Notes for Bible students. I put together these notes about 50 years ago, but cannot remember the source of some of them.
The authority of the Bible: Its self-witness.
That the Bible claims repeatedly to be inspired may seem to be gross question-begging, but if it made no such claim we should not have any call to believe it in the first place. So we need to know first what claims it makes for itself. Implicitly it claims divine authority throughout, and sometimes explicitly too: e.g.
… that Moses received from God the moral law and moreover all the more detailed commandments, even extending to the arrangements for the tabernacle.
… that the prophets were speaking messages from God – “Thus says the Lord”.
… that Jesus’s words have authority not merely as a great teacher but as the eternal Son. (Jesus refers to himself many times as the ‘son of man’, thus telling his listeners that he is the one referred to in Daniel 7.13 who is given everlasting dominion and glory).
… that like Jesus, the apostles also assumed that their words had authority, both when quoting the Lord and when developing the Christian message under the guidance of the outpoured Holy Spirit.
So far, authority is claimed for spoken words. What about written words? The New Testament certainly assumes the authority of Old testament writings. e.g. Jesus says “It is written” three times when tempted. He says to the Jews “The scriptures bear witness to me”(John 5.39). he goes over the relevant prophetic scriptures on the road to Emmaus. The phrase “...that the scriptures might be fulfilled” occurs all over the gospels.
Paul’s attitude is in Timothy 3.16. “All scripture is inspired by God”. It is clear from v15 that he has the Old Testament in mind.
Peter’s attitude is in 2 Peter 1.20-21. “no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
In 2 Peter 3.16 he accords the same authority to Paul’s writings. “Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
Thus the Bible by its self-authentication challenges us to faith or to unbelief.
The Reformed Doctrine
The reformers built their doctrine on the self-witness of scripture. It was a response of faith to the challenge. They weren’t contradicting the view of the medieval church in this, but they were taking a positive step. To them, the Bible was the supreme authority from which all other authorities derived. Two reformation views developed:
Calvinists: direct rule of scripture, even to details of church order and worship
Lutherans and Anglicans: negative authority of scripture; i.e. nothing should be permitted which is excluded by or repugnant to scripture.
The reformers threw overboard the authority of church tradition. They also threw overboard metaphorical interpretations and ‘types’ as a basis for doctrine except where the Bible expressly sanctions such interpretations.
For genuine understanding of the Bible the reformers believed there must be illumination by the Holy Spirit in the mind of the believer, the real reason for belief being inward knowledge of its truth, given by the Holy Spirit. As a fundamental axiom, the truth of the Bible must be known by experience. This argument is only rational for a believer.
The Roman Catholic view of scripture (from the teachings of David Pawson)
Catholics believe in the inspiration of scripture, but their basic bible is Jerome’s Vulgate (c400ad) written in Latin – not the original Hebrew or Greek. Thus any inaccuracies of meaning in the Latin translation can be used as the basis for doctrine – (e.g. Jesus said “Do penance for the kingdon of God is at hand” [Douay, based on Vulgate]). The reformers recognised this sort of error, and it was the spate of new translations of the Bible which sparked off the Reformation, based on the original Greek and Hebrew.
The Apocrypha, written over about 40 years during the four centuries of silence between the Old testament and the New Testament, is part of the Roman Catholic Bible, because it was in the Vulgate. Yet the books in the Apocrypha are not prophetic. Nowhere in them is the phrase “Thus says the Lord”. So there is neither self-evidence nor external evidence to back up their canonicity i.e. their right to be part of scripture. The New Testament quotes 350 times from the Old Testament, but never from the Apocrypha.
Notes: RC translations don’t leave you to interpret by yourself. Footnotes add comment – e.g. the note to 2 Timothy 3.16 says “Of course the scriptures by themselves are not sufficient to make us wise unto salvation”.
Additions: Many biblical doctrines are added to by the Roman Catholics: e.g. the Bible teaches heaven and hell; Catholics add limbo (for unbaptised babies) and purgatory (for those unready for heaven yet). The doctrine of the immaculate conception – that Mary was free of original sin when she was conceived – is a tradition which adds to scripture. The whole church hierarchy from the Pope downwards adds to scripture.
The liberal protestant view of scripture (from New Bible Commentary). This is complex but basically it rejects a transcendent deity and supernatural acts of God. The Bible is reduced to the level of a human book, and because it is human it is liable to error. This clearly challenges and contradicts what the Bible says about itself. So the authority of the Bible is rejected, all religion is approached comparatively and judged relatively, and every individual becomes a law unto himself in religious matters. God is dethroned and humanity reigns.
The neo-orthodox view is that the Bible is a fallible human book but can become God’s word to us insofar as the Holy Spirit illumines and applies it to the individual soul.
A balanced view is surely that the Bible is authoritative both because of its historical accuracy and because of the way in which the Holy Spirit applies its truths in our lives.
