Who Put These Guys in Charge?

It Seemed Like a Good Idea in 1978, Part 3

In the last post I described the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as modern and optional. I want to be fair to that claim. I am not dismissing the document from a distance. I have read it carefully, and I have marked my concerns. What follows is not a point-by-point refutation. It is a pastoral witness — the honest response of a believer who loves Scripture, loves the Church, and found himself saying, more than once while reading, that is not right.

I offer it in that spirit. Not to win an argument. But to give you permission to trust your own discomfort if you have felt it too.

The Statement opens with a series of affirmations and denials about the authority of Scripture. Among them, this pair:

“We deny that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source.”

And:

“We deny that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible.”

These two sentences, taken together, produce a problem the document never resolves. The New Testament as we hold it today was assembled and confirmed at a Church council. The canon — the specific collection of letters and gospels that evangelicals now call inerrant — did not fall from heaven as a complete and self-evident gift. It was discerned, debated, and formally recognized by councils of Church leaders across several centuries. If those councils had no authority equal to Scripture, then they had no authority to assemble it. And if they did have the authority to assemble it, then their authority in that moment was necessarily greater than the document being affirmed.

This is not a minor logical wrinkle. It is a foundational contradiction at the heart of the document. The Chicago Statement, in its effort to establish Scripture as the supreme and self-authenticating authority, inadvertently saws off the branch it is sitting on.

There is a second concern that took me longer to name, but once I saw it I could not unsee it.

The list of men who signed the Chicago Statement is a remarkable document in its own right. Nearly three hundred scholars, pastors, and theologians, representing the leadership of evangelical Christianity in America. But when you look closely at who they are, a pattern emerges. These men, virtually without exception, were Cessationists. They believed that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, tongues, prophecy, healing, words of knowledge, ceased when the last apostle died. Some located the cessation more precisely: the miraculous gifts ended when the canon of Scripture was closed and confirmed.

This is not incidental. It is the key to understanding what the Chicago Statement is really doing.

If you believe that God no longer speaks directly to His people, that the age of prophetic encounter is closed, that the Holy Spirit now operates exclusively through the written Word, then of course the written Word must be made to bear the full weight of divine communication. It must be inerrant, infallible, and precisely authoritative in every detail, because it is the only channel left. The Chicago Statement is not merely a doctrine about Scripture. It is a doctrine about a silent God, and about a Church that must manage in His silence by defending the text He left behind.

The Statement even addresses the Spirit directly: “We deny that this witness of the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against Scripture.” The intention is to prevent charismatic excess. But the implication, pushed to its logical conclusion, is that the Holy Spirit cannot speak apart from the written Word. Tell that to Ananias, receiving a direct word from the Lord about a man named Saul on Straight Street. Tell that to Paul and Silas, singing at midnight in a Philippian prison cell, without a Bible between them, in the manifest presence of God. Tell that to every believer across nineteen centuries who could not read, had no access to Scripture, and yet encountered the living Christ in the interior of their own soul.

The Holy Spirit has never been limited to the text. The ancient Church knew this. The martyrs knew this. The mystics knew this. The underground church in China knows this today.

The Statement makes one final move that I must name honestly.

After establishing inerrancy as essential to sound Christian faith, the document adds this: “We deny that such confession is necessary for salvation.” And then, in the very next breath: “We further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church.”

Well. How kind.

This is the structure of a threat dressed in the language of charity. We will not say you are damned for rejecting our doctrine. But we will say that grave consequences await you if you do. The Athanasian Creed of the fourth century opened with nearly identical logic: whoever does not guard the catholic faith whole and inviolable will doubtless perish eternally. The Chicago Statement, for all its Protestant credentials, has reproduced the most coercive instinct of medieval Catholicism — the instinct that says, agree with our formulation or face the consequences.

This is not the spirit of Christ. And it is not the spirit of a document that has any business telling the rest of the Church what to believe about Scripture.

I want to say clearly: the men who signed this document loved God and loved the Scriptures. Many of them were faithful servants of the Church. The document itself contains much that is true and good about the value and sufficiency of Scripture. These are not small things.

But good intentions do not correct bad logic. And pastoral concern does not excuse a doctrine that places a 1978 American evangelical council above the creeds, the councils, and the nineteen centuries of believers who somehow encountered Christ faithfully without it.

There are older ways. There are deeper ways. And they do not require you to choose between loving Scripture and being honest about what it is.

Next time, we will look at what this doctrine cost a generation — and why the generation rising now may be the unexpected corrective.

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