Dr. Francis Schaeffer, in The Great Evangelical Disaster, calls the historic doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible, "the WATERSHED of the Evangelical World." He meant that what any pastor, teacher, or church member believes about the inerrancy of the Bible radically determines whether that person continues to take the words of the Bible as his absolute, God-inspired guide about all doctrine, all morals, and all areas of life, OR, considers the Bible to be part true and part false and thus uses his own (or his teacher's) wisdom to determine which parts are which.

If a person chooses the latter course, he or she has moved from believing in the absoluteness of God's written Word to a position of "Biblical relativism," and it is inevitable that such a person will drift increasingly toward a more liberal, neo-orthodox, anti-Biblical view of many historic doctrines and many moral issues. Once a person starts on that slippery, downhill road, there is no logical, objective stopping point for how far they drift.

Dr. Schaeffer's analysis of the essential nature of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy as a "watershed" issue has been proven over and over in the Church's history. This issue is dealt with in the first of our 24 ICCP Documents. Most of the false, anti-Biblical points outlined in other 23 Theological Documents would not even have arisen as theological issues if all Evangelicals still believed in the inerrancy of the Bible!

"Unless the Bible is without error, not only when it speaks of salvation matters, but also when it speaks of history and the cosmos...the next generation of Christians will have nothing on which to stand." (Schaeffer)

This doctrine of inerrancy is the most fundamental, critical, and urgent issue because it is the theological foundation of all the other current controversies outlined here and of all doctrines, morals, ethics, and ministry.