What do Christians mean when they say the Bible is inerrant? The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy tells us what leading inerrantist mean by inerrancy. I’ll be posting a section of this statement each week until I’ve posted the whole thing.
After a preface and a short statement, the Chicago Statement contains the Articles of Affirmation and Denial. (You can read previously posted sections of this statement in by clicking here.) The last section is the Exposition, which “gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our summary statement and articles are drawn.” This is the very last section of this historic church document.
Inerrancy and Authority
In our affirmation of the authority of Scripture as involving its total truth, we are consciously standing with Christ and His apostles, indeed with the whole Bible and with the main stream of Church history from the first days until very recently. We are concerned at the casual, inadvertent, and seemingly thoughtless way in which a belief of such far-reaching importance has been given up by so many in our day.
We are conscious too that great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible which God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasonings and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that at bottom independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.
We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified. Amen and Amen.