The BFM2000 affirms that the Bible is 'the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried' and that it is 'truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.' This is an inerrancy position — the claim that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, contains no error in anything it affirms, whether in matters of faith, history, or science.

This commitment to inerrancy was galvanized in the SBC through the 'Conservative Resurgence' (also called the 'Fundamentalist Takeover') of the 1980s and 1990s, in which conservative leaders successfully moved the denomination back from what they saw as drift toward a looser view of biblical authority in its seminaries and institutions. Today, all six SBC seminaries require faculty to affirm inerrancy.

The SBC's inerrancy position is aligned with the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), which defines inerrancy in careful and qualified terms. It acknowledges that biblical authors used different literary genres, employed approximations, and addressed different purposes, but insists that in all their assertions, the biblical authors spoke truth. Inerrancy is widely considered a mark of orthodoxy within SBC fellowship.