The Place of Biblical Inerrancy in Historic Christianity
A consolidated look at biblical inerrancy — what it is, why sincere Christians disagree on it, and why it need not shake your faith
Should our faith weaken if the Bible is proven to contain errors? Isn't the Bible the very core of Christianity? If the core of Christianity were erroneous, shouldn't Christianity itself crumble?
If these questions trouble you, you are not alone, and you are not off the mark to ask them. To relentlessly assault the Bible's trustworthiness is the fervent passion of many. To rattle the faith of Christians is, for some, a vocation. The full-blown wrath of Christianity's detractors, including the New Atheists, is aimed squarely at unsettling the faith of ordinary believers — those of us who are not trained in seminaries or steeped in academic theology. At the first sound of their relentless tirades, our faith can shake.
This post brings together three pieces I've written over the years on biblical inerrancy into a single, consolidated treatment. My aim is to walk through what the doctrine of inerrancy actually claims, why faithful, sincere Christians land in different places on it, and why — whichever side of this you land on — your faith in Christ does not need to hang by that thread.
What Is Biblical Inerrancy, and Why Do Christians Disagree About It?
Broadly, there are two categories of Christians on this question, and both remain within the bounds of Historic Christianity.
Unlimited (or total) inerrancy holds that the Bible is without error in everything it affirms — not just matters of redemption, but also history, geography, and science. Defenders of this view state plainly that they deny biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual or redemptive themes, and that the authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if total divine inerrancy is in any way limited.
Limited inerrancy takes a more lenient position. It considers the Bible inerrant only in its redemptive teaching — matters pertaining to salvation — while allowing that the Bible may be susceptible to errors in non-salvific matters such as geography, history, or science. Proponents of this view hold that the central purpose of the Bible is spiritual transformation, to bring the lost into a saving relationship with God, and that if the Bible contains some errors or discrepancies that don't touch that transforming power, this is not a fatal problem. Interestingly, even bodies like the National Association of Evangelicals commit only to the Bible's infallibility — its inability to fail — in their statement of faith, without committing to unlimited inerrancy.
Christian evangelical scholars have studied, discussed, and debated this question at the highest academic levels for years, and they continue to hold contradictory positions on it. Yet they remain, on both sides, true and sincere Christians.
I should be upfront that this is a genuinely contested question even among careful, faithful evangelical scholars who love Scripture. I am not presenting one side as having won the argument. What follows is my own reasoning on why I don't believe this disagreement should be allowed to threaten anyone's faith — not an attempt to settle the debate itself.
The Case for Unlimited Inerrancy — and a Question Worth Asking
Those who hold to unlimited inerrancy argue from two strong premises:
A. God cannot lie, either intentionally or unintentionally. If the Bible is God's Word, and God cannot lie, then the Bible ought to be without error.
B. Christ Himself, God incarnate, proclaimed that God's Word cannot be broken (cf. John 10:35 & Matthew 5:18).
On the face of it, this reasoning looks airtight. But it is worth examining one premise more closely.
The argument typically runs:
Premise 1: God cannot err.
Premise 2: The Bible is God's Word.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible cannot err.
Premise 1 is correct. But Premise 2 deserves a second look. The term "God's Word" can carry two meanings — the spoken word of God, or the written word of God. If the Bible were simply a voice recording of God's spoken word, this conclusion would be very hard to resist. But that is not how the Bible came to us. Human agency and human authorship were involved in its writing. The Bible was not dictated word-for-word to its human authors; rather, those authors were inspired by God as they wrote, and the text was then transmitted across centuries by human scribes.
That presence of fallible human authors and copyists opens a window through which errors could, in principle, creep in — and textual criticism tells us that, at least at the level of manuscript transmission, they have. It is a well-documented finding that the New Testament text is about 99.5% accurate as preserved across the manuscript tradition, meaning roughly 0.5% of the text involves some kind of variation. Importantly, these variations do not affect any significant doctrine taught in the Bible. So at the very least, the Bible's transmission history contains some textual variants, which means the syllogism above — that the Bible cannot err simply because it is "God's Word" — is not as bulletproof as it first appears.
Why Biblical Inerrancy Is Not an Essential Doctrine of Historic Christianity
Historic Christianity rests on certain essential doctrines — doctrines that bear directly on one's salvation, such that unbelief in them jeopardizes salvation itself. Christ's bodily resurrection is one such doctrine. A person who denies it cannot rightly be called a Christian.
Is biblical inerrancy — specifically, the unlimited version of it — one of those essential doctrines? I don't believe it is.
The Nicene Creed lays out the essential doctrines of the historic Christian faith: belief in one God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth; in the one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father, who for our sake became incarnate, was crucified, died, was buried, and on the third day rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, from where He will come again to judge the living and the dead; belief in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who spoke through the prophets; and belief in one holy, universal, and apostolic church, one baptism for the remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. At a bare minimum, belief in what the Creed lays out is sufficient for salvation.
A Christian who believes wholeheartedly in the Triunity of God, the Lordship of Christ, His bodily resurrection, and the other essential doctrines of the faith — but who does not subscribe to unlimited inerrancy, holding instead that the Bible is fully trustworthy and authoritative without being inerrant in every non-redemptive detail — has not thereby forfeited salvation. This is an entirely different situation from someone who denies that the Bible is trustworthy in its entirety. Rejecting unlimited inerrancy does not require rejecting the essential doctrines of the faith; the two are logically separable. A Christian holding to limited inerrancy can affirm everything in the Creed while still maintaining that the Bible's inerrancy is confined to redemptive matters.
Christianity's truthfulness does not depend on the Bible being inerrant in this unlimited sense; it is anchored instead in events of history, which I get to below. For that reason, I don't think biblical inerrancy, in its unlimited form, can be elevated to the status of an essential doctrine of Historic Christianity.
So What If the Bible Were Proven to Contain Errors?
Here is the deeper and, I think, more important question: if the Bible were somehow proven to contain errors, would that bring Christianity crashing down?
Our response to that scenario depends heavily on whether we treat inerrancy as essential to the faith or not. If you treat unlimited inerrancy as essential, and the Bible were shown to err, your faith could be badly shaken. But if you regard the Bible as inerrant in its redemptive core while open to error elsewhere, an error of that kind would not touch your faith at all.
Easier said than done, of course. But consider the question from another angle entirely: would an erroneous Bible entail the non-existence of God? Not by any chance.
God exists necessarily. His existence is not predicated on, or intricately tied to, the veracity of the Bible. God would not cease to exist if the Bible were shown to be erroneous. In fact, God existed before the Bible was ever written. It was God who inspired human authors to write it; the Bible reveals God, but it is not the only means by which God reveals Himself (cf. Romans 1:19–20).
The Lord Jesus Christ, the means of mankind's salvation, existed independently of the Bible's veracity. History itself affirms Christ's existence and resurrection apart from any claim of biblical inerrancy. Dr. Gary Habermas has long argued that Jesus's death by crucifixion, His post-mortem appearances to His disciples, and Paul's encounter with the resurrected Christ are among the most widely affirmed historical facts, accepted by Christian and non-Christian scholars alike.
So even if the Bible were proven to contain errors, neither God nor Christ would cease to exist, and the historical case for Christ's resurrection would remain standing on its own footing. This is not an exercise in undermining the Bible's authority. It is simply an exercise in recognizing that God, Christ, and the salvation He offers exist independently of the question of biblical inerrancy.
God is at the core of Christianity. Christ, and the salvation He offers mankind, are at the core of Christianity. But inerrancy of the Bible need not be at that core. If inerrancy were placed at the center of the faith, it would imply that inerrancy is more valuable than God, Christ, and salvation themselves. But since God is the source of the Bible, it is God who belongs at the center — not the inerrancy of the text that reveals Him. Inerrancy, where it holds, is the corollary of God's nature, not a substitute for it.
Bart Ehrman, the well-known New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lost his faith in Christ after he discovered what he regarded as a discrepancy in the Gospel of Mark. By his own account, his strong prior commitment to biblical inerrancy was the very thing that shattered when that discrepancy surfaced. He drifted first into a more liberal Christianity, and eventually into agnostic atheism, after he found himself unable to reconcile the philosophical problems of evil and suffering. Whatever one concludes about that particular passage, Ehrman's trajectory illustrates the real danger of placing inerrancy itself — rather than God, Christ, and the resurrection — at the very foundation of one's faith.
Faith Alone: How Billy Graham Weathered This Storm
This is not merely a hypothetical danger; it has played out in real lives. The renowned evangelist Billy Graham went through his own crisis of faith when his close friend and fellow evangelist Charles "Chuck" Templeton began questioning the Bible's veracity and ultimately abandoned the faith altogether.
Graham later recalled that period:
"The exact wording of my prayer is beyond recall, but it must have echoed my thoughts: 'O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. … I can't answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck [Templeton] and others are raising.' I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it: 'Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith!' … I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months."
Templeton's departure from the faith did not deter Graham. He survived that crisis and emerged a more deeply committed believer in Christ. How? Through simple faith. You and I will not be remiss if we, too, simply believe that the Bible is the Word of God, even while we hold open questions about the finer points of inerrancy.
Truth Alone: Christianity Doesn't Stand or Fall on Inerrancy
The deeper reason none of this needs to threaten anyone's faith is that the truthfulness of Christianity does not depend on the Bible being inerrant. As Christian apologist Frank Turek has put it, Christianity would still be true even if the Bible had never been written, because Christianity's truth rests on a historical event — the resurrection of Jesus — not on a perfectly transmitted text reporting that event.
It is a mistake to think that the Christian faith is a house of cards, ready to collapse if a single verse or reference in the New Testament turns out to be mistaken. Inerrancy, however well it may be defended, is an unnecessarily high bar to set for establishing the central event of the faith: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If Christ rose from the dead, Christianity is true; if He did not, then, as the first-century eyewitness Paul himself admitted, it is false. But establishing that the resurrection happened does not require inerrant sources, any more than establishing that a football game was played requires a perfectly accurate newspaper stat line.
In fact, the presence of minor discrepancies between eyewitness accounts is itself evidence that something real took place, not evidence against it. The very existence of a flawed stat line presupposes that a game was actually played; nobody bothers writing up, let alone disputing the details of, an event that never happened. The same logic holds for the New Testament's resurrection accounts. Even where the multiple narratives differ on minor details, such disagreement reflects independent eyewitnesses describing the same dramatic event from different vantage points, not collusion or fabrication, and certainly not evidence that the event didn't occur. Survivors of the Titanic disagreed about exactly how the ship went down, yet no one doubts that it sank. All the resurrection accounts agree that the resurrection happened; they differ only on incidental details, such as who arrived first at the tomb.
This matters all the more when we consider who wrote these accounts down. Nearly all the New Testament authors were observant Jews who had every reason to lose everything by proclaiming a resurrection. They were not protecting their reputations or their safety by writing what they wrote; they were risking both. There were, as the saying goes, thousands of Christians before a single line of the New Testament was written. Paul was already a Christian before he wrote a word of Scripture, and so were Matthew, John, James, and Peter. They did not invent the resurrection and then build a faith around it. They witnessed something, and the resurrection itself gave rise to the New Testament documents — not the other way around.
This is why the foundational beliefs of Christianity — what C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity — remain true even if the reports contain some errors. Getting a detail wrong in reporting the resurrection does not undo the larger fact that the resurrection occurred. If every account agreed on every single detail, we would rightly suspect collusion rather than independent eyewitness testimony.
So whether or not one holds to an inerrant Bible in the unlimited sense, the resurrection we celebrate is a historical event that actually took place roughly two thousand years ago — and that means we can trust that those who put their faith in Christ will be raised as He was.
Where This Leaves Us
There is nothing wrong with simply believing, by faith, that the Bible is God's Word. Christianity is true whether or not the Bible turns out to contain errors in non-redemptive matters, because its truth rests on the historical reality of Christ's resurrection, not on a guarantee of total textual perfection. Without diluting the Bible's significance in the slightest, there is also nothing wrong with declining to treat unlimited biblical inerrancy as an essential doctrine of Historic Christianity.
God is at the core of Christianity. Christ, and the salvation He offers mankind, are at the core of Christianity. The Bible reveals our triune God, and Scripture cannot be broken. Let us continue to trust and study God and His Word with full confidence — not because every jot and tittle has been independently verified to our satisfaction, but because the God who inspired it, and the Christ to whom it points, stand firm regardless.
So, fear not.
This post draws on and consolidates three earlier articles of mine:
1. "The Bible Has Errors, What Do We Do?" (March 2016)
2. "Why Is Biblical Inerrancy Not An Essential Doctrine Of Historic Christianity?" (August 2019)
3. "Does The Bible Contain Errors Or Not? How Should A Simple Christian Think This Through?" (August 2019)
Sources referenced across these articles:
defendinginerrancy.com (on unlimited vs. limited inerrancy, and on why inerrancy matters)
National Association of Evangelicals, Statement of Faith — nae.net/statement-of-faith
Roger Olson, "Is the Bible Inerrant or Infallible?" — patheos.com
Dr. Gary Habermas, on the minimal facts of the resurrection — garyhabermas.com
Bart D. Ehrman — biographical note via Wikipedia
Billy Graham, on his crisis of faith with Chuck Templeton — billygraham.org and defendinginerrancy.com
Frank Turek, "Christianity Is True Even If Some Of The Bible Isn't" — crossexamined.org
Stand to Reason, "Is The New Testament Text Reliable?" — str.org
