III Authority
CHAPTER III
AUTHORITY
My conscience is subject to the Word of God.
MARTIN LUTHER
The authority of the holy scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God.
WESTMINSTER CONFESSION, I. IV
THE PROBLEM STATED
WE have said already that one odd feature of this controversy is that the real question, or group of questions, that lies at its heart has not yet been raised. The real question concerns the principle of authority. But anti-fundamentalists fail to see this. Hence, instead of recognizing and discussing the difference that exists here, we find them glossing over it with equivocal formulæ. Hebert, for instance, more than once affirms the authority of God's word, of the gospel, of Christ, in terms which Evangelicals would use. But his book shows that he does not mean them in an evangelical sense. Yet he seems quite unaware that there is any difference of view at this point, and supposes that disagreement begins only over principles of biblical interpretation. This is typical of those who write and speak against Evangelicalism today. What they say reveals that, in the strict sense of the phrase, many of them do not know what they are talking about.
In the following chapters we address ourselves to this situation. Our aim is to clarify the neglected issues. We shall try to formulate the question of authority, specify the difference of the contending groups about it, and justify our claim that it is central in the present dispute. We shall expound the evangelical view, and work out its implications; and we hope to do this in enough detail to remove the possibility of further confusion arising through the use of the ambiguous formulæ now in vogue. This will involve us in a critique of some common views, and of the anti-fundamentalist outlook as a whole. We hope to make clear the implications of the position that opposes our own, and to confirm our argument for the rightness of the one by exhibiting the wrongness of the other. What we shall write is not offered as in any sense an exhaustive statement; our aim is limited to saying what seems necessary in order to make clear the basic issues in this debate and the foundations of the evangelical position. We shall confine ourselves as far as possible to broad principles; many points of detail must be passed by for lack of space. As it is, the aim which we have set ourselves will involve us in fairly full discussions.
We would begin this chapter by calling attention to the extreme importance of its subject.
The problem of authority is the most fundamental problem that the Christian Church ever faces. This is because Christianity is built on truth : that is to say, on the content of a divine revelation. Christianity announces salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, in and through whom that revelation came to completion; but faith in Jesus Christ is possible only where the truth concerning Him is known. The New Testament tells us that God has made provision for the communication of this saving truth. He entrusted to the apostles, and through them to the whole Church, a message from Himself which conveys it. This is called 'the word of God', 'the word of the Lord', or sometimes 'the word' simply.1 Its contents denominate it 'the word of Christ', 'the word of the cross';2 and its divine origin guarantees it to be 'the word of truth'.3 Men come to faith through receiving this word, and such faith is specifically described as 'obeying the truth'.4 'The faith of God's elect' goes with 'the knowledge of the truth'.1 But if this truth is rejected or perverted, faith is overthrown (cf. 2 Tim. ii. 18) and men come under the power of a lie (cf. 2 Thes. ii. 10-13), with terrible results. The startlingly violent tone of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians reflects his vivid awareness of this. The circumcision heresy might seem a small thing in itself, but Paul knew that revealed truth was all of a piece, and that to follow out the principle which this heresy enshrined would mean the effective abandonment of the gospel; so he writes: 'Behold, I Paul say unto you, that, if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing. . . Ye are severed from Christ . . . ye are fallen away from grace.'2 Hence the vehemence of his twice-repeated imprecation: 'Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. As we have said before, so say I now again, If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema." 3 Paul finds himself unable to over-estimate the importance of holding fast the truth and avoiding error as to the content of the gospel. Here he is in line with the witness of the whole New Testament. Modern man, sceptical and indifferent as he is to dogmatic pronouncements about the supernatural order, may find it hard to take seriously the idea that one's eternal welfare may depend on what one believes; but the apostles were sure that it was so. Theological error was to them a grim reality, as was the spiritual shipwreck which comes in its wake.
Hence we see how important it is to find a right criterion of truth, by which we may tell the word of God from human error. The New Testament tells us that 'many false prophets are gone out into the world',4 and holds out no hope that the world will ever be without them. We must expect to find error constantly assailing the truth; Christendom will always be a theological battlefield. But in that case the Christian's most pressing need in every age is to have a reliable principle by which he may test the conflicting voices that claim to speak for Christianity and so make out amid their discordant clamour what he ought to believe and do.
Here, however, difficulty arises, for several possible principles present themselves. In the imprecatory passage quoted from the Galatians, for instance, Paul is specifically warning against one plausible but unreliable criterion—the personal dignity of the speaker. The New Testament knows of others. Paul cautions Timothy against treating as a criterion 'the profane babblings and oppositions of the knowledge (gnōsis, the current religious philosophy) which is falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the faith'.1 We are also told that teaching may have the status of honoured tradition, or be the product of exalted, visionary states of mind, and yet not be true;2 so that these factors provide no safe criterion. Yet we find that all these principles of authority which the New Testament rejects have, in fact, had a long history within the Christian Church.
This being so, we must not be surprised that the problem of authority still divides Christian people. And clearly it is the most far-reaching and fundamental division that there is, or can be, between them. The deepest cleavages in Christendom are doctrinal; and the deepest doctrinal cleavages are those which result from disagreement about authority. Radical divergences are only to be expected when there is no agreement as to the proper grounds for believing anything. The doctrinal divisions in the Church therefore fall into two distinct classes. Some presuppose a common view of authority; some do not. The seventeenth-century debates between Presbyterians and Independents, or Calvinists and Arminians, were examples of the first class; in them, both sides agreed that Scripture is the final authority and differed only as to what it teaches. On the other hand, the historic differences between Protestantism and Rome over the Papacy, the priesthood and the Mass belong to the second class; for these divisions reflect the fact that the disputants are divided about authority. Plainly, these two classes of disagreement must be approached at different levels. Any plan for settling the doctrinal disputes of Christendom which overlooked the distinction between them, and tried to resolve disagreements of the second type as if they were of the first—to settle them, in other words, without raising the question of authority at all—would stand condemned as quite unrealistic and misguided. Those who disagree as to the principle of authority and, in consequence, as to the right method in theology, can reach no significant agreement on anything else.
It is, however, a disturbing fact that today this is largely overlooked. Christian bodies of all sorts are constantly urged to come together, sink their differences and present a united front to the forces of secularism and Communism. It is taken for granted that the differences in question are small and trifling—unsightly little cracks on the surface of an otherwise solid wall. But this assumption is false. Not all the cracks are mere superficial disfigurements; some of them are the outward signs of lack of structural integration. The wall is cracked because it is not all built on the same foundation. The more one probes the differences between Roman and Protestant, Liberal and Evangelical, the deeper they prove to be; beneath the cracks on the surface lie fissures which run down to the very foundations, broadening as they go. Nothing is gained just by trying to cement up the cracks; that only encourages the collapse of the entire wall. Sham unity is not worth working for, and real unity, that fellowship of love in the truth which Christ prayed that His disciples might enjoy,1 will come only as those sections of the wall which rest on unsound foundations are dismantled and rebuilt. Till this happens, the question of authority must remain central in discussion between the dissident groups; and the best service one can do to the divided Church of Christ is to keep it there.
We maintain that the 'fundamentalist' controversy is of the second type mentioned; that is, that it is rooted in disagreement about authority. It is, in fact, an episode in the continuing debate between Evangelicalism and what we shall call Subjectivism, of which Liberalism is a modern form. And it is idle to hope that we and our critics can reach stable agreement on other matters while we lack common ground on the subject of authority. This is the contention which we shall now expound.
The problem of authority may be formulated thus. All Christians agree that Christianity, being founded on revelation, is a religion of authority, requiring that its adherents conform themselves to the revelation on which it rests. This revelation was given in history, in the course of a process of redemptive action which centred upon the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Authority derives from this revelation. What God says to man and does for man in the present is no more than a particular application of what He said to the world and did for the world once for all through the man Christ Jesus. It is God speaking in Christ, and God's word spoken through Christ, that is ultimately authoritative; it is the Bible that bears authoritative witness to the speaking of that word; and it is the Holy Spirit who, in every age, mediates that authoritative word to the individual Christian and the Church. These general conceptions are common ground. The problem arises when we try to be more specific and practical in our forms of statement. How should we set about discovering just what this word of God is? By what channel exactly is it mediated from the past to the present? From what source may we gain authoritative guidance as to what God has and has not authoritatively said? When Christian opinions differ, where should be the final court of appeal? This is the problem of authority.
THREE RIVAL ANSWERS
There are three distinct authorities to which final appeal might be made—Holy Scripture, Church tradition or Christian reason; that is to say, Scripture as interpreted by itself; Scripture as interpreted (and in some measure amplified) by official ecclesiastical sources; and Scripture as evaluated in terms of extra-biblical principles by individual Christian men. The problem of authority can be answered in three ways, and three only, according to which of the authorities mentioned is given precedence over the other two: we call these three types of answer the evangelical, the traditionalist and the subjectivist respectively. Confessional Protestants give the first; Romanists, some Anglo-Catholics and Orthodox give the second; modern Liberal Protestants give the third. The consequent threefold division of Christendom on the subject of authority cuts across many denominational barriers, and is in fact the deepest cleavage of all.
We must briefly set out these three positions side by side. Analysed in terms of principle, they are as follows :
a. The Evangelical View
This was first formally stated in opposition to the other two at the time of the Reformation, but, as we shall see, it is in fact the original Christian position. Its basic principle is that the teaching of the written Scriptures is the Word which God spoke and speaks to His Church, and is finally authoritative for faith and life. To learn the mind of God, one must consult His written Word. What Scripture says, God says. The Bible is inspired in the sense of being word-for-word God-given. It is a record and explanation of divine revelation which is both complete (sufficient) and comprehensible (perspicuous); that is to say, it contains all that the Church needs to know in this world for its guidance in the way of salvation and service, and it contains the principles for its own interpretation within itself. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit, who caused it to be written, has been given to the Church to cause believers to recognize it for the divine Word that it is, and to enable them to interpret it rightly and understand its meaning. He who was its Author is also its Witness and Expositor. Christians must therefore seek to be helped and taught by the Spirit when they study Scripture, and must regard all their understanding of it, no less than the book itself, as the gift of God. The Spirit must be acknowledged as the infallible Interpreter of God's infallible Word. 'The supreme Judge . . . in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.'1
The Bible, therefore, does not need to be supplemented and interpreted by tradition, or revised and corrected by reason. Instead, it demands to sit in judgment on the dictates of both; for the words of men must be tried by the Word of God. The Church collectively, and the Christian individually, can and do err, and the inerrant Scripture must ever be allowed to speak and correct them.
Not that Church tradition is unimportant. On the contrary, it yields much valuable help in understanding what Scripture teaches. The Spirit has been active in the Church from the first, doing the work He was sent to do—guiding God's people into an understanding of revealed truth. The history of the Church's labour to understand the Bible forms a commentary on the Bible which we cannot despise or ignore without dishonouring the Holy Ghost. To treat the principle of biblical authority as a prohibition against reading and learning from the book of Church history is not an evangelical, but an anabaptist mistake, which comes from overlooking what the Bible says of the Spirit's work in the Church. Tradition may not be so lightly dismissed. But neither may it be made a separate authority apart from Scripture. Like every commentary on the Bible, it must itself be tested and, where necessary, corrected by the Bible which it seeks to expound.
Nor may reason be viewed as an independent authority for our knowledge of God's truth. Reason's part is to act as the servant of the written Word, seeking in dependence on the Spirit to interpret Scripture scripturally, to correlate its teaching and to discern its application to all parts of life. We may not look to reason to tell us whether Scripture is right in what it says (reason is not in any case competent to pass such a judgment); instead, we must look to Scripture to tell us whether reason is right in what it thinks on the subjects with which Scripture deals.
On this view, then, the proper ground for believing a thing is not that the Church or reason says it. Both these authorities may err, and in any case it is not to them that God has told us to go for authoritative indications of His mind. The proper ground for believing a thing is that God says it in His written Word, and a readiness to take God's word and accept what He asserts in the Bible is thus fundamental to faith.
b. The Traditionalist View
This deviates from that expounded above towards an ecclesiastical authoritarianism. It maintains that the final authority for faith and life is the official teaching of the institutional Church. To learn the mind of God, one should consult the Church's historic tradition; what the Church says, God says. (The fact that 'Catholic' bodies differ as to the limits of tradition does not affect their unity on this principle.) This view does not question that the Bible is God-given and therefore authoritative; but it insists that Scripture is neither sufficient nor perspicuous, neither self-contained nor self-interpreting, as an account of God's revelation. The Bible alone, therefore, is no safe nor adequate guide for anyone. However, tradition, which is also God-given and therefore authoritative, supplies what is lacking in Scripture; it augments its contents and declares its (alleged) meaning. (Rome goes furthest in thus supplementing and wresting Scripture, adding the Apocrypha to the canon, treating the Vulgate as an authentic version, and imposing such traditions as Papal infallibility and the Mary-cult; others are less extravagant.) The work of the Holy Spirit as Giver and Interpreter of revelation is thus equated with the pronouncements of the teaching Church. This view allows reason no authority to judge tradition; reason's task is to receive, record and apply tradition, not to test it. The practical implication of this position is that the reason why a Christian should believe a thing is not that he sees for himself that the Bible says it (though it may), nor that his reason approves it (it may, or it may not), but that the Church teaches it. Faith is primarily a matter of believing what the Church lays down.
F.—4
This is a veritable chameleon, and takes many forms. Sometimes it appears as mysticism (as in the Quakers), sometimes as rationalism (as in the Socinians and Deists), sometimes as a combination of both (as in some nineteenth-century Liberals who took their mysticism from Schleiermacher and their rationalism from Ritschl).But all its many varieties spring from a single principle, namely, that the final authority for my faith and life is the verdict of my reason, conscience or religious sentiment (subjectivists vary in the way they put this) as I examine Scripture 'with an open mind' (i.e., without presupposing that its own account of itself is true), and measure it by what I have learned from other sources, historical, philosophical, religious and scientific. What under these circumstances reason and conscience say, what I find that 'I feel', that God says.
In general, the subjectivism of the past century has given some such account of the Bible as this : Scripture is certainly a product of outstanding religious insight. God was with its authors. They were inspired to write, and what they wrote is inspiring to read. But their inspiration was not of such a kind as to guarantee the full truth of their writings, or to make them all the word of God. Like all human products, Scripture is uneven. One part contradicts another; some parts are uninspired and unimportant; some of it reflects an antiquated outlook which can have no relevance for today. (The same, of course, on this view is true of Church tradition.) If the essential biblical message is to mean anything to modern man, it must be divorced from its obsolete trappings, re-formulated in the light of modern knowledge and re-stated in terms drawn from the thought-world of today. Reason and conscience must judge Scripture and tradition, picking out the wheat from the chaff and re-fashioning the whole to bring it into line with the accepted philosophy of the time. The work of the Spirit as interpreter is equated with this endless activity of reconstruction. According to subjectivism, therefore, the proper ground for believing a thing is not that the Bible or tradition contains it, but that reason and conscience commend it; from which it seems to follow that faith is essentially a matter of being loyal to such religious convictions as one has.
Here, then, are the three rival answers to the problem of authority. They are mutually exclusive, and cannot in reality be combined. Sometimes, it is true, an attempt is made to combine them in a formula, and we are told that Scripture, tradition and reason should be regarded as coordinate authorities, neither being set above the other two. But the formula is unworkable; what happens when they clash? There seems no other way of making sense of the formula than to suppose that it conceals an intention of accepting all that Scripture and tradition are held to agree upon, but of appealing to the arbitration of reason when they differ. If so, then, of course, reason is the ultimate authority all along; neither Scripture nor tradition is to be followed further than reason approves. The formula thus enshrines one of the many forms of subjectivism, and is not a fourth option at all. There is no fourth option.
Which of these three, now, is the authentic Christian position? That is what we have to decide.
THE NEW TESTAMENT IN RELATION TO THE OLD
It is convenient in the first instance to approach this as an historical question, to be answered by appeal to historical matter of fact. Christianity is an historical religion, and had an historical Founder, whose teaching all Christians profess to regard as normative. The authentic Christian position on any subject, therefore, will be that which corresponds with what He taught. The New Testament, regarded simply as an historical document, provides us with first-hand contemporary evidence as to what the earliest Christians held that Christ had taught, and accordingly, as to what they believed themselves. Whether the teaching of the New Testament, on this or any other subject, is to be treated as final is a question which for the moment we postpone, though the answer to it will become clear as we go along. For the moment, we simply ask: What, in fact, is the New Testament position on authority?
The entire New Testament outlook is determined by the conviction that the Old and New dispensations are organically one. The writers see the coming of Christ as the climax of a single revelatory process which had been going on in Israel for over a millennium; and their writings, in which this crowning revelation is described and explained, ask to be read as the complement and completion of the Old Testament. Whether or not they knew that any part of what they wrote was designed by God for canonical Scripture, none of them doubted the essential continuity between what they were saying and what the Scriptures of the Old Covenant said. To them, the Old and the New were all of a piece; the contents of the New had been concealed in the Old, and the meaning of the Old stood revealed in the New. Christianity was no fresh start, but the finishing of something begun long before.
Both Christ and the apostles were at pains to insist that, revolutionary though the new order might seem, it was in fact no more than had been foretold when the prophets spoke of the coming of Israel's Messiah and the setting up of His kingdom. This theme constantly recurs in the early Christian preaching.1 Christ had already made the point that the relation between the new order and the old was one not of mere substitution, but of fulfilment. 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.'2 The consequence of His coming was that the life of the Church of God was reconstructed in its permanent and final form. As a result, the Church came to look very different from what it had been before. It became a mainly Gentile body, in which most Jews had no place. It lost its national life and became an international society. Its characteristic rites were no longer circumcision and the annual passover, but baptism and the weekly Lord's Supper; and whereas the synagogue had met on the seventh day, Christians came together on the first day of the week. They had no priestly caste nor central shrine: they offered no animal sacrifices. They had abandoned all the elaborate Old Testament machinery for bringing sinners near to a holy God; they claimed that it had been done away by the Messiah's priestly sacrifice of Himself, which won permanent access to God for all believers everywhere. The outward differences between the Old and the New order were thus considerable; yet the apostles insisted that the Christian community was essentially the same Church as before. Gentile converts were told that in Christ they had become 'the Israel of God', 'Abraham's seed' and heirs of the Abrahamic promise, for they had now been grafted into the one olive tree (the covenant community, of which the patriarchs were the root and first-fruits) in place of those of Abraham's lineal seed who were broken off through unbelief.1 The God of the Christians was the God of Israel; Jesus, the Son of God, was the Christ, Israel's long-awaited Messiah; and Christianity itself was no more than Israel's religion brought to its perfect and final form through the fulfilment of Israel's hope by Christ's death and resurrection.
In the light of this professed continuity between the old and the new dispensations it is very significant for our enquiry to find that Israel's religion had always been based on the authority of a written word of God. It was on record that when God first entered into covenant with the nation at Sinai and gave them His laws, He inscribed the Decalogue—the core of the code—on two tables of stone, 'written with the finger of God', which Moses brought down from the mountain and deposited in the Ark.2 The biblical concept of written revelation seems to have been directly derived from those tables. The rest of the Pentateuch, and the later prophetic messages, written down either by the prophets themselves3 or by their associates,4 were always regarded as no less divine, no less truly words of God, than the words which God had written with His own finger. The fact of their human authorship was never held to affect the reality of their divine authorship. The same conviction extended to the canonical history books, which were regarded as prophetic in character. There seems no doubt that in our Lord's day the entire contents of the Old Testament were received as abidingly valid 'oracles of God',1 to be treasured, studied, believed and obeyed.
The nature of the authority ascribed to these writings appears from the fact that Israel regarded itself as a theocracy, and its Scriptures as, in effect, the statute-book by which God ruled and judged His people. Those Scriptures contained the laws which He had made for them; they were under obligation to obey His enactments, and flouted them at their peril. For while law-keeping meant prosperity, law-breaking would bring judgment in the form of disaster.2 The Jews of Christ's day shared this conviction of their forbears. They knew themselves to be the people of God, living under the laws and government of God, and bound to obey His laws under penalty of wrath and judgment. Thus, the religion in which our Lord was brought up was first and foremost a religion of subjection to the authority of a written divine word.
THE TEACHING OF CHRIST3
a. His Attitude to the Old Testament
Jesus Christ, so far from rejecting this principle of biblical authority, accepted and built on it, endorsing it with the greatest emphasis and the full weight of His authority. And the authority to which He laid claim was absolute and unqualified. He appealed to no human authority, but put His teaching forward as divine in origin, and therefore eternally valid in its own right. 'My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.' 'I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak . . . whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.'1 Therefore 'heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away'.2 He told His hearers that their eternal destiny depended on whether, having heard His words, they kept them;3 for 'he that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words . . . the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day'.4 He taught 'as one having authority' ;5 some were awed, others were shocked, by His authoritative manner. He did not hesitate to challenge and condemn, on His own authority, many accepted Jewish ideas which seemed to Him false. But He never opposed His personal authority to that of the Old Testament. He never qualified the Jewish belief in its absolute authority in the slightest degree. The fact we have to face is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who claimed divine authority for all that He did and taught, both confirmed the absolute authority of the Old Testament for others and submitted to it unreservedly Himself.
There is no lack of evidence for our Lord's attitude to the Old Testament. He prefaces with his regular formula of solemn assertion ('Verily [amen] I say unto you') the following emphatic assurance : 'till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law'.6 He quotes Gn. ii. 24—in its context a comment passed by Adam or (more likely) the narrator—as an utterance of God : 'have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning . . . said…?'7 He treats arguments from Scripture as having clinching force. When he says 'it is written', that is final. There is no appeal against Scripture, for 'the scripture cannot be broken';8 God's Word holds good for ever. He constantly upbraids the Jewish theologians for their ignorance and neglect of Scripture; 'Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures?'9 'Have ye not read . . .?10 'Go ye and learn what that meaneth . . .'1 When He comes to disentangle principles of the Mosaic law from the perversions of scribal exegesis,2 He prefaces a word of warning, lest His purpose be misunderstood. 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets'—you must not suppose that when I contrast what 'was said to them of old time' with what 'I say unto you', I am cancelling Scripture; 'I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil'—to expound Scripture, to exhibit and implement its true meaning, and thus, so far from annulling it, to vindicate and confirm its abiding authority.3
As well as endorsing the principle of biblical authority in its application to others, our Lord submitted to it Himself. He read the Old Testament as the word of His Father. His mind was saturated in it, as His teaching showed. He met the tempter by avowing His intention to obey what was written.4 He kept the law; when His opponents accused Him or His disciples of breaking it, He always replied, not that He or they were exempted from it, but that they were in fact keeping it, and their critics had misunderstood its meaning.5 His whole ministry, as recorded in the Gospels, may justly be described as a prolonged and many-sided affirmation of the authority of the Old Testament. For He drew His conception of the Messianic office entirely from the strands of Old Testament prophecy concerning the One that should come—the Son of David who was the Son of God, the Son of man who should take the kingdom, the Servant who should preach mercy and suffer for the people's sins. He told the congregation at Nazareth that He was preaching in fulfilment of Scripture.1 Matthew says that He healed in fulfilment of Scripture;2 indeed, He said as much Himself when, to restore the Baptist's faith in His Messiahship, He appealed to the evidence of His cures in words drawn from the prophetic picture of the day of redemption in Is. xxxv. 5 f.3 And He went to death in fulfilment of Scripture. As soon as Peter had confessed Him Messiah at Cæsarea Philippi, 'he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and . . . be killed, and after three days rise again"4—must, because so it was written. 'Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.'5 'The Son of man goeth as it is written of him,' He said at the last supper.6 'I tell you,' He added a little later, 'that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, "And he was reckoned with transgressors"; for what is written about me has its fulfilment.'7 When arrested, He checked Peter's impulse to fight for his Master's life : 'Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so? . . . All this has taken place, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.'8 He ended a life of obedience to Scripture by dying in obedience to Scripture, looking to His Father to raise Him from death in fulfilment of Scripture. Duly he rose; and returned to His disciples to explain to them from Scripture the meaning of what had happened : 'These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. . . . Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations.'1
In life and death, therefore, our Lord devoted Himself to fulfilling the Scriptures. And it was as the fulfiller of Scripture that He presented Himself to the Jews. He claimed to exhibit in Himself what the Old Testament actually meant. He appealed to it as providing the warrant for what He said and did, and the sphere of reference in terms of which alone He could be understood. He saw Himself as the key to it, and it as the key to Himself. Any interpretation of either that was not given in terms of the other would be a misinterpretation. Indeed, He held that anyone who really believed the Old Testament would know who He was, and come to trust Him. 'You search the scriptures,' He told the Jews, 'because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. . . . If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?'2 And by His very assertions that the Old Testament bears authoritative divine witness to Him, our Lord bears authoritative divine witness to it.
In short, the Gospels assure us that the historic Israelite belief in the divine authority of the Old Testament was the foundation of Christ's whole ministry. He challenged current interpretations of Scripture, but shared and endorsed the accepted view of its nature and status as an authoritative utterance of God.
b. The Significance of His Teaching
It thus appears that Christ's answer to the problem of authority can be summed up as follows :
1. The Old Testament is to be received on His authority (over and above its own witness to itself) as the authoritative written utterance of God, abidingly true and trustworthy. Its divine authority and His confirm each other, so that not to accept both would be to accept neither.
2. To learn what they must believe and do, His disciples are not to regard His words alone, but to take His teaching and the Old Testament together, reading the old revelation as the presupposition of the new and the new as both expounding and augmenting the old. In conjunction with Christ's teaching, the written word of the Old Testament retains its full, divine authority.
Attempts have been made by some who reject Christ's view of the Old Testament to evade the force of this conclusion. But this can be done only by denying Christ's authority altogether. Christ's claim to be divine is either true or false. If it is true, His Person guarantees the truth of all the rest of His teaching (for a divine Person cannot lie or err); therefore, His view of the Old Testament is true. If His claim is false, there is no compelling reason to believe anything else that He said. If we accept Christ's claims, therefore, we commit ourselves to believe all that He taught—on His authority. If we refuse to believe some part of what He taught, we are in effect denying Him to be the divine Messiah—on our own authority. The question, 'What think ye of the Old Testament?', resolves into the question, 'What think ye of Christ?' And our answer to the first proclaims our answer to the second.
Some, overlooking the organic connection between the two Testaments, have suggested that Christ's deference to the authority of the Old should be understood as deliberate accommodation to the prejudices of His hearers : He appealed to the Old Testament, not because He accepted its authority Himself, but because He knew that they did, and hoped thus to gain a readier acceptance for His own teaching. But the hypothesis is impossible. It clearly assumes that the authority of the Old Testament was no essential part of Christ's teaching, which ideally would stand on its own, independent of the Jewish Scriptures. But as we have just seen, the divine authority of the Old Testament was actually axiomatic for Christ's thought and teaching about His own Person and vocation. He forbade men to view Him as anything other than the Fulfiller of the law and the prophets, for He did not believe Himself to be anything other than that. He was the divine Messiah of whom the Old Testament spoke; He had come into the world to fulfil the Scriptures, and that was what He was doing. He appealed to Scripture as the sole and sufficient warrant for the things that He said and did because it was in conscious obedience to Scripture that He said and did them. If we reject His attitude to the Old Testament, we are saying in effect that He founded Christianity on a fallacy. And if we say He was wrong here, we really imply that He was wrong everywhere; for His view of the nature and authority of the Old Testament underlies all He said and did. If, on the other hand, we believe that His claims and ministry were comprehensively vindicated by His resurrection, we are bound to say that His view of the Old Testament was thereby vindicated also.
The theory of conscious accommodation, then, will not fit the facts. Nor will attempts to evade the significance of our Lord's attitude to the Old Testament by appeal to a 'kenosis' theory of incarnation. On this kind of view, the process of incarnation involved such a resignation of divine knowledge on the Son's part that in matters of this kind He inevitably fell victim to the prejudices and errors of His own age. He became a man of His time, it is said, so that naturally His views about the Old Testament were those of His time; but they need not bind us. This is a common line of thought, but it is clearly inadequate. In the first place, it does not reckon with our Lord's claim that all He taught was divine truth. It is true that He did not profess to know all things. He confessed ignorance, for example, of the time of His return. 'No man, no, not the angels . . . neither the Son' can say when it will be. But the very context of this admission was a claim, made in the previous verse, that all He did affirm possessed the abiding quality of unchanging truth. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away : but my words shall not pass away.'1 And among His affirmations, as we saw, must be numbered the truth and authority of the Old Testament.
Secondly, this theory, like the other, fails to see the fundamental importance of the Old Testament for our Lord's conception of His calling. It, too, assumes that Christ's ideas about the Old Testament are unessential elements in His thought which can be jettisoned without loss to His real message or to His personal authority. But in fact nothing is more crucial to either. If Christ was mistaken in His view of the Old Testament, He misunderstood His own mission, and was mistaken all along the line. And, as Professor Tasker forcibly remarks, 'If He could be mistaken on matters which He regarded as of the strictest relevance to His own person and ministry, it is difficult to see exactly how or why He can or should be trusted anywhere else.2 To undercut Christ's teaching about the authority of the Old Testament is to strike at His own authority at the most fundamental point.
Others tell us that the final authority for Christians is not Scripture, but Christ, whom we must regard as standing apart from Scripture and above it. He is its Judge; and we, as His disciples, must judge Scripture by Him, receiving only what is in harmony with His life and teaching and rejecting all that is not. But who is this Christ, the Judge of Scripture? Not the Christ of the New Testament and of history. That Christ does not judge Scripture; He obeys it and fulfils it. By word and deed He endorses the authority of the whole of it. Certainly, He is the final authority for Christians; that is precisely why Christians are bound to acknowledge the authority of Scripture. Christ teaches them to do so. A Christ who permits His followers to set Him up as the Judge of Scripture, One by whom its authority must be confirmed before it becomes binding and by whose adverse sentence it is in places annulled, is a Christ of human imagination, made in the theologian's own image, One whose attitude to Scripture is the opposite to that of the Christ of history. If the construction of such a Christ is not a breach of the second commandment, it is hard to see what is. It is sometimes said that to treat the Bible as the infallible word of God is idolatry. If Christ was an idolater, and if following His teaching is idolatry, the accusation may stand; not, however, otherwise. But to worship a Christ who did not receive Scripture as God's unerring word, nor require His followers to do so, would seem to be idolatry in the strictest sense.
We conclude, then, that we must reckon seriously with the fact that Christ accepted the principle of biblical authority, on which the life of the Jewish Church was based, and embodied it unchanged in Christianity. Through His coming, new revelation was given, and new books were added to the canon of Scripture, as we shall see; but the principle that the people of God must live in subjection to the written Word of God remained unaltered.
THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES
The apostles clearly grasped their Master's teaching about Scripture. They proclaimed Christianity as the fulfilment of Scripture. They preached the authority of Christ on the basis of the authority of the Old Testament. They argued from Scripture, quoting its words as the speech of God.1 Indeed, they laid claim to the Old Testament as a Christian book. The oracles of God, entrusted to the Jews, had been written primarily, they maintained, for the benefit of Christian believers. 'Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.' The events in the wilderness in Moses' day 'were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come'. The prophets who spoke of the sufferings and glory of Christ 'were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you'.1 The reckoning of righteousness to believing Abraham was recorded 'not for his sake alone, but for ours also'.2 The Old Testament Scriptures are 'able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus'.3 To Christians, who held the key to its meaning, the Old Testament was luminous, though to those who veiled their hearts by refusing to find its meaning in Christ it remained obscure.4 This, to the apostles, was precisely the difference between Christians and Jews; not that the latter were still fettered to the authority of the Old Testament while the former were free from its shackles, but that Christians could understand the Old Testament where Jewry could not.
The apostles followed our Lord in recognizing the abiding authority of the Old Testament over the people of God. The Church proclaimed its continuity with Israel, not merely by claiming the Jewish Scriptures as a Christian book, but by treating those Scriptures as God-given law for the guidance of its life. That the true Israel is a community which submits to the authority of the Old Testament was taken for granted; in fact, the Christian case against Jewry was precisely that Christians did this where Jews did not, and that the Jews had un-churched themselves by their refusal to do so. The use of the Old Testament in the New Testament Epistles shows that the churches addressed acknowledged its authority. The Church of the New Testament differed from the Old Testament Church in many ways, as we saw earlier, but in professing subjection to the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures the two were at one.
Not, of course, that the Old Testament contained the only divine teaching that the apostles taught the early Church to acknowledge. Christ's own words were authoritative;1 and so were those of the apostles themselves.2 The apostles claimed an authoritative commission from Christ3 to act as His representatives in founding and building up the first churches.4 They presented themselves as Christ's ambassadors,5 and their message as God's word.6 They claimed to have received the Holy Ghost in a unique way, so that they might correctly understand the mystery of God's revelation in Christ and proclaim it in normative, authoritative statements, 'not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth'. 7 Their authority had been given them by Christ through His word of commission and His gift of the Spirit. He had promised the twelve that the Spirit should come to teach them what in His own earthly ministry He had left unsaid,8 and He had kept His promise; so that the apostolic teaching was in reality the complete and final version of His own. Paul is our fullest witness here. He sets up his gospel as a norm of truth.9 He commands 'in the name (i.e., with the authority) of the Lord Jesus'.10 One mark of spirituality, he says, is recognition of his authority and submission to it: 'If any one thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. If any one does not recognize this, he is not recognized.'11 The churches must bow to Paul's rulings,12 and those who will not must be put out of fellowship till they come to a better mind.13 Apostolic utterances are the truth of Christ and possess the authority of Christ; they are to be received as words of God, because what they convey is, in fact, the word of God.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE EARLY CHURCH1
The early churches received the apostolic teaching (which included the words of Christ) and the Old Testament as two complementary parts of the body of divine revelation which Christ had given them as the rule for their faith and life. It was only natural, therefore, that they should begin to make regular use of apostolic Epistles and apostolically authenticated Gospels, when these appeared, as a basis for teaching and exposition, and as authoritative documents for reading in public worship alongside the Old Testament. The apostles' own requirement that their letters be read to the assembled church had from the first pointed the way to this,2 and it was, in fact, an obvious step once the nature of the apostles' authority as interpreters of Christ had been recognized. So far as we know, the practice received no discussion; certainly, it needed none.
Not that all apostolic writings were at once put into service as part of the canon of Scripture. Such evidence as there is in the sub-apostolic literature suggests merely that at the end of the first century they were universally held to possess the same divinely authoritative character as the books of the Old Testament.3 But where this recognition was present, the explicit acknowledgment of them as Scripture was only a matter of time. Indeed, we find Paul's Epistles bracketed with 'the other scriptures' as early as the second Epistle of Peter.4
When in the mid-second century the Church began formally to define the limits of its New Testament canon, it seems that the process involved no more than the explicit recognition of an established state of affairs. It was not a case of imparting to a newly-made collection of books an authority which they had not had before, nor of reminding a forgetful generation what authority the earliest Christians had ascribed to apostolic writings. What evidence there is suggests rather that it was simply a case of settling the limits of a class of books whose authoritative character had never been in doubt; and that it needed doing, not so much because the churches were omitting to use the books they should, as because some were using books that they should not. The criterion used for this task seems to have been a simple historical one; which books are in fact apostolic (i.e., apostolically written or authorized)? The Church reminded itself that the criterion of canonicity is inspiration, and that the ability to teach and write the faith in an inspired form (i.e., a form in which the human words could be regarded as words 'which the Holy Ghost teaches', words from God having normative authority) was an apostolic prerogative; accordingly, it sought to ensure that such regard should not be paid to any book which lacked apostolic authorship or an equivalent apostolic sanction. The evidence we have is too sparse to make it quite clear in what precise sense the writings of such non-apostolic authors as Mark and Luke were regarded as possessing apostolic sanction; what is clear, however, is that they were so regarded, and acknowledged as authoritative on that basis. In fact, the major books in our New Testament—the four Gospels, Paul's Epistles, 1 Peter, 1 John, Acts—were universally recognized from the first; though some of the others had to wait till the fourth century before being accepted by certain sections of the Church. The important thing to grasp as one surveys the intricacies of the history of the canon is that what the Church believed itself to be doing was not creating the New Testament, but recognizing it. God was held to have created it, by inspiring the books destined to compose it; the Church sought merely to discern which books those were.
F.—5
For the idea of a 'canon' (a set of authoritative Scriptures functioning as a rule of faith and life) was not a second-century invention. It had existed in Christendom from the first, since the Church took over the canonical Jewish Scriptures. And the expectation of a New Testament canon to supplement and complete the Old emerged naturally—indeed inevitably—from the original Christian understanding of Christianity. Christ had bound His Church to live under the authority of the Old Testament, in conjunction with His own teaching and that of the apostles (which was, after all, no more than His own teaching in its completed form). But if the new revelation was to become law for the Church alongside the old, it needed to be put into a permanent written form, as the old had been. And if God had caused His earlier, preliminary revelation to be written, then without doubt He would cause His final, crowning revelation to be recorded in writing. If the New Covenant was the completion and fulfilment of the Old, then it was natural to expect from the God who inspired an authoritative account of the one an authoritative account of the other. When there was an Old Testament, recording the first and more obscure stages in saving revelation, it would have been strange indeed had there been no New Testament, proclaiming God's full and final revelation in Christ, to complete and elucidate it. The inner logic of Christianity thus required an apostolic New Testament as a God-given complement to the Old. The fact that the early Church felt this shows that it understood by what principle of authority it ought to live. We should not hesitate to ascribe the process by which it sought and found a New Testament to the providential guidance of the Holy Ghost, nor to receive that New Testament as from the hand of Christ, as God-breathed Scripture, inspired and, together with the Old Testament, authoritative for faith and life.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
Let us sum up our study. The religion of the New Testament professes to be a perfected form of the religion of the Old Testament; and that religion was based on the principle of biblical authority. Jesus Christ used His personal authority as a divine Teacher to confirm the authority of the Old Testament. The apostles, bearing a unique commission from Christ and being uniquely empowered by His Spirit, claimed Christ's authority for their own teaching; and they treated the authority of the Jewish Scriptures as axiomatic, and imposed them on the infant Church as the Christian Bible. Their own writings claimed, and were credited with, the same divine authority that the Old Testament had. The nature of Christianity, as the completion of Israel's religion, made it virtually certain that God would give the Church an apostolic New Testament, as the completion of Israel's Bible; and this in fact He has done. It is clear that the Christian Church stands in the same relation to its Scriptures as did the Jewish Church to the Old Testament. To deny the normative authority of Scripture over the Church is to misconceive the nature of Christianity, and, in effect, to deny the Lordship of Christ. If the teaching of Christ and the apostles is to rule the Church, the Church must be ruled by Scripture. As the Old Testament was the law by which God governed the Jewish Church, so the Christian Bible—Old and New Testaments together—is the law by which Christ governs His Church today. Christ rules, as Jehovah ruled, by the written Word. Such is the conclusion to which our study of the New Testament doctrine of authority leads. Those who acknowledge the Lordship of Christ are bound to accept the principle of biblical authority.
But let us be clear what this involves. The principle has far-reaching practical implications. It dictates both our approach to Bible study and our use of Scripture in our own and the Church's life. We shall return to the former topic again.1 Here, we shall only make the general statement that the Bible itself must fix and control the methods and presuppositions with which it is studied. On the latter topic, we would say this : because the Church on earth consists of imperfectly sanctified sinners, there are always two defects in the lives of its members, both corporately and individually. These are ignorance and error, which cause omissions and mistakes in belief and behaviour. The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred. Scripture is designed to meet this twofold need; it is 'profitable for teaching . . . and for training in righteousness' on the one hand, and for 'reproof' and 'correction' on the other.1 It is the Church's responsibility to use Scripture for its intended purpose. This it does by the complementary activities of exposition followed by reformation. To accept the authority of Scripture means in practice being willing, first to believe what it teaches, and then to apply its teaching to ourselves for our correction and guidance. The Reformers saw that this was what God demanded of the Church in the sixteenth century; and the truth is that He demands the same in every age of the Church's life. The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God.
This means that ecclesiastical traditions and private theological speculations may never be identified with the word which God speaks, but are to be classed among the words of men which the Word of God must reform. A moment's thought will show how momentous this conclusion is. Take first the matter of tradition. Whether or not we belong to a communion that treats tradition as an authoritative source of teaching, we are all in fact children of tradition in our religion. We do not start our Christian lives by working out our faith for ourselves; it is mediated to us by Christian tradition, in the form of sermons, books and established patterns of church life and fellowship. We read our Bibles in the light of what we have learned from these sources; we approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world. Inevitably, we grow up children of our own age, reflecting in our outlook the mental environment in which we were reared. The process is as natural as breathing in the air around us, and as unconscious. It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us. But we are forbidden to become enslaved to human tradition, either secular or Christian, whether it be 'catholic' tradition, or 'critical' tradition, or 'ecumenical' tradition, or even 'evangelical' tradition. We may never assume the complete rightness of our own established ways of thought and practice and excuse ourselves the duty of testing and reforming them by Scripture.
Again, whether or not we call ourselves Liberals, we are all in fact inclined to subjectivism in our theology. God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and the God-centred approach which the Bible makes to problems of life and thought is in the highest degree unnatural to the minds of sinful and self-centred men. It calls for a veritable Copernican revolution in our habits of thought, and is slowly and painfully learned. On the other hand, it is entirely natural for sinners to think of themselves as wise, not by reason of divine teaching, but through the independent exercise of their own judgment, and to try to justify their fancied wisdom by adjusting what the Bible teaches to what they have already imbibed from other sources ('modern knowledge'). Professed re-statements of the faith in modern terms often prove to be revisions of the faith to make it square with popular intellectual fashions. This process of assimilating God's revealed truth to the current religious and philosophical opinions of men is the essence of the speculative method in theology which Scripture repudiates. Yet we all constantly do it, more or less; for sin is present with all of us. As usual with sinful habits of mind, we are largely unconscious of our lapses, and only become aware of them as we test ourselves by Scripture and ask God to search our minds and teach us to criticize our own thinking. This, once again, is a discipline that none may shirk.
Scripture, indeed, contains emphatic warnings against uncritical deference to traditions and speculations in theology. Christ deals with the question of the authority of tradition in Mk. vii. 6–13. The Pharisees claimed that their oral law was derived from Moses and should therefore be treated as an authoritative supplement to and exposition of the written law. Christ rejects this idea, contrasting the written word with the oral law as 'the commandment of God' and 'the commandments of men' respectively. He uses the first to judge the second, and tells the Pharisees that by following the second as against the first they 'lay aside' and 'reject' God's commandment, and 'make the word of God of none effect'. The fact that they are bowing to man-made tradition rather than God-given Scripture, He says, shows that their hearts are far from God. To Christ, ecclesiastical tradition was no part of the word of God; it must be tested by Scripture and, if found wanting, dropped. The New Testament gives no hint that this principle was affected by the transition from the old order to the new.
Nor may speculative revisions of the faith by the light of secular thought be equated with the word of God. Paul affirms this in Col. ii. 8 and 18. Having said, 'as ye. . . received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him' (verse 6), he adds this warning: 'see to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy . . . according to human tradition . . . and not according to Christ'; 'let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head (Christ)' (RSV). The message preached to the Colossians was 'the word of God', 'the word of the truth of the gospel'; it alone was 'according to Christ', and their salvation depended on holding it fast.1 But the reconstructed version of it which the religious philosophers of Colossæ had produced (guided, apparently, by a paganized Judaism without and mystical intimations within) was false; inevitably it led away from Christ (as speculative theology always does) and jeopardized men's souls. The principle illustrated here is that no synthesis between the gospel and non-Christian systems is permissible. The gospel is complete in itself; to supplement it with extraneous ideas is not to enrich it, but to pervert it; to amalgamate it with pagan religions and philosophies is, indeed, to destroy it. The apostolic gospel, which is the word of God, says Paul, must judge all such speculative syntheses. This principle still holds good, although we now have the apostolic word in written not in oral form.
We conclude, then, that the Church must seek, first, to expound Scripture and, second, to reform its belief and practice, where these have erred, by the biblical teaching. This is the theological method which Christ commands His Church to follow: to use Scripture as the rule of faith and life. And the practical proof that Christians accept the authority of Scripture is that they do, in fact, use it in this way.
THE PRESENT ISSUE
Now at last we are in a position to appreciate the fundamental cleavage between so-called 'Fundamentalists' and their critics. The latter are, in fact, subjectivists in the matter of authority. Their position is based on an acceptance of the presuppositions and conclusions of nineteenth-century critical Bible study, which are radically at variance with the Bible's own claims for itself. On this basis, they think it necessary to say—indeed, to insist—that some scriptural assertions are erroneous. Therefore, they cannot accept the axiom that whatever Scripture is found to assert is part of the word of God; for untruths cannot be God's word. Hence they think it impossible to take seriously the 'Jewish' conception of the nature of God-given Scripture which Christ and the Bible teach. Instead, they say, we must use our Christian wits to discern beneath the fallible words of fallible men the eternal truth of God. But this makes it impossible to regard Scripture as authoritative without qualification; what is now authoritative is not Scripture as it stands, but Scripture as pruned by a certain type of scholarship—in other words, human opinions about Scripture. It is true that these critics pay lip-service to the principle of biblical authority, and, indeed, suppose themselves to accept it; but their view of the nature of Scripture effectively prevents them from doing so. It is evident that they have not thought out with sufficient seriousness what subjection to biblical authority means in practice. Their view really amounts to saying that the question of authority is now closed; the supreme authority is undoubtedly Christian reason, which must hunt for the word of God in the Bible by the light of rationalistic critical principles; and a frank recognition of this should henceforth be the starting-point for all our theological thinking. This is all too plainly what they mean when they tell us (as they often do) that biblical criticism has come to stay.
Consequently, we find that the only problem about the Bible which they recognize as outstanding is to formulate a doctrine of the word of God in Scripture which allows for the presence of error there too, and to lay down principles of interpretation for extracting the wheat from the chaff. Therefore, it does not occur to them to treat the evangelical approach to Scripture as anything more than one point of view on this problem; and so they see no more in it than a clumsy style of exegesis springing from a cramping assumption of factual inerrancy. This is illustrated by Dr. Hebert's Fundamentalism and the Church of God, which criticizes the evangelical approach to Scripture on the grounds of a proneness to overlook the literary character of imaginative passages, to draw unwarrantable inferences from texts, and to ascribe scientific status to non-scientific statements. Whether or not this is fair comment (and we do not deny that Evangelicals have on occasion laid themselves open to such charges), it misses altogether the central evangelical contention about Scripture, which Hebert does not see at all: namely, that Scripture has complete and final authority over the Church as a self-contained, self-interpreting revelation from God.1 But this is what Evangelicals are concerned above all to maintain. What Scripture says, God says; and what God says in Scripture is to be the rule of faith and life in His Church.
The crucial issue which underlies the 'Fundamentalism' controversy thus concerns the attitude in which Christians should approach Scripture, and the use which they should make of it. Evangelicals seek to approach and use it as it demands that men should; that is, they seek to think and live in accordance with its authoritative teaching. Accordingly, they hold that view of the nature and interpretation of Scripture which they believe to be the Bible's own; and they reject views which they believe to be contrary to it. They reject, for instance, the supposition that Scripture errs; for Scripture claims not to err. They reject all methods of biblical criticism which assume about Scripture something other than Scripture assumes about itself. They reject all approaches to Scripture which would not permit it to function in the Church as a final authority. They will not become subjectivists to order. They regard as mistaken those who believe themselves to acknowledge the authority of the Bible while adopting principles of biblical criticism which Scripture repudiates. They reject as misguided all attempts to weld different theological traditions together without seeking to reform them by the Bible. And they do not believe that agreement is possible in this present controversy till both sides have shown the reality of their acceptance of the Lordship of Christ by adopting the biblical interpretation of the principle of biblical authority, and the method of theological procedure which the Bible itself requires.