Event · 1978

Chicago Statement on Inerrancy

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, drawn up in October 1978 at a summit of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and signed by several hundred Evangelical leaders.

History

Roots

The claim that Scripture does not err is old. Augustine told Jerome that he firmly believed none of the biblical authors had erred in writing (Letter 82), and the Reformers treated Scripture as the word of God that binds the conscience. What was new in the modern period was the pressure. Historical criticism, Darwin and the comparative study of religion pushed Protestants to say exactly what kind of truth the Bible claims. At Princeton Seminary, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield answered in their article “Inspiration” (1881): the Bible is without error in everything it affirms, in the original manuscripts. That formula became the core of fundamentalist and later evangelical teaching on Scripture.

Causes

The postwar evangelical movement put inerrancy into its founding documents. The Evangelical Theological Society (1949) made a single doctrinal claim about the Bible: it “is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs” (ETS constitution). By the 1960s that consensus was fraying. Fuller Theological Seminary, founded as a flagship of the new evangelicalism, dropped inerrancy from its statement of faith in the early 1970s after a decade of internal argument. Some evangelical scholars began to say that the Bible is fully reliable in matters of faith and practice but need not be accurate in every detail of history or science, the position now called Limited Inerrancy.

Two books turned this into an open fight. Harold Lindsell, a former Fuller professor and editor of Christianity Today, published The Battle for the Bible (1976, Archive.org), naming schools, denominations and people he believed had given up inerrancy and arguing that the rest of the faith would follow. Two years earlier the Lausanne Congress had described Scripture as “without error in all that it affirms” (Lausanne Covenant, sec. 2), but that wording could be read in more than one way. Inerrantists wanted a statement precise enough that it could not be.

Proceedings

The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was founded in 1977 to “clarify and defend” the doctrine, with a plan to run for ten years and then dissolve (DTS archive description). Its leaders included R. C. Sproul, J. I. Packer, Norman Geisler, James Montgomery Boice and Kenneth Kantzer. The first summit met in Chicago in October 1978. Papers were read on the biblical, historical and philosophical case for inerrancy, later published as Inerrancy (1980, ed. Norman Geisler, Archive.org). The drafting committee produced a Short Statement, nineteen Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and a longer Exposition. By Sproul’s own account he wrote the rough draft of the articles overnight, and Packer wrote the general statement at the beginning (interview, secondary). More than 200 participants signed it (summary, secondary); John MacArthur and Francis Schaeffer were among them. The council’s archive holds the text as mailed to participants on November 7, 1978, with the signatures and a typed list of signers (statement, scanned; text).

Aftermath

Two more summits followed. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics (1982) addressed how an inerrant text should be read, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application (1986) turned to ethics and public life. The council then wound up as planned, and its records went to Dallas Theological Seminary.

The 1978 statement became the working definition of Biblical Inerrancy for a large part of American evangelicalism. Seminaries and mission agencies wrote it into their doctrinal standards. It supplied vocabulary for the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979 onward. In 2004 the Evangelical Theological Society voted 234 to 58 to move toward using it to interpret the inerrancy clause in its doctrinal basis (SBTS news, secondary). Most later disputes about inerrancy among evangelicals turned on what the Chicago articles do and do not allow.

Key ideas and contributors

Total truthfulness. The Short Statement says Scripture, “being wholly and verbally God-given,” is “without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in 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.” The key move is that history and science are not exempt. Article XII denies “that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science.” This was aimed directly at Limited Inerrancy.

Grounded in inspiration. The statement argues from what Scripture says about itself (2 Timothy 3:16) and from Jesus’ teaching (John 10:35, Matthew 5:18). If God cannot lie and God gave the words, the words cannot err. Article XV denies that Jesus’ view of Scripture “may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity.” Article XI ties infallibility and inerrancy together: they “may be distinguished, but not separated.”

The autographs. Inerrancy strictly applies to the original manuscripts. Article X adds that the original text “can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy,” and that copies and translations “are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.”

Room for literary form. The drafters knew the standard objections and built answers into the text. Article XIII denies that inerrancy is negated by “a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.” Article XVIII requires “grammatical-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices.”

A claim about church history. Article XVI affirms that inerrancy “has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history” and denies that it was “invented by Scholastic Protestantism” or devised as a reaction to higher criticism.

Important, not saving. Article XIX affirms that confessing inerrancy is “vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith,” but denies “that such confession is necessary for salvation.” It adds that inerrancy cannot be rejected “without grave consequences.”

Authority over the church. Articles I and II restate Sola Scriptura: Scripture does not receive its authority from “the Church, tradition, or any other human source,” and creeds and councils do not have authority equal to the Bible.

Key controversies

Is the history right? Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (1979, Archive.org) argued that Augustine, Calvin and the Westminster divines held Scripture infallible in its saving purpose, and that strict inerrancy came from seventeenth-century Protestant scholastics and Old Princeton. That is precisely the view Article XVI rejects. John Woodbridge answered in Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982, Archive.org), arguing that the church had long affirmed Scripture’s truth in historical and factual matters. Historians still disagree over how much the older writers meant by “without error.”

Creation and science. Article XII denies that “scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.” The 1982 hermeneutics statement went further and rejected “evolutionism.” The official commentary read this as excluding macro-evolution (summary, secondary). Signers included both young-earth and old-earth creationists, so the text did not settle the age of the earth. But it left evangelicals who accept Evolutionary Creation arguing that they could sign it in good conscience, while critics said they could not. The broader dispute is traced under Creation and Evolution.

How much does Article XIII allow? The allowances for genre and imprecision are generous, and the line between “literary form” and “error” is not drawn. In 2011 Norman Geisler, one of the framers, published open letters against Michael Licona, who in The Resurrection of Jesus (2010) had suggested that the raised saints of Matthew 27:51–53 might be apocalyptic imagery. Geisler said this “dehistoricized” the text in breach of Article XVIII. Licona’s defenders said genre judgment is exactly what Article XIII permits. Many evangelical scholars backed Licona, and the episode showed the framers themselves could not agree on what the statement ruled out.

Unprovable autographs. Critics argue that tying inerrancy to manuscripts no one possesses makes the doctrine untestable: any apparent error can be assigned to a copyist. Defenders reply that textual criticism recovers the original with high accuracy (Article X) and that the claim concerns what God inspired, not any one copy.

An American document? In Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (2013, ed. J. Merrick and Stephen Garrett), the Australian scholar Michael Bird argued that the statement reflects American culture-war concerns and that most evangelicals worldwide affirm Scripture’s truthfulness without its specific apparatus. Peter Enns, in the same volume, argued that its account of inspiration does not fit how the Bible actually behaves. R. Albert Mohler defended it as the classic definition, and Kevin Vanhoozer proposed a reformulation that keeps its intent. Roger Olson later called it more a boundary-policing political document than a doctrinal one (summary, secondary).

Grave consequences. Article XIX’s denial that inerrancy is necessary for salvation sits beside its warning of “grave consequences” for those who reject it. Critics read this as making inerrancy a test of evangelical fellowship in practice, even while denying it in principle.

What remains unresolved

Nobody in the debate thinks the Bible is careless or false. The open questions are narrower: whether “error” should be judged by modern standards of precision or by what each text was trying to do, and who decides which passages are history and which are literary form. The Chicago Statement answered the first question in principle by tying truth to the author’s intended assertion. It left the second to exegesis, and that is where the arguments have continued.