Inerrancy of the Bible

“The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.”

— Psalm 12:6 (ESV)

Inerrancy means “that when all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.”¹ The doctrine follows from Scripture’s own divine authorship: because God cannot lie and speaks only truth, his own written word must itself be entirely truthful and trustworthy, in every subject it actually addresses.¹ Inerrancy applies strictly to the inspired original autographs, not to the accuracy of any single later copy or translation.

Confessional Witness

The word “inerrancy” is a modern technical term (the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, its fullest evangelical articulation, dates to 1978), but the claim it names, that Scripture as originally given is wholly true, is what the older confessions already assert under the heading of Scripture’s own infallibility. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession calls Scripture “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith and Obedience.”² The Chicago Statement restates the same conviction for a modern evangelical audience, opening by tying a Christian’s confession of Christ to obedience of his written word: “those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God’s written Word.”³ Its first article states plainly that “the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God,” denying “that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source,”⁴ and its third article affirms that “the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God,” denying 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.”⁵

Biblical Basis

Scripture claims a divine origin for its own words: “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16), and Jesus states as a settled fact that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). This claim rests on God’s own character rather than on a separate argument about the text: Scripture describes God as one “who never lies” (Titus 1:2), whose “word is truth” (John 17:17) and who is “not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19). The psalmist and the sage draw the conclusion for God’s own spoken words specifically: “the words of the LORD are pure words” (Ps. 12:6), and “every word of God proves true” (Prov. 30:5).

Historical Development

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, signed in 1978 by nearly 300 evangelical scholars, was among the first formal, jointly-signed statements in the church’s history devoted specifically to the inspiration and authority of the Bible.⁶ Its signers included J. I. Packer, R. C. Sproul, Carl F. H. Henry, Francis Schaeffer, and Roger Nicole, among others.⁶ The statement did not invent the underlying doctrine but gave the wider evangelical movement a single, detailed reference point for a claim earlier confessions had already made in the vocabulary of “infallibility.”

That reference point has itself been challenged from within evangelical scholarship since. A. T. B. McGowan proposed replacing “inerrancy” with “infallibility” as the preferred term for Scripture’s trustworthiness, arguing that “the term ‘infallibility’ maintains that the final authority for the Christian is the authority of God speaking in and through his word and that the Holy Spirit infallibly uses God’s word to achieve all he intends to achieve.”⁷ On McGowan’s account, infallibility describes what Scripture accomplishes, not a static property of the text itself, and he argued his proposal was consistent with, not opposed to, traditional inerrancy.⁷

Opposing Views

McGowan’s proposal drew a direct scholarly response. John Thomas English argues that relocating the doctrine of Scripture primarily under the work of the Holy Spirit, as McGowan’s account does, risks separating the Spirit’s work from the Father’s and the Son’s, and that McGowan’s own account implies “it is possible for God to act according to his will, and yet, not necessarily speak truthfully,” a conclusion English calls “a theological error” the traditional doctrine of inspiration was built to avoid.⁷ On this reading, weakening inerrancy to a claim about Scripture’s effect rather than its own truthfulness ultimately separates what God does through Scripture from what God says in it.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t inerrancy collapse once textual criticism shows that no single existing manuscript perfectly matches any other, since the doctrine only applies to autographs no one possesses? The objection conflates two separate questions: whether the original text was true, and how confidently that original text can now be identified from the manuscripts that survive. Inerrancy answers only the first question; answering the second is the ordinary work of textual criticism, which reconstructs the original wording from many manuscripts rather than requiring any one copy to be perfect on its own.

Scripture records ordinary human idiom, rounded numbers, and differences of vocabulary and style between authors. Doesn’t inerrancy require a flatter, more artificial uniformity than the text actually shows? Herman Bavinck answers that inspiration is organic rather than mechanical: the Holy Spirit “did not spurn anything human to serve as an organ of the divine,” and “the personality of the authors is not erased but maintained and sanctified,” which is exactly why the biblical books differ in language, style, and the personal concerns of their human authors.⁸ Bavinck adds that Scripture was never intended as a manual for the physical sciences: he quotes the older saying that “Scripture does not tell us how the heavens move but how we move to heaven,” while affirming that Scripture is not therefore irrelevant to other fields of knowledge, only that its own purpose is to “make us wise unto salvation.”⁸

Isn’t it unreasonable to affirm inerrancy while so many alleged contradictions in the text remain unresolved? Bavinck answers that demanding every difficulty be settled before trusting Scripture sets an impossible standard no field of knowledge could meet: “those who do not want to believe the Word of God before they see all problems resolved will die of spiritual starvation,” in the same way that “those who do not want to eat before they understand the entire process by which food arrives at their table will starve to death.”⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Paul D. Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 294, quoted in John Thomas English III, “Theological and Pastoral Implications of a Trinitarian Account of Biblical Authority,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 188. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), preface, quoted in John Thomas English III, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 27. ↩
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), art. 1, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” 28. ↩
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), art. 3, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” 28. ↩
English, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” 26-27. ↩ ↩²
A. T. B. McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), quoted and critiqued in English, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” 40-41. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩ ↩² ↩³