Missouri Synod theologians had traditionally affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible, and, although such a term can mean many things, in practice it meant certain rather specific things: harmonizing of the various biblical narratives; a somewhat ahistorical reading of the Bible in which there was
little room for growth or development of theological understanding; a tendency to hold that God would not have used within the Bible literary forms such as myth, legend, or saga; an unwillingness to reckon with possible creativity on the part of the evangelists who tell the story of Jesus in the Gospels or to consider what it might mean that they write that story from a post-Easter perspective; a general reluctance to consider that the canons of historical
exactitude which we take as givens might have been different for the biblical authors.