It is the "belief that the Bible is completely trustworthy as a guide to salvation and the life of faith and will not fail to accomplish its purpose.
[2] The idea of biblical infallibility gained ground in Protestant churches as a fundamentalist reaction against a general movement towards modernism within mainstream Christian denominations in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
"[5] No matter how little common ground was apparent at the time between Roman Catholicism and the Evangelical Right, these two reformulations of scriptural and papal supremacy represented a defiant assertiveness in reaction against the crisis of religious authority that was engulfing Western religion.
[8] The Second Vatican Council, citing earlier declarations, stated: "Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.
"[10] The Methodist theologian Thomas A. Lambrecht notes that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ...used the word "infallible" to describe the Scriptures.
To ignore or disobey the teachings of Scripture is to contradict its infallibility, which puts us on a completely different theological path altogether.
'"[19] Some denominations that teach infallibility hold that the historical or scientific details, which may be irrelevant to matters of faith and Christian practice, may contain errors.
"[21] And "We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or Redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science.