Biblical Inerrancy: Pt. 1: Introduction

I'm beginning a new study tonight on biblical inerrancy. That's just a copy of one of the original Geneva Bibles. Figured I'd throw that up there. This is the document that we're going to be using. It is available on PDF form, plus you can also buy it if you need it.

But we're gonna be using this. The document was put together by R .C. Sproul and Norman Geisler, which is interesting. One is a reformed theologian, the other is dispensational. But that just goes to show you how important this topic really is.

What Biblical Inerrancy Means and Why It Matters

So let me get right to it in our introduction. First, what is biblical inerrancy? That's the way we're gonna open this up. How you answer that question will affect your view of every major doctrine of scripture, okay?

Therefore, to call inerrancy an important doctrine is really an understatement. I've changed this all to white based on some comments I had. Is this easier to read with everything in white? Okay, just so that you understand now, when I'm quoting, it'll still be in white, but it'll be italics and quotations to help you know when I'm quoting from the book.

While it's so important, most Christians, while affirming the doctrine, would have trouble to articulate it clearly. And I've seen that in broad-based in churches. Do you believe in the inerrancy of scripture?

Yes. What does that mean? And people start to stutter and they have, or they just articulate something that is not what the doctrine is at all. So it's important. During the 20th century, the orthodox doctrine of inerrancy came under severe attack and that came under attack from several different fronts.

It wasn't just one particular view. You had the neo-orthodoxy who came in and liberalism came in, liberalism just denying outright the inerrancy of scripture, neo-orthodoxy defining it in a way that is foreign to what scripture says.

And then, of course, you have the charismatic churches who knows what they believe about inerrancy. In response to that situation, in 1978, a council was called to address this particular topic of biblical inerrancy.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and Its Historical Setting

So I'm going to give you just a little historical background. The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, ICBI, if you see me abbreviate it, met at the Hyatt Regency Hotel at O 'Hare Airport in Chicago in the fall of 1978.

Nearly 300 evangelical scholars from across denominational and geographical lines, this was from all over the world, and pretty much every major church had men who came to it and it was called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Okay? 246 of the scholars actually signed the document. Meeting over the course of that weekend, there were many sessions. The main document was put together by R .C. Sproul. He was the one who actually put pen to paper and then brought it out to the council where it was debated and things were changed.

Okay? And again, out of the, I think it was about 280, roughly around there, people, scholars who met, and you would recognize a lot of the names. I mean, these are people who are giants in their particular fields.

Besides Sproul and Geisner, I believe Greg Bonson was there, James Montgomery Boyce was there, and many, many others. This is from the book. This landmark document is considered to be the first systematically comprehensive, broadly based, scholarly creed-like statement on the inspiration and authority of Scripture in the history of the church.

Okay? That's interesting. That's not to say that there weren't councils that addressed canonicity and those other topics. They were, but something, they had never addressed this as broad-based as this council did.

All right? Now, this is, what you're gonna see now is the preface to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the CSBI. The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian church in this and every age.

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

Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of the Holy Scripture is essential for a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority. I just wanna show you that. Notice what it says. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scriptures is essential.

The wording is chosen very carefully. Essential, what does essential mean? Well, we've actually seen that word bandied around during the pandemic about who was an essential worker. That's not what we mean by essential.

Essential means that it is necessary for your faith to be genuine. Okay? If you don't have a proper view of the inerrancy of Scripture, you will go off in some sort of error one way or another, and it will jeopardize your faith.

Okay? This is still continuing with the preface to this statement. The following statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial.

We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit, and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own word, which marks the true Christian faith.

We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the faith of current lapses from the truth of our inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstandings of this doctrine in the world at large.

Notice, the statement affirms the inerrancy of Scripture afresh. I highlighted that for a particular reason. This council is not coming up with a new doctrine. This is a doctrine that has been held all the way back to biblical times.

What the prophets wrote in the Old Testament, it was accepted, it was received as Scripture. The New Testament times, the writings of the apostles were received as Scripture. So, and then every church council has reaffirmed this doctrine.

So what this statement is doing, they're not coming up with something new. What this statement, what this council did was come up and say, what is the historic teaching of the church according to the Scriptures on the subject of inerrancy?

So that's why it says it affirms the inerrancy of Scripture afresh. Making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. Notice, affirming the understanding, that means that you need to understand what the doctrine is.

That's why we're having these sessions on Wednesday night because we believe that it's essential to not only for church, for church to be responding in a biblical manner, but for individual Christian growth.

If you don't understand biblical inerrancy, it will affect your own progressive sanctification. Does that make sense? Again, notice how carefully they are highlighting the urgency and the necessity of this doctrine.

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 Christians. Ouch, look at that. In other words, it was within the church that we started to see in the 20th century that we started to see an erosion of this doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture.

Not only there, but misunderstandings of this doctrine in the world at large. There are a lot of people who are non-Christians, and when you talk to them, they kind of poo-poo you when you say that you believe in the inerrancy of Scripture because they don't understand what it says either.

Why? Because most churches are not articulating the inerrancy of Scripture in a biblical way. It's still in the preface. This statement consists of three parts. A summary statement, okay? Articles of affirmation and denial, and an accompanying exposition.

All right. How we're going to handle this class is tonight, I'm going to go through the short statement, which is only five points. Those five points, very short, concise, and it will sum up what the Orthodox Christian doctrine is of inerrancy.

Then there's articles of affirmation and denial, and I just love the way they do it. This is very typical R .C. Sproul. If you've followed R .C. Sproul's teaching, he loves to do this type of teaching.

And if you've noticed, this is something that I have kind of stolen from him. When you hear me teach a lot, I will go through, this is what we mean, this is what we don't mean. I just have found that to be so helpful in teaching the Scriptures.

All right. And then an accompanying exposition. So we're going to do the summary statement tonight, then we're going to start going through the affirmations and denials. And the accompanying exposition, we're not going to do that separately.

I've taken it and taken the parts that are germane to each particular article, and we'll discuss that during the affirmations and denials. Everybody follow how we're going to proceed? Okay. So if you're following along in the book, you're going to have to be able to jump back and forth.

All right. I think it's easier this way for our purposes. Okay. It has been prepared in the course of a three-day consultation in Chicago. Those who have signed the summary statement and articles wish to affirm their own conviction as to the inerrancy of Scripture and to encourage and challenge one another and all Christians to growing appreciation and understanding of this doctrine.

All right. Now, and then we acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief intensive conference and do not propose that this statement should be given creedal weight. That's important. This council, this document is very important, but what they're saying is they do not want, nor did they intend to have this doctrine become part of the creeds of a church.

All right. And you'll see as we go through why they did that. I think that'll become manifest. I'll point a couple of things out. All right. And again, they call it being brief. I mean, they met over three days, some of the finest theological minds of the 20th century, but they very humbly, and I think very wisely say that this was in fact a brief statement.

All right. And again, should not be given creedal weight. Yet we rejoice in the deepening of our own convictions through our discussions together. And we pray that the statement we have signed may be used to the glory of our God toward a new reformation of the church in its faith, life, and mission.

Okay. There's the purpose of the statement that was written up in Chicago. All right. Just the fact that you have R .C. Sproul and Norman Geisler agreeing and signing this document together and actually giving deference to one another.

If you read the documents, they have some very kind things to say about each other. With Geisler being a confirmed dispensationalist, Sproul being obviously the poster boy for reform theology, just shows you that this doctrine is so important.

They could agree on this whole statement. And in fact, one of the things that I like about it, Geisler is very good on certain other things. Obviously, we disagree with his view on church in Israel and his eschatology, but there are certain things, inerrancy of scripture, the resurrection of Christ, those type of things.

Geisler is just superb in those. So if you've ever heard me make a negative comment about Geisler, it was only in respect to those few areas. Yes.

The people who didn't sign it, is there any reason that we know why?

They didn't include it in the book. I can tell you why I believe, all right? So this is only my supposition at this point, not a presupposition, it's my supposition, okay? As we go through this, you will see that this would be very difficult for Pentecostal and charismatic preachers to sign.

And there were some of those theologians who attended the conference. You'll see why as we go through the affirmations and denial because it comes right out, continuing revelation is no more, all right?

Which right away is going to take away a whole arm of the charismatic and Pentecostal church. I'm not saying that every Pentecostal pastor refused to sign it, but okay. All right, and was there any other questions?

Did I answer that okay? Okay. Continuing in the preface, we offer this statement in the spirit not of contention, but of humility and love. I like this, not of contention. In other words, the whole purpose here is to pull people together, not drive them apart, all right?

But of humility and love, which we purpose by God's grace to maintain in any future dialogue arising out of what we have said. In fact, let me pause right here. This is interesting. Not only did they produce this document in 1978, but in 1982, the conference met again and they came up with a document on biblical hermeneutics.

Okay? Very similar to this, but in hermeneutics. Then in 1988, they met again and they came up with another document on biblical application, how to apply the scriptures. All right? You can see how very thoughtful, starting with inerrancy, moving on to hermeneutics, and then moving on to application.

And we will go through, at least when we finish with this, we will go through at least the hermeneutics part. But in the hermeneutics, I will probably add some things that were not included in the statement.

We'll see how that goes. Not that I'm going to correct these scholars. I don't want to give anybody, but they did it with a very narrow perspective. And when I teach hermeneutics, I want to broaden it.

So by no means am I going to correct R .C. Sproul and Norman Geisler. All right. Okay. Oh, did I finish this one? No. We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of scripture and do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior.

And we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits into true subjection to the dead of the divine word. What they're basically saying is that people who may not agree completely doesn't mean they're not believers.

Okay? And then he's also saying there also could be people who believe this and affirm it strongly who are not living it. So you have to be very cautious. And I think it's very humble that they are pointing and making the point that just because somebody doesn't sign this document for a particular reason, it doesn't mean they're not a believer.

This is not the touchstone, so to speak, that you believe it. If you don't believe it, you're not a believer, et cetera. Okay? However, that being said, if you do deny this document, it will have an effect and you will see the results of that in other areas of theology.

And in fact, we'll go through some of that when we go through the affirmations and denials. Continuing in the preface, we invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about scripture by the light of scripture itself under whose infallible authority we stand as we speak.

We claim no personal infallibility for the witness we bear and for any help which enables us to strengthen this testimony, to God's word, we shall be grateful. All right? I just love that. They're inviting debate.

To my knowledge, there has never been, since 1978, no council or no serious scholars have been able to refute these articles. Okay? For many who've seen reason to its affirmations about scripture, what's the key?

We're not looking, they weren't looking for opinions. You have to do it by the light of scripture. In other words, if you're going to attack this document, chapter and verse, okay? No, so here, that's the preface to it, to the book.

The Short Statement: God, Scripture, and Salvation

Now we're going to go through the short statement. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time examining these, but I want to do this short statement first. And then, because in the affirmations and denials, that's where we're going to get into the nitty gritty of what each section means.

First paragraph, God, who himself is truth. That's a great way to begin any study on the inerrancy of scripture. God, who is himself truth, all right? And speaks truth only, okay? Has inspired holy scripture in order thereby to reveal himself to lost mankind.

This is important, not just for our study in inspiration and inerrancy, but look at, they're giving you, what's the purpose of the scriptures? Why did God give us the scriptures? To reveal himself to lost mankind.

Remember, apart from the scripture, how can anybody be saved? I hope everybody's saying you can't, because that's the answer. You're not going to be saved by going out and standing on a mountaintop and looking at his beautiful creation.

That'll tell you he's there, but it's not going to save you, all right? So that's why it's so important that we understand that he has inspired scripture, because that's the only way that one is saved.

Therefore, it's important, what if this was not an inerrant document? Could you imagine you're going to the scriptures to be where God is going to reveal himself, but it's not all error-free? That means that you're going to get some distortions or lies about God in the scriptures?

Doesn't make any sense. Through Jesus Christ as creator and Lord, notice he's not just your creator, he is your Lord. As we go through this, you'll see how certain errors in theology will come to the forefront.

Remember back in the middle of the 20th century, a very popular theology was when you pray a sinner's prayer, God is your savior, Jesus is your savior, but you have to make him your Lord. That's not what the Bible teaches.

If Christ is your savior, he is your Lord. If he's not your Lord, guess what? He ain't your savior, okay? And you don't make him Lord. God made him Lord. All right, redeemer and judge, two sides again.

He's going to be your redeemer, or he's going to be your judge. Holy scripture is God's witness to himself. This again explains why this doctrine is so important, because if this is God's witness to us about who he is, it has to be error-free.

God is not going to give us a distorted, inaccurate view of who he is. That would demean the whole purpose of giving us the scriptures in the first place, okay? So that's the first statement. This is the foundation for pretty much the rest of the document.

Holy scripture being God's own word, okay? This is the word of God, written by men, okay? And that's important as well. Prepared and superintended by his spirit, okay? We'll go through this a little bit more as we work our way through it.

But notice, it's God's own word written by men, all right? Superintended and prepared by the Holy Spirit. The Bible, just like Christ. What do we know about Jesus Christ? About his essence, his being?

He's fully God, and he's what? Fully man, okay? The Bible is fully human. It was written by men, but it is fully divine, which makes sense because Jesus Christ is the Logos. He is the word. And so we have the incarnate word of God, Jesus Christ, and we have the inscripturated word of God.

So it's only natural that the two parallel each other, okay? All right, so it's of divine authority, infallible divine authority. Who can tell me the difference between infallible and inerrant? Because we're going to get into this a little bit more, but I'll bring it up now.

What's the difference between infallible and inerrant?

Infallible is not able to have error, and errant is there's error, or inerrant means there are no errors. Infallible means it's not able to have errors. Give that man a cigar.

That's exactly the point. Inerrancy means that the document itself is error-free, all right? Infallible means it's not capable of having error. Why? Because it was written by God. It is possible for me to teach a certain point on scripture and to do it inerrantly, not all the time, but it is possible.

It's not possible for me to do it infallibly because of my sinful nature. I'm always prone to making some sort of error, but it is possible for a human to say some things that are inerrant. God is love.

Is that an inerrant statement? Yes. Okay, you see the difference? Okay. All right. In all matters, so it's infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches. Okay, that means it's not just a theology book, but every area that it touches, whether it be history, whether it be science, geography, you name it, psychology, you name it, it is inerrant and infallible upon the area in which it touches.

All right? So if a scientist comes up and says, I have shown that the Bible is wrong, on this particular point, and they put up some scientific document, you know one thing, that scientific document is wrong.

Okay? It is to be believed as God's instruction in all that it affirms. Everything that it says is true is true, and it is to be believed. All right? It is to be obeyed as God command in all that it requires.

If the Bible says do this, guess what? You better do that. If it says don't do this, guess what? Don't do that. Okay? And then embraced as God's pledge in all that it promises. Every promise of scripture will come true.

There is no such thing as a promise that God made that will not be kept. Okay? So that's article one, well not articles, these are from the short statement. I don't want to confuse you because the affirmations and denials are numbered as articles.

So I don't want you to confuse them. Third paragraph. The Holy Spirit, scripture's divine author, okay, both authenticates it to us by his inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

Okay? And again, you're going to see later on as we go through the affirmations and denials that this is important because there are those who come up and say, well, if the Bible is so deep that we can't possibly understand it as humans.

Okay? And this paragraph denies that. The Holy Spirit both opens our minds and gives us understanding, and there's also that inward witness. That's Paul talks about that in Romans chapter eight. Right?

Paragraph four, being holy and verbally God-given, scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, all its teaching, no less what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, about its own literary origins under God, then in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

Unfortunately, a lot of churches jump to this one last word and say, that's what the Bible is for, teach you how to be saved. But don't go to the Bible if you want to understand anything about science, et cetera.

That's not true. Now, that being said, I'm not saying that the Bible is a textbook on science. It's not a textbook on geography, but when it addresses those subjects, it is absolutely true. Okay? And we're also not saying that textbooks are irrelevant or unnecessary.

It's just that you have to use them and by the witness of scripture. If they start varying from what the scripture teaches, then you know right from the beginning that you're on dangerous ground. Okay?

And the fifth and the final article is, the authority of scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is any way limited or disregarded. Okay? What it's saying is, if you start to limit or mitigate or push to the side any area of, of this document, of this doctrine of divine inerrancy, you are going to, it's going to be impaired.

In other words, you're going to hurt the doctrine. Okay? We're made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own. I give you an example of what they mean by this. The account of Genesis. Okay?

We're a church that affirms six literal days of creation. It's the way the Bible teaches it. If you look at the literary structure of that first week in Genesis, it's clear from the grammar and everything alone that it's talking about six days.

The evening and the morning was one day. Okay? There are churches who say, well, no, there are, it's talking about ages, not days. All right? And in fact, the 1909 Schofield Reference Bible actually put in that between Genesis 1 .1 and Genesis 1 .2 that there was a gap of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.

Now, why did they do that? Because geologists were saying that canyons like the Grand Canyon, they would take hundreds of thousands of years to be constructed by water.

Yes. Is that the gap theory or something? Yes. Yes.

And yet that's trying to accommodate a science, by the way, that has now been proven very faulty. Mount St. Helens, if you haven't ever studied this, just study Mount St. Helens. Read Dr. Morris, Dr. John Morris.

Whose degree is in geology. And after studying Mount St. Helens, he says his PhD in geology is worthless. He said he went back to, and all his textbooks were wrong based upon what they saw on Mount St. Helens.

Couple of years after Mount St. Helens, he went back to his alma mater. And guess what? They were using the same textbooks. Knowing that they're giving wrong and erroneous information. But see, made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own.

The Bible speaks, it says that it's true. That simple. And such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the church. Okay, now it's just about seven minutes to eight. And I do not want to start the affirmations and denials because I think we wind up being cut off.

So I'm kind of working through this. I've never taught this class in this manner before. So you're going to have to work with me a little bit as to how much I'm going to teach in each of the sessions.

So you don't have my big slide up there that says questions. So I'll go to this. Questions? Yes, Joe. Yes. Yes, that's another reason why they said they didn't want to make it of creedal. They didn't want to say that this is a creed that should be taken.

I'll give you a little hint about that. There are evangelical churches that hold, that don't always hold to the 66 canonical books that we hold to. There are some churches that hold to more. Some have taken away.

For example, don't forget Martin Luther didn't believe that James should be in the Bible. All right, yet anybody want to say that Martin Luther wasn't saved? I certainly don't. All right. And so there's an area.

You're going to see later on, in I think in one of the expositions, that they wanted to leave, the reason they didn't put in how many books are in the canon is because most of the major confessions handle that.

For example, we hold to the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. Chapter one, not only determines that is about the word of God, but it defines what we believe the word of God is. That's the 66 books.

The 39 of the Old Testament, 27 of the New Testament. So that's in our creed. So in this church, if you don't believe in 66 books, you've either lied to me or you've got a problem because it's in the confession.

See, and the confession is something that we hold to very tenaciously here because we believe it's a good doctrine. Substandard to scripture. And we'll get into that, showing that the Bible is the supreme norm.

But our confession is a norm because the confession is necessary. You must believe the confession to be a member of this church.

Yes. I have two questions. Sure. My first question is, I think it was either the first or the second slide when it says in this document, Yes.

What is it? Why does it have a... It means that because the doctrine of inerrancy had started to be eroded, people were not believing it anymore. Historically, the church held to the inerrancy of scripture.

Understand this too. The Roman Catholic Church believes in the inerrancy of scripture. Our beef with the Roman Catholic Church is not over that the scripture can be wrong or inerrant. It's they put it on a par equal to or less than church councils, the magisterium, the Pope.

They do. They do, but there's so many different versions of the book. There's enough of the truth in their Bible. Somebody can read it and be saved. I know people who are reading that Bible have come to faith.

My second question is, well, from that same slide, you were saying how there are certain things we need to, like the importance of reading to understand scripture and how there is a warning against the denial of the inerrancy of scripture.

What would be a warning against, because not everybody believes in the inerrancy of scripture, so what would be some of the concerns.

If they didn't? Some of the concerns would be holding to extra biblical revelation, okay? Which can be, obviously we don't believe that, being cessationists, all right? But so if you don't hold to this document, which affirms no continuing revelation, you can go astray by listening to somebody who comes over and says, I have a word from the Lord for you, you know?

And they come up and they tell you something like, you know, you need to marry my son, right? You know, that sounds funny. I know that has happened, that specific thing.

Where does it mention how the canon of scripture is now closed? Because I've heard that before, but I'm not sure where.

In church councils, that was discussed in several. That's not an issue that they're discussing in this document, but there were several church councils. We're going to touch on that a little bit when we talk about authority, because even in those early church councils, when they were examining which books should be included in the canon, the church did not make a determination, okay, we're, you know, James is in the canon because we say it's in the canon.

They didn't say that. They used a word in Latin, recipromus, okay? We recipromus the book of the epistle of James, all right? What they're saying is we receive this as scripture. They're not giving authority to it.

They say, we recognize this as scripture, and so we're receiving it as holy scripture.

All right. How did they come to the conclusion of what should be, or what?

There is no simple answer. Basically, they had like a three-pronged approach to it, which we can get into at a, because this short time, I couldn't. Well, not that, I just, I couldn't do justice in this short period of time.

I will, in a future lesson on inerrancy, if you want, I will address that. Okay.

Because I have heard people say, oh, well, there's other documents that maybe should be a part of the canon of scripture.

Yeah, and that's a fair question, but when you see how the church councils did it, they're very similar to what this church council did here, and they examined it very carefully, and it was a lot of study as to how they were gonna do it.

Most of the thing was what was operating as scripture, all right? The Old Testament, very simply, is easy because the New Testament gives credence to it. The New Testament is a little bit more difficult, but we know that the apostles had the authority to write scripture, so that became easy.

That's why who the author of the books were became very important. That's why Hebrews actually was a question mark, all right, because nobody could come to, did Paul write it? Did Apollos write it? Should it be included in, you know?

And it's an interesting study, but you can see it wasn't done haphazardly. Maria. No, I was just going to.

Oh. The formalization of the New Testament, the movement started as a result of other people trying to, Platonism is like the popular one in which they were denying the Holy Spirit as God, and so after the Council of Nicaea, that's when the process began.

I think it took about like 50 to 70 years.

Yeah, it was, they met over a period of time, yeah.

But there was at least, I think, five or six criteria that the books had to go through.

It's funny you say the Old Testament was pretty much sealed, but yet that's the one the Roman Catholics decided to throw a bunch of extra books into. Yeah.

Again, I'll get into it because, but Christ pretty much ratifies the Old Testament. When he says that, talking about the blood, in his Olivet Discourse, not the Olivet. Anyway, where he says that the blood of, from Abel to Zechariah will be upon this generation.

Abel and Zechariah, it sounds too convenient. Well, he went from A to Z. No. Abel was the first martyr in the first book of the Bible. Zechariah was the last martyr in 2 Chronicles, which in the Hebrew text is the last book of the Old Testament.

So he kind of showed, not even intending to, that all of scripture is included in that. But that's just one point. So, anything else? Yes, was the Pope saved? This one. Which one? I don't know about this one.

I would find it hard to believe that this Pope has made a profession, credible profession of faith. I don't think this Pope is even Catholic. And I didn't say that to be funny. I mean, I'm being, there's an air of seriousness there.

He's rejected basically even what Roman Catholic theology says.