A Perfect Word: The Innerancy of Scripture

Defining and defending the inerrancy of Scripture through the Chicago Statement.



On October 26 1978, around 268 participants - pastors, missionaries, and theological scholars like Dr. R.C Sproul and J. I. Packer, gathered for three days to define biblical inerrancy.



The following is a short version of The Chicago Statement:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. 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.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

The statement begins by affirming the doctrine of inspiration for both the OT and NT. Simply stated, inspiration means that the Bible contains the very words of God. For a better understanding of inspiration, read 'A Word of Inspiration'.

After establishing the inspiration of Scripture, the statement addresses the inerrancy of Scripture - if the Bible is the inspired word of God and God cannot tell a lie, then the Bible is true. Gregg Allison has observed,

The church has historically acknowledged that Scripture in its original manuscripts and properly interpreted is completely true and without any error in everything that it affirms, whether that has to do with doctrine, moral conduct, or matters of history, cosmology, geography, and the like.

This definition helps to distinguish that inerrancy does not denote that the Bible contains "absolute scientific precision," exhausting all facts on every conceivable subject, but rather that Scripture is true and trustworthy regarding subjects that it directly addresses. For example, we know our solar system is Heliocentric, meaning the sun is at the center and does not move. Many opponents of biblical inerrancy state that the Bible taught that the Sun rotated around the earth in a geocentric solar system with the Earth as the center ( e.g., Josh 10:12,13; 2 Kings 20:8-11).

In defense of Scripture, these sections of the Bible are not primarily concerned with addressing astronomical models, but rather speaking in the language of phenomenon to describe historic events. We still employ similar language today. Often, when we plan events we might say we should do something "before the sun goes down." We might also get up early one morning to sit on our porch with a cup of coffee and watch the "sunrise".This language of phenomenon is not spoke in error, but in a figurative way, describing what appears to be happening from our limited perspective.

For further clarification, when speaking of inerrancy we need to examine its relationship to precision. John Frame, in his book The Doctrine of the Word of God, explains this relationship.

Inerrancy, therefore means that the Bible is true, not that it is maximally precise. To the extent that precision is necessary for truth, the Bible is sufficiently precise. But it does not always have the amount of precision that some readers demand of it. It has a level of precision sufficient for its own purposes, not for the purposes for which some readers might employ it.

Examples of such sufficient precision are seen in what some critics would claim are numerical or mathematical discrepancies in the Bible, specifically in the Old Testament.

1. The number of arms-bearing men in Judah and Israel (2 Sam 24:9; 1 Chron 21:5)
2. The number of Syrian charioteers slain by David (2 Sam 10:18; 1 Chron 19:18)
3.The number of stalls in Solomon's stables (1 Kings 4:26; 2 Chron 9:25)



With an appropriate understanding of inerrancy, we are able to understand that discrepancies like these might have been caused by:

- Rounding numbers up in one place, and down in another
- Mistaking one number or letter for another during transmission or translation
- Adding an extra number in one instance and omitting it in another during transmission


We must remember that the historical definition of Scripture without error, only extends to the original autographs (manuscripts) while maintaining that when all manuscripts currently available are examined, they agree in 99.5% of the text. Most of these discrepancies are in spelling or word order, none of which alter any basic Christian doctrine.

Inerrancy assures us that even today, we have a reliable copy of God's inspired word and reminds us of the need to submit ourselves to God's authority because in everything it claims, Scripture proves true. So let us affirm the Chicago statement on inerrancy, and echo the words of Augustine who said,

“For it seems to me that most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books...for I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error.”

“And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript(copy) is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.”

“For if you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement as made in the way of duty, there will not be left a single sentence of those books which, if appearing to any one difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away, as a statement in which, intentionally, and under a sense of duty, the author declared what was not true.”