Liz Charlotte Grant’s Christian Century piece on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy begins this way: “On October 25, 1978, about 250 White men strode across the orange carpet of the Chicago Hyatt Regency O’Hare’s lobby with a ten-dollar theological word on their minds: inerrancy. The weekend conference was invite only, a closed-door event organized by 39-year-old R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries and backed by a grant, officially anonymous, from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.”
It’s a fascinating slice of recent evangelical history. Here is more:
The night before the conference, R. C. Sproul pulled an all-nighter to finalize the first draft of the statement’s affirmations and denials, finally emerging bleary-eyed and jittery to welcome guests to the Chicago Regency with the position paper that would demand the attendees’ full attention. (According to Stephen Nichols’s biography of Sproul, the person originally assigned to write the first draft had dropped the ball, a problem that went unnoticed until the night before attendees arrived.)
To supplement the main event—drafting the statement—Sproul and his team had planned three days of lectures. Scholars and pastors presented papers with titles such as “Legitimate Hermeneutics” and “Alleged Errors and Discrepancies in the Original Manuscripts of the Bible.” British theologian J. I. Packer delivered a plenary address called “The Adequacy of Human Language.”
During free moments, guests refilled their coffee mugs and surveyed their compatriots. Grudem remembers feeling starstruck. Packer was at one end of the room; L’Abri founder Francis Schaeffer was at the other. Theologians Sproul, D. A. Carson, Robert D. Preus, John Gerstner, Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth Kantzer, John Warwick Montgomery, Roger Nicole, Earl Radmacher, and John Wenham milled around, conversing with peers who had recently completed the New American Standard translation of the Bible.
Others present had developed novel fields of Christian academic study, like the contingent of young earth creationists led by Norman Geisler, Henry Morris, and John Whitcomb. Or they had founded evangelistic organizations, like Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ and Audrey Wetherell Johnson of Bible Study Fellowship (one of the few female-led organizations represented at the summit). Also in attendance were best-selling authors Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth), Josh McDowell (Evidence That Demands a Verdict and More Than a Carpenter), and Bruce Wilkinson (Walk Thru the Old Testament and, much later, The Prayer of Jabez). The founders of Jews for Jesus, the National Association of Evangelicals (formerly United Action Among Evangelicals), the Association of Christian Schools International, and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals mingled with seminary presidents, denominational leaders, radio preachers, and editors from Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Moody Press, and Zondervan.
Amid the small talk, suits, and whiffs of aftershave, each attendee seemed to understand the gravity of the weekend, and each hoped to participate meaningfully in drafting the statement. They met in circles of 10 to 12 to carefully parse each word and phrase of the statement, making edits to submit for review to the top drafting committee. Then the entire group gathered to discuss and strategize.
It was during this discussion that Grudem made his mark on the historic document. He recounts leaning over to Clowney, a theological cessationist amid a crowd of cessationists, to suggest tempering a clause that stated that God’s revelation had ended after the apostles wrote and collected the New Testament. “Don’t we want charismatics to sign this?” Grudem asked Clowney. His mentor agreed and suggested they qualify “God’s revelation” with the word normative, a suggestion reflected in the final version of the statement.
“So, the word normative was my contribution,” Grudem said, smiling. “Everybody had a sense of participating. . . . There was an excitement in the lobbies and hallways and meetings . . . at being part of a team that was doing something to stop the erosion of confidence in scripture. We had a sense that God had brought us together.”
And this:
The other people of color who signed the Chicago Statement included Emilio Antonio Núñez, a Salvadoran who pioneered the Central American Theological Seminary and became one of the foremost biblical scholars in Latin America, writing a best-selling tome that criticized liberation theology. Malaysian pastor Luis L. Pantoja Jr. led an SBC megachurch in the Philippines that established 15 satellites around the globe. At his death, SBC leader Richard Land called him “one of the most important leaders of Evangelicalism in all of Asia.” Luis Palau Jr. was Billy Graham’s Argentine mentee and successor who, according to Outreach magazine, “spoke in person to more than 1 billion people.” Assemblies of God Argentine pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz spoke at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, and became famous for his evocative metaphor of Christian unity as a mashed potato, which launched him into international ministry. Jeevaratnam Buraga founded the Bharat Bible College in India, a fundamentalist seminary dedicated to training Indigenous Christian youth in evangelism and church planting across India. And Edwin M. Yamauchi is one of the most prolific Bible and archaeology scholars in the United States and was the first Japanese American to be elected president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
The few women who attended the conference either were associated with a man who had been invited—like Dorothy Patterson, Margaret Grudem, and Martha L. Johnston—or received invitations because they advocated for patriarchal gender roles within recognized groups, such as the women connected to Bible Study Fellowship or Moody Monthly magazine.
I asked Grudem about this lack of diversity in the signatory list. “When you’re dealing with the teachings of the Bible,” he responded, “my guess is, no matter how many diverse groups are represented in the production of such a statement, they’re going to come out saying the same thing. Because it’s summarizing what the Bible says. There is an objective truth to what the Bible teaches about the deity of Christ, the atonement, the nature of justification, et cetera.”
Asked the same question, Angela Parker fervently disagreed with Grudem. The statement “would be completely different,” she told me. She suggested that a diverse group of writers would have written a statement acknowledging the uncertainty of interpreting an ancient book for our contemporary culture, while addressing the cultural perspectives that readers and interpreters bring into their hermeneutics. For example, a minority reader can illuminate tensions within Bible interpretation that White American Christians may overlook, such as when the ancestors of enslaved Africans must reckon with the Bible’s teachings about slavery, which have so often been weaponized against African Americans.
“No one is devoid of any kind of cultural connection,” Parker said. And the statement writers’ cultural ignorance likely made them more vulnerable to being led by the worst aspects of their own culture. “The patriotism and American nationalism and Whiteness crept in unbeknownst to them,” she said, “and [the statement] has propelled [American evangelicals] into the way of Whiteness more than the way of Jesus.”
The Chicago summit was apolitical, according to its organizers. Yet that does not mean that inerrancy has not affected American politics—nor that the attendees themselves did not engage deeply with partisan politics. In 1978, evangelical Christianity’s political influence was on the rise, and many of the statement’s signatories held direct lines to powerful politicians.
Read the entire piece here.
