Years ago, R.C. Sproul gathered with church leaders in Chicago to defend the inerrancy of Scripture. Today, Stephen Nichols and Nathan W. Bingham discuss why Christians must continue to uphold God’s Word as our perfect foundation for truth. Request the Reformation Study Bible for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3884/donate Meet Today’s Teacher: Stephen Nichols is president of Reformation Bible College, chief academic officer for Ligonier Ministries, and a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow. He is host of the podcasts 5 Minutes in Church History and Open Book. He is author of many books, including Peace, A Time for Confidence, and R.C. Sproul: A Life. He is coeditor of The Legacy of Luther and general editor of the Church History Study Bible. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Today on Renewing Your Mind, a special conversation with Stephen Nichols on a vital topic.
Every word and all of the words are the Word of God. And because this is God, who is true and who does not err, it is inerrant. It is without error. And therefore, it is entirely trustworthy.
The Word of God and the authority of God's Word have been under attack from the earliest pages of the Bible as we read of the serpent in Genesis 3, asking Eve, did God actually say? And these attacks have continued in every generation, including in the 20th century.
And today on Renewing Your Mind, we'll learn more about what we believe concerning the Bible's authority and what a group of theologians did, including R.C. Sproul, to respond to those attacks in the 1970s. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and I'm glad you're joining us today.
Stephen Nichols is a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and he's also the president of Reformation Bible College. I was traveling with him and while in Chicago, we used that as an opportunity to sit down and discuss a vital topic on a significant event in church history that took place in that city. But before you hear that discussion, to help place the Word of God into the hands of more people,
along with trusted notes and commentary until midnight tonight. You can request your very own copy of the Reformation Study Bible with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. I'll be sure to remind you of this offer and tell you more about that study Bible at the end of today's episode. So here's my conversation with Stephen Nichols.
Dr. Nichols, when we think back to 2015, when we released the revised and expanded edition of the Reformation Study Bible, I remember Dr. Sproul saying that although we call it the Reformation Study Bible, what he wanted to see was a Bible study reformation. Why is it so important for us to not only read the Bible, but to study the Bible?
You know, I remember when he said that, Nathan, and I thought it was a great statement. I remember seeing something he had said back in the early 70s that said, you know, it's very important to read the Bible, of course. But then he writes next to it, we must study. And I think he underlined study two or three times. We must study the Bible.
So for decades, at the beginning of Ligonier and in the final years of Dr. Sproul's life, he was stressing Bible study. And there's one reason why we read this book, why we study it, why we put so much effort to understand it, why we at Ligonier spend so much time producing resources to help people understand God's Word, is because it is the Word of God. It is holy.
Paul's going to call it sacred writings. It is the holy, authoritative word of God. And we would do well to read it, to study it, to follow Dr. Sproul's advice, and to submit to it.
really throughout our lives. You said the key word authoritative. When we think of the authority of Scripture, what are those key doctrines that we need to remember?
Yeah, that's a great question. We're talking about the doctrine of the authority of Scripture. Well, what does that mean? How do we flesh that out? And over the centuries of church history, we've landed on two key words that under the doctrine of authority of Scripture. The first is inspiration, which of course is a biblical term itself.
And what inspiration means is that God is the source of the Bible. It is God-breathed. We speak of God using human instruments, and He certainly did. And you don't have to be a student of Greek or a student of Hebrew to recognize that the biblical books read differently.
They had different levels of education, they had different experiences, different contexts, writing for different audiences, even using different genres. So we sense some differences as we move from author to author. So God certainly used the personality of the author, but God superintended those human authors so that every word would be the word of God.
Two key words here when we speak of inspiration. verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration. So verbal means the words. It's not thoughts. It's not as if God sort of implanted in Matthew's head thoughts and then Matthew wrote the actual words. No, the very words. And then plenary is just a word that means full, complete. So all of the words are inspired.
The next keyword is inerrancy, which means without error. And so this only follows from inspiration. If the Bible is sourced in God, then it is true. So yes, when we talk about the authority of Scripture, we're talking about inspiration and inerrancy.
At Ligonier, we talk about the Reformation a lot, and one of the major issues during the Reformation was the question of the authority of Scripture. But has the authority of Scripture come under attack since then in other ways?
Yeah, absolutely. It's almost in every age of the church God's Word is going to be challenged, of course from without, but sadly even from within. So we go back to the turn of the 20th century, and modernism is in the culture, liberalism is in the church.
And this has greatly affected the seminaries, and of course, the American seminaries, and seminaries in Great Britain, for that matter, and universities. And so as the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit. And as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.
And so we were seeing folks in all the denominations, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, moving away from the authority of Scripture and seeing Scripture as more of the human construct, more of the human expression of the divine encounter, rather than the very Word of God. And so people like J. Gresham Machen and the Princetonians B.B.
Warfield took a very strong stand for inspiration and inerrancy in their day back in the early 20th century.
How do you respond to those who say that those Princetonian theologians that you just mentioned, that they invented the doctrine of inerrancy?
Yeah, that's a popular thesis, and you'll hear it from time to time. It's a modern invention. It only came about because of the sort of scientific way we do things. You can find it in the Church Fathers. It's all through Augustine, speaking specifically of inerrancy. But you can even push back and find that Scripture itself expresses authority. Go back to Jesus and his temptation with the devil.
And it's those words of Scripture that Jesus is holding on to. As he interacts with the Pharisees or the Sadducees, the religious leaders at different moments, he appeals to... actual words of Scripture, specific words of the Old Testament to make his case. Paul does the same thing as he appeals to the Old Testament.
Peter calls Paul's writings Scripture when he says there's hard stuff in Paul, things difficult to understand, as with the rest of Scripture. So how does Scripture view itself? is where we start. And then we have it in the Fathers, of course, we have it in the Reformation. So it is not accurate, this idea that the Princetonians created the doctrine of inerrancy.
So the Princetonian theologians, that's the early 20th century, J. Gresham Machen, 1920s, 1930s. Right. What happened in the 1960s?
Yeah, well, similar things happened with the doctrine of Scripture, but rather than coming through the quest for the historical Jesus, or did Moses write the Pentateuch, or was it a later expression again of the Israelite community of their encounter with God? Two key figures that had an influence on the evangelical church in America were Bultmann and Karl Barth.
And Bultmann introduced this idea of mythology and the idea that here we are in the 20th century, the scientific universe. We need to understand scripture differently. We need to demythologize it because scripture was written in a mythological age. And of course, they're going to speak of things like the resurrection. We know now in our moment that that doesn't happen.
People don't rise from the dead. So we demythologize the history of the text and we understand it as myth. Now, in a Table Talk article, Nathan, Dr. Sproul said this about Bultmann. He said, "...the historical character of Judeo-Christianity is what markedly distinguishes it from all forms of mythology. A myth finds its value in its moral or spiritual application."
That's what Bultmann was trying to do. while its historical reality remains insignificant. Again, that's what Bultmann was teaching. R.C. replies, fairy tales can help our mood swings, but they do little to give us confidence in ultimate reality. But at the seminary where R.C. studied, for instance, his professors were Boltmanian. They actually believed in this demythologization.
And the other figure was Karl Barth. And here's something for you, Nathan. Dr. Sproul actually had, as a seminary professor, Barth's son was at the seminary where R.C. Sproul went. Anyway, Barth tried to say that the Word of God, the Bible, contains the words of God, but stopped short of calling it the Word of God. Well, here's what happened.
The Bardian influence, the Boltmannian influence was all through the seminaries, both transatlantic and here in the United States. And again, just as earlier with the Princetonians in the turn of the 20th century, as the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit, and as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.
And so these churches that had come out of the modernist-liberalist controversy, now they were selling their birthright. And again, this was trans-denominational. It was in the Baptist Church, in the Presbyterian Church, in the Lutheran Church, among the Methodists, among the independent sort of church world, a wavering and a compromising of the doctrine of inerrancy.
And they were beginning to ask, is there another way to understand God's Word apart from inerrancy? And that was a crisis in the life of the church in the late 1960s.
Well, a response to that came in 1978. And I'm sure our listeners can tell we're not sitting in the studio today. We are not. We are in Chicago right now. And they can hear a little bit of the city. It's a bustling city. What happened in Chicago in 1978?
Well, Nathan, Chicago is known for so many things. It's right here on the shores of Lake Michigan. And some people know Chicago for its sports teams. They might even be their favorite teams. Know Chicago for the art museum or the architecture and the tall buildings. But it actually plays a role. The city played a role in 20th century evangelicalism and in church history in 1978.
A group of theologians, several hundred of them, theologians, church leaders, and not only from the United States, but many countries were represented, gathered here and signed and affirmed the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. That statement, as the statement proper, consists of five points. It's followed by 19 articles of affirmation and denial.
And it was the product of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. This was a small group of theologians. R.C. Sproul was a leader among them. Also included J.I. Packer and others. Dr. Sproul's buddy, what he called his foxhole buddy, James Montgomery Boyce from 10th Press in Philadelphia.
Norman Geisler was part of that, Earl Rodmacher, several others formed that committee and produced the Chicago Statement at this very city where we are back in 1978.
Now, Dr. Sproul signed that document. You said he was a leader and played a significant role in that. But the story of Dr. Sproul's influence on the Chicago Statement precedes 1978, doesn't it?
It does, in a very fascinating way, Nathan. We leave Chicago and go back to the Ligonier Valley Study Center in western Pennsylvania. And in 1973, Dr. Sproul convened what I actually think might be Ligonier's very first conference And it was a conference on the inerrancy of Scripture.
It was held not at the Study Center, but a few miles away at a retreat center nestled in the woods, a little waterfall, big rocks all around the property, a beautiful property, just a retreat in the woods. And there at that retreat center, a couple hundred people were gathered. About eight folks came that were invited by R.C. to present papers. And at that conference, R.C.
Sproul presented a statement that he wrote that was called the Ligonier Statement on Inerrancy. It's from 1973. I'm going to read this. It's a little long, but as you follow with it, you'll hear some really important points that are being made in this statement. So it begins, we believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired and inerrant Word of God.
We hold the Bible as originally given through human agents of revelation to be infallible, and see this as a crucial article of faith with implications for the entire life and practice of all Christian people. With the great fathers of Christian history, we declare our confidence in the total trustworthiness of the Scriptures.
urging that any view which imputes to them a lesser degree of inerrancy than total is in conflict with the Bible's self-testimony in general and with the teaching of Jesus Christ in particular. Out of obedience to the Lord of the Church, we submit ourselves unreservedly to this authoritative view of holy writ. Now that is a densely packed, but a great statement on the doctrine of Scripture.
And it was written... Five years before the Chicago Statement and really became the seed of what would become the Chicago Statement. And Dr. Sproul was a significant driver, both to stress the need for it, but then when the council happened to be a significant contributor to it.
I love one of those final words, unreservedly.
Yes.
There is just a complete and full commitment, no wavering.
It's Dr. Sproul, right? Don't do anything by halves, and especially doctrines that are so crucial and critical. And of course, this is what we see in church history. This was Luther. It just wasn't a stand. It was a bold stand for solo scriptura and scriptural authority when it was challenged. This was Hodge. This was Machen. And this was that group of men in 1978 that gathered. here in Chicago.
You had the opportunity to write Dr. Sproul's biography and in your research for that you came across some of his notebooks and different writings and there was just a few lines that you found that I think you'd like to share with our listeners.
Yeah, when I saw these lines in the notebook, I could hardly believe it. But R.C. was talking about inerrancy, and he was presenting a lecture on inerrancy at the Study Center. And then he just puts this note at the very end of his notes. He writes, "...need an evangelical summit." may fail, but must try.
And I saw that, Nathan, and I realized he's talking about the International Council on Biblical Inherency. He's talking about the Chicago Statement and the need for that summit. And then even with humility and that unreserved commitment, hey, this may fail, but we ought to do it. And of course, it did not fail.
So what was the impact of the Chicago Statement?
Well, you know, I've talked to people who were there. I've talked to people who needed that as they began their ministry. And I kept hearing things along these lines. It puts steel in our spines.
We recognize at the beginning of our teaching or the beginning of our preaching or the beginning of whatever ministry God had for us, that we cannot waver even a half step from the authority of God's word. If we're going to have any ministry, any church, even any Christian life, that ultimately is going to have significance and impact, it has to be built upon the Word of God. And here's the thing.
If the Word of God errs, even in part, how can we trust it? And how do we know where it errs and where it doesn't? And remember, going back to the statement, Anything that we impute, R.C. says, if we impute a view that is lesser than full and total trustworthiness and inerrancy, well, then we can't trust it.
So I do think the Chicago Statement played a role in stealing that generation to come to stand on the authoritative word of God. As you look over 20th century church history, it's a significant moment. And even just for this, Nathan, there were three, 400 people there who signed this statement. Five points, 19 articles. Can you imagine getting 400 evangelicals in a room?
today and getting them to agree on anything even half as big as the Chicago Statement, it would probably be an impossibility. So I do believe God used it at a moment in the church's life, and I believe God still uses it as we think about in our moment.
these doctrines. I would say it's just as important today when we think about the inspiration of Scripture and the authority of Scripture. I'm thinking about Ligonier's State of Theology Survey, where we take the theological temperature of the U.S. We have done it in the U.K. as well. And there's one statement there in the State of Theology Survey, which is the 16th statement.
And this is the statement. The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths, but is not literally true. Now, you would think if you posed that statement to a Christian, they would all say, strongly disagree. It is literally true. It's not an account of ancient myths. But when we surveyed the U.S.
population, and then we just pulled out those who would call themselves evangelicals, the 2022 results showed us that 26% of professing evangelicals is stating that the Scriptures are not literally true.
So one in every four evangelicals needs to hear this. They need to understand the value and importance of inerrancy.
And what makes it worse is if you go back to 2020, when we put this same statement before evangelicals, it was 15%, which was shocking. But to see this change going from 15% to 26%.
And you think of all that's happening, this swirl of culture around us. We need more than ever a moral compass, a true north, and it is the Word of God.
So what is it, just to remind us again, that we are affirming when we talk about the doctrine of the authority of Scripture?
Well, we're back to those two key words of inspiration and inerrancy. And again, when we speak of inspiration, it is verbal, plenary inspiration. Every word and all of the words are the word of God. And because this is God, who is true and who does not err... It is inerrant. It is without error. And therefore, it is entirely trustworthy.
What I hope our listeners hear today, Dr. Nichols, is that Dr. Sproul's defense of this doctrine was not merely an argument amongst theologians purely for academic reasons, but he was convinced and recognized that the authority of Scripture, that it's inerrant, that it's inspired,
is so practical in the life of the Christian, and that if we are to flourish and be faithful Christians, we need to believe this, to know this, and defend it ourselves.
On the heels of the statement, various conferences were held, and at one of those conferences, Dr. Sproul spoke on the topic of what difference an inerrant Bible makes. And in it, he was summarizing some objections to caring even about the doctrine of inerrancy that some people make. And Dr. Sproul says, why should we worry about the doctrine? Let's get on with the ministry of the church.
I'm not going to get bothered with the doctrine of scripture. Well, to that objection, this is what R.C. says. How naive can you be? And what he's saying there is this is of immense practical importance. It is of importance for the life of the church. It is important for the life of the Christian. But let's end with Scripture as we're talking about Scripture. So we all know 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.
It's a densely packed real estate on the doctrine of Scripture and Scripture. Perhaps the most densely packed real estate. But go to the two verses before it, to verses 14 and 15. And I think this is just helpful for us all to consider. Here, Paul says to Timothy, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed...
knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Hearing the context to the Ligonier statement, the Chicago statement, it makes me go back to the quote from Dr. Sproul that we shared at the beginning of this conversation when we released the Reformation Study Bible and him saying, we call it the Reformation Study Bible, But what we want to see is a Bible study reformation. And that for him, this was not a throwaway line.
This summarized his entire ministry, all the battles that he fought outside the church and even within. So, Dr. Nichols, thank you so much for this conversation, sharing some of that history and the context. It really has been great to be with you here in Chicago. Oh, you're quite welcome. It's been my pleasure.
That was Stephen Nichols in Chicago discussing the inerrancy, inspiration, and authority of Scripture in the 1978 document, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. As you heard today on Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul wanted Christians to not simply read the Bible, but to study it.
And although we call the Reformation Study Bible the Reformation Study Bible, what he hoped we'd see is a Bible study reformation. If you show your support today with a donation to help fuel the spread of God's Word and trusted Bible teaching around the world, to say thank you, we'll send you a copy of the Reformation Study Bible.
It contains more than 1.1 million words of verse by verse and topical explanations to aid you in your study. And R.C. Sproul served as the general editor. With theological notes from Dr. Sproul and creeds and confessions from church history, this really is a theological library in one volume.
So call us today at 800-435-4343 or visit renewingyourmind.org to make your donation and we'll rush a copy to you. This is a one-day only offer to help accelerate the gospel outreach of Ligonier Ministries and Renewing Your Mind. So visit renewingyourmind.org or use the link in the podcast show notes before midnight tonight and while supplies last. Thank you.
Ligonier Ministries exists to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God in all of its fullness to as many people as possible. If there is one subject that R.C. Sproul is known for, it's the holiness of God. And this year marks 40 years since his landmark book, The Holiness of God, was first published.
So join us beginning Monday as you'll hear messages from that series and learn about a new anniversary edition of the classic book. That's next week here on Renewing Your Mind. ¶¶