The PCA is strongly committed to biblical inerrancy as affirmed in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978). The statement teaches that the Bible, in its original autographs, is completely without error in all that it teaches—not only in matters of faith and practice but in history, science, and geography as well.

This is verbal, plenary inerrancy: every word is God's Word, and the whole Scripture is given by divine inspiration. Inerrancy does not require wooden literalism; the Bible contains various genres and uses figures of speech, hyperbole, and phenomenological language, all of which can be inerrant in their proper context.

Inerrancy is grounded in the nature of God and his Word: God cannot lie, and he has preserved his Word through the transmission process sufficiently for the church's use. Textual variants in manuscripts are acknowledged, but the original text is held to be inerrant. This doctrine is foundational to PCA identity and distinguishes it from more liberal Presbyterian bodies.