What is biblical inerrancy?

I thought I’d take the time to explain what is biblical inerrancy.

According to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, “We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.” This says the Bible is free of falsehood, fraud and deceit in matters of faith, conduct, and religion, but it also says the same thing of all areas in which it speaks – including history and science.

This means that nothing that was written in the Bible is untrue. Another way of stating this is that everything written in the Bible is true.  This does not say that what was written was not a lie or something deceitful that someone had said or done.

Neither does this say that God does not use hyperbole in the Bible. This is a common literary device that IS used in the Bible. Neither does it say that what was said or done was honest, but that it was accurately transmitted in the Scripture.

What is it saying is that what was written is what happened. If someone lied, that was written. If someone was deceitful, that was written. The truth is what was written in the Bible, even if the truth was of a lie being committed.

So the Bible can be trusted to have in it the accurate transmission of what occurred.

[Editor's Note: Much of the discussion in the comments deals with the interpretation of Genesis 1. Differing understandings of a specific text does not mean the text was not written exactly as intended. The details and even the words in the text can be understood in different ways, and sometimes a passage is merely a poetic way of saying that something occured. Sometimes a story is poetry only with no details being important (only the ideas expressed being important) and sometimes poetry is exact in its details with both the details and the ideas being important. There are different ways to understand various parts of scripture. Differences in opinion of these sorts of things is what is being discussed in the comments below, not whether the text is inerrant. We must always try to learn and be able to defend what ever position we come to regarding scripture. What follows in the comments are examples of doing just that. Hopefully you will find we disagreed in respectful manners.]