Free Book in Honor of R.C. Sproul: Explaining Biblical Inerrancy

Dr. R.C. Sproul was one of the greatest champions for the total inerrancy of the Bible that the Church has ever seen.

In 1973, he convened the Conference on the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture at Ligonier, Pennsylvania. There he penned the Ligonier Statement, which says:

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 his authoritative view of Holy Writ.

This statement was signed by John Warwick Montgomery, J.I. Packer, John H. Gerstner, Clark H. Pinnock, John M. Frame, Peter R. Jones, and R.C. Sproul. It was one of the first major, noteworthy statements by evangelical Christian scholars which addressed the rise of the “limited inerrancy” or “partial inerrancy” among some evangelical scholars.

In 1976, Dr. Jay Grimstead wrote a private letter to Dr. R. C. Sproul about his idea to create a . . .

yearly conference for Christian scholars, theologians, apologists, and Biblical scholars who stand for the traditional view of scripture that you [Sproul] and Gerstner and Warfield and I [Grimstead] believe. … with an ongoing ten year strategy, to teach and inform and encourage the Christian church along orthodox lines of believing and living. … I’d like to begin shooting for a conference in ’78 (Jay Grimstead, Rebuilding Civilization on the Bible [Nordskog, 2014] 265-269.)

This conversation was the beginning of what would become the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.  Dr. Sproul was the first scholar Jay turned to for the sake of starting a “global army of scholars who would meet together annually to strategize how to turn evangelicalism back to orthodox theology and the inerrancy of the Bible” (Ibid, 298). Dr. Harold Lindsell was the second. At Sproul’s recommendation, the next step towards the formation of the ICBI occurred in 1977 at a conference on the authority of scripture at Mount Hermon, California.  John Gerstner and J.I. Packer were recruited to the team. R. C. Sproul recommended Norman Geisler and Greg Bahnsen next. (Ibid, 299.)  This was the original core of what would grow into the ICBI. At the Mount Hermon conference on the Authority of Scripture, the need for a larger, international, non-denominational, scholarly, and powerful response was advanced. They laid plans for what would soon become the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI).

As one of the founding members of the ICBI, and as one of the framers of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Dr. Sproul was well-qualified to write the official, ICBI-sanctioned commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In 2013, with the new wave of biblical errancy among evangelical scholars on the rise, Dr. Sproul (and Ligonier Ministries) graciously gave permission for his commentary to be republished together with Dr. Norman Geisler’s official commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, in the e-book Explaining Biblical Inerrancy.

Photos from the ICBI archives. . .

In the picture below, Dr. Sproul is second from the right on the top row. J.I. Packer is next to him–third from the right.  Dr. Norman Geisler is on the lower row, second from the right.