They are frightened of certain mental attitudes and stances with which they feel the word inerrancy is now inseparably linked and which in their view tend to obscure the Bible’s main message and bar the way to the best in biblical scholarship.
In Truth and Power: The Place of Scripture in the Christian Life, J. I. Packer acknowledges that some Christians believe in the inspiration of Scripture but are hesitant to affirm its “inerrancy.” This he finds “perplexing.”

They are frightened of certain mental attitudes and stances with which they feel the word inerrancy is now inseparably linked and which in their view tend to obscure the Bible’s main message and bar the way to the best in biblical scholarship.

Specifically, they hear the inerrancy claim as challenging all comers to find mistakes in Scripture if they can—which, so they think, is an improper diverting of interest from the great issues of the gospel to the minutiae of Bible harmony, and from believing proclamation to rationalistic apologetics.

Packer can understand this mindset, because he once held it himself:

I sympathize. Yet I wonder if they have chosen the wisest and most fruitful course of action. I say this as one who over the years has moved in the opposite direction. Once I too avoided the word inerrancy as much as I could, partly because I had no wish myself to endorse the tendencies mentioned, and partly because the word has a negative form and I like to sound positive.

But I find that nowadays I need the word.

Verbal currency, as we know, can be devalued. Any word may have some of its meaning rubbed off, and this has happened to all my preferred terms for stating my belief about the Bible. I hear folk declare Scripture inspiredand in the next breath say that it misleads from time to time. I hear them call it infallible and authoritative, and find they mean only that its impact on us and the commitment to which it leads us will keep us in God’s grace, not that it is all true.

That is not enough for me. I want to safeguard the historic evangelical meaning of these three words and to make clear my intention, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, to receive as from the Father and the Son all that the Scripture, when properly interpreted—that is, understood from within, in terms of its own frame of reference—proves to be affirming.

The historic Christian teaching, rightly understood, is that the Bible is both inerrant and infallible. It is without error (inerrant) because it is impossible for it to have errors (infallible). [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

In his chapter on “The Inerrancy of Scripture” in The Doctrine of the Word of God(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010), John Frame offers some important distinctions and clarifications on the doctrine. He points out that inerrancy suggests to many the idea ofprecision, rather than its lexical meaning of mere truth.

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