Are There Errors in the Bible? Examining the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

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Are there errors in the Bible? Well, that's one of the most important things we could ever ask ourselves, because as Christians, we base our faith on what the

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Bible says. And so if it is, as many people suggest, riddled with errors and filled with inaccuracies, then that tends to be a big problem when we say we're holding to the truth and we don't know what the truth is.

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So today we're going to talk about the subject of inerrancy, we're going to talk about the subject of the

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Bible's authority, and we're going to talk about a document that came out in the 70s called the

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Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. So stay with us.

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Your Calvinist Podcast begins right now. And welcome back to Your Calvinist Podcast.

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My name is Keith Foskey, and I am your Calvinist. I'm thankful to have you on the show with me today to discuss this very important subject.

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But before we do, I want to just remind you of a few important things. Number one, this podcast is a ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church.

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So if you're in the Jacksonville area, come visit us at Sovereign Grace, and you can find out more about us at sgfcjax .org.

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Also I'm going to be at the Dangerous Friends Conference, which is being promoted by the

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Friday Night Live show, which is where my wife and I read your questions and answer your questions on a live program on Friday night, you can go to KeithFoskey .com

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and leave your questions there. Okay. So with that, we have some sponsors we want to mention real quick, and then we'll get to the program.

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Now let's get back to the podcast. Often in evangelical churches, we will hear three particular phrases that regard the

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Bible. We hear people say the Bible is inspired, that the Bible is inerrant, and that the

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Bible is infallible. We'll hear those three phrases. Inspired means that it comes from God.

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This is taken from a text in 2 Timothy that says all scripture is given by inspiration of God.

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It's the Greek word theopneustos, which means it's God -breathed. So that says this is where scripture comes from.

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It's inspired by God. Inerrant means it does not err. And the reason why that's believed is because God himself has superintended it to keep it from error.

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The Bible says that holy men spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, that God was superintending these things.

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And that's where scripture comes from. And then we also have the third word, which is infallible.

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Now infallible and errant are similar, but different. Inerrant means it does not err, but infallibility means it cannot err, because it derives from the idea of where it's authority, where it comes from.

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It comes from God. And because God does not lie, because God does not fail, the Bible itself, because it is

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God's word, is infallible. So those three words, you'll hear people say the Bible's the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God.

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But then a question immediately arises when people hear that and they begin to think through the implications of that statement.

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The question is, well, which Bible? Because there isn't just one translation of the

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Bible. There isn't just one Bible. Many of you know there's the, in English, there's the

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King James, the New King James, the New International Version, the New American Standard Bible, the English Standard Bible.

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Now there's the Legacy Standard Bible, and there's tons of other ones in between. Those are just a few.

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And the question is, well, are all the translations without error? What about paraphrases that really put it into an individual's own words, like the

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Message Bible or what used to be called the Living Bible? And then what about verses that are in one translation but are not in another translation?

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For instance, go check out John 5, 4. Look at it in the King James and then look for it in the

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NIV. Right? It's not there. And so is it supposed to be there?

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Is it not supposed to be there? And that leads to the claim of some to hold up one translation above others and say, this is the translation that's without error.

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This is the one that we should hold to. This is the inspired, inerrant, infallible

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Word of God. It's this particular translation. Normally, those would be people who hold to the King James.

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But the King James is in English. What about the underlying text? The Bible wasn't written in English.

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The Bible was written in Hebrew in the Old Testament, a little bit of Aramaic, but mostly

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Hebrew, and then Greek in the New Testament. Also, there's a little bit of Aramaic in there, a few words here and there, but mostly

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Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New Testament. And both have a dramatically different textual history.

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For the Old Testament, we have the Masoretic text, which was a preserved text within the

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Jewish community. And we have the Greek Septuagint, which was a Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was translated prior to the time of Christ.

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And it gives us an ancient witness to the content of the Old Testament. There's also the discovery of the

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Dead Sea Scrolls, which gives us another ancient witness to the text of the Old Testament, showing remarkable preservation, by the way.

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There's a lot of interesting things that you can learn when you look at the history of those texts.

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But that's all the Old Testament. Then you have the New Testament. And in the New Testament, we have different what are called manuscripts, family lines of manuscripts, sometimes identified as the

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Byzantine and the Alexandrian. And then there's the Western text and the Caesarian text. It's based primarily on where these texts were produced and where the transmission lines went.

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And there's ongoing debate right now about the rigid categorization of those texts, whether or not they should be really categorized that way or if it's really a more fluid thing than perhaps was originally thought.

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So these are the conversations that you get into when you start talking about textual transmission and textual history.

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And within these lines of transmission, there is the introduction of something called textual variation or, simply put, textual variance.

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These are mostly small and often insignificant differences that arise in the manuscripts.

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And many of them are unintentional. They result from copyist errors, mistakes in what's being seen, what's being copied.

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Sometimes lines are missing. Sometimes there will be misspellings of words. Sometimes there'll be just simply unintentional actions on the part of a scribe.

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But then there are other variants, which seem to be maybe intentional attempts at harmonizing certain texts.

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We see this, for instance, in the account of Jesus giving the model prayer, where we have the

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Matthew account and the Luke account, and there seems to be an attempt there to harmonize those two. So we end up with these introductions of these variants, and the vast majority of these variants are either nonviable or they are irrelevant.

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Nonviable means there's ample evidence to prove they're not really even potentially part of the original.

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And then irrelevant means they don't change anything. So for instance, if it says the Lord Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ the

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Lord, that word order is a variant, but it's a meaningless variant. It doesn't change the meaning of the text.

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There's something called the movable new, which is like in English, we will say a car, but we'll say an apple.

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Well, that's where we add the N for the phonetic sound, because a apple sounds weird.

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So we'll say an apple rather than a car. An car doesn't sound right. So we'll say a car, an apple, but doesn't change the meaning.

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Well, that same thing exists in Greek. It's called the movable new, and that introduces a variant.

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So again, a lot of these variants are just plain meaningless, but there are meaningful variants.

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There are ones that are not irrelevant. There are ones that are viable and they have to be studied to discern what is to be recognized as the original and what is not.

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And anytime variants are discussed, we have the immediate insinuation that the entire

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Bible is corrupted. Well, because these variations exist within the manuscript tradition, and remember the

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New Testament is the most widely attested document of antiquity, meaning it has more copies than any other work of antiquity by far.

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I mean, it's like it's a blowout. We have way more manuscripts than any other document of antiquity.

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But because of that, because the more documents you have, the more variations you have. If you only had one copy of, let's say, the

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Gospel of Matthew, if there was only one copy in the world of the ancient manuscript, then there wouldn't be any variations because there's no variations if there's just one, right?

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But because there are so many, that introduces more variations. And when these variations are discussed, again, a lot of times people insinuate that that means the text itself is corrupted.

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Well, in fact, I'll give you a few quotes here. The 8th of Mormonism's 13 Articles of Faith found at the end of the

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Pearl of Great Price says, quote, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly.

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And then it goes on, the LDS Church teaches that as the Bible has been transmitted over the centuries, it has, quote, suffered the loss of many plain and precious parts.

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So if you ask a Mormon, is the Bible true, they'll say yes, but it's either not been translated correctly or it has suffered the loss of plain and precious parts.

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And then the Muslim view, the Islamic view of the Christian Bible, which Christians hold to be revelations from God, is based on the belief that the

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Quran says that parts of the law, but they believe that some of it has been distorted or corrupted and that a lot of the text has been added, which was not part of the original revelation.

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I remember having a conversation very recently with a Muslim who visited our church. He didn't visit to worship with us.

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He just came and sat in church with us. And afterwards, we wanted to have a conversation with me.

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We ended up talking for two hours. And during that conversation, he specifically said that he didn't believe that David had sinned with Bathsheba.

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He believed that that was a corruption of the text because he didn't believe that David, a righteous man, would do that unrighteous thing, that he didn't believe that was within the capacity of God's chosen righteous man.

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And so he just denied it straight out. That's not what David did. And so right there, he's saying that's a corrupted part of the text.

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That's essentially what he did say. And I have this quote from a website.

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This is a skeptic's website. It says, So this is the way the

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Bible is seen by other religions and by many skeptics and those who would hold to maybe an atheistic or agnostic position.

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They just say the Bible is not trustworthy. So what do we do?

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How do we respond to this knowing that the textual variations again, again, exist?

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What do we do? Well, some suggest that we simply agree on one translation, usually the

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King James, and we say that's the one, that's the perfect one. No other one is perfect, but this one's perfect.

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So if we want to have a standard, this is the standard. I remember one man who debated James White on the subject of the

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King James. He said, I like having a standard and this is my standard. And he held up his King James Bible.

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And others would say, well, we don't need to necessarily hold the English translation as the standard, but we can hold the underlying

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Greek manuscript, which underlies that translation. And they would hold to something called the Textus Receptus, and they would say that's the standard.

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So the standard becomes not the English translation, but the Greek upon which that English translation is based.

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And others would say that the original writings, this is more where I would be, the original writings are what are inspired and that all of the copies that came after, all of the translations which came out of those copies are faithful representations, which have experienced miraculous preservation, but they still include variation, which have to be studied and have to be considered when determining what the original said.

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So in that view, we don't say that the King James is the inspired and inerrant

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Word of God and neither the NIV or the NASB, but we say the original autographs are inspired by God and have been preserved through the centuries and giving us the

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Word of God, which we possess today, which we admit at this point includes textual variation that have to be studied.

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But overall, we can say this is the preserved Word of God, and this is the part where a lot of people take great issue, and they say, well, you can't say it's preserved if it has these textual variations.

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But that's why we are going to talk about what we're going to discuss today, and that is the

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Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. That's really why

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I wanted to make this video, because I think a lot of people have never even heard of the

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Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but this particular document made a huge impact in the evangelical church in the 70s and then, of course, later in defining what the church means when the church says that we believe the

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Bible is inerrant. Because again, we're saying we believe it's inerrant, infallible, but that has some qualifications, and we want to make sure we understand those qualifications.

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We don't want to overstate our case, but we also don't want to understate our case. We want to speak truth, and so this document, this statement was published for the purpose of clarifying what we mean when we say we believe the

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Bible is inerrant and infallible. Just a few thoughts. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was produced at an international summit conference of evangelical leaders held at the

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Hyatt Regency O 'Hare in Chicago in the fall of 1978. This congress was sponsored by the

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International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement was signed by nearly 300 noted evangelical scholars, including men like James Montgomery Boyce, Norman Geisler, John Gerstner, J .I.

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Packer, Francis Schaeffer, and R .C. Sproul. These are probably names many of you are very familiar with.

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And why does this statement exist? Why did they even do this? Well, the Chicago Statement exists as a response to the growing theological liberalism and the debates that were happening in the 20th century regarding the authority and the reliability of the

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Bible. It was meant to address the changes from liberal theological perspectives that question the inspiration and reliability of the

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Scripture, and it was also meant to articulate what was meant when we talked about inerrancy and we distinguished it from common misconceptions and overstatements.

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That's what this was for. And my purpose today is I want to walk through this document with you.

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I want to read certain portions to you. I can't read all of it to you because it is lengthy.

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It's 11 pages, and if I did that, we'd just be sitting here reading. And the great thing is you can go get this yourself.

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Just type in to a Google search, Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, it'll pull up the same one

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I did. In fact, I'll pull it up on the screen now. It'll pull this up. You'll be able to see it. You'll be able to read right through it, just like we're going to do here.

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And it's interesting because this is actually a photocopy of what looks like something that was typed on a typewriter, which makes sense because of when it was written.

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It has the letterhead here, International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, even has the phone number.

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I wonder if that still works. I know you can't see it on the screen. There it is. I don't know if anybody wants to try to give that number a call.

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But the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and it includes the preface, which is then followed by a short statement, which is identifying what the document itself says, and then that has 19 articles of affirmation and denial.

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We're going to read through some of those. And then after this, there is an exposition of the idea of what the doctrine of inerrancy must be.

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It's essentially an exposition of the doctrine and how it relates to what the scripture says of itself and of Christ.

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And then finally, toward the bottom, it answers some of the common questions, such as skepticism and criticism, transmission and translation, inerrancy and authority.

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And then it ends right there with, we affirm that what scripture says, God says, may he be glorified.

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Amen and amen. All right. So that is, again, the 11th page is basically just a few sentences.

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So we're going to go back up to the beginning. We're going to walk through a few portions of this document.

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And again, my purpose in this is really, I wanted to introduce this to you.

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Also introduce to anyone in my audience who's not familiar with textual criticism or the idea of textual variation, wanted to just sort of help you maybe be introduced to this idea.

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Also ask you if you have any questions on this subject that you want me to address further, like maybe a specific verse or something, you can send those questions in for Friday Night Live, or maybe something

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I could do another podcast about. So this is, again, all this is just my desire to want to provide you with good, helpful, useful information.

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So going back to the document here, again, it's made up of primarily a preface, a short statement, 19 articles, and then the few things at the end.

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And I want to read through a little bit of the preface here. I'll have it up on the screen for you.

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It begins by saying this, the authority of scripture is a key issue for the Christian church in this and every age.

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Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying

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God's written word. To stray from scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our master.

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Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority.

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The following statement affirms this inerrancy of scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial.

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We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the

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Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own word, which marks true Christian faith.

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We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow

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Christians and misunderstanding of this doctrine in the world at large. Now, I wanted to read that part because it makes me think of today.

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The liberalism that crept in, particularly after the

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Enlightenment period and in the early part of the 20th century, and it infected almost all denominations.

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Almost every denomination has a liberal wing, right? Those who sort of went the liberal direction.

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And one of the first things that is done in that is sort of a re -understanding of the

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Bible and what it says. Is the Bible true? When the Bible talks about miracles, do we accept them as miraculous or do we see them as just parabolic or hyperbolic or just stories?

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Are they mythological? Are they actually true? And these are the type of things that the issue of inerrancy deals with because when the

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Bible says Jesus walked on water, is that true or is it not? So it's not just textual variation that the issue has to deal with, and that is an important issue, but it's also the question of, okay, all four

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Gospels say Jesus rose from the dead. Many of the epistles reference the resurrection of Jesus. Is the resurrection of Jesus true?

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The Bible says it's true, and do we stand upon the authority of Scripture or do we not?

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This is interesting because someone like maybe a modern preacher example might be someone like Andy Stanley, who seems to be becoming ever increasingly willing to jettison portions of the

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Scripture to say, well, you don't really have to believe that. We've all probably heard of his unhitching from the

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Old Testament. You don't really have to believe those things. The only thing you really have to believe is the resurrection of Jesus.

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And then somebody like me, I step back and I say, okay, if you're telling me all I have to do is believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but where do

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I get that information? I get that information from scripture. So if I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, why would

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I not believe in the other things? Why would I not believe in the other miracles? Why would I not believe in the Old Testament if I believe in the

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New Testament? The New Testament authors believed in the Old Testament. Many of the New Testament authors cite the

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Old Testament. It's a foredrawn conclusion that they believe what the

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Old Testament says. And so it comes down to an issue of truthfulness. Is the Bible true?

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Does what it says about itself actually represent what is the truth?

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And that's the question, and that's how this comes up. And so we're in a different place than we were in the 70s.

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We're in a place now where, in so much of the world, because of the introduction of the

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Internet and because of YouTube and because of podcasts like this, people have more information than really they ever have in regard to subjects like these.

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And so you have people who are coming out making all kinds of bold claims about the tenacity of the

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Scripture, about the veracity of Scripture, about its truthfulness and about its historical transmission, and the idea that there were stories that were introduced from other ancient

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Near Eastern cultures and all of these things. This is what gave rise to the recent blow -up of Wesley Hough.

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And I said on my golf cart ride last week, I'm excited about seeing him rise to a position where he's actually talking about things like textual variance, and he's talking about these things in the public square, because these are questions that are out there people have and we need to be able to address them.

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And again, it's nothing new. It's been, you know, in the 70s they were dealing with this. They were trying to make a clear statement to answer the questions that were being asked.

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And somebody like Wesley Hough is coming along. You know, he's answering the objections from those who are making false claims.

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He's going on to public platforms like Joe Rogan and making clear statements about the truth.

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So we should be thankful for that. I'm thankful for what he's doing, and I hope that by God's grace people will hear that and see that the

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Bible is unique historically. It is trustworthy, even in the light of textual variation, things like that.

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What it says is trustworthy. We can believe that it is the truth. And so that's what this document is trying to get across.

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It goes on to talk a little bit more about the document itself, but I'm going to jump down here to this short statement.

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It's only five statements, but this is a summary of what they are trying to get across.

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Number one, God who is himself truth and speaks truth only has inspired

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Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge.

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Holy Scripture is God's witness to himself. Again, that first one speaks of what the

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Bible is. It is God's witness to himself, and he himself is truth.

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And so if the Bible is God's witness to the truth, then it is true. Holy Scripture then, number two,

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Holy Scripture being God's own word written by men prepared and superintended by his Holy Spirit is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches.

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It is to be believed as God's instruction in all that it affirms, obeyed as God's command and all that it requires, embraced as God's pledge and all that it promises.

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It is God's word. That is the point. Number three, the Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine author, both authenticates it to us by his inward witness and opens our mind to understand its meaning.

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Now that inward witness is sometimes misunderstood. Sometimes people have a hard time understanding the idea behind that.

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But this is sometimes what we call the self -authentication of Scripture. When it is read, it is recognized as being unique.

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It's recognized as being different, especially by those, by believers. I just noticed something.

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I may, when I was reading the first part, I don't think I had it on the screen. So I do apologize. I'm working off of two screens here.

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So please bear with me. All right. So moving on now to number four, being holy and verbally

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God -given, Scripture is without error or fault in all of its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts and 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.

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So again, it's holy and verbally God -given and without error or fault in all of its teaching.

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The idea of being verbally God -given is God didn't just inspire the ideas of Scripture.

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God didn't just inspire the authors with good thoughts that they wrote down in their own words, but the words themselves are inspired of God.

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The words, what we call verbal and plenary inspiration, that all of the words are

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God's words. Not one jot or tittle will pass away from the law, right? Because all of them are from God.

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And that's the idea here. And finally, number five, 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

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Bible's own. And such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the church.

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Very important, that last phrase. When we disregard the truth, we bring serious loss to both an individual and the church.

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I remember one time I had a man in our church who was very upset with some of my preaching.

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He was just unhappy in general with some things that were going on, so he asked me for a meeting at my home. He came to my home, and we were sitting on my couch, we were talking, and I said something about the

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Bible. And he said, well, I don't believe the whole Bible is true.

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And I stopped and I said, okay. I said, you don't believe the whole Bible is true? And he said, no,

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I think some of it's wrong. And I said, okay. I said, well, number one, I said, we're probably not the church for you because our church emphatically states that we believe the whole

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Bible is true. Like we believe in the inspired and infallible Word of God. We believe the whole

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Bible is true. Because he wasn't talking about textual variants and things like that. He was talking about like certain, they're just stories in the

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Bible that just aren't true. I don't believe in the, I don't believe Jonah was in the belly of a fish.

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I don't believe Jesus walked on water. That's the kind of stuff he was referring to for the context of the conversation. And I said, really,

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I mean, if that's where you're at, you don't believe the whole Bible is true, then we're probably not the church for you, right?

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I mean, just is what it is. Later in that same conversation though, because he kept wanting to talk, he challenged me on a doctrinal point and wanted to argue about something

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I had said in a sermon. And I said, well, I can't really argue that with you.

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And he said, well, why not? I said, well, you already told me just a few minutes ago, the whole

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Bible isn't true. I said, so if I pull out my Bible and I show you that what I said is in accord with the

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Bible, all you then have to say is, well, I don't believe that. So we're at an impasse.

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If you're going to look at the Bible and I'm going to show you what's in the Bible and you're going to say, well, I don't believe that's true. Where do we go from there?

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Right? I mean, the conversation's over. You've put yourself in a position where you're saying,

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I don't believe the whole Bible. So there you go. So that's where, going back to this part where it says it brings serious loss to both the individual and the church.

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When we deny the truth of the scripture, we're putting ourself in a difficult situation because now we don't have a standard, we don't have anything to stand on, we don't have any truth to hold to.

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We don't have anything to discuss because now it's just one man's opinion over another.

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All right. So with that in mind, I want to continue to move through the articles. Now again, there's 19 articles.

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I don't want to read every one of them, but we're going to read a few of them. The first one, of course, says we affirm, let me go back down so you can see it.

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We affirm that the holy scriptures are to be received as the authoritative word of God.

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We deny. I like this, by the way, this format, because it not only says what we believe, but what we don't believe, like we affirm this, but we also deny this because there are certain people who would say, well, yeah,

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I affirm that, but I don't deny this other thing, which would deny the affirmation.

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So the affirmation and the denial together makes a more comprehensive statement.

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So it says we affirm the holy scriptures are to be received as the authoritative word of God. We deny that the scriptures receive their authority from the church tradition or any other human source.

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This is huge right now because one of the arguments that's happening in broader evangelicalism as there's been sort of a shift, especially among certain demographics, young men particularly have been shifting towards looking at Rome and looking at Eastern Orthodoxy, which has a lot of roots and a lot of history, and it's become appealing.

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And one of the arguments that you'll hear, and I've heard people like Trent Horn say things like this, say, well, if you believe the

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Bible, then you have to believe in the Catholic church because the Catholic church gave you the Bible. That's not true.

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That is not the way that history works. That's not what we base the authority of scripture on, is that the church gives it its authority.

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And I talked about this a little bit on my golf cart ride, and I've taught this in my on how we got the

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Bible. Happy to link that for anyone who would like to watch it. It's an eight -part series.

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It's over 10 hours of teaching, and it deals with the subject of how the

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Bible came to be. But ultimately, when we talk about the participation of the church, the church does not give the scripture its authority, but the church as a whole recognizes the authority that is inherent in the text.

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And as God has given his word through his apostles and prophets, that word is then received by the community of faith, recognizing that it is, in fact, the word of God.

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Michael Kruger's book on the canon is great about this. He talks about how there, and I talked about this on the golf cart ride, there's the canon that is the ontological canon that existed as soon as it was written.

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There was the functional canon that within the first few hundred years of the church, not every church in every area had every book of the

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Bible. And so there was debate and questions about, well, what about the Epistle of Barnabas? What about this book here?

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What about that book there? But ultimately, there came a consensus over what books were recognized to be the written word of God, and we hold those today as the

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New Testament books. Again, the Old Testament books were another debate because you had the question of whether or not the

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Apocrypha was meant to be included. This again is something that is a whole other show we could do to discuss why most

37:39

Protestants do not accept the Apocrypha, because we don't believe that the Jews accepted the Apocrypha as Scripture.

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It's fine to look at them historically, to look at them as having value for the time and purpose for which they're written, but they were not held to be

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God's word. And so again, where does the authority come from for Scripture?

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It comes from God himself. And the question of canon is more of a theological question than it is a historical or practical question.

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Why do I say that? Well, when we think of canon, we think of God knows what he wrote, and he wants his people to know what he wrote.

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So he doesn't inspire a list. He doesn't give us an inspired list to look at, but what he does is providentially he brings his people to a recognition that this is what

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I've written. This is what I've written. And interestingly enough, that when we look at the 39 books of the

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Old Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament, we say these are agreed on throughout

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Christendom. There are books that are not agreed on. There's the Deuterocanonical books, the Apocryphal books. Those are not agreed on.

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But these are agreed on. Nobody's wanting to throw these out, right? We're agreeing these are in. And so we have recognized these, but not given them authority, simply recognize the authority that God providentially has imbibed them with.

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All right. So again, we need to move more quickly here because I do want to keep this to a reasonable time.

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Looking again at number two, we affirm that the scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience and that the authority of the church is subordinate to that of scripture.

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We deny that church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible. That's very important.

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There are not other authorities in the church that are equal to scripture.

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Scripture is the one authority that is overall. And that's what this is saying.

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Article three, we affirm that the written word in its entirety is revelation given by God.

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We deny that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation or only becomes relevant revelation in encounter.

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It depends on the responses of men for its validity. That's an issue regarding how people would say, well, the

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Bible is a word of God when I receive it, or the Bible is a word of God when it becomes

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God's word to me. No, it's God's word regardless of whether it's received by an individual.

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Moving along, I want to get to article number six begins to deal with the issue of its parts.

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We affirm that the whole of scripture and all of its parts down to the very words of the original, notice it mentions the original.

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That's key. We're given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of scripture can be rightly affirmed of the whole without the parts or of some parts, but not the whole.

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That's where some would say, well, I believe this book, but not that book. I believe this part of this book, but not this part of this book. It's all inspired by God in its original writing.

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And it talks about here, the human writers. Moving on,

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I want to get to the part, because there's a section in here about the issue of textual variance, but I don't want to read that before I look at what it says in the articles here.

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Thank you. Okay. Article 10, we affirm, let me get down here where you can actually read it with me.

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Article 10. 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.

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We further affirm that copies and translations of scripture are the word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

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This part is huge because this answers the question that I raised earlier when we asked the question of what about textual variance?

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That's what they're attempting to address here. Notice the denial.

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We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs.

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We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant. That is huge, and here's why.

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There are those who would say that because we don't have the original autographs, that's what autograph means.

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It means the original. Because we don't have the autographs, we can't know for sure what they said.

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Well, we can construct what they said based upon the vast amount of available manuscripts that we have, and there have been many studies done to show that this is true, that we can take the vast amount of biblical manuscripts that we have, and we can together look at those and come to a conclusion about what the original said.

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I remember there was a ... I think it was a radio show with Bart Ehrman where he made the statement that ...

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or the guy doing the radio show made the statement, well, we really don't know what the original ... we don't have any idea what the original's writings actually said, and Ehrman was like, no, no, we do.

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We know what they said because we can reconstruct what they said.

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There's very little variation to say, well, we don't know about this part or this part, but for the most part, we know exactly what it said.

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And so that has to be recognized here that that's what they're saying. We can ascertain from available manuscripts with great accuracy what the original said, and we affirm that copies and translations are the word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

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That's the answer to the question, what do we do with textual variation?

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And again, they deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs.

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People say, well, you don't have the original. No, but nothing that we need to believe as Christians is absent because we don't have the original autographs.

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And a lot of people ask the question at this point, they say, well, why? Why don't we have the original autographs? Why don't we have them?

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Why wouldn't God just preserve them? Why aren't they in a safe in the Vatican somewhere where we could just go look at them?

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I can't give you an answer as to why God would or would not do that. We know that he hasn't done that.

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So historically, there's a reason providentially he did not maintain the original for us to hold.

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And I tend to think it may have something to do with the behavior of men and how they look for things to worship other than God.

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And men do look for things to worship. I mean, just look at the ways that statues are treated in certain churches.

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People will bow down, kiss a statue. There was a picture yesterday on X of a guy holding a statue of Mary, and he was holding it like he was holding a lover.

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He was looking at it like he was looking at his – like honestly, like he was looking at a wife.

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I mean, he was looking with such love and adoration in his eyes and just – the protestia had a quote.

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It said, you know, find a man who looks at you like this priest looks at this statue of Mary. And so this – men are so given to – men are so given to looking for idols and things to worship.

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Imagine if an original copy of Paul's letter to the Philippians – it wouldn't even be the original copy.

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It would be the original. The autograph was somehow available. People would want to touch the edges of the paper to feel some kind of connection to God.

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And I don't think that was God's intention ever. All right. So obviously

47:23

I want to encourage you to read this entire document. I don't want to read the whole thing to you. It says so many good things, so many very important things.

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But the one I want to jump down to here, and this is why I'm moving very quickly now. Through the exposition,

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I encourage you to read that. But I want to go here to this portion where I'm going to begin to draw to a close, and that is the issue of skepticism and criticism and then transmission and translation.

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So let's look first at skepticism and criticism. Since the Renaissance, and more particularly since the

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Enlightenment, worldviews have been developed which involve skepticism about basic Christian tenets. Such are the agnosticism, which denies that God is knowable, the rationalism, which denies that he is incomprehensible, the idealism, which denies that he is transcendent, and the existentialism, which denies rationality in his relationships with us.

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When these un - and anti -biblical principles seep into men's theologies at presuppositional level, as today they frequently do, faithful interpretation of Holy Scripture becomes impossible.

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So this is the reason why I wanted to bring this up. This deals not only with the fact that the

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Bible is inspired, infallible, and errant, but also the issue of interpretation, because another issue that has really become a popular discussion is the idea that, well, the

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Bible's true, but we don't know what it says. We don't really understand it. And that's actually,

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I think, was the reaction to the rise in this argument of infallibility.

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Obviously, the Chicago Statement helped many churches identify what it meant when they said infallible.

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And almost every evangelical church will have some statement on infallibility on their website or in their statement of faith.

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So the response became, well, sure, the Bible's true, but we don't know what it says. I mean, we can't really understand it.

49:24

Who really knows? I mean, there's a thousand different interpretations. I remember one time I was talking to my uncle about the

49:30

Bible, and he compared it to a manual. He was a baseball coach, and he compared it to a manual that they use for coaching baseball.

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And he says, you know, I can read that manual, and I can get this out of it, and my other coach can read the manual, and he gets this out of it.

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And even if we don't disagree, we're both getting what we need out of it. And that's the way I see the Bible. I see the Bible as this man gets this out of it, this man gets that out of it.

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But it really doesn't – it isn't really clear. That was the idea. It really wasn't clear. You know, you're a

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Baptist, so you get this, and a Presbyterian's going to get this. And so that was the argument. It's just not clear. It's just not clear.

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Well, what's being said here is that that idea really comes from a lot of the philosophies that have arisen in the last 150 to 200 years, and a lot of it's based on the idea that we just can't know the truth.

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Sort of going back to the whole pilot, you know, what is truth, right? Who really knows the truth? And so this here is saying such skepticism makes interpretation impossible.

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We have to believe not only that God wanted us to have His Word, but also wants us to know what it means, and isn't giving it to us in riddles and confusing statements.

50:55

But this is what we call the perspiscuity of Scripture. The Bible is clear enough that we can understand its basic teachings, and while yet it's still deep enough that it can be studied for a lifetime and not fully reach all of its depths.

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And so let's move real quickly to this transmission and translation. This is the part I'm going to draw to a close with this, and then say a few final words.

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Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired, and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission.

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I'm going to stop right there and say this. When it says textual criticism, there's two types.

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And I haven't said this yet, but I need to say it. There's higher criticism, which questions the content of Scripture in the sense that, well, did

51:55

Jesus really rise from the dead? Did he really do miracles? Did he really do this? Did he really do that? And then there's what we call biblical criticism, textual criticism, or sometimes referred to as lower criticism, and it addresses the actual text itself.

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What did the text say? It's not seeking to ascertain whether or not what it said is accurate.

52:14

We believe what it says is accurate and true. It's the question of what did the original say, and that's the difference.

52:20

And so men like John Dominic Crossom would question the stories and say these are parabolic or these are legendary or mythological.

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That's a different field of discipline than lower criticism, which is seeking only to determine what the original autograph said.

52:41

And it is a science, and that's what goes on to say. The verdict of this science, however, is that the

52:47

Hebrew and Greek text appear to be amazingly well -preserved, and I want to just keep reiterating that. The Bible is so well -preserved, it's on the level of miraculous.

52:58

So that we are amply justified in affirming with the Westminster Confession a singular providence of God in this matter, and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error -free.

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I'm going to say that again. The authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error -free.

53:27

That's an important statement. And it goes on to say, similarly, no translation is or can be perfect, and all translations are an additional step away from the autographa, which is the autographs.

53:41

Yet the verdict of linguistic science is that English -speaking Christians at least are exceedingly well -served in these days, with a host of excellent translations, and have no cause for hesitating to conclude that the true

53:52

Word of God is within their reach. Indeed, in view of the frequent repetition in Scripture of the main matters with which it deals, and also of the

54:00

Holy Spirit's constant witness to and through the Word, no serious translation of Holy Scripture will so destroy its meaning as to render it unable to make its reader, quote, wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

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That is really just, that part to me sings out. We can look at our translations, even as it's said, even the ones which are not the ones that we like the best, and we can say this still is a witness to God's Word.

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This is the truth, and I can hold to it. I think that this is such a helpful document.

54:39

It goes on, again, to say many more things, and I encourage you to read it completely and thoroughly if you have the opportunity, if you're wanting to study more on the subject of biblical inerrancy.

54:52

Look up the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. All right, guys, I hope that this show has been a benefit to you and a help to you on this subject.

55:02

If you have further questions or specific questions you want me to address about a specific text of the

55:08

Bible, please take the opportunity to go to KeithFoskey .com, send me an email, ask me the question, and I'll do my best to either send you an email back, answer your question on a live show, or if it's a question worthy of an entire podcast,

55:22

I'll do what I did today, and I'll open it up and look at it. So let me know if you like this lesson today by hitting the thumbs -up button, and if you didn't, hit the thumbs -down button twice.

55:34

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55:41

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