The Lordship of Scripture

A few years ago two friends met who had not seen one another for about a decade. In college, they had a daily Bible study together. At that time, one was a valiant defender of the inerrancy and authority of Scripture.

When they met again, however, the inerrantist told the other he no longer believed in an inerrant Bible. The man asked him why. “Well,” he said, “I spent a couple of years in a Muslim country as a missionary, and I heard them saying the same things about the Koran. I guess I got a more cosmopolitan perspective.”

“When I got back to the States,” he continued, “I went to Union Seminary and was exposed to higher critical theories and scholarship, and I just had to set aside my mistaken youthful adherence to biblical infallibility.”

The man asked him what he still “was” able to believe, and he said, “I still believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” The man rejoiced to hear him say this. After all, important as the intellectual commitment to the doctrine of inerrancy is, it is faith in Christ that saves us.

But the man asked him this question: “You say you believe in Christ as your Lord. But how does He exercise His lordship? Obviously not through the Bible, because you have set up your own mind as the supreme judge of the Scriptures. So how do you know the Lord’s will?”

He said that he obtained God’s will through the church. “Which church?” I asked. “The Presbyterian church,” he replied. “Which Presbyterian church?” I asked. The man went on to point out to him that whatever church he chose, we both knew it had changed its mind from time to time and reversed itself on various positions.

This is where the rubber meets the road. The Reformers maintained that the Bible was the place where Christ’s Lordship and will were to be heard, because the church was fallible. The voice of the church has weight, but only the voice of the Son is inerrant.

Where in your life do you locate final authority for matters of faith and practice, ethics and decision making? If you claim Christ as Lord, that authority must reside in the unchanging Scriptures. In our day of changing standards, be sure that the decisions you make today are based on the unchanging truth of the Bible.

Is It Human to Err?

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14).

John 1:14 tells us that the second person of the Godhead became incarnated as a man and lived in human flesh. It also tells us that this God-man was filled with truth.

This teaching was not acceptable to many people in the ancient world. As a result, there arose a heresy known as “docetism,” which rejected the idea that God could become man. It would be beneath the dignity of God to take on human nature, the docetists said. The docetists argued that though Jesus “seemed” to have a physical body, in reality He did not.

More sophisticated forms of docetism appeared as time went along, but in general any view that devalues the humanity of Christ is called docetic. Now, in the twentieth century a number of modernist theologians, most prominently Karl Barth, have argued that the classical Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is docetic. They say this view does not do justice to the humanity of Scripture.

In particular, Barth and others say that the orthodox view does not take into account the human propensity to err. “To err is human,” they say. “Thus, if the Bible is both divine and human, it must contain both truth (the divine part) and error (the human part).”

It is one thing to admit that fallen man can err, and even that all fallen men do err. It is quite another thing to say that unless you make mistakes, you cannot be human. To say the latter is to deny the incarnation. Did Jesus err? Did Jesus sin? No. But was Jesus human? Certainly.

Jesus was truth incarnate. A human so filled with truth cannot err. The Scriptures, as the Word of Christ, are, like Him, both divinely inerrant and humanly inerrant. The question is not whether or not men “can” err. The question, rather, is whether the writers of the Bible “did” err. Beyond this is the question of whether the God of truth can “inspire error”!

If we say God cannot produce an inerrant Bible, we must then conclude that all Scripture is suspect. If so, perhaps its teaching is wrong with regard to the deity of Christ, the completed atonement and other vital areas of belief. List several other major doctrines which depend upon the trustworthiness of the Bible.

The Inspired Biblical Text

"Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:20–21).

The classical and orthodox Christian faith does not hold that our “translations” of the Bible are verbally inspired and inerrant. Rather, it is the original writings themselves that were directly inspired by God and are free of error. We call these original writings the “autographa.”

Nor do we maintain that no errors have ever crept into the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible as a result of copying them repeatedly. Indeed, there is an entire science of “lower criticism” that compares the manuscripts to find the reading that is most likely the original one.

Critics of orthodox Christianity have ridiculed the faith at this point. They say that if inspiration extends only to the original autographs, how can we even speak about inspiration since none of the autographs exist today? They say that we are simply copping out on the question.

Is the orthodox position a cop out? Well, suppose I am reading a passage in 2 Chronicles and I come across a statement that seems to me almost certainly to be wrong. I check all the various ancient copies of 2 Chronicles that we have with us today, and I find that every copy has this same problem. Then I say, “Well, since this is clearly wrong, then a copying error must have been made very early in the transmission of the text of 2 Chronicles. My guess is that the original, inspired text would have read in such and such a way.” Now, that would be a cop out.

But in fact, no classical exegete does this. Rather, the position of the historic church has always been that if there are difficult things in a text, and we have no other manuscript evidence, we have to live with the difficulty.

There are very few places in the Bible where the manuscripts are in dispute. It is amazing that among the thousands of copies of the Bible from the ancient and medieval world, there are so few copying errors. In other words, the inspired text of the original autographs has been “preserved” for us with astounding accuracy.

We can trust our Bibles. Yet while God has preserved His inerrant Scriptures for us, that does not guarantee an absence of interpretive problems. Identify passages which are difficult for you and work with your minister to resolve them in light of more clear and instructive Scriptures.

The New Testament Authority

"After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea" (Colossians 4:16).

How did we get the New Testament? Who decided which books were to be put in the canon of Scripture? (Canon means “rule or list,” and the canon of Scripture is the list of books included as authoritative.) This is an involved question, but we can make a couple of basic points today.

The New Testament writers themselves show that they were aware that Scripture was being produced; in other words, that such new writings had the same authority as the Old Testament. When Paul wrote his letters to the Ephesians, Romans, Colossians, and others, he was not just dashing off notes to friends in other places. Notice in Colossians 4:16, cited above, that he wanted his letters distributed throughout the churches.

The apostle Peter explicitly refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture, on a par with the Old Testament, in 2 Peter 3:15–16: “As our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

Paul quotes from Luke’s gospel, and calls it Scripture, in 1 Timothy 5:18: “For the Scripture says, ‘Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,’ and ‘The worker deserves his wages.’ ” The first quotation is from Deuteronomy 25:4, while the second is from Luke 10:7. Notice that Paul puts the gospel of Luke on an equal footing with the fifth book of Moses. Notice also that he does not say he is quoting a saying of Jesus that had been passed around in the churches, but he calls it Scripture—which shows he is citing a written source.

It was only later in the history of the early church, when heretics began to challenge the New Testament books, that the orthodox church wrote up a list of canonical books. But the New Testament Scriptures were recognized as inspired from the very beginning.

Both testaments are equally authoritative. However, some people accord greater status to the New over the Old, or to the words of Jesus over Paul. Don’t limit your canon of Scripture. Submit yourself to the whole of God’s Word.

The Old Testament Canon

"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he [Jesus] explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).

Today we will get an overview of the canon of the Old Testament. Remember that a canon is a rule, so the canonical Old Testament Scriptures are those ancient Jewish writings that are part of the rule of the church. Also, a canon is a list, so that the canon of the Old Testament is the authoritative list of inspired Old Testament books.

We receive the Old Testament canon from the Jews, specifically from the Palestinian canon. The Jewish Old Testament has 22 or 24 books, depending on how you count, while our Christian Bible has 39 Old Testament books. Actually, these are the same. We divide the Jewish books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles into 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. The Jewish Old Testament combines Ezra and Nehemiah, and all 12 minor prophets are in one book.

The Jewish Old Testament is divided into three parts. The first is the Law, which consists of the five books of Moses. The second is the Prophets, which is divided into two sections. We Christians usually speak of the major and minor prophets, but this is not the distinction the Jews made. They distinguished between the Former and Latter Prophets. The Former Prophets are what we call historical books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The Jews regarded these histories as prophetic, in the sense that they prophesy God’s Word to His people. The Latter Prophets are what we regard as the prophetic books today: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve (“minor prophets”).

The third division of the Jewish Old Testament is the Writings. This division includes the poetic books, the wisdom literature, and the books of Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The Old Testament is quoted hundreds of times in the New Testament. It was the Bible of Jesus and the early church, and it is part of our Bible as well.

The Old Testament is God’s Word and the foundation of the New Testament. Can you name all the Old Testament books in order? Check yourself and work to achieve this. Also, challenge yourself to read a neglected book of the Old Testament this week.