Many conservative Protestants affirm biblical inerrancy, that the Bible, as the inspired word of God, is wholly true and without error in all that it affirms. In its developed form the doctrine holds that scripture does not mislead in matters of faith, history, or, in the strongest statements, science, being the trustworthy revelation of a God who does not deceive. It is a strong version of the wider Protestant principle of the supreme authority of scripture (sola scriptura), and it grounds the appeal to the Bible as the final rule of belief and life.
The doctrine received its most influential modern formulation in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, drafted in 1978 by nearly three hundred evangelical scholars gathered as the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, a document that carefully distinguished inerrancy from claims of scientific precision or modern historiographical exactness, affirming that scripture is wholly true in what it intends to teach while allowing for phenomena such as approximation, figures of speech, and the conventions of ancient reporting; the statement became a touchstone many evangelical institutions and denominations later adopted, in whole or in part, as a doctrinal test.