The Authority of the Bible
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE
Carl F. H. Henry
Western civilization is in a severe “authority crisis,” not confined solely to the realm of religious faith, nor specially or uniquely threatening to Bible believers. Parental authority, marital authority, political authority, academic authority, and ecclesiastical authority are all deeply questioned. Not only particular authorities—the authority of Scripture, of the pope, of political rulers, and so on—but the concept of authority itself is vigorously challenged. Today’s crisis of biblical authority thus reflects a waning civilizational consensus on issues of sovereignty and submission.
In some respects the contemporary questioning of authority has a legitimate moral basis and is highly commendable. The twentieth century has witnessed the rise of ruthless and arbitrary tyrants imposing totalitarian dictates upon politically enslaved citizenries. In the United States political power was misused during the so-called Watergate era. Corporate power has been manipulated to institutional advantage both by huge business conglomerates and by massive labor unions.
REVOLT AGAINST BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
Judge of men and nations, the self-revealed God wields unlimited authority and power. All creaturely authority and power is derived from that of God. As the sovereign Creator of all, the God of the Bible wills and has the right to be obeyed. The power God bestows is a divine trust, a stewardship. God’s creatures are morally accountable for their use or misuse of it. In fallen human society God wills civil government for the promotion of justice and order. He approves an ordering of authoritative and creative relationships in the home by stipulating certain responsibilities of husbands, wives, and children. He wills a pattern of priorities for the church as well: Jesus Christ the head, prophets and apostles through whom redemptive revelation came, and so on. The inspired Scriptures, revealing God’s transcendent will in objective written form, are the rule of faith and conduct through which Christ exercises his divine authority in the lives of Christians.
Revolt against particular authorities has in our time widened into a revolt against all transcendent and external authority. The widespread questioning of authority is condoned and promoted in many academic circles. Philosophers with a radically secular outlook have affirmed that God and the supernatural are mythical conceptions, that natural processes and events comprise the only ultimate reality. All existence is said to be temporal and changing; all beliefs and ideals are declared to be relative to the age and culture in which they appear. Biblical religion, therefore, like all other, is asserted to be merely a cultural phenomenon. The Bible’s claim to divine authority is dismissed by such thinkers; transcendent revelation, fixed truths, and unchanging commandments are set aside as pious fictions.
In the name of man’s supposed “coming of age,” radical secularism champions human autonomy and creative individuality. Man is his own lord and the inventor of his own ideals and values, it is said. He lives in a supposedly purposeless universe that has itself presumably been engendered by a cosmic accident. Therefore, human beings are declared to be wholly free to impose upon nature and history whatever moral criteria they prefer. In such a view, to insist on divinely given truths and values, on transcendent principles, would be to repress self-fulfillment and retard creative personal development. Hence, the radically secular view goes beyond opposing particular external authorities whose claims are considered arbitrary or immoral; radical secularism is aggressively hostile to all external and objective authority, viewing it as intrinsically restrictive of the autonomous human spirit.
Any reader of the Bible recognizes rejection of divine authority and of a definitive revelation of what is right and good as an age-old phenomenon. It is not at all peculiar to contemporary man to “come of age”; it was found already in Eden. Adam and Eve revolted against the will of God in pursuit of individual preference and self-interest. But their revolt was recognized to be sin, not rationalized as philosophical “gnosis” at the frontiers of evolutionary advance.
If one takes a strictly developmental view, which considers all reality contingent and changing, what basis remains for humanity’s decisively creative role in the universe? How could a purposeless cosmos cater to individual self-fulfillment? Only the biblical alternative of the Creator-Redeemer God, who fashioned human beings for moral obedience and a high spiritual destiny, truly preserves the permanent, universal dignity of the human species. The Bible does so, however, by a demanding call for personal spiritual decision. The Bible sets forth man’s superiority to the animals, his high dignity (“little less than God,” Ps. 8:5, NASB) because of the divine rational and moral image that he bears by creation. In the context of universal human involvement in Adamic sin, the Bible utters a merciful divine call to redemptive renewal through the mediatorial person and work of Christ. Fallen humanity is invited to experience the Holy Spirit’s renewing work, to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, and to anticipate a final destiny in the eternal presence of the God of justice and justification.
Contemporary rejection of biblical tenets does not rest on any logical demonstration that the case for biblical theism is false; it turns rather on a subjective preference for alternative views of “the good life.”
The Bible is not the only significant reminder that human beings stand daily in responsible relationship to the sovereign God. The Creator reveals his authority in the cosmos, in history, and in inner conscience, a disclosure of the living God that penetrates into the mind of every human being (Rom. 1:18-20; 2:12-15). Rebellious suppression of that “general divine revelation” does not succeed in wholly suspending a fearsome sense of final divine accountability (Rom. 1:32). Yet it is the Bible as “special revelation” that most clearly confronts our spiritually rebellious race with the reality and authority of God. In the Scriptures, the character and will of God, the meaning of human existence, the nature of the spiritual realm, and the purposes of God for human beings in all ages are stated in propositionally intelligible form that all can understand. The Bible publishes in objective form the criteria by which God judges individuals and nations, and the means of moral recovery and restoration to personal fellowship with him.
Regard for the Bible is therefore decisive for the course of Western culture and in the long run for human civilization generally. Intelligible divine revelation, the basis for belief in the sovereign authority of the Creator-Redeemer God over all human life, rests on the reliability of what Scripture says about God and his purposes. Modern naturalism impugns the authority of the Bible and assails the claim that the Bible is the Word of God written, that is, a transcendently given revelation of the mind and will of God in objective literary form. Scriptural authority is the storm center both in the controversy over revealed religion and in the modern conflict over civilizational values.
HIGHER CRITICISM
Discussion of biblical authority has been shadowed in the twentieth century both by sweeping claims for higher criticism from nonevangelical critics and by extravagant claims of what scriptural authority requires and implies from evangelical polemicists.
Skepticism toward the reliability of Scripture seems to survive in many academic circles despite the repeated collapse of critical theories. One still finds a disposition to trust secular writers whose credentials in providing historical testimony are often less adequate than those of the biblical writers. Not long ago many scholars rejected the historicity of the patriarchal accounts, denied that writing existed in Moses’ day, and ascribed the Gospels and the Epistles to second-century writers. But higher criticism has sustained some spectacular and even stunning reverses, mainly through the findings of archaeology. No longer is it held that the glories of King Solomon’s era are a literary fabrication, that “Yahweh,” the redemptive God of the Hebrews, was unknown before the eighth-century prophets, or that Ezra’s representations about the Babylonian captivity are fictional. Archaeologists have located the long-lost copper mines of Solomon’s time. Tablets discovered at Ebla near Aleppo confirm that names similar to those of the patriarchs were common among people who lived in Ebla shortly before the events recorded in the later chapters of Genesis took place.
New Testament critic John T. Robinson conceded in Redating the New Testament (1906) that the late critical dating of New Testament books is wholly unpersuasive. Robinson argued that failure of the Gospels and Epistles to mention the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 is evidence that the writings were completed earlier, because otherwise that turn of events would have been used apologetically by the writers. It would be better, however, to arrive at dates of composition from what the writers teach and who they are rather than from what the writings do not contain; neither is it sound to be guided primarily by a supposed apologetic motivation that underlay their composition.
The “documentary” view of Scripture has long been considered by nonevangelical scholars the most firmly established achievement of literary and historical criticism. The theory (that the Old Testament narratives are a product of “redaction” by editors who blended separate reports into a single narrative) has had—until recently—the support of almost every prestigious Old Testament scholar outside evangelical circles. But the theory, also known is the “J-E-P-D hypothesis” (the letters standing for the supposed separate documents), has been under mounting attack. Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951), who held the chair of Bible at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, repudiated the prevalent critical notion that the biblical accounts gained their unity through literary redaction (editing), but retained relatively late datings for the completion of the Pentateuch and of Isaiah (Biblical and Oriental Studies, published posthumously, 1973). In a 1959 Christianity Today interview, Cyrus H. Gordon, a distinguished Jewish scholar, rejected the notion that the use of Elohim and Yahweh as divergent names for God implies different literary sources (“Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit”).
Recent linguistic research supports the argument that stylistic variations reflect the pace and mood of the narratives; it is less likely that they identify supposed redactors. Robert Longacre has argued that “the assumption of divergent documentary sources” in the Flood story, for example, is unnecessary and “obscures much of the truly elegant structure of the story.” Thus, older critical views that refer the teaching of Scripture not to the originally named recipients of divine revelation but to late editorial redactors are themselves coming under fresh criticism. Furthermore, Bernard Childs has argued persuasively against the view that there exists behind the canonical writings earlier and more reliable sources that the biblical writers mythologized in the interest of the Hebrew cult.
THE BIBLE’S VIEW OF ITSELF
The intelligible nature of divine revelation—the presupposition that God’s will is made known in the form of valid truths—is the central presupposition of the authority of the Bible. Much recent neo-Protestant theology demeaned the traditional evangelical emphasis as doctrinaire and static. It insisted instead that the authority of Scripture is to be experienced internally as a witness to divine grace engendering faith and obedience, thus disowning its objective character as universally valid truth. Somewhat inconsistently, almost all neo-Protestant theologians have appealed to the record to support cognitively whatever fragments of the whole seem to coincide with their divergent views, even though they disavow the Bible as specially revealed corpus of authoritative divine teaching. For evangelical orthodoxy, if God’s revelational disclosure to chosen prophets and apostles is to be considered meaningful and true, it must be given not merely in isolated concepts capable of diverse meanings but in sentences or propositions. A proposition—that is, a subject, predicate, and connecting verb (or “copula” )—constitutes the minimal logical unit of intelligible communication. The Old Testament prophetic formula “Thus saith the Lord” characteristically introduced propositionally disclosed truth. Jesus Christ employed the distinctive formula “But I say unto you” to introduce logically-formed sentences which he represented as the veritable word or doctrine of God.
The Bible is authoritative because it is divinely authorized; in its own terms, “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). According to this passage the whole Old Testament (or any element of it) is divinely inspired. Extension of the same claim to the New Testament is not expressly stated, but it is not merely implied. The New Testament contains indications that its content was to be viewed, and was in fact viewed, as no less authoritative than the Old. The apostle Paul’s writings are catalogued with “other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15-16). Under the heading of “Scripture,” 1 Timothy 5:18 cites Luke 10:7 alongside Deuteronomy 25:4 (compare 1 Cor. 9:9). The book of Revelation, moreover, claims divine origin (1:1-3) and employs the term “prophecy” in the Old Testament sense (22:9-10, 18). The apostles did not distinguish their spoken and written teaching but expressly declared their inspired proclamation to be the Word of God (1 Cor. 4:1; 2 Cor. 5:20; 1 Thess. 2:13). (See the chapter “The Inspiration of the Bible.”)
THE INERRANCY QUESTION
The doctrine of biblical authority has been subverted by attacks on its historical and scientific reliability and by allegedly tracing its teaching to fallible human sources. Furthermore, the doctrine has sometimes been unnecessarily clouded by extreme conservative apologists who have overstated what biblical authority presupposes and implies. Some conservative scholars have repudiated all historical criticism as inimical to biblical authority and distinguished “true” from false Christians on the basis of subscription to “biblical inerrancy.” If one accepts “plenary” divine inspiration of Scripture—that is, God’s superintendence of the whole—the doctrine of biblical authority doubtless implies “inerrancy” of the content. But the Christian faith can hardly hope to advance its claims through a repudiation of historical criticism. To do so would imply that to support its position it must resort to uncritical views of history. To “higher criticism,” which is so often pursued on arbitrary presuppositions that promote unjustifiable conclusions, the evangelical must reply with sound criticism that proceeds on legitimate assumptions and yields defensible verdicts.
Evangelical Christianity should champion the inerrancy of Scripture as a sound theological commitment, one that is consistent with what the Bible says about itself. But it need not repudiate the Christian integrity of all who do not share that commitment, nor regard them as hopelessly apostate. J. Gresham Machen, a brilliant evangelical apologist of the 1920s and 1930s and staunch champion of scriptural inerrancy, wrote that the doctrine of plenary inspiration “is denied not only by liberal opponents of Christianity, but also by many true Christian men . . . many men in the modern church . . . who accept the central message of the Bible and yet believe that the message has come to us merely on the authority of trustworthy witnesses unaided in their literary work by a supernatural guidance of the Spirit of God. There are many who believe that the Bible is right at the central point, in its account of the redeeming work of Christ, and yet believe that it contains many errors. Such men are not really liberals, but Christians, because they have accepted as true the message upon which Christianity depends” (Christianity and Liberalism, 75).
Yet Machen himself never wavered in his conviction that the whole Bible is to be considered “the seat of authority.” He was convinced that the doctrine of inerrancy avoids instability in expounding authoritative doctrine and morals. He insisted that a “mediating” view of the Bible is not tenable. “Modernists” who claim to honor the authority of Jesus Christ rather than the authority of Scripture contradict Jesus’ teaching since Jesus held a high view of Scripture. Moreover, the full explanation of Jesus’ life and work depended on his crucifixion, resurrection, and heavenly ministry, and was derived from the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of the apostles. It is illogical to pick and choose from the teaching of Jesus during his earthly ministry only those elements that serve one’s own presuppositions. Rejection of the full trustworthiness of Scripture may finally lead one to ascribe to Jesus a life purpose different from the biblical idea that Christ died and rose bodily to be the source of divine forgiveness of sinners.
The historic evangelical position is summed up in the words of Frank E. Gaebelein, general editor of The Expositors’ Bible Commentary. In the preface to this commentary he spoke of a “scholarly evangelicalism [that was] committed to the divine inspiration, complete trustworthiness, and full authority of the Bible.” Scripture is authoritative and fully trustworthy because it is divinely inspired. Lutheran theologian Francis Pieper directly connected the authority of the Bible with its inspiration: “The divine authority of Scripture rests solely on its nature, on its theopneusty”—that is, its character as “God breathed.” J. I. Packer commented that every compromise of the truthfulness of the Bible must at the same time be regarded as a compromise of its authority: “To assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii) the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God. The value of these terms is that they conserve the principles of biblical authority; for statements that are not absolutely true and reliable could not be absolutely authoritative.” Packer reinforced that argument by demonstrating that Christ, the apostles, and the early church all agreed that the Old Testament was both absolutely trustworthy and authoritative. Being a fulfillment of the Old, the New Testament was no less authoritative. Christ entrusted his disciples with his own authority in their teaching so the early church accepted their teaching. As God’s revelation, Scripture stands above the limitations of human assertion. (See the chapter “The Inerrancy and Infallibility of the Bible.”)
RECENT CHALLENGES
In recent debate the authority of Scripture is compromised by some mediating scholars through their willingness to grant the infiltration of culturally dependent teaching. Some of the apostle Paul’s statements about women, or his views about a regathering of Israel in Palestine, are dismissed as reflective of the rabbinic teaching of the time and hence as evidence of Paul’s culturally limited perspective. At some points biblical teaching obviously coincides with Jewish tradition. But where Hebrew tradition was elevated into a norm considered superior to or modifying and contravening Scripture, Jesus was critical of that tradition. That the apostle Paul may at some points have taught what was also taught by tradition historically rooted in the Old Testament proves nothing; at other points he was sharply critical of the rabbinical tradition.
The evangelical view has always been that what the inspired biblical writers teach they teach not as derived from mere tradition but as God-breathed; in their proclamation they had the mind of the Spirit to distinguish what was divinely approved and disapproved in current tradition. It is a sounder perspective therefore to speak of elements in which the Jewish tradition reflected prophetic revelation and of elements in which it departed from it. Once the principle of “culture dependency” is introduced into the content of scriptural teaching, it is difficult to establish objective criteria for distinguishing between what is supposedly authoritative and unathoritative in apostolic doctrine. Paul’s views on homosexuality could then be considered as culturally prejudiced as his views of hierarchical authority or for that matter of the authority of Scripture.
In a further development some recent scholars have sought to ascribe to Scripture only a “functional” authority as an inner life-transforming stimulant, setting aside its conceptual-propositional authority. Recent neo-Protestant theologians—for example, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Fritz Buri—identify the supposed authoritative aspect of Scripture in radically divergent and even contradictory elements. All of them depart from the historic evangelical view (expounded, for example, by B. B. Warfield in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 1948), that the authority of Scripture is concentrated in its disclosure of divinely revealed truths which constitute the rule of faith and morals. The “functional” view, which is reflected by David H. Kelsey in The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (1975), rejects the finality of any of the divergent views and accepts them equally (no matter how conflicting and contradictory they may be). Claims for external authority are subordinated into a supposed internal authority that dynamically alters the life of the community of faith. In spite of its profession of nondiscrimination toward divergent views, such a theory must of course explicitly exclude the traditional evangelical emphasis on the objective truth of the Bible. But once the validity of the biblical teaching in whole and part is forfeited, no persuasive reason remains why one’s personal life ought to be transformed at all. One’s life might be transformed in alternative and even expressly opposing patterns, or conformed sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, or transformed in correlation with ideas derived from non-Christian or anti-Christian sources as readily as in correlation with ideas derived from the Bible.
The issue of biblical authority can hardly be divorced from interest in the rational validity and historical factuality of the Scriptures. But evangelicals hold that the authority of the Bible is a divine authority; not all truths and historically accurate statements fall into that category. Scripture is authoritative because it is God’s Word. The chosen prophets and apostles, some of them called by God in spite of their own indifference or even hostility—for example, the prophet Jeremiah and the apostle Paul—testify that the truth of God became theirs by divine inspiration. Judeo-Christian religion is based on historical revelation and redemption; instead of indifference to the concerns of history, the Bible asserts a distinctive view of linear history alien to that of ancient religions and philosophies.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF REJECTION
The basic assumptions of modern secularism blunt in advance the personal force of many historic Christian claims. As a result young people are tempted, especially in a morally permissive age, to dismiss as superstition the special claims for Scripture. Even adult Christians sometimes show a certain discomfort concerning the Bible: they may bow to many of its penetrating ethical judgments but they are culturally conditioned to approach some of its authoritative claims with great reservation. Biblical language may ring strange in modern ears and the very notion of supernaturally revealed or inspired writings may seem like an echo from the historically conditioned past. Living almost two thousand years after the time of Jesus of Nazareth, some contemporary thinkers tend to dismiss as precritical, uncritical, or archaic the confident affirmations of Scripture’s authority found in the historic Christian confessions. To them it may seem contrary to the contemporary mood or even repulsive to recognize Scripture as the divine rule of faith and conduct. No tenet of the inherited religious tradition suffers more abuse than assertion of the full authority of the Bible. Is it so incredible that a literature translatable into some 770,000 English words, printable on 1,000 small pages, and reducible photographically to a tiny negative should be regarded by Christians as the Word of God?
Yet it is clear from the history of theology and philosophy that efforts to preserve the reality of the living Creator-Redeemer God apart from the authority of the scriptural word always falter. Even the neoorthodox theology of “divine encounter,” emphasizing as it did the distinctive interpersonal self-revelation of God, soon emptied into existentialist alternatives and finally into death-of-God speculation. The triune God is indeed the “ontological premise” on which the historic Christian faith is founded, but the case for biblical theism seems to require his definitive revelation in the inspired Word of Scripture.
Scriptural authority has often been needlessly blurred by appending to the Bible all kinds of secondary and tertiary authorities—apocryphal books, ecclesiastical tradition, and cultic interpretation. In earlier centuries, mediating scholars at times revised certain biblical doctrines and more radical critics completely rejected whatever articles of faith clashed with the temper of their age. In our own century such cumulative alterations, correlated with a naturalistic view of reality, have come to a climax. The historic Christian emphasis on biblical authority has in some places been totally repudiated. Officially atheistic regimes in communist countries, for example, may enlist all political and academic resources to undermine a theistic view. Even after signing the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, they may repress Christian witness and evangelism, penalize those who do not uncritically support state absolutism, and at best allow only token distribution of the Bible. In other parts of the world, assaults on biblical authority by critical scholars have precipitated doubts in many influential academic communities.
THE POWER OF GOD’S WORD
Yet the Bible remains the most extensively printed, most widely translated, and most frequently read book in the world. Its words have been treasured in the hearts of multitudes like none other. All who have received its gifts of wisdom and promises of new life and power were at first strangers to its redemptive message and many were hostile to its teaching and spiritual demands. In all generations its power to challenge persons of all races and lands has been demonstrated. Those who cherish the Book because it sustains future hope, brings meaning and power to the present, and correlates a misused past with the forgiving grace of God would not long experience such inner rewards if Scripture were not known to them as the authoritative, divinely revealed truth. To the evangelical Christian, Scripture is the Word of God given in the objective form of propositional truths through divinely inspired prophets and apostles, and the Holy Spirit is the giver of faith through that Word.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bruce, F. F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 1960.
Childs, Brevard. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, 1979.
Henry, Carl F. H. God, Revelation, and Authority, 1979.
Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism, 1923.
Robinson, John A. T. Redating the New Testament, 1976.
Warfield, B. B. The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 1948.