In today’s episode, I’m starting a mini-series about the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The series of videos will highlight what I consider to be problems with the Chicago Statement.

Many evangelical churches have a doctrinal statement or confession of faith that includes an affirmation about the inerrancy of the Bible. These statements usually say something like: The Bible, in its original manuscripts (autographs), is completely true and without error in everything it teaches and affirms. This statement and others like it are modeled after the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

I think the Chicago Statement, formulated by over 200 evangelical scholars in 1978, has served the Church well, but in light of new scholarship, it’s probably time for a more nuanced approach.

Before I explore the Chicago Statement, I should say that I believe the Bible is the word of God. I believe that according to 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” I believe that the Bible is indispensable for having a correct view of God. I believe that a relationship with God, including forgiveness of sins and eternal life through the Lord Jesus, is possible only by the supernatural power of God’s Spirit and the word of God. Furthermore, I believe that the Bible is a reliable record of God’s interactions with humanity and a trustworthy guide by which to live.

However, I do not believe that the Bible is wholly without error, at least in the way most evangelical Christians believe. Therefore, it is correct to say that I believe the Bible, even in its original manuscripts, has inaccuracies and errors. I believe that there are errors because the Bible was not written to be 100% accurate in every detail.

But I’m not alone in this belief. The Chicago Statement affirms that the Bible may have inaccuracies. The Statement says, “Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims.”

The problem with this statement is that it says Scripture is inerrant only “in the sense of making good its claims.” This phrase is vague, subjective, and unhelpful. It seems to have been added as a sort of loophole that allows a blanket defense when faced with a problem passage. In other words, if the plain reading of a text shows that it is historically untenable or disagrees with other Scripture, it can be explained away by saying, “This verse is not making good its claims.”

The Exposition of the Chicago Statement says, “Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.”

So, when you are reading the Bible and encounter what seems to be an inaccuracy, you can say, “This verse is not making good its claims nor is it achieving that measure of focused truth at which its author aimed.”

I don’t know about you, but saying it this way sounds silly, but maybe I’m not smart enough to understand what the framers of the Chicago Statement meant.

The other problem with this statement is the difficulty of finding the author’s aim and purpose. To discover an author’s purpose, we must enter their culture, see the world through their eyes, be sensitive to their historical circumstances, and be cognizant of the hopes and fears of the writer and the writer’s audience. Only to the extent that we understand the cultural milieu of the writer can we begin to wrestle with what it was he wanted to say. In the end, finding authorial intent may be a hurdle too high for most Christians.

The Chicago Statement says that “Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching.” The phrase “in all its teaching,” though rather broad and vague, sets limits on the meaning and extent of Scripture’s inerrancy. Essentially, the framers of the Statement are saying that whatever the Bible actually teaches as true is true.

Other similar qualifying phrases concerning the inerrancy of Scripture include “in all matters it addresses,” and “in all that it affirms.” These qualifications, limitations, and exceptions to total inerrancy reduce it to a form of limited inerrancy.

Elsewhere in the Statement, inerrancy is limited by various explanations. For example, Article XIII says that it is not “proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.” The problem with this qualification is that it can be subjectively applied to almost any section of Scripture that poses difficulties. Who gets to say that a statement in the Bible doesn’t really mean what it says because the author had a different purpose?

The Chicago Statement affirms the inerrancy of the Bible yet allows for inaccuracies. For example, the Statement says, “When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it.” In other words, parts of the Bible may be imprecise and not perfectly accurate.

For example, the Statement says: “inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.” The qualification “in all its assertions” means that when God’s word is not making an assertion, that part of the Bible may or may not be inerrant.

This qualification puts the reader in an unenviable position of sitting over Scripture making interpretive decisions concerning which parts of Scripture are assertions.

The Chicago Statement says: “in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production.”

So, you, the reader, “must pay the most careful attention” to the Bible to determine what the “writer is asserting in each passage.”

Let’s go to the time before the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Before these discoveries, people believed that the sun and the stars revolved around the earth. Some reasons for believing that the sun revolves around the Earth   were statements in the Bible like “the sun rises” or the verse in Joshua 10:12, “the sun stood still.” Christians believed that these kinds of biblical statements were assertions of scientific fact.

Today, however, these verses are understood to be phenomenological language, a way to describe things as they appear rather than according to scientific facts. No one today believes the Bible is asserting that the sun moves around the Earth. So, it is not always easy to figure out when the Bible is making an assertion of fact that must be believed.

At this point, you can see for yourself that the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy has so many qualifications, limitations, exceptions, and explanations that it is virtually useless as a guide for understanding inerrancy.

In the next couple of videos, I’ll be highlighting other problems with the Chicago Statement that make it imperative for evangelical Christians to face the issues honestly. Falling back on unexamined beliefs concerning inerrancy can no longer be our modus operandi. We must reexamine our faith, know why we believe what we believe, and be able to defend our faith in the reliability of God’s word in the face of questions that were ignored when the Chicago Statement was formulated.