Inerrancy Walks Into a Bar
It Seemed Like a Good Idea in 1978, Part 4
Inerrancy walks into a bar. You think it would have seen it coming and ducked.
Words matter. The right word in the right place carries centuries of meaning, and the wrong word — or the right word pressed into the wrong service — can quietly distort everything built upon it. The architects of the Chicago Statement chose such a word. They chose inerrancy. And in choosing it, they created a problem they never fully resolved.
The word means without error. Simple enough. But when you apply it to the Bible, the complications begin immediately.
Here is the first complication. The Chicago Statement applies inerrancy specifically to the original autographs — the original manuscripts as first written by their human authors. This is a careful and deliberate move. It insulates the doctrine from the obvious objection that the manuscripts we actually possess contain variations, discrepancies, and textual difficulties. The original documents, the Statement implies, were without error. All subsequent copies are as faithful as humanly possible, but the guarantee of inerrancy belongs to the originals alone.
There is only one problem with this. We do not have the originals.
Not one. The autographs — the actual letters Paul wrote, the actual Gospel Mark composed, the actual scroll Isaiah dictated — are lost. Every Bible anyone has ever held, in every language, in every century, is a copy of a copy of a copy, translated from manuscripts that are themselves copies of earlier manuscripts that no longer exist. The entire textual tradition of Scripture is a transmission history, and it is a remarkably faithful one, but it is a transmission history nonetheless.
When inerrancy is anchored to documents that do not exist, the doctrine is doing no real work. It is an unfalsifiable claim about an inaccessible object. You cannot verify it. You cannot challenge it. You can only assert it. And a doctrine that can only be asserted, never tested, never examined, is not a foundation. It is a posture.
Here is the second complication. The manuscripts we do possess do not always agree with one another.
The NIV translators, working from the oldest and most reliable manuscripts available, omitted a verse that appears in later manuscripts and in the King James Bible. The verse in question, Mark 9:29, reads in the KJV: “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.” The NIV renders it: “This kind can come out only by prayer.” The words “and fasting” are absent from the earliest manuscripts and present in the later ones.
Two faithful renderings of the Bible. One missing a phrase. If inerrancy applies to the originals, and the originals said “prayer and fasting,” then a Bible that reads only “prayer” contains an error of omission. If the originals said only “prayer,” then a Bible that reads “prayer and fasting” contains an addition. Either way, something does not line up. The word inerrancy, applied to documents we do not possess, cannot resolve this. It can only pretend the problem does not exist.
This is not an isolated example. Textual scholars have catalogued thousands of variations across the manuscript tradition, most of them minor, some of them significant. None of this undermines the breathtaking faithfulness with which Scripture has been transmitted across the centuries. But it does expose the word inerrancy as inadequate to the actual complexity of what we hold in our hands.
What the Chicago Statement’s authors actually believed about Scripture is, in many respects, worth affirming. They believed it is eternally true. Fully faithful. Sufficient for salvation and for the life of faith. Pointing unerringly toward Christ. These are convictions the ancient Church shared, expressed in the simpler and more honest language of inspiration: the Scriptures are God-breathed, given by the Holy Spirit, profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
That language served the Church for nineteen hundred years before the Chicago Statement was written. It did not require a new term. It did not require a council in Illinois to formalize it. It asked only that believers receive the Scriptures as the sacred, Spirit-carried witness to Christ that they have always been.
The problem with inerrancy is not that it says too much about Scripture. It is that it says the wrong thing, in the wrong register, anchored to the wrong object. And in doing so, it has quietly elevated Scripture to a place it was never meant to occupy.
Here is the theological endpoint of that elevation, and I want to name it plainly.
If Scripture is inerrant, infallible, fully authoritative, and the supreme rule of all faith and practice, and if the Holy Spirit operates only through Scripture and never apart from it, then what you have effectively constructed is a fourth member of the Godhead. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Holy Scripture. The book has been given the attributes of divinity: eternal, without error, the final word on all things.
It is worth remembering, as we noted in Part 2, that the men who signed the Chicago Statement were virtually all Cessationists — believers who held that the gifts and active work of the Holy Spirit ceased when the last apostle died and the canon of Scripture was closed. This was not incidental to their doctrine of inerrancy. It was inseparable from it. If God no longer speaks directly to His people through prophecy, through dreams, through the interior witness of the Spirit, then the written Word must carry the entire weight of divine communication. Inerrancy was not merely a doctrine about a book. It was a doctrine about a God who had gone silent, and about a Church left to manage in that silence by defending the text He left behind.
In that Cessationist version of the faith, you are left with something even more troubling than a Holy Quartet: Father, Son, and Holy Scripture. The Spirit has been quietly replaced by the text. The living third Person of the Trinity has been substituted with a document.
The correct theological term for this is not inerrancy. It is bibliolatry. The making of an idol from a sacred thing. And idols, however sincerely constructed, have never had the power to save. To call it by its proper name: this is idolatry. And the Church deserves to hear that said plainly.
The Bible is not God. It is the witness to God. It is sacred, sufficient, and breathtakingly beautiful in its faithfulness across the centuries. It points, from its first page to its last, toward a Person. And that Person is not contained within its pages. He stands behind them, before them, and beyond them, alive and present and accessible to every soul that turns toward Him in the Interior of its own being.
That is what the Scriptures have always been for. That is what they were before 1978. That is what they will be long after the Chicago Statement is forgotten.
Go to the One the book reveals. Abide. That has always been enough.
