[God] has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3:6

What is Inerrancy?

1 - 2 - 3

Inerrancy literally means "incapable of error." In Christianity, it refers to the theological belief that the Bible is without any errors or contradictions. It is a simple idea, really, but in its simplicity it says quite a bit. Consider if you will the following: We all know that the Bible didn't just drop out of the sky one day. It was written by human beings, fallible men and women, no different than you or me. We also know that the Bible is fairly long; modern translations in English are roughly 1,500 to 2,000 pages in length. Now, obviously people make mistakes from time to time. And within the space of 2,000 pages, there was plenty of room for one of those biblical writers to make a mistake. For modern Christians to say that the Bible is completely error-free, then, is really quite amazing!

The Chicago Statement

For evangelical Christians, the doctrine of inerrancy has been most thoroughly laid down in the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy's "Chicago Statement," a document signed by nearly 300 evangelical scholars at a conference in Chicago in the fall of 1978. A few of the more important articles have been reproduced here for our purposes:

Article III. We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God. We deny that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity.

Article VII. We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

Article VIII. We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

Article IX. We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write. We deny that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God's Word.

The overriding theme in all of these articles is that God is the sole "Author" of Scripture, and that the many different human authors who actually penned the various books that comprise the Bible were merely "secretaries" or "vessels" of God's own spoken word. Even Article VIII, which at first glance seems to offer the hope of introducing at least a reasonable human element to the writing of Scripture, states emphatically that even the very words used by these authors were chosen and directed by God.

These articles are prefaced by an even more emphatic statement on Bible inerrancy. Part of that introduction states that:

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.