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Great article, Gamecock.

Although inerrancy was taken for granted in church history until the Enlightenment, it was especially at Princeton Seminary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became a full-blown formulation. This view is articulated most completely in Inspiration, a book coauthored by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield and published by the Presbyterian Church in 1881. Their argument deserves an extended summary especially because it remains, in my view, the best formulation of inerrancy just as it anticipates and challenges caricatures...

If we do not hold ourselves and each other to modern standards of specialized discourse in ordinary conversation, we can hardly impose such standards on ancient writers. As Calvin observed, "Moses wrote in the manner of those to whom he wrote." If one wants to learn astronomy, Calvin adds, one must ask the astronomers rather than Moses, since his purpose was not to deliver supernatural information about the movement of planets. (17) Inerrancy requires our confidence not in the reliability of Moses and his knowledge of the cosmos but in the reliability of the historical narratives, laws, and promises disclosed in the Pentateuch. Even then, it is truthfulness, not exactness, that we expect when we come to the biblical text...

Whatever the holy, unerring, and faithful Father speaks is--simply by virtue of having come from him--holy, unerring, and faithful. In addition, the content of God's speech is none other than the gift of the eternal Son who became flesh for us and for our salvation. Revelation therefore is not merely an ever-new event that occurs through the witness of the Bible, it is a written canon--an abiding, Spirit-breathed deposit and constitution for the covenant community in every generation. Thus, the Christian faith is truly "a pattern of the sound words" and "the good deposit entrusted to you" that we are to "guard" by means of "the Holy Spirit who dwells within us" (2 Tim. 1:13-14; cf. 1 Tim. 6:20). It is an event of revelation that not only creates our faith--fides qua creditor, the faith by which we believe--but, according to Jude 3, contains in canonical form "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints"--fides quae creditor, the faith that is believed.