Link to Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy September 16th, 2014 Ed Chait September 16 at 12:32am Just came across this and it was a good read. http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy Full text of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, with exposition. BIBLE-RESEARCHER.COM LikeLike · · Share Seen by 61 Corpuz Valdemor Avellaneda Ramil and 3 others like this. Byron Earnheart Not to be the “Calvinist” troll…but Sproul’s “Can I trust the Bible” is a really good and really easy read on the Chicago Statement. I think it’s free (or dirt cheap) on iBooks on Apple. If you believe in inerrancy, it’s nothing earth-shattering, but still an interesting commentary. September 16 at 10:40pm · Like · 2 Ed Chait Thanks Byron! Sproul’s commentary on the Chicago Statement is free on Amazon for my Kindle. September 16 at 11:10pm · Like · 1 Jed Kramer Thanks for posting this, Ed. It confirms what I shared with my kids recently. My 13 year old daughter and my 10 year old son spent an hour and a half asking me questions in regard to Biblical inspiration. A lot of what they asked and we discussed was included in the CSBI. We also discussed whether the Bible is a complete document and why the Bible isn’t a work in progress with God continuing to inspire Christians to write on a level that would justify Biblical inclusion. I love such opportunities to guide my kids’ spiritual development! September 17 at 10:54pm · Like · 2 Ed Chait Thank you, Jed, I’m glad you found it confirming. Confirmation is what I experienced as I read through it. You are indeed blessed to have opportunities to have spiritual discussions about God and His Word with your children! September 17 at 11:11pm · Like · 1 Tom Gindorf Jr. This is being reaffirmed at the 2015 Shepherd’s Conference with some of the original signers. Check out www.shepherdsconference.org Yesterday at 11:46am · Like · 1 Robert Lowry I would point out that you cannot accept the articles of the Chicago Statement and also believe the earth is old. 21 hrs · Like Ed Chait As much as we can make a “hobby horse” of it, knowing the actual age of the earth is not an essential issue. The Bible is inerrant, but that doesn’t mean we are able to understand all the truth it contains. 21 hrs · Like Tom Gindorf Jr. Yet inerrancy is directly linked to hermeneutics. Higher criticism would find issue with the idea of inerrant Scriptures and as a result also have fallacious views regarding doctrine we would find unacceptable. 20 hrs · Like Ed Chait Hi Tom, I understand the first sentence of your above comment, but could you clarify the second one for me? 20 hrs · Like Tom Gindorf Jr. Higher criticism in it’s approach to textual interpretation would (to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual) take issue with the idea of an inerrant Scriptures. They might even say that the autographa was inerrant, but too many transmission errors and variants exist to say that God’s Word is without error in it’s current form. As a result, it is easy to claim various texts are spurious. That is an example of how hermeneutics impacts one’s view of inerrancy. So when Robert Lowry mentions how one employs anything different than a hermeneutic that demands for a literal 6 day creation resulting with an impact on inerrancy, it has technical merit. His point being that a hermeneutic that allows for a different interpretation will itself be self-defeating with respect to upholding inerrancy at some other point (assuming that one uses that hermeneutic consistently). 20 hrs · Like · 1 Ed Chait Thanks for explaining that Tom. Applying a consistently rigid literal hermeneutic to the entire Bible would certainly lead to huge errors, so what is the hermeneutic called that allows for a rigidly literal interpretation of Creation, yet more flexibility later on? 20 hrs · Like · 1 Robert Lowry The purpose for my post was not to start another fuss about age of the earth. The purpose involved a much more important point, namely, that if you believe in inerrancy of the whole BIble (which I do), you have to believe that everything you read in it is true. You can’t accept that one topic is true but that another topic is not. We do not have a wishy-washy God who wrote the Bible with a mix of truth and error, what kind of God is that? For instance, if you believe that you are a sinner, that Christ died for your sin, that you repent of your sin, and you accept Christ as your Savior, if you believe all of that is true from the Bible, then you also have to believe the arithmetic of the genealogies in Genesis from Adam to Jesus add up to about 4000 years. The issue is not one of how old the earth is, or what the hermeneutics are, or anything else, it’s an issue of accepting and believing in God’s authority, based on his written Word to us. 9 hrs · Like Ed Chait I appreciate what you’re saying Robert. I don’t think we’re debating the age of the earth so much as using the disagreement to see how it relates to Biblical inerrancy. I don’t agree that believing in an old earth means that a Christian is applying a hermeneutic that would be inconsistent with the Bible being inerrant. I don’t really have a dog in the old vs new earth hunt. 11 mins · Edited · Like Tom Gindorf Jr. Ed – a literal historical grammatical hermeneutic is not rigid and is not letterism as some presume. It takes into account genre, symbolism, etc. It is, however, a consistent approach as opposed to spiritualism or allegoricalism that is employed subjectively. 7 mins · Like Ed Chait Well, I can assure you that we both believe that God’s Word is completely inerrant, and that’s more important than arguing over the age of the earth. 18 hrs · Like · 1 Ed Chait I apologize for the tone of my above comment. As far as the age of the earth, I like how the following article covers it.http://www.gotquestions.org/earth-age.html What is the age of the earth? How old is the earth? www.gotquestions.org What is the age of the earth? How old is the earth? Is the earth billions of years old, or thousands of years old? 16 hrs · Like · 1
