There Is One Book From God-1
by Edward P Myers

Introduction

    Throughout the years, the Bible has always been under attack from without. Infidels, atheists, and agnostics have never been friendly in their denial of the claim that the Bible is the divine word of God. But, when those within the community of “the faith” reject that claim, it causes one to be greatly disturbed. To distort, abuse, neglect and even ignore the Bible as God's inspired revelation to man is to do so to the discredit of man--the very being made in the image of God. Why is this so? What cause is there for man to reject the claim of the Bible as being the word of God?

    In addition to this are the claims of others that the Bible is only one of God's books of revelation. They say there are other books which God inspired to give further (latter day) revelations, thus providing Himself with two witnesses (e.g., The Bible and the Book of Mormon).

    The purpose of this study is to present evidence for the claim that God has given one book, and only one book, and that all other claims fall short of veracity. It is not our purpose to present the claims of other books.1 Our desire is to look at the positive claims presented in the Scripture for the uniqueness, authority, and importance of the Bible. Primarily, this lecture will center around the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

    The inspiration of the Bible has been the subject of discussion for many years and will probably continue to be so. In his work The Progress of Dogma, James Orr contended that the “Christian church” in every great epoch of its history has been forced to come to grips with one particular doctrine of crucial significance for that day and for the subsequent history of the church. 2 That doctrine for us today is the full and final authority of God found expressly in the pages of the Bible.

    In considering the importance and significance of the Bible, there are three questions of paramount importance: (1) Is the Bible the word of God? (2) What evidence is there for the Bible's being the word of God? (3) What evidence ought to persuade people that the Bible is the word of God? These three questions are distinct, yet related.


The Importance of The Doctrine of Inspiration

    The Bible claims to be God's word. At the heart of the doctrine of inspiration is the understanding that the Bible claims to be the word of God. That claim comes in various forms. B.B. Warfield3 presents evidence that the phrases “It Says,” “Scripture Says,” and “God Says” are often virtually indistinguishable so that when you read “It says,” or “Scripture says,” it is equivalent to saying, “God says.” 4

    J.I. Packer in, God Has Spoken, writes that the loss of conviction that “what Scripture says, God says” has weakened church life in a number of ways. (1) It has undermined preaching. (2) It has undercut teaching. (3) It has weakened faith. (4) It has discouraged the average Christian from reading the Bible. (5) And, it has hidden Christ from view. 5

    Clark Pinnock pens,

• My second aim in the book is to speak out, in the context of the crisis of the Scripture principle, in defense of the full authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. Unfortunately, this is necessary because of a major and widespread shift in contemporary theology toward seeing the Bible as a fallible testament of human opinion and religious experience, not the reliable deposit and canon of normative instruction. 6

    The battle Pinnock is fighting in the evangelical world is also making inroads into the body of Christ. One author among us has written, “Honest investigation reveals many minor problems in Scripture. Given that the Bible was conveyed to us in a human tongue, marked by human personality (2 Pet. 3:16), assembled by a variety of human minds and hands (See Acts 1:1ff), from many different backgrounds, addressing a variety of situations and needs, and then has endured the process of manuscript transmission over nineteen centuries, some discrepancies are to be expected.” 7

    Are there really discrepancies? In a similar way, one critic of the Bible tried to point out what he feels is a discrepancy found in the four gospel accounts. He says, “Ask yourself, did Judas kiss Jesus to betray Him or not? Mark-Matthew says that Judas kissed Jesus. But Luke says that Judas tried to kiss Jesus and did not make it. For John, there was no betrayal kiss at all. And, John underlines his point of view by adding that Judas kept standing with the crowd.” 8 What Luke actually records is this, “But Jesus said to him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” He no where states that Judas tried to kiss Jesus but failed. Lewis wants to find a contradiction so badly that he actually puts words into Jesus' mouth. 9

    It seems to me that this is exactly what Pinnock seeks to answer; viz., “that the Bible is a fallible testament of human opinion and experience, not the reliable deposit and canon of normative instruction.” Given his understanding of the humanness of Scripture over against the supernatural character of Scripture, it is no wonder that he concludes “some discrepancies are to be expected.” 10 Someone may say, “Then you do not believe it was possible for there to be errors made by the Biblical writers?” My response is, “Of course it was possible, that's why they were inspired.” Jack Cottrell is correct when he says, “If error were not possible, inspiration would not have been needed. But if errors were inevitable, then inspiration would have been futile. The very purpose of the Spirit's supervision was to keep men who could err from doing so.” 11

    The Bible is a perfect blending of the human and the divine with respect to inspiration. T.C. Hammond has written,

• It is worth pointing out more fully how the difficulty of the mind in grasping the nature and extent of inspiration is due to the fact that we are dealing with a blending of the human and divine. Wherever God is, there is mystery. But it is precisely this element which is the unique glory of the Christian revelation. No mere impersonal supreme object of worship has been deduced from nature, and no mere philosophy of life has dropped from heaven written on tables of stone. But God has appeared and dwelt with us in human flesh, and His written revelation has come in a form which is at once vitally connected with the living Revelation, and is brought as close to the defective apprehension of human nature as God could possibly have made.

    Note the following comparisons. The living Revelation was mysteriously brought into the world without the intervention of a human father. The Holy Spirit was the appointed Agent. The written revelation came into being by a similar process without the aid of human philosophical abstractions. The Holy Spirit was again the appointed Agent. The mother of our Lord remained a human mother and her experiences throughout would have been those of every other mother--except that she was made aware that her child was to be the long-expected Redeemer of Israel. The writers of the Biblical books remained human authors, and their experiences appear to have been similarly natural, though they were sometimes aware that God was giving to the world through them a message of non-ordinary importance (e.g., “For I received from the Lord, what I also delivered to you...” (1 Corinthians. 11:23). Mary, the mother of our Lord, probably brought into the world other children by the normal process of birth. The writers of Biblical books probably wrote other purely personal letters which were not necessarily of canonical importance. More important still, no student should fail to grasp the fact that the divine-human personal life of our Lord is one and indivisible by any human means of analysis. On no recorded occasions can we say that in the one instance there was a purely divine thought, and in the other a purely human thought. The two natures were united in one indissoluble Person. From the manger to the cross, the Lord must always be thought of and described from that point of view. Similarly, though the parallel is not quite complete, the student will be saved much unsound thinking, unnecessary confusion and, even, injury to his faith, by observing that in the Scriptures the divine and human elements are blended in such a way that in few cases can we, with any certainty, analyze the record to demonstrate purely human elements. 12

    Benjamin B. Warfield says,

• The church, then, has held from the beginning that the Bible is the Word of God in such a sense that its words, though written by men and bearing indelibly impressed upon them the marks of their human origin, were written, nevertheless, under such an influence of the Holy Ghost as to be also the word of God, the adequate expression of his mind and will. It has always recognized that this conception of co-authorship implies that the Spirit's superintendence extends to the choice of the word by the human authors (verbal inspiration), and preserves its product from everything inconsistent with a divine authorship--thus securing, among other things, that entire truthfulness which is everywhere presupposed in and asserted for Scriptures by the Biblical writers (inerrancy). 13

What Do We Mean By Inspiration?

    It is important to define what we mean by the language we use. It is a valid question to ask, “What is meant by inspiration?” If we are going to speak of a doctrine of inspiration, it is necessary to insist that the doctrine of inspiration to which we subscribe must be that which the Bible itself teaches. While this seems obvious to most, it seems to be overlooked, ignored, or disregarded by others.

    There are many fine definitions given for inspiration. Benjamin Warfield avers inspiration to be “...that extraordinary, supernatural influence (or passively, the result of it) exerted by the Holy Ghost on the writers of Sacred Books, by which their words were rendered also the word of God, and therefore, perfectly infallible.” 14 Edward J. Young has written, “According to the Bible, inspiration is a superintendence of God the Holy Spirit over the writers of the Scriptures, as a result of which these Scriptures possess Divine authority and trustworthiness and, possessing such Divine authority and trustworthiness, are free from error.” 15

    One of the best definitions found by this writer is, “Inspiration is the term used to refer to the special supernatural supervision exercised by God over His messengers to make sure they communicate His message accurately.” 16


Views of Inspiration

    Having shown the importance of the doctrine of inspiration and having given different definitions of what it means, we now turn to the study of inspiration itself.

    The word “inspiration” appears only one time in the New Testament (2 Timothy 3:16). Paul wrote that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” and this is the passage most often referred to in any discussion about biblical authority.

    How are we to understand what is meant by the word “inspiration?” How are we to view inspiration? Several views of inspiration have been presented throughout history. 17

1. Some that think inspiration (NT) is best explained by understanding the experience of the prophets. Through dreams, visions, or an inward voice, the divine message could be put into words. God spoke, the prophet heard, and wrote His word. Prophets gave the impression that God's message came in verbal form and they repeated it aloud and wrote it down word for word. 18 An extreme position based on this understanding is the theory of verbal dictation. 19
2. An opposite extreme is that the Bible is nothing more than the word of men of remarkable religious insight with the ability to express themselves in eloquent language. Such a view does not take seriously the biblical data and biblical claims regarding inspiration and the language of Scripture as being the “word of God.”
3. Others argue that the Bible is a witness to divine revelation rather than a revelation itself. This view, commonly referred to as the “religious insight” view is generally coupled with an understanding of inspiration referring to a “human religious consciousness.”
4. Others says, the Bible is no different than any other book in composition but the Holy Spirit makes use of it and it “becomes” the word of God. One of the most prominent figures of this view is Karl Barth. 20

The Truth About Inspiration

    Plenary, Verbal Inspiration. The view which I feel best presents what the Scripture claims for itself is referred to as “plenary, verbal inspiration.” The word “plenary” means “full.” When one uses this word to describe inspiration he generally means that the Word of God is fully, equally and completely inspired by the Spirit of God. All Scripture is given by the inspiration of God. The word “verbal” means that the Holy Spirit played an active part in superintending the words chosen by the writers of Scripture (1 Peter 1:19-21). B.B. Warfield stated, “The men who spoke from God are here declared, therefore, to have been taken up by the Holy Spirit and brought by his power to the goal of his choosing. The things they spoke under this operation of the Spirit were therefore his things, not theirs.” 21 In this regard, there are some who ask: “In what way, or by what manner, did the Spirit work in choosing the words of Scripture?” Or, “Exactly how did the Holy Spirit influence the authors of Scripture?” God's communication to man in Scripture involved different kinds of messages. Some of it was totally newly revealed material, while other material involved historical data or something personally-witnessed. This being true, the Spirit's activity was not identical in both instances. When we are dealing with historical material, personal feelings and experiences, the Spirit needed only to exercise a general kind of supervision (cf. Luke 1:1-4). But with regards to other situations, a more active participation was needed, as sometimes prophets uttered predictions they did not understand (1 Peter 1:10-11).

    Let the Bible speak for itself. What does the Bible claim or teach concerning its inspiration? What does the Bible say concerning its divine origin and authority?

    There are several passages in the New Testament which claim inspiration for the Old Testament.22 “For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21).

• As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven-- things into which angels long to look (1 Peter 1:10-12).

    From the Old Testament, itself, comes these claims: “Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say” (Exodus 4:12). “And you are to speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I, even I, will be with your mouth and his mouth, and I will teach you what you are to do” (Exodus 4:15). “Then the LORD stretched out His hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me, 'Behold, I have put My words in your mouth'“ (Jeremiah 1:9). “The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me, And His word was on my tongue” (2 Samuel 23:2).

[end of part one]

This item originally appeared at Brown Trail Church of Christ

See also:

Part One
Part Two