What is limited inerrancy? Are only parts of the Bible inerrant?

From the earliest days of the church, believers have maintained that the Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant. That is, it is God-breathed and free from error. The Bible is the Word of God, and God cannot lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18). Jesus equated God’s Word with truth in John 17:17. The doctrine of inerrancy has always been foundational to the church’s belief in the authority of Scripture. However, a movement within neo-evangelicalism advocates for limited inerrancy—the belief that only parts of the Bible are inerrant. It’s a position that proves to be self-destructive.

Limited inerrancy, as presented by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, allows that the Bible contains no errors in matters related to salvation, but it also allows for mistakes in the Bible relating to historical or scientific content (The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, Harper & Row, 1979). Rogers and McKim proposed that the Bible’s human writers wrote in the genre of Greco-Roman biography, which permitted invented dialogue, legendary exaggeration, historical inaccuracies, and outright fiction.

A belief in limited inspiration assumes the biblical writers created their stories as vehicles of theology rather than actually recording historical events. But accepting theological truth while rejecting historical truth destroys the trustworthiness of the Bible as a whole. How can we guarantee the truthfulness of one part if another part is false? If a news outlet gets 25 percent of its stories wrong, who can trust the other 75 percent of its stories? Accuracy matters.

Further, what percentage of the Bible is errant versus inerrant? Who gets to decide what parts are factual and what parts are fictional? Interpreters who adopt limited inerrancy essentially place human reason above the Word of God. They themselves sit as judges over divine revelation. Any criteria used to determine the truthfulness of a text becomes the de facto authority over that text.

In his book Biblical Authority, John Woodbridge provides an analysis of the Rogers and McKim approach to biblical authority and demonstrates that position to be false and biased (Zondervan, 1982). The battle for the Bible goes all the way back to the early church fathers, Reformers, and orthodox theologians, who wholeheartedly embraced biblical inspiration and inerrancy.

A crack in the foundation will eventually collapse the entire structure. Fortunately, “the firm foundation of God [which He has laid] stands [sure and unshaken despite attacks]” (2 Timothy 2:19, AMP). In 1978, a group of over 300 evangelicals drafted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI). The statement maintains that “the authority of Scripture is essential for the Christian Church in this and every age” (from the Preface). The CSBI states that the fact of inspiration ensures that everything the biblical writers affirm, whether doctrinal or historical, is true. As worded in part 4 of the CSBI Short Statement,

The neo-orthodox error of seeing the Bible as a fallible witness to the Word instead of the actual Word of God continues through the limited inerrancy movement. The tragic consequence of abandoning complete inerrancy is that people lose their connection to the foundation of truth. We must preserve the perspective that the Word of God speaks truthfully on all matters, spiritual, moral, and historical.