In the 1920s theological students were commonly told that 'the theory of the verbal inspiration of Scripture was as dead as Queen Anne'. As Oliver Barclay recalls: 'By the 1930s, evangelicals were effectively the only section of the British churches that held to this truth.' (1)
The Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF) broke with SCM on this issue in the 1920s (2), and for a time the IVF's testimony to the infallibility of Scripture was unique and alone in the universities.
As evangelical influence grew after the Second World War, and noticeably among students, opposition centred on its claim that evangelical Christianity alone was being true to Scripture. A published address by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the subject, given at an IVF conference in 1952, drew a stinging response from Nathaniel Micklem, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. The IVF and Lloyd-Jones outlook, he charged, was 'divisive, schismatic, obscurantist and quite unbiblical'. (3)
