Theopedia

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) is a 1978 evangelical statement, signed by nearly 300 scholars gathered by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, affirming that Scripture, because it is God’s own Word, is wholly true and without error in everything it affirms.1 Its own summary: “what Scripture says, God says.”2

Confessional Definition

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter on inerrancy and never uses the term; it predates the word by nearly three centuries. Its own chapter on Scripture states a related but broader claim: “The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,” given because the light of nature and providence, though real, are “not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”3 Where the confession affirms Scripture’s sufficiency and infallibility as the church’s rule of faith, the CSBI targets a narrower, more modern question: whether Scripture’s individual factual and historical statements, not just its saving doctrine, are also wholly true. The two claims agree in substance, that Scripture is divine in origin and wholly reliable, without the confession having addressed the specific apologetic target the CSBI was written for.

Historical Development

The CSBI answered a doctrine of Scripture its drafters believed was under sustained pressure from modern and postmodern literary criticism’s challenges to a text’s author, meaning, and reader.4 Nearly 300 evangelical scholars, including James Montgomery Boice, Norman L. Geisler, John Gerstner, Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth Kantzer, Harold Lindsell, John Warwick Montgomery, Roger Nicole, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul, and John Wenham, gathered under the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy to sign the statement in 1978.1

The debate over Scripture’s authority continued past that point. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim’s The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (1979) argued, on historical grounds, that the strict inerrantist reading of Scripture the CSBI had just codified was itself a post-Reformation scholastic innovation rather than the church’s original teaching. John D. Woodbridge’s Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982) answered that historical argument, defending the traditional evangelical account of inerrancy and authority against the Rogers/McKim thesis.5 The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy itself went on to issue two companion statements, on hermeneutics in 1982 and on application in 1986, before formally disbanding in 1988.

Content

The statement opens with a Preface and a five-paragraph Short Statement, then nineteen Articles, each pairing an affirmation with a denial. The Preface ties confessing Scripture’s authority to discipleship itself: “those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God’s written Word… to stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master.”1 The Short Statement grounds that authority in God’s own truthfulness: “God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind… Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself,” and it is “of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.”2

Among the nineteen Articles, Article I locates Scripture’s authority in its divine origin rather than in any human institution: it affirms “that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God” and denies “that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source.”6 Article III affirms “that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God” and denies “that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity.” R. C. Sproul, one of the statement’s drafters, read this denial as ruling out any “disjunction between the revelation that is given to us in the person of Christ objectively and the revelation that comes to us in equally objective terms in the Word of God inscripturated”: the Bible is “not merely a catalyst for revelation, but revelation itself.”7 Article VII addresses how that revelation was given, affirming that “inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word,” while conceding that “the mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us,” and denying “that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.”8 Article VIII affirms that “God in his work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom he had chosen and prepared,”9 holding together full divine authorship with genuine, unsuppressed human authorship rather than a dictation model.

Opposing Views

Not every evangelical theologian who affirms Scripture’s full truthfulness has endorsed the CSBI’s own formulation of inerrancy as the right way to state it.

A. T. B. McGowan’s divine authenticity model. McGowan, professor of theology at the University of the Highlands, argues in The Divine Authenticity of Scripture: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage (2007) that the doctrine of Scripture should be relocated from a freestanding epistemological claim to a chapter within the doctrine of God, and specifically the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, rather than treated apart from it.10 He proposes replacing “inerrancy” with “infallibility” as the governing term, on the grounds that inerrancy imports rationalistic assumptions about propositional truth foreign to Scripture’s own self-presentation: “we must not make the mistake of imagining that revelation is simply the communication of information, as if God used prophets and apostles to communicate certain facts that human beings need to know.”11 McGowan still holds that Scripture is “entirely trustworthy” and “does not deceive us,” so his proposal revises the CSBI’s terminology and its doctrine-of-God framing rather than abandoning confidence in Scripture’s reliability.12

The incarnational model. Peter Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation and Kenton Sparks’s God’s Word in Human Words and Sacred Word, Broken Word argue by analogy from Christ’s incarnation: as the Son took on a genuine human nature, Scripture is, in their account, “thoroughly human and thus, fallible.”13 This model appeals to the CSBI’s own Article VIII, that God “utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles” of the human writers, as an opening toward a fuller doctrine of Scripture’s humanity than the CSBI’s authors intended by that article.9

Objections and Responses

Does the CSBI adequately ground Scripture’s authority in the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than in a general theism? John Thomas English’s dissertation on the trinitarian grounds of biblical authority judges the CSBI “a strong account of biblical authority in the evangelical tradition” on the question of inerrancy and authority, but argues that it “largely fails to appropriate trinitarian language” and “does not properly set God’s communicative agency in its trinitarian context.”14 On his account, the CSBI grounds Scripture’s reliability in God’s truthfulness as such, without distinguishing the Father’s, Son’s, and Spirit’s own roles in speaking that Word. This is a call to supplement the CSBI’s doctrine of Scripture with a fuller trinitarian grammar, not a rejection of what the statement affirms about inerrancy itself.

Does strict inerrancy, of the kind the CSBI codifies, claim more historical continuity than the church’s actual teaching supports? Rogers and McKim argued, the year after the CSBI’s signing, that this reading of Scripture was a post-Reformation scholastic development, not the position the wider Christian tradition had always held. Woodbridge’s Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal answered that historical argument directly, defending the traditional evangelical account of inerrancy and authority against the Rogers/McKim thesis.5

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Thomas English III, “The Unbegotten Father and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 27. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 27-28. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  4. John Thomas English III, “The Evangelical Doctrine of the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 1-2. ↩

  5. English, “The Evangelical Doctrine of the Authority of Scripture,” 17-18. ↩ ↩2

  6. English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 28. ↩

  7. R. C. Sproul, Explaining Biblical Inerrancy (Oakland, CA: International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1980), 25 and 29, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 28-29. ↩

  8. English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 29, 31. ↩

  9. John Thomas English III, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), chap. 3. ↩ ↩2

  10. A. T. B. McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 9, 12, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 33. ↩

  11. McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture, 20, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 34. ↩

  12. McGowan, The Divine Authenticity of Scripture, 21, quoted in English, “The Unbegotten Father,” 35. ↩

  13. English, “The Evangelical Doctrine of the Authority of Scripture,” 22. ↩

  14. John Thomas English III, “Theological and Pastoral Implications of a Trinitarian Account of Biblical Authority,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 185. ↩