The doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility address the truthfulness and dependability of the Scripture that God has inspired. Inspiration answers the question of Scripture’s origin: the biblical writings are God-breathed. Inerrancy and infallibility draw necessary conclusions from that origin. If the ultimate author of Scripture is the God of truth, then the Word He gives cannot properly be characterized by falsehood, deception, or failure. These doctrines therefore do not add qualities to Scripture that are absent from its own claims; they seek to express the implications of divine authorship with theological precision.

Although the terms are closely related, they emphasize somewhat different aspects of biblical truthfulness. Inerrancy focuses primarily upon the truth of what Scripture affirms: properly interpreted according to its intended meaning, Scripture does not affirm anything contrary to fact. Infallibility emphasizes Scripture’s unfailing character: God’s Word does not deceive, misdirect, or prove incapable of accomplishing the purpose for which God gave it. The two concepts can therefore be distinguished for purposes of theological analysis, but they should not be separated. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy makes precisely this point, describing Scripture as both infallible and inerrant and rejecting the possibility that it could be infallible while nevertheless erroneous in what it asserts.¹

Careful definition is especially important because neither doctrine requires Scripture to conform to standards foreign to its own literary character. Inerrancy does not mean exhaustive precision, and infallibility does not eliminate the need for interpretation. Both doctrines concern Scripture as God actually gave it: a collection containing historical narrative, poetry, prophecy, parable, wisdom, correspondence, metaphor, hyperbole, approximation, and other ordinary forms of meaningful human communication. The task is therefore not to impose a modern technical standard upon every biblical sentence, but to determine accurately what a passage intends to communicate and then affirm the truthfulness and dependability of that communication.

1. International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” arts. XI–XII, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, accessed September 13, 2026, https://www.mbts.edu/about/beliefs/chicago-statement/. ↩︎