about many things. Not all your opinions carry the authority of Scripture. Knowing the difference between what Scripture requires and what your tradition or culture prefers is a discipline that will serve you throughout your ministry.
The Wesleyan tradition is sometimes described as using four sources of theological authority: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This framework, often called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, is useful but easily misunderstood. The most common misunderstanding is treating the four sources as equal contributors, as though the Wesleyan method involves weighing Scripture against tradition, reason, and experience and going with whatever wins.
That is not what Wesley meant, nor is it what the Church of the Nazarene teaches. In the Wesleyan framework, Scripture is the primary authority. Tradition, reason, and experience are not equal partners. They are tools for interpreting Scripture well. They help us understand what Scripture means, not whether we need to follow it.
When Wesley appealed to reason, he was reasoning from Scripture. When he appealed to experience, he was testing theological claims against the lived experience of God’s grace, asking whether what he read in Scripture corresponded to what he observed in the transformed lives of believers. When he appealed to tradition, he was asking whether the church’s long history of reading Scripture gave guidance on contested questions.
None of those appeals were meant to sit in judgment of Scripture. They were meant to help the church read Scripture more accurately and apply it more faithfully. That distinction matters when a person argues that their personal experience justifies ignoring what Scripture teaches, or that modern reason has made certain biblical claims obsolete.
The Christian tradition is not infallible, but it is not worthless either. Two thousand years of careful, prayerful, costly engagement with Scripture has produced insights that no individual interpreter can replicate alone. When you read what the early church fathers wrote about a passage, when you study what the Reformers argued about a doctrine, when you consider how the holiness movement read the texts on sanctification, you are drawing on a reservoir of wisdom that should shape your own interpretation.
Dismissing tradition entirely creates the illusion that you are reading Scripture fresh, when you are reading it through assumptions absorbed from elsewhere, usually your own culture and era. Tradition, used well, challenges those assumptions rather than confirming them.
Wesley was not anti-intellectual. He believed God made human minds capable of understanding God’s revelation, and that using those minds well was part of faithful discipleship. The Nazarene tradition carries that conviction. We do not ask people to believe things despite the evidence. We ask people to follow the evidence faithfully.
But reason has limits. It cannot create the content of revelation. It can only receive and interpret what has been given. A theology that subjects everything to rational verification will find that the most important claims of Christian faith, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the new birth, resist reduction to what unaided human reason can demonstrate. Reason is a servant of faith, not its master.
Wesley understood that the doctrines of Scripture could be confirmed in the experience of believers. When Scripture says God transforms the human heart, and you watch that transformation happen in person after person across decades of ministry, the experience does not prove the doctrine, but it does confirm it. Experience functions as a witness, not as the source.
This is important for your ministry. You will encounter people who say their experience contradicts what Scripture teaches. The pastoral question in that moment is not which one wins. It is about helping the person interpret their experience more clearly, or about sitting with them in the tension until they can see more.
Which of the four sources do you tend to lean on most heavily when you encounter a difficult theological question? Where do you find yourself most tempted to let experience or reason overrule what Scripture plainly says? Honest answers to those questions will shape how you read the Bible and how you teach it.
Because Article 4 uses the word inerrantly, people sometimes assume the Church of the Nazarene holds a position identical to the strict inerrancy championed by some fundamentalist and conservative evangelical traditions.
Some inerrancy traditions teach that God dictated Scripture word for word to passive human writers. The Church of the Nazarene does not teach this. We believe God worked through the personalities, vocabularies, concerns, and contexts of the human authors. That is why Paul’s letters sound like letters and the Psalms sound like poetry. The humanity of Scripture is not a defect to be explained away. It is part of how God chose to speak.
Some strict inerrancy traditions locate inerrancy only in the original autographs of Scripture, the manuscripts that came directly from the hands of the original authors. Since no original autographs survive, this position becomes untestable and practically irrelevant. The Church of the Nazarene’s position is more focused on Scripture’s functional reliability for its stated purpose: revealing what we need to know for salvation.
Article 4 does not require that biblical accounts of creation, cosmology, or natural history conform to modern scientific categories. The writers of Scripture were not writing science textbooks. They were writing within the cosmological assumptions of their own times and cultures, and God used those frameworks to communicate truths about his relationship to creation and humanity that transcend any scientific era.
This does not mean Scripture and science are in fundamental conflict. It means that asking Genesis 1 to answer the questions modern biology asks is asking the wrong kind of question. The questions Genesis 1 answers—Who made this? Why does it exist? What is the human being’s place in it?—remain as important and as thoroughly answered by that text as they have ever been.
On the other side, some theological traditions treat the Bible primarily as a human document that reflects the religious development of an ancient people, valuable for wisdom but not authoritative in any binding sense. That is not the Nazarene position. We are not saying Scripture is a useful record of religious experience. We are saying it is the Word of God, that God is its primary author, and that it has authority over the church.
The Nazarene position occupies a real middle ground. It takes Scripture’s divine origin seriously enough to call it inerrant in its core purpose. It takes Scripture’s human origin seriously enough to insist that good interpretation requires attending to genre, context, culture, and authorial intent. Neither side of that balance can be dropped without distorting what we teach.
Knowing what Article 4 says is not the same as knowing how to use Scripture in ministry. The Wesleyan tradition has a distinctive understanding of what Scripture is for, and that understanding shapes how Nazarene pastors read, preach, and teach the Bible.
The Wesleyan tradition reads Scripture as a unified narrative of God’s redemptive work in the world. Creation, fall, redemption, sanctification, and glorification: these are not disconnected doctrines. They are chapters in one story, and every text in Scripture plays a role in that story. When you read the law in Leviticus, you are reading a chapter in which God is forming a holy people. When you read the Gospels, you are reading the climax of the story, the moment when God himself enters the narrative in flesh to accomplish what the law and prophets could only anticipate.
This narrative shapes how Nazarene pastors preach. We do not mine texts for principles or applications. We read texts in their place in the story and ask what this chapter reveals about God’s character, humanity’s condition, and the trajectory of redemption.
Wesley understood that the purpose of Scripture was not just to inform the mind but to transform the heart. He read the Bible not primarily as an answer book but as the primary means by which the Holy Spirit accomplishes sanctification. Repeated, prayerful, attentive engagement with Scripture is how God shapes us into Christlikeness.
This has practical implications for how you encourage your congregation to read the Bible. A congregation that reads Scripture primarily to accumulate information will have full heads and unchanged hearts. A congregation that reads Scripture expecting God to meet them there, to convict, to comfort, to challenge, to transform, will be shaped by what they read in ways that mere information never produces.
Because the Church of the Nazarene believes Scripture is the Word of God, Nazarene preaching is expected to be biblical preaching. This does not mean every sermon must be a verse-by-verse exposition of a passage. It means that what you say from the pulpit must be accountable to Scripture, derived from Scripture, and tested against Scripture. Your opinions and observations are not the Word of God. The Scriptures are. Your job as a preacher is to be the servant of the text, not the master of it.
Before your next message, ask yourself: am I letting the text speak, or am I using Scripture to dress up a conclusion I already reached? The method matters less than the posture. A topical sermon can be biblical when the preacher has done the work to let Scripture shape the message. A verse-by-verse exposition can still diminish the text if the preacher never lets it say anything uncomfortable. The discipline is submission to what is there, whatever form the sermon takes.
You will not be a pastor for long before someone in your congregation raises a hard question about the Bible. Preparing now for how to engage those questions is part of your formation as a minister.
People sometimes encounter what appear to be contradictions in Scripture and assume that this disproves the reliability. Before concluding that a contradiction in the Bible exists, good interpretation asks several prior questions. Are these two passages describing the same event from different perspectives? Are they using the same words with different meanings? Are they addressing different audiences for different purposes? Most apparent contradictions dissolve under careful reading.
Where tensions remain after careful study, the honest answer is that the church has not always resolved them completely, and that living with unresolved tensions is part of what it means to trust a revelation that is larger than our understanding. That is not intellectual cowardice. It is intellectual honesty about the limits of human comprehension when dealing with a text that spans centuries, cultures, genres, and languages.
Some passages in Scripture are genuinely difficult: texts that command violence in certain historical contexts, texts about women that seem to conflict with the Nazarene position on women in ministry, texts about eternal punishment that weigh heavily on pastoral hearts. These passages do not disappear if you preach around them.
The approach to difficult texts involves taking them seriously enough to study them carefully, placing them in their canonical context, and being honest with your congregation about where the hard questions lie. A congregation that never hears its pastor wrestle honestly with a difficult text will not be equipped to wrestle with those texts themselves.
You will face questions about how a text written in a particular culture and time applies to a very different one. This is a legitimate interpretive challenge, not an excuse to disregard passages. The question is always: what is the timeless principle this text is expressing, and what was the culturally specific application of that principle in its original context?
Distinguishing those two things requires careful exegesis and theological humility. It also requires being honest when you are uncertain, and avoiding the temptation to use cultural relativity selectively, accepting it when it makes hard texts easier, and rejecting it when it would require changing a position you prefer.
2 Timothy 3:16–17 “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
Paul’s description of Scripture’s purpose is practical. The Bible is not a source of interesting historical or theological information. It is given so that the minister of God can be equipped for the work of ministry. That is the purpose Article 4 serves: establishing that the resource you are depending on for that formation is reliable for the task it was given to perform.
Every sermon you preach will be tested against Scripture by your congregation, even if they do not say so. Every counseling conversation you have will eventually come back to what Scripture says about the human condition and God’s provision for it. Every ethical question your congregation faces will send them to you with the expectation that you know what the Bible teaches. Article 4 is not just a doctrinal statement you affirm at your licensing interview. It is the foundation of your entire ministry.
The Nazarene claim about Scripture is that it is inerrant for the things that matter most: knowing God, understanding the human condition, finding the path of salvation, and being formed into the image of Christ. That is the claim that you are building your pastoral life on, something that will hold.
Preach the book. Trust the book. Let the book form you. Everything else in ministry follows from that.