# Biblical Inerrancy **Summary.** Biblical inerrancy is the doctrine that Scripture, in its original writings, is without error in all that it affirms. It sits at the center of the evangelical doctrine of Scripture and shapes how a tradition reads difficult texts. How far the claim extends — and whether it covers history and science or only matters of faith — is where traditions divide. ## The doctrine and its range The strongest form, often called full or strict inerrancy, holds that the biblical text tells the truth in everything it addresses, including historical and scientific detail. A more limited form restricts the claim to what Scripture teaches for salvation, faith, and practice, while allowing that incidental historical or scientific details reflect the authors' own limited knowledge. The word "infallibility" adds a further wrinkle. Some writers treat inerrancy and infallibility as near-synonyms. Others use infallibility as the weaker claim: Scripture does not fail in its saving purpose, even if it is not error-free in every incidental detail. Reading any given author well means checking which sense they intend. The **Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978)**, produced by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, is the best-known modern articulation of the strict view. It affirms inerrancy in the original manuscripts (the "autographs"), allows for ordinary language, approximation, and phenomenological description, and denies that inerrancy requires modern standards of technical precision. > [!contradiction] > Conservative evangelicals hold that inerrancy is essential to biblical authority — if Scripture errs anywhere, its trustworthiness collapses. Many mainline and academic scholars reject inerrancy as a category mistake: they read the Bible as a human and historically conditioned witness whose authority does not depend on freedom from error. These are not two degrees of one position; they rest on different accounts of what Scripture is. ## Why it matters in this wiki Inerrancy is often the load-bearing belief that gives way during [[Deconstruction]]. When someone raised to treat every verse as errorless meets the findings of [[Textual Criticism]] or historical scholarship, the strict framework can strain past its limits. Understanding the spectrum — strict inerrancy, limited inerrancy, infallibility — gives people language for revising the doctrine without treating the whole of faith as lost. ## Related - [[Hermeneutics]] — the interpretive method that determines how inerrancy claims apply to a given text - [[Textual Criticism]] — the discipline that clarifies what "the original text" even refers to