Evangelical Disaster II

"...It is important to note that, up until recent times, 1) belief in the inerrancy of Scripture (even when it was not practiced fully) and 2) claiming to be a Christian were seen as two things which necessarily went together. If you were a Christian, you also trusted in the complete reliability of God's written Word, the Bible. If you did not believe the Bible, you did not claim to be a Christian. But no one, until the past two hundred years or so, tried to say, "I am a Christian, but at the same time I believe the Bible to be full of errors."  As incredible as this would have seemed to Christians in the past, and as incredible as this may seem to Bible-believing Christians today, this is what is now happening within the evangelical world...

The Ground Cut Out From Under

    There are two reasons in our day for holding to a strong uncompromising view of Scripture. First and foremost, this is the only way to be faithful to what the Bible teaches about itself, to what Christ teaches about Scripture, and to what the church has consistently held through the ages. This should be reason enough in itself. But today there is a second reason why we should hold to a strong, uncompromising view of Scripture. There are hard days ahead of us -- for ourselves and for our spiritual and physical children. Unless the Bible is without error, not only when it speaks of salvation matters, but also when it speaks of history and the cosmos, we have no foundation for answering questions concerning the existence of the universe and its form and the uniqueness of man. Nor do we have any moral absolutes, or certainty of salvation, and the next generation of Christians will have nothing on which to stand. Our spiritual and physical children will  be left with the ground cut out from under them, with no foundation upon which to build their faith or lives."

pages 45-46 in the book Evangelical Disaster, by Francis A. Schaeffer
published by Crossway Books in 1984