Kevin Stilley

  • Home
  • Blog Posts
  • On the Air
  • Quotes
  • Site Archive

December 30, 2017 by kevinstilley

The Bible – select quotes

The distribution of Bibles, if the simplest, in not the least efficacious of the means of extending the blessings of the Gospel to the remotest corners of the earth; for the Comforter is in the sacred volume: and among the receivers of that million of copies distributed by the Society, who shall number the multitudes awakened thereby, with good will to man in their hearts, and with the song of the Lamb upon their lips? The hope of a Christian is inseparable from his faith. Whoever believes in the divine inspiration of the holy Scriptures, must hope that the religion of Jesus shall prevail throughout the earth. Never since the foundation of the world have the prospects of mankind been more encouraging to that hope than they appear to be at the present time. And may the associated distribution of the Bible proceed and prosper, till the Lord shall have made “bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.
~ John Quincy Adams

For me the Word of God is a happening, not a thing. Therefore the Bible must become the Word of God, and it does this through the work of the Spirit.
~ Karl Barth

Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but because it contradicts them.
~ E. Paul Harvey

The Bible is the cornerstone of American liberty. A student’s perusal of this sacred volume will make them a better citizen.
~ Thomas Jefferson. According to Daniel Webster, Jefferson said this to him in regard to why the Bible was foundational in the educational plan he helped program for the school system in Washington D.C. Daniel Webster to Professor Peace, June 15, 1852 in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, edited by Edward Everett, (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1903).

The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible.
~ Dwight L. Moody

I know not a better rule of reading the Scripture, than to read it through from beginning to end and when we have finished it once, to begin it again.
~ John Newton, in The Works of the Rev. John Newton (London: Nathan Whiting, 1824), page 466.

The Bible is the Constitution of Christian civilization.
~ Gordon Palmer, in By Freedom’s Holy Light (NY: Devin-Adair Co., 1964), page 4

I could not believe that anyone who had read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly uninformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?
~ Bishop John Shelby Spong

A Book which will lift men up to God must have come down from God.
~ R.A. Torrey, quoted by A.W. Pink in “The Miraculous Power of the Bible Shows Forth That Its Inspirer Is The Almighty”

If every book but the Bible were destroyed not a single spiritual truth would be lost.
~ R.A. Torrey, quoted by A.W. Pink in “The Completeness of the Bible Demonstrates Its Divine Perfection”

Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
~ A.W. Tozer

The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
~ A. W. Tozer

It is impossible rightly to govern the world without God and the Bible.
~ George Washington

If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we or our prosperity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.
~ Daniel Webster

God himself has condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book! At any price give me the book of God. Let me be a man of one book.
~ John Wesley

We search the world for truth: we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From graven stone and written scroll:
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our Mothers read.
~ John Greenleaf Whittier

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life.
~ Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States

When you have read the Bible you will know that it is the Word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness, and your own duty.
~ Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
~ The Bible, Hebrews 4:12
__________

RELATED CONTENT

  • Index To Great Quotes

__________

Book Cover

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Quotes, Theology Tagged With: Bible, canon, inspiration, quotations, quote, revelation, Scripture

May 22, 2014 by kevinstilley

Lectio Divina

What’s in a name, that which we call a rose (Lectio Divina)
By any other name (Magic, Humanism, Neo-Orthoxy) would smell as sweet.

Increasingly Lectio Divina is being adopted and practiced by many in the Christian faith for whom I have great admiration. However, I believe that when practicing this ancient form of mysticism they are spiritually misled and/or misleading.

It is magic – In the process by which a practitioner of Lectio Divina conjures up the sacred state/crisis experience in which they converse with God, the neophyte is instructed to select a phrase or single word to focus on. They are instructed to clear their mind of anything they think they might know, and simply let God use that one word or phrase to convey His message which is discovered by the practitioner as he enters into a divine union with God. The practitioner is to completely disengage the word or phrase from its context for this stage of the process. Let me ask you what the difference would be between opening your Bible and focusing on the word “overwhelmed” from Psalm 124:4 and opening my dictionary and opening it to the O words and focusing upon the word “overwhelmed”? “Well,” one might say, “the answer is obvious, the Bible is God’s Word and the dictionary is just a book of words.” To that I would respond by saying that when you remove the word “overwhelmed” from the biblical text it also becomes just a word. And, if you think that it has some magical conjuring properties in this detached state just because you found it in God’s sacred book then you are no longer treating it as God’s Word, you are treating it as a magical talisman.

It is humanism – Thousands of years ago Protagoras declared “Homo mensura”, that is “man is the measure”. Today, Christians are reading the Bible and asking not “What hath God said?” but “What does it mean to me.” The Lectio Divina displaces God and promotes a self-centered humanism that makes man the measure rather than God’s revelation.

The Lectio Divina is neo neo-orthodoxy (existentialism) – it replaces the authority of Scripture (what it means) with the authority of experience. Believers responded to classical nineteenth century liberalism’s attack on the Scriptures by realigning into movements with various “authority” claims. (1) Fundamentalists reasserted the Scripture as authoritative for all things related to faith and practice; (2) Pentecostalism and its variants resorted to claims that the Holy Spirit is the authority for faith and practice; and (3) the Neo-orthodox who at least partially bought into nineteenth century liberalism’s criticism of the Bible but wanted to retain much of the Christian tradition gravitated into a camp in which the “experience of God” became the authority for faith and practice. The Lectio Divina uses the Bible only as the starting point, catalyst, religious talisman to get one to the “experience of God” and then this experience becomes the source of authority (“what does it mean to me”).

It is bad hermeneutics – Origen got the church off to a bad start in looking for hidden, figurative, allegorical messages in the Scripture. Now, we have Christians practicing the Lectio Divina who are using decontextualized clips of words from the Bible, memories from their past, and other “texts” to find the hidden, figurative, and allegorical messages that are available through a crisis experience with God. It was bad hermeneutics with Origen and it is bad hermeneutics today.

It denies in practice, if not in theological commitment, the verbal inspiration of Scripture. Those who hold to the verbal-plenary inspiration of Scripture believe that God inspired the very words of the text and thus the specific meaning of individual words is important. When those practicing the Lectio Divina remove a word from its context and then conjure up any of many different meanings (see how groups practice the Lectio Divina) then they are denying the importance of the meaning assigned by God. As my old linguistics professor, Kenneth Pike from Wycliffe, used to say “You will know a word by the company it keeps.”

The Lectio Divina is contrary to Scripture. There is much about the practice of Lectio Divina which is perfectly consistent with the teaching of sacred Scripture. But, there is also significant areas in which this spiritual practice diverges from the instruction of Scripture. The Scriptures do not tell us to clear our mind, they tell us to replace bad thoughts with good thoughts. The Psalmist does not create new truths when he meditates on God’s Word in Psalm 119, but he is wiser than all his teachers because his eyes were opened to the wonderful things found in the Law of God, not wonderful things found in his own imagination. We are not told to chant a single word from the Bible, but to study the Bible (2 Timothy 2:15)

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Theology Tagged With: Bible, Bible Reading, Bible study, Lectio Divina, Meditation, Scripture

March 15, 2014 by kevinstilley

Infographic: The “One Another” Commands

An infographic with all of the “one another” commands in the New Testament:

Infographic: all the one another commands in the New Testament

Filed Under: Articles, Bibliology, Books, Ecclesiology, Ethics / Praxis Tagged With: church, Community, love

March 13, 2014 by kevinstilley

A Bible Infographic

Infographic: How long is the Bible?

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Books, Trivia Tagged With: Bible, New Testament, Old Testament

October 2, 2013 by kevinstilley

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

Background

The “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” was produced at an international Summit Conference of evangelical leaders, held at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago in the fall of 1978. This congress was sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement was signed by nearly 300 noted evangelical scholars, including James Boice, Norman L. Geisler, John Gerstner, Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth Kantzer, Harold Lindsell, John Warwick Montgomery, Roger Nicole, J. I. Packer, Robert Preus, Earl Radmacher, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul, and John Wenham.

The ICBI disbanded in 1988 after producing three major statements: one on biblical inerrancy in 1978, one on biblical hermeneutics in 1982, and one on biblical application in 1986. The following text, containing the “Preface” by the ICBI draft committee, plus the “Short Statement,” “Articles of Affirmation and Denial,” and an accompanying “Exposition,” was published in toto by Carl F. H. Henry in God, Revelation And Authority, vol. 4 (Waco, Tx.: Word Books, 1979), on pp. 211-219. The nineteen Articles of Affirmation and Denial, with a brief introduction, also appear in A General Introduction to the Bible, by Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix (Chicago: Moody Press, rev. 1986), at pp. 181-185. An official commentary on these articles was written by R. C. Sproul in Explaining Inerrancy: A Commentary (Oakland, Calif.: ICBI, 1980), and Norman Geisler edited the major addresses from the 1978 conference, in Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980).

Clarification of some of the language used in this Statement may be found in the 1982 Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics


The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

Preface

The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian church in this and every age. Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God’s written Word. To stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority.

The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God’s own Word which marks true Christian faith. We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstandings of this doctrine in the world at large.

This Statement consists of three parts: a Summary Statement, Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and an accompanying Exposition. It has been prepared in the course of a three-day consultation in Chicago. Those who have signed the Summary Statement and the Articles wish to affirm their own conviction as to the inerrancy of Scripture and to encourage and challenge one another and all Christians to growing appreciation and understanding of this doctrine. We acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference and do not propose that this Statement be given creedal weight. Yet we rejoice in the deepening of our own convictions through our discussions together, and we pray that the Statement we have signed may be used to the glory of our God toward a new reformation of the Church in its faith, life, and mission.

We offer this Statement in a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love, which we purpose by God’s grace to maintain in any future dialogue arising out of what we have said. We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior, and we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word.

We invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself, under whose infallible authority we stand as we speak. We claim no personal infallibility for the witness we bear, and for any help which enables us to strengthen this testimony to God’s Word we shall be grateful.

— The Draft Committee


A Short Statement

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

 


Articles of Affirmation and Denial

Article I.

WE AFFIRM  that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God.

WE DENY  that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source.

Article II.

WE AFFIRM  that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture.

WE DENY  that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible.

Article III.

WE AFFIRM  that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God.

WE DENY  that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity.

Article IV.

WE AFFIRM  that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.

WE DENY  that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God’s work of inspiration.

Article V.

WE AFFIRM  that God’s revelation within the Holy Scriptures was progressive.

WE DENY  that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings.

Article VI.

WE AFFIRM  that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

WE DENY  that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.

Article VII.

WE AFFIRM  that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.

WE DENY  that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

Article VIII.

WE AFFIRM  that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

WE DENY  that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

Article IX.

WE AFFIRM  that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.

WE DENY  that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word.

Article X.

WE AFFIRM  that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

WE DENY  that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

Article XI.

WE AFFIRM  that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.

WE DENY  that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated.

Article XII.

WE AFFIRM  that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

WE DENY  that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

Article XIII.

WE AFFIRM  the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

WE DENY  that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Article XIV.

WE AFFIRM  the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.

WE DENY  that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the Bible.

Article XV.

WE AFFIRM  that the doctrine of inerrancy is grounded in the teaching of the Bible about inspiration.

WE DENY  that Jesus’ teaching about Scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity.

Article XVI.

WE AFFIRM  that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history.

WE DENY  that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.

Article XVII.

WE AFFIRM  that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the Scriptures, assuring believers of the truthfulness of God’s written Word.

WE DENY  that this witness of the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against Scripture.

Article XVIII.

WE AFFIRM  that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.

WE DENY  the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship.

Article XIX.

WE AFFIRM  that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ.

WE DENY  that such confession is necessary for salvation. However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church.

 


Exposition

Our understanding of the doctrine of inerrancy must be set in the context of the broader teachings of the Scripture concerning itself. This exposition gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our summary statement and articles are drawn.

Creation, Revelation and Inspiration

The Triune God, who formed all things by his creative utterances and governs all things by His Word of decree, made mankind in His own image for a life of communion with Himself, on the model of the eternal fellowship of loving communication within the Godhead. As God’s image-bearer, man was to hear God’s Word addressed to him and to respond in the joy of adoring obedience. Over and above God’s self-disclosure in the created order and the sequence of events within it, human beings from Adam on have received verbal messages from Him, either directly, as stated in Scripture, or indirectly in the form of part or all of Scripture itself.

When Adam fell, the Creator did not abandon mankind to final judgment but promised salvation and began to reveal Himself as Redeemer in a sequence of historical events centering on Abraham’s family and culminating in the life, death, resurrection, present heavenly ministry, and promised return of Jesus Christ. Within this frame God has from time to time spoken specific words of judgment and mercy, promise and command, to sinful human beings so drawing them into a covenant relation of mutual commitment between Him and them in which He blesses them with gifts of grace and they bless Him in responsive adoration. Moses, whom God used as mediator to carry His words to His people at the time of the Exodus, stands at the head of a long line of prophets in whose mouths and writings God put His words for delivery to Israel. God’s purpose in this succession of messages was to maintain His covenant by causing His people to know His Name—that is, His nature—and His will both of precept and purpose in the present and for the future. This line of prophetic spokesmen from God came to completion in Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Word, who was Himself a prophet—more than a prophet, but not less—and in the apostles and prophets of the first Christian generation. When God’s final and climactic message, His word to the world concerning Jesus Christ, had been spoken and elucidated by those in the apostolic circle, the sequence of revealed messages ceased. Henceforth the Church was to live and know God by what He had already said, and said for all time.

At Sinai God wrote the terms of His covenant on tables of stone, as His enduring witness and for lasting accessibility, and throughout the period of prophetic and apostolic revelation He prompted men to write the messages given to and through them, along with celebratory records of His dealings with His people, plus moral reflections on covenant life and forms of praise and prayer for covenant mercy. The theological reality of inspiration in the producing of Biblical documents corresponds to that of spoken prophecies: although the human writers’ personalities were expressed in what they wrote, the words were divinely constituted. Thus, what Scripture says, God says; its authority is His authority, for He is its ultimate Author, having given it through the minds and words of chosen and prepared men who in freedom and faithfulness “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). Holy Scripture must be acknowledged as the Word of God by virtue of its divine origin.

Authority: Christ and the Bible

Jesus Christ, the Son of God who is the Word made flesh, our Prophet, Priest, and King, is the ultimate Mediator of God’s communication to man, as He is of all God’s gifts of grace. The revelation He gave was more than verbal; He revealed the Father by His presence and His deeds as well. Yet His words were crucially important; for He was God, He spoke from the Father, and His words will judge all men at the last day.

As the prophesied Messiah, Jesus Christ is the central theme of Scripture. The Old Testament looked ahead to Him; the New Testament looks back to His first coming and on to His second. Canonical Scripture is the divinely inspired and therefore normative witness to Christ. No hermeneutic, therefore, of which the historical Christ is not the focal point is acceptable. Holy Scripture must be treated as what it essentially is—the witness of the Father to the Incarnate Son.

It appears that the Old Testament canon had been fixed by the time of Jesus. The New Testament canon is likewise now closed inasmuch as no new apostolic witness to the historical Christ can now be borne. No new revelation (as distinct from Spirit-given understanding of existing revelation) will be given until Christ comes again. The canon was created in principle by divine inspiration. The Church’s part was to discern the canon which God had created, not to devise one of its own.

The word canon, signifying a rule or standard, is a pointer to authority, which means the right to rule and control. Authority in Christianity belongs to God in His revelation, which means, on the one hand, Jesus Christ, the living Word, and, on the other hand, Holy Scripture, the written Word. But the authority of Christ and that of Scripture are one. As our Prophet, Christ testified that Scripture cannot be broken. As our Priest and King, He devoted His earthly life to fulfilling the law and the prophets, even dying in obedience to the words of Messianic prophecy. Thus, as He saw Scripture attesting Him and His authority, so by His own submission to Scripture He attested its authority. As He bowed to His Father’s instruction given in His Bible (our Old Testament), so He requires His disciples to do—not, however, in isolation but in conjunction with the apostolic witness to Himself which He undertook to inspire by His gift of the Holy Spirit. So Christians show themselves faithful servants of their Lord by bowing to the divine instruction given in the prophetic and apostolic writings which together make up our Bible.

By authenticating each other’s authority, Christ and Scripture coalesce into a single fount of authority. The Biblically-interpreted Christ and the Christ-centered, Christ-proclaiming Bible are from this standpoint one. As from the fact of inspiration we infer that what Scripture says, God says, so from the revealed relation between Jesus Christ and Scripture we may equally declare that what Scripture says, Christ says.

Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation

Holy Scripture, as the inspired Word of God witnessing authoritatively to Jesus Christ, may properly be called infallible and inerrant. These negative terms have a special value, for they explicitly safeguard crucial positive truths.

lnfallible signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe, and reliable rule and guide in all matters.

Similarly, inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of His penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.

The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of irregularities of grammar or spelling, phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements (e.g., the lies of Satan), or seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. It is not right to set the so-called “phenomena” of Scripture against the teaching of Scripture about itself. Apparent inconsistencies should not be ignored. Solution of them, where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances, and by maintaining our confidence that one day they will be seen to have been illusions.

Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer’s mind.

Although Holy Scripture is nowhere culture-bound in the sense that its teaching lacks universal validity, it is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today calls for a different sort of action.

Skepticism and Criticism

Since the Renaissance, and more particularly since the Enlightenment, world-views have been developed which involve skepticism about basic Christian tenets. Such are the agnosticism which denies that God is knowable, the rationalism which denies that He is incomprehensible, the idealism which denies that He is transcendent, and the existentialism which denies rationality in His relationships with us. When these un- and anti-biblical principles seep into men’s theologies at [a] presuppositional level, as today they frequently do, faithful interpretation of Holy Scripture becomes impossible.

Transmission and Translation

Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission. The verdict of this science, however, is that the Hebrew and Greek text appear to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession, a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.

Similarly, no translation is or can be perfect, and all translations are an additional step away from the autographa. Yet the verdict of linguistic science is that English-speaking Christians, at least, are exceedingly well served in these days with a host of excellent translations and have no cause for hesitating to conclude that the true Word of God is within their reach. Indeed, in view of the frequent repetition in Scripture of the main matters with which it deals and also of the Holy Spirit’s constant witness to and through the Word, no serious translation of Holy Scripture will so destroy its meaning as to render it unable to make its reader “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).

Inerrancy and Authority

In our affirmation of the authority of Scripture as involving its total truth, we are consciously standing with Christ and His apostles, indeed with the whole Bible and with the main stream of Church history from the first days until very recently. We are concerned at the casual, inadvertent, and seemingly thoughtless way in which a belief of such far-reaching importance has been given up by so many in our day.

We are conscious too that great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible which God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasonings and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that at bottom independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.

We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified. Amen and Amen.

Filed Under: Apologetics, Bible Exposition, Bibliology, Blog, Epistemology, Hermeneutics Tagged With: Bible, Harmonization, inerrancy, inspiration

November 2, 2012 by kevinstilley

Hermeneutics / Bible Interpretation – select quotes

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
~ William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
~ George Bernard Shaw

It’s not what I don’t understand about the Bible that bothers me; it’s what I do understand that bothers me.
~ Mark Twain

We must be on guard against giving interpretations of scripture that are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
~ Augustine of Hippo

__________

Related Content

Lectio Divina

Filed Under: Bible Exposition, Bibliology, Blog, Preaching / Teaching Tagged With: Bible, hermeneutics, interpretation

February 25, 2012 by kevinstilley

Studying the Bible — R.C. Sproul Explains Why & How

Why Study The Bible – R.C. Sproul

R.C. Sproul answers the question, “Why Study the Bible”. Many own a Bible – it is a perennial bestseller — but few are those who actually study it.

Private Interpretation – R.C. Sproul

The Science of Interpretation — R.C. Sproul

Literal Interpretation — R.C. Sproul

Literary Forms (part 1) — R.C. Sproul

Literary Forms (part 2) — R.C. Sproul

Reading the Bible Existentially — R.C. Sproul

The Historical Narrative — R.C. Sproul

The Explicit & The Implicit — R.C. Sproul

Parallelisms – R.C. Sproul

Scripture & Culture — R.C. Sproul

Principle vs. Custom — R.C. Sproul

Related Books:

Book Cover Book Cover Book Cover Book Cover

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Spiritual Growth, Video Tagged With: Bible, Bible Interpretation, Bibliology, hermeneutics, R.C. Sproul, Scripture

December 6, 2009 by kevinstilley

I Wrote The Bible

Well, it seems that I have been published again and I didn’t even know it.  During the summer I attended a large book event in Dallas where the Bible Across America project was in attendance.  They had me hand-write two copies of a biblical verse.  My contribution was then combined with those of more than 31,000 other individuals to create two entirely handwritten copies of the Bible.

One of those handwritten Bibles sold this week on eBay for more than $15,000.  Proceeds for the sale will go to Biblica, formerly known as the International Bible Society.  The other copy will be donated to a museum.

I wonder if I should add this to my curriculum vitae.

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Family Circus, Front Page Tagged With: Bible, Translation

May 16, 2009 by kevinstilley

Bible (Authority)

“The authority of the Scriptures does not rest “on the authority of the Church. The Church may
bear witness to what she received from the apostles as law, but this is not giving authority to
that law but humbly recognizing the authority which rightly belongs to it whether the Church recognizes it or not. The puzzle which some people fall into here is something like mistaking the relative ‘authority’ of the guide-post and the road; the guide-post may point us to the right road but it does not give its rightness to the road. It has not ‘determined’ the road—it is the road that has ‘determined’ the guide-post; and unless the road goes of itself to its destination the guide-post has no power to determine its direction. So the Church does not ‘determine’ the Scriptures, but the Scriptures the Church.”
~ B. B. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings,  Vol. 2, page 538

__________

RELATED

Index to Great Quotes

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Quotes Tagged With: Authority, Bible, church, Scripture

June 22, 2006 by kevinstilley

Baptists and the Bible

Baptists and the Bible – – Recommended by Paige Patterson

At a recent alumni luncheon of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, L. Russ Bush III was honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award. Bush presently serves as distinguished professor of philosophy of religion, director of the Center for Faith and Culture, and academic vice president and dean of the faculty emeritus at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Seminary President Paige Patterson described Bush as a man known for his intellect and gentleness and cited Bush’s book “Baptists and the Bible” as “one of the 10 most important publications” of the 20th century.

Book Cover

Filed Under: Bibliology, Blog, Books, Church History, History Tagged With: Baptist, Bible, Church History, SWBTS

Recent Blog Posts

  • Discussion Questions for “The Language of God”
  • Billy Graham knew where he was going
  • Interesting quotes from “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln” by Stephen L. Carter
  • The Bible – select quotes
  • America’s Christian Heritage
  • Christian Involvement In Politics
  • Freedom – select quotes
  • Kevin Stilley on For Christ and Culture Radio
  • Early Western Civilization classroom resources
  • Early Western Civilization Final Exam

Currently Reading

Frankenstein

Twitter Feed

Tweets by @kevinstilley

Connect With Me On Twitter

Follow_me_on_Twitter

Connect With Me On Facebook

Receive My Monthly Newsletter


Copyright © 2023 · Executive Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in