Inerrancy Defined and Defended

In 1978 a group of conservative Evangelical scholars—including John Gerstner, R. C. Sproul, Edmund Clowney, J. I. Packer, James Montgomery Boice, Clark Pinnock, Norman Geisler, John Warwick Montgomery, John Frame, and even Francis Schaeffer—began meeting under the name International Conference on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI) to construct what would become known as The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. They saw that the battle over the authority of God’s Word would be, as Schaeffer described it, “the watershed” that would come to divide Evangelicalism at the end of the twentieth century.1

Defining Inerrancy

The inerrancy of Scripture refers to its absolute freedom from error. If the word of God is perfect (Ps. 19:7) and the word of God is truth (Jn. 17:17), then it follows that this word is a perfection of truth. But no truth which is perfect can be the least defective in truth. Error is such a defect. The slightest error would imply a lack of total perfection. So Hodge defines this attribute as being “free from all error whether of doctrine, fact, or precept.”2 This “extends to everything which any sacred writer asserts to be true.”3 

The first important distinction to make about this definition concerns the exact matter that is being called “inerrant.” It is without error in the autographa: not in the copies. Let us hear this from the Chicago Statement, Article X. 

“We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.”

The objection against this will be obvious enough. It will be seen by the critic as a meaningless concept. How can one defend that which is not present? To put it another way, does this not imply that no other Bible besides the original “one” is the inerrant word of God? How a non-realist answers this can be an interesting spectacle. We will have to wait for our section on textual criticism and translations to explain the lay of the land here. Suffice it to say, we will insist that it is a perfectly meaningful concept.

The second important distinction about our definition regards objective meaning. The inerrancy of Scripture means that the original text is without error in all that it means to say. Inerrancy does not answer to the pet concerns of the critic. Truth and falsehood are a function of authorial meaning. One cannot complain that the author doesn’t mean what the critic means and pretend to be concerned about “tough-minded” truth. This implies that genre, style, cultural idiom, and, yes, theology all comprise the object of meaning. This will prove to be a very important point, because the definition regards the concept being claimed, not the word pattern in the hands of “any old meaning.” That isn’t how any truth claim works. As in the rest of theology, so it is here: We understand the essence of inerrancy on the concept-level, not simply the word-level.

The third important distinction about our definition regards the scope of what is inerrant. Inerrancy does not respect what is not the canon; or, only the canon of Scripture is inerrant. Bracketed texts, for example, are not errors. Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11, and 1 John 5:7-8 are interesting matters for text criticism, but they should cause no doubts about errors. They could only be errors of Scripture if they are Scripture; and that really begs the whole question, doesn’t it? 

The words inerrant and infallible may at first seem to be strict synonyms. That is not the case. Infallible is a broader word. We might ask, for example: “It doesn’t fail to do what?” Of course the Bible is infallible. God’s word never fails to do that which He sends it to do (cf. Isa. 55:11). Yet a distinction here is still crucial. As an example of why such precision is needed, ​​Frame defines inerrancy as “freedom from error or untruths,” yet in the next breath defines infallibility as “incapable of erring.”4 Those can sound identical to the reader who is unaware that a distinction ought to be made at all.  

Under the influence of Barthian theology, a position that has been called limited inerrancy (or ‘infallibilism’) slyly states that all Scripture is indeed God’s word and without error “in all matters of faith and practice.” But this conceals an equivocation. Within this limited inerrancy view, the terms “faith and practice” are morphed into “spiritual-not-literal.” So, in this qualifier, the spiritual and redemptive are separated from the mundane details of science and history. The word indeceivability has been used by the likes of G. C. Berkouwer and Donald Bloesch as an attempted middle ground between infallibilism and inerrancy.5 In this view the Scriptures are free from any lying or fraud. 

There is a fundamental problem of criteria in the limited inerrancy position. Once we go down this path, there is really no end. Think about just how natural, how historic, how secular, the biblical revelation is! One cannot separate the saving acts of God from the cosmos or the timeline of history. Sproul summarizes the reductio ad absurdum implied here: “We cannot believe the Bible concerning earthly things, but we stake our lives on what it says concerning heavenly things. That approach was totally abrogated by our Lord (John 3:12).”6 It is for this reason that the Chicago Statement defined inerrancy in this way:

“We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood” (Article XII).

Defending Inerrancy

The defense of inerrancy consists first in positive demonstration and second in the overthrowing of objections. As a preliminary matter, one must clear the problems associated with one’s method. Even this will be criticized and thus even our method is in need of defense. One relevant criticism is that a doctrine such as inerrancy is necessarily deductive and dogmatic. In other words, the position is a commitment of faith. Even if one can articulate it in a rational way, and even if one can recall having arrived at it, once upon a time, on the basis of other more general evidence for the Bible’s divine inspiration—still the idea of this book containing no errors is a broader commitment. Furthermore, such an idea cannot possibly be tested to its fullest extent in the course of one human lifetime. Therefore, the defense of inerrancy must always begin with a premise that excludes the possibility of error. No amount of induction can be allowed to count as evidence to the contrary. 

How can we respond to this? 

First, this objection is based on a naive understanding of a “pure induction” typical of the early modern period but which has been dismantled even among philosophers of science in the twentieth century.7 Second, it is not true in any event. That is, the best expressions of inerrancy are a hybrid of deduction and induction often called “retroduction.” Paul Feinberg explains,

“A paradigm, or conceptual model, is formulated through an informed and creative thinking process, generally involving the data to be explained, and is then brought back, adduced, or tested against the data for ‘fit,’ or accuracy.”8

For how this can translate from scientific paradigms to theological doctrines like inerrancy, he then cites Geisler’s model which “proceeds inductively to premises about the inspiration of the Bible guaranteeing that what it teaches is true and about the fact that the Bible teaches historical, factual material. From these premises one deduces that the Scripture is without error in matters of history and so on.”9

Another preliminary sort of objection is to rule out inerrancy as a matter of logical possibility given its human authors. This discussion is a hybrid of topics: namely, of inspiration and inerrancy. If we recall the ideas of concursive operation and causal analysis, we already possess the categories required for our answer. But what is the essence of the objection? It is simply that human authors do not merely introduce the possibility of error, but the inevitability.

The maxim, “To err is human,” comes to mean “To be human is to err.” But this confusion immediately turns in on itself, undermining its own credentials. We must ask the source, “Are you human?” Now if our critic actually means to say that all human statements are erring statements, then that statement is an erring statement (being made by a mere human). On the other hand, if it means that only some (or even most) statements are erring statements, then it gives us no help whatsoever in this discussion.

The Chicago Statement, Article IX is instructive here: 

“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.”

When we take the step from preliminary matters to the majority of defense, we do have to introduce a little bit of logic in order to make a study of such a topic. 

One of the most unnoticed but treasured of all fallacies is called “proof by a lack of evidence,” which in simple terms means that a thing is seen to be false because it has failed to satisfy some threshold of high degrees of probability. This already conflates proof and evidence (Strike 1), but it also begs the question as to whether or not that threshold is arbitrary (Strike 2). What follows from that conflation—i.e., “proof” equals “evidence”—is a demand to demonstrate soundness as if it were the same thing as negating invalidity. In other words [says the critic], you must show me what else (B, C, D) this text, or these texts, mean, or else this text (A) contradicts some other text or some other indubitable body of knowledge (~A). But the opposite of invalid is valid, not sound (Strike 3). In all of this, logic as a whole is really being conflated with some accepted body of knowledge in history or the other sciences. 

Another key principle is that the burden of proof always begins with the critic. This is not simply a principle having to do with this subject. It is a standard rule in literary interpretation, historical accounts, and, most famously, courts of law: i.e., “innocent until proven guilty.” All the more so does this principle prove reasonable as evidence accumulates for the trustworthiness of the speaker: e. g. the consistency of the sum of his propositions and cogency of his claims to soundness.

There are even two fallacies that I had to make up a name for. At least, as far as I can tell, they had never been coined. These two I call the fallacy of precisionism and the fallacy of exhaustivism. They have legendary status in the halls of pop-criticism of the Bible. 

First, let it be said that inerrancy does not imply wooden precision. Frame sets us up to understand what I have in mind by this first fallacy: 

“Now precision and truth are not synonyms, though they overlap in meaning. A certain amount of precision is often required for truth, but that amount varies from one context to another … But outside of science and mathematics, truth and precision are often much more distinct.” 

He then uses examples of asking someone their age and how big a book is, as distinguished from the sum of 6 + 5. He concludes, “Indeed, when someone gives excess information in an attempt to be more precise, he actually frustrates the process of communication, hindering rather than communicating truth. He buries his real age under a torrent of irrelevant words.”10 When the critic demands that a “truth” in the Bible would be true only if it told us “precisely” the unit measurement of x piece of information that the critic is interested in, this is the fallacy of precisionism. In this same context, Frame reminds us that “propositional language makes claims on its hearers,” so that it might be better to define inerrancy as “that the Bible makes good on its claims.”11

Second, there are many demands that a biblical passage answer this or that question. There is a suspicion that the biblical authors have much to hide, or that they have “failed to reckon” with this or that fact that “we now know.” In truth, this thing that I am calling the “fallacy of exhaustivism” is an application of the whole-to-part fallacy to the question of biblical truth. Modernists are quick to assume that for the Bible to speak truly about the physical universe, it must give us a full picture of what our scientific curiosity would like to have resolved. If it “fails” that test, we suspect it is “less than true.” The Bible does not tell us everything we would like to know about angels either, but there is no modern exaltation of angels. Hence moderns never bother to apply the same standard between the angelic and the scientific. Schaeffer explains: 

“The Bible is not a scientific textbook in the sense that science is not its central theme, and we do not have a comprehensive statement about the cosmos.”12

However, he goes on to argue—and he uses the above parallel to angels, incidentally—there is a great difference between saying that the Bible speaks truly or else exhaustively about the same subject matter. If exhaustive knowledge were required about a thing in order to have any true knowledge about that thing, well then every single claim to knowledge in finite modes of communication would fail by that standard. Incidentally, that includes all of the premises behind the objection. 

On the basis of my own experience listening to criticisms that people bring against the Bible, I have organized these into six basic categories of alleged errors, namely:

(1) of textual variants and translations

(2) of moral repugnance

(3) of scientific primitivism

(4) of improbability

(5) of contradiction

(6) of interpretive license. 

One frequent example that does not seem to fit into any of these categories is the difficulty some have with speech of the devil. If (1) the Bible only utters truth—and if Satan only utters lies—and if (2) the Bible’s speech includes Satan’s speech, then this seems to contradict. But this is a very simple misunderstanding to correct. Remembering that the Bible uses various literary genres, just like any other book, the records of Satan’s speech are not didactic nor prophetic nor law. They are narratives of his speech. They are telling us the truth about what that arch-liar said. And actually the very objection is self-defeating. If we are at all able to tell a lie when we see one, then our minds and speech are able to replicate or represent that lie. Whenever we do so, without exception, we are telling the truth about a lie that was told. So it is with the Bible’s truth about the devil’s lies.

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1. Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1984),

2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:152.

3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:163.

4. John Frame, Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2013), 597.

5. G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 184-94; Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1: God, Authority, and Salvation (New York: HarperOne, 1982), 67-70.

6. R. C. Sproul, Scripture Alone, (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2005), 35.

7. cf. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003; fp. 1924); Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2003; fp. 1935); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; fp. 1964); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; fp. 1958); The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; fp. 1966).

8. Paul D. Feinberg, in Geisler, ed., Inerrancy, 273.

9. Feinberg, in Geisler, ed., Inerrancy, 274.

10. Frame, Systematic Theology, 599; cf. The Doctrine of the Word of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2013), 171, 72

11. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 173, 74.

12. Schaeffer, No Final Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1976), 23.