We don’t use that word the way most Protestants do. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, absolutely true in what it teaches about salvation and doctrine. But we’re not committed to defending every historical detail or scientific statement as if God dictated the text word-for-word.
This confuses people coming from evangelical backgrounds. You’ve probably heard sermons defending biblical inerrancy, maybe even signed a statement of faith that used that exact word. The Orthodox Church has never required that kind of precision. We believe something both simpler and more grounded: Scripture is God’s Word given through human authors, and it accomplishes exactly what God intended.
What We Actually Believe
The Bible can’t lead you astray on matters of faith and salvation. Period. When Scripture reveals who God is, how He saves us, what it means to follow Christ, it’s completely trustworthy. The Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to write what we needed for our healing and union with God. That’s what infallibility means to us.
But the Bible wasn’t written as a science textbook or a modern history with footnotes and citations. The authors wrote in their own styles, from their own perspectives, with the literary conventions of their time. Sometimes they rounded numbers. Sometimes they told the same story differently because they had different theological points to make. That doesn’t make Scripture errant. It makes it human and divine at once, like Christ Himself.
Fr. Thomas Hopko used to say the Bible is true in everything it affirms, but we have to understand what it’s actually affirming. When Genesis says God created the world, that’s absolutely true. Whether the six days are literal 24-hour periods? That’s a different question, and the Church has never required one answer. St. Basil the Great and St. Augustine had different views on that sixteen centuries ago.
Why We Don’t Talk About Inerrancy
The word “inerrancy” came out of Protestant fundamentalism in the early 1900s, a reaction to liberal theology that was gutting Scripture of its supernatural content. We get why that happened. But Orthodoxy never went through that crisis because we never separated the Bible from the Church in the first place.
Here’s the thing: we received Scripture from the Church. The same apostolic community that wrote the New Testament also passed down the liturgy, the episcopacy, the creeds, the whole faith. You can’t pull the Bible out of that context and make it stand alone. When you do, you end up needing elaborate theories about inerrancy to prop it up.
We read Scripture inside Holy Tradition. The Church gave us the Bible, the Church preserved it, and the Church interprets it through the consensus of the Fathers. That doesn’t mean the Church is above Scripture, it means they’re inseparable. St. Basil said we accept both written and unwritten tradition with equal honor.
What About Contradictions?
There are apparent contradictions in Scripture. How many angels were at the tomb? Did Judas hang himself or fall and burst open? How many blind men did Jesus heal at Jericho? The Gospel writers give different details.
This doesn’t bother us the way it bothers fundamentalists who’ve committed to defending every detail. The Fathers noticed these differences too. They didn’t lose sleep over them. Sometimes they harmonized them, sometimes they said “I don’t know,” sometimes they found spiritual meaning in the very differences. St. John Chrysostom saw the variations as proof the Gospel writers weren’t colluding, they were reporting honestly from different perspectives.
What matters is that all four Gospels proclaim the same Christ, the same salvation, the same truth. The details serve that proclamation. They’re not the point.
Living With Scripture
In Southeast Texas, you’ll meet people who treat the Bible like a legal document where every word has to hold up in court. That’s exhausting, and it’s not how the Church has ever read Scripture. We’re not lawyers defending a contract. We’re children learning about our Father.
The Bible is true because Christ is the Truth, and Scripture bears witness to Him. It’s inerrant in the sense that it won’t fail to bring you to God if you read it in the Church, with humility, asking the Holy Spirit for understanding. But if you’re coming to it looking for ammunition in debates about geology or ancient Near Eastern chronology, you’re missing the point entirely.
Read the Bible. We’re serious about that. But read it in church, read it with the Fathers, read it liturgically. Let it shape your prayers. The Orthodox Study Bible is a good place to start, it includes patristic commentary that shows you how the Church has always understood these texts. You’ll find that the question of inerrancy matters less and less as you encounter the living God in the words of Scripture.
