When the Bible Becomes an Idol
Why Biblical Inerrancy Isn't Faithful—and How It’s Distorting God’s Character
I believe in the Bible. I read it. I preach from it. I treasure it. But I don’t believe it’s perfect. And I don’t believe God ever asked me to.
For many Christians, especially in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, that sentence would be enough to brand me a heretic. But it’s precisely because I take Scripture seriously that I feel called to say it out loud. The Bible is not God. The Bible is a witness. It points us toward a God who is alive, relational, loving, just, and always speaking. But when we treat the Bible as flawless—as a fixed code of divine law without nuance, context, or human fingerprints—we turn it into something it was never meant to be. We turn it into an idol.
“When the Bible replaces the living voice of the Spirit—when we treat its most troubling texts as if they must perfectly reflect God's eternal character—we have created a golden calf out of the very thing meant to lead us to the true God.”
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy teaches that the Bible is "without error in all that it affirms." This belief was codified in the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a document that became foundational to American evangelical theology. Its goal was to defend the authority of Scripture in a time of growing secularism and theological liberalism. But over time, it hardened. What began as an attempt to safeguard reverence turned into rigidity. The Bible became less a living text and more a weapon. Less a source of wisdom and more a litmus test for belonging.
As writers like Peter Enns and Rachel Held Evans have pointed out, this view of Scripture has done profound damage. It has created a generation of Christians trained to think in binaries: either the Bible is completely perfect, or it's worthless. Either every command must be applied literally, or nothing can be trusted. There is no space for tension. No room for wrestling. No patience for the slow, sacred work of discernment.
But this is not faithfulness. It is fear.
And it is a form of idolatry. When the Bible replaces the living voice of the Spirit—when we treat its most troubling texts as if they must perfectly reflect God's eternal character—we have created a golden calf out of the very thing meant to lead us to the true God. We worship the form instead of the presence. We mistake the map for the destination.
“The Bible is not a cage. It is a map. And if we follow it rightly, it will always lead us to a person. Not a proposition. Not a doctrine. But Christ.”
If God is not the author of confusion, then our theology should reflect moral coherence. And that coherence is not found by flattening Scripture into a single voice. It is found in the person of Jesus. He is the Word made flesh. Not a text, but a life. Not a proposition, but a presence. Everything we read must be filtered through him.
This is not just about LGBTQ inclusion, though that is one of the clearest places where the damage of inerrancy shows. The Bible has also been used to justify slavery, to silence women, to blame the poor for their suffering, and to endorse authoritarianism through selective readings of Romans 13. These are not random misreadings. They are symptoms of a deeper problem: a refusal to acknowledge that God’s revelation is always mediated through culture, through history, and through imperfect people. And that is exactly why we need the Spirit.
The Bible is not a cage. It is a map. And if we follow it rightly, it will always lead us to a person. Not a proposition. Not a doctrine. But Christ.
The Word of God is not bound in ink. It is alive. It speaks. And it still has more to say.
Jason Chukwuma (@truthispeaking) is the creator of TRUTH IS SPEAKING on YouTube and the TRUTH SPEAKS newsletter on Substack, delivering sharp commentary on politics, news, and culture. His work reaches audiences across Instagram, Twitter (never X), Medium, and more, and has been featured on MSNBC and The Daily Beast, establishing him as a rising voice on politics and culture. He is a student at Harvard Law School and a graduate of Harvard College.
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