What is biblical inerrancy?

To put it simply, biblical inerrancy is the idea that the Bible is without error. To get a better grasp of this belief, one can read the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, written at the 1978 International Summit Conference and sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. (I've attached a link to the statement in the external link of this chapter.)

People who support biblical inerrancy believe that God inspired Holy Scripture, but also that He worked through the biblical writers so that everything they wrote down was as infallible as God Himself. They believe that Holy Scripture is without error about everything, from creation to the Great Flood, from its teachings to its commandments, and from history to science. For those who believe in biblical inerrancy, one flaw in the Bible means that none of it can be true. They consider the Bible to be the literal word of God, so if one sentence is wrong, then God is a liar who cannot be trusted.

A large minority of self-identified Christians believe in the concept of biblical inerrancy. In 2014, a Pew Research study found that 39% of US Christians believed that the Bible is the Word of God and should be interpreted literally. That same year, a separate Gallup poll found the percentage of US Christians who believed in biblical inerrancy to be much lower at 28%, one percent above the all-time low of 27% in 2001 and 2009.

Another large minority Christians believe that the Bible is God-inspired but should not be interpreted literally. In 2014, this group was at 47% according to the Gallup poll and 36% according to the Pew Research Center.

On the other hand, the position against biblical inerrancy is perfectly summed up in the Presbyterian Confession of 1967:

❝The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God's work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken His word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that He will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture.❞

Christians who are against biblical inerrancy believe that even though God influenced Scripture, we have to account for the medium with which He spoke to us. Only God can be perfect, and so even His Word here on Earth, since it was written down by man, cannot be perfect.

However, this does not mean that Christians cannot trust what the Bible says. Just because a fifty-page article contains an untrue statement does not mean that the rest of the fifty pages are automatically false. Likewise, just because a mother is sometimes in wrong in how she teaches her child, it does not mean that she is lying when she says to look both ways before crossing the street. Although a mother sometimes gets it wrong, overall, she is trustworthy and worth looking to for advice.

The same goes for the Bible. Those who reject the idea of biblical inerrancy believe that the Bible doesn't have to be inerrant to be trustworthy, and that things such as homosexuality, slavery, and the subordination of women in the Bible should be reevaluated in light of what we know about morality, human psychology, and science today. It does not mean that they pick and choose their way through the Bible, throwing away everything that doesn't fit their worldview. Nor are they ignoring the passages that bother them. Instead, they study everything in the Bible in depth, even the "ugly" stuff. They do in-depth research about the origins of the writings, the plausible authors, and the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They delve deep into the history of the time period, the neighboring peoples and religions, and the other writings of the time. They believe that the Bible speaks a deep Truth, but that it doesn't have to be perfect to do this.