I. SAYS WHO?

“Authority” is a crisis issue in both society and in the Church today. Autonomy is sought even within the one institution created and dedicated to serve God’s law. At issue is the integrity and the transcendence over time and culture of God’s Word to impose moral obligation. “Christians need to know on what basis and to what extent the Bible is binding authority in the modern world.” (Integrative Theology). How do we know Jesus as our Lord and Savior? How does He exercise his Lordship over our lives? Where do we get our marching orders from? It is to these matters this course has given me an opportunity to explore and develop.

Scripture is quite consistent and emphatic in its claim that God and God alone has right, in and of Himself, to impose ultimate obligation over His creatures. But that authority is exercised in and through the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Because it is not exercised directly (and won’t be until His second coming), authority was left by Christ (“He who receives you receives Me and he who receive Me receives Him who sent Me”-Mat 10:40) with the Apostles as Spirit-endued witnesses to Christ’s words, work, death and resurrection. Since there is no Scriptural warrant for the inheritance of Apostolic office, such authority is preserved in the Apostolic writings as testimony through which Christ still speaks, works and commands. Carl Henry writes, “It is through the Bible that Jesus Christ now exercises his divine authority, imparting authoritative truth, issuing authoritative commands and imposing an authoritative norm...”. That New Testament record also includes Christ’s clear attestation to the historicity and authority of the Old Testament writings. The New Testament validates the truth and character of Jesus and He validates the whole truth and character of the Old Testament.

The issue for us today is not so much whether one believes in the God of the Bible but rather the real test is in believing what God says and living accordingly, having what the Reformers called fiducia. It is a matter of by what standard “must”, “should” or ”ought” we believe and thereby live. As we discussed in class, it’s the great “Says who”question; by whose authority must we do or say this or that.

Right from the beginning of the Biblical account of creation and redemptive history, the issue is whether God is to be believed in all He says. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were asked “Hath God said?” They certainly had awareness of God, even intimate knowledge of Him (notitia) and they intellectually understood the truth of the information they had (assensus) but they did not trust in all He said (fiducia). They, like all their offspring, sought autonomy from God. Therefore, the First Adam initiated playing fast and loose with God’s words, picking and choosing what “tickled the ears”, and assuming God’s effort to communicate Himself was deficient and required His creature’s enlightened correction.

In His wilderness temptation, Jesus, the second Adam, refused to compromise or negotiate God’s word, insisting His active obedience to God the Father was grounded in “It is written.” Unlike the First Adam, Jesus lived by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God - “sola scriptura”. This high view Christ held of Scripture Orthodox, Reformed Christianity has likewise upheld as the only means by which to bind the conscience and to know the mind of Christ.

The integrity and trustworthiness of Scripture went largely unchallenged for nearly 1800 years within the Church until it was vandalized by the Higher Critics. To them the words of men could not be the same as the words of God. What really was being reported by the Biblical accounts were subjective experiences and personal feelings of an ancient, semi-nomadic people as they encountered God. Rather than the “it is written” by God which binds conscience and conduct, the Higher Critics said Scripture was written by fallible men conditioned by their primitive culture and perspectives and therefore has only such obligation as men may choose to grant it. Therefore, a new higher authority is required to separate husk from embedded kernel in Scriptural writings. Objective reality and truth becomes a wax nose of subjectivity and relativism. “Those who start by postulating a distinction between the Bible as a human book and the word of God that is in it are unable, on their own premises, to recognize and exhibit the real oneness of these two things and when they try to state their mutual relationships they lapse into arbitrary subjectivism.”( J. I. Packer)

Scripture says man did not discover or discern God rather God unveils Himself to His creatures. God’s self revelation is what He chose to do in time and space therefore giving human history purpose, design and a goal. Scripture presents God not abstractly but in propositional truth (words and statements) which was and is publicly proclaimed and openly testable. It is the written permanent record of God’s outworking of His character and will, whose focus is the Living Word of God - Jesus Christ. “The Bible is “a single book with a single author -God the Spirit - and a single theme - God the Son and the Father’s saving purposes, which all revolve around Him.” (J.I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God)

God has made Himself generally known through the visible world. The natural order is a mirror reflecting the mind and magnificence of its Creator. His self disclosure is also registered within the human conscience such that Paul says in Romans 1:28 that all people are without excuse to acknowledge He is there and He is not silent. He stands behind and sustains all things He has created and ordered, mind and matter alike. God makes sure He gets through to us even though we seek to suppress or change His moral law.

We can know something about God in and through His general revelation but we can not Him personally unless and until He chooses that relationship. And He does that by pulling back the curtain on the redemptive drama He authored and walking onto the stage Himself bidding His audience to join Him in the final act. The zenith of God’s progressive revelation of Himself is Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of all that the Old Covenant promised for atonement,reconciliation and the restoration of the shattered imago Dei.

Those alive when Jesus walked about Palestine could know something about Him first hand but for those elsewhere or who would come later special revelation would not be efficacious unless it were recorded for transmission. In special revelation, we are really speaking about the the two words of God - the Living Word, the Logos, God Incarnate and the Written Word, the Oracles of God, the Inscripturated Word. Thus, it has two aspects, distinguishable but not separable, which are the divine and the human. The revelation is transmitted through something and it is something itself. David says, “The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me, his word was on my tongue (2 Sam 23:2) and Jeremiah writes, “Then the Lord reached out His hand and touched my mouth and said to me ‘Now, I have put my words in your mouth’” (Jer 1:9). Likewise Paul writes, “If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command.” (I Cor 14:37). While the “Two Words” need to be distinguished, they are sides of the same coin. The one is God in human flesh, the true, perfect imago Dei and the other God in human language - the true, rational communication of Himself. Like two poles of the same line that define the line and reveal it to us, the “Two Words” of God, the sinless Christ and the errorless Bible also reveal the mysterious connection and union between God and man that brings reconciliation. Both “Words” logically express and equate to each other. This analogy between the Incarnation and the inspiration of Scripture goes to the heart of the my discussion about authority.

The Author of Life sovereignly chose Mary, a virgin peasant of no worldly status, to play the creature’s special role in His supernatural drama of redemption. She conceived through the superintendence of the Holy Spirit the One who fuses divinity and humanity not as an abstract concept but personally and relationally. To save man, God condescended to man. God became man, the God-man. Likewise in Scripture, to converse with man, God stooped down to man in using human language. God talk became man talk.

In the Old Testament God literally pitched His tent in the midst of His nomadic people. It was called the tent of meeting - the place where He and His people would fellowship. It was also called the tent of testimony - the place where God spoke and pointed to ultimate reality and His people listened. John’s Gospel tells us that God became a physical being to literally live among His people for fellowship and for testimony to ultimate reality’s presence.

The Incarnation is the incomprehensible mystery of the infinite entering the finite and becoming comprehensible in time and space. Integrative Theology says “the historical Jesus was the revelation of the shekinah glory of God.” Perhaps the most common idea of Jesus’ deity and humanity has been that He is half God and half human; a human body and a divine mind. On the outside He is man and on the inside He is God. The Council of Chalcedon affirmed Jesus as fully God and fully man; as two natures in one person but without being changed, divided or confused. The natures remain distinct but come together and are united but retain their own attributes. Likewise, as I will later develop, Scripture is a fully divine and fully human product, distinguished, not separated or confused but come together as one while keeping human and divine attributes.

There are tendencies either to allow Christ’s human nature to be swallowed up by His divine nature or his humanity to overshadow His divinity. In either case while the two natures must be distinguished, not separated, they must be held together. Here too, as I will also develop, Scripture’s humanness and divinity are often set against each other rather than harmonized.

In His humanity, Jesus had the same limitations as all humans except He was without sin. His purpose in coming into the world was to be the agnes Dei - the perfect sacrifice, the lamb without blemish to secure the sins of the world, to placate His own wrath against sin and to achieve salvation of the elect. He could not become the perfect mediator between God and man to exchange holy life for sinful lives apart from His becoming the God-man, taking on true humanness i.e. the holiness and righteousness it reflected before the fall.

Of the Incarnation and our salvation John Stott writes in Basic Christianity,“We are not to think of Jesus Christ as a Third Party wrestling salvation for us from God unwilling save to us. No. The initiative was with God himself. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Precisely how we can have been in Christ while he made Christ to be sin for us, I can not explain but the same apostle states both truths in the same paragraph. And we must accept this paradox along with the equally baffling paradox that Jesus of Nazareth was both God and man and yet one person. If there was paradox in his person, it is not surprising that we find it in his work.”

Jesus’ sinlessness was never really seriously challenged in the Church until the last two centuries when Scripture’s inerrancy also came under attack. Until that time Christ’s perfection was understood to be essential to salvation itself. For Christ to be sinless in practice he had to be sinless in nature. But the liberals reasoned that for Jesus to be human he must have sinned. After all, they contended, not only is it human to err but to sin as well. Thus they posited a less than perfect Savior for salvation and a less than truthful Bible for doctrine. Yet if sinfulness is part of the definition of what humanness is, then God would have created Adam and Eve sinful. Strangely, when the elect are glorified and sinless in heaven we would no longer be human.

Sin or error is the corruption or contradiction of true humanity. It is not natural but unnatural. To sin or to err is not part of the imago Dei in its fullest and most complete. Hoekema makes the point that “the original human pair imaged God sinlessly and obediently. Man was then, to quote Augustine,’able not to sin’ ”. A human being is the image of God by definition and that can not change. Jesus was a real man not only in the sense he shared our human condition in every respect but also in the sense he was true man, a human being who perfectly fulfilled His humanity.

What was lost at the fall was conformance to God’s knowledge, holiness and righteousness. What Hoekema refers to and we discussed as Functional capacities. We are still the image of God but it is shattered, twisted and distorted. Hoekema says originally we had the ability to respond to God, other people, and the creation, but not since the Fall. We are no longer able on our own steam to conform to God’s complete, perfect image. Only Jesus is the image of God in both senses (structural and functional) and by His atonement the image of the elect has already been positionally restored and is being restored in the newness of redeemed life.

The question I’d like to pursue now is whether the God who can take on human flesh and live a sinless life also is able to consistently use human language to express His nature, character and will without error in the actual words that were originally communicated and recorded in Scripture. The Bible’s inspiration (i.e. its being expired by God) is a mystery no less than the Incarnation. As in the case of God becoming a man, it would seem we can go only so far to appreciated of divine inspiration of human authors. “My thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8-9). As in the case of God becoming man it would seem we can go only so far to appreciate the method and extent of divine inspiration of human writers. Yet if God is altogether consistent and coherent then between both His general revelation and special revelation, and within His special revelation, we should be able to look for and expect to find unity, consistency, integrity and practical relevance between the “Two Words”.

If one can accept the truth claim that the infinite did manifestly enter into the finite and confine Himself to a certain human body without compromise, then it would not seem to be a stretch to accept that eternity expresses itself rationally and inerrantly through human language in a certain group of writings as well. The Spirit’s work is supernatural, not strange.

The Apostle Paul tells us Scripture originated with God, not man, and God sustained or actuated it through His human instruments of revelation. “But know this first of all, that no prophesy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”

Inspiration is God’s revelation of Himself in a process by which the Holy Spirit superintended the production of the Bible. He guided human writers so that their words would be nothing less than the words of God. “Although physically time bound, as image bearers of the divine, they were created with the capacity to receive truths beyond time by revelation.” (Integrative Theology). What was written down was exactly what He wanted to be written for communication to others. To do that God sovereignly chose and then prepared these human authors He would “breathe” into at the preordained times and circumstances using the interests, talents, abilities and characteristics which He had given them. He prepared them and their writing styles and superintended the writing process so that no errors or distortions of God’s truth crept in. He permitted each to express eternal truths in their own unique styles of writing which I think added interest and impact to the later reading of the text.

In inspiration God did not obliterate personality, perspective or cultural conditioning. Any fair reading has always convinced that it was written by people who were very human and very much people of their time. But God controlled them such that they could not and did not distort the truth they were given to convey. “The authority of Scripture requires that in whatever the author meant to say by the words used, he presents us with the truth of God, without a mixture of error.” ( J.I. Packer)

Scripture bears witness to its own divine origin and therefore its authority. The prophets spoke God’s word and proclaimed “thus says the Lord”. Jesus said that Scripture could not be broken. Therefore, it is the record of revelation and also revelation itself, as opposed to being a fallible witness of revelation.

In his The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, B. B. Warfield mockingly states: “He was reduced to the necessity of going down to earth and painfully scrutinizing the men He found there seeking anxiously for the one who, on the whole, promised best for His purposes; and then violently forcing material He wished expressed through him, against his natural bent, and with as little loss from his recalcitrant characteristics as possible. Of course, nothing of the sort took place. If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write such letters.”

God’s superintending influence ensured the Scriptures are inerrant. Carl F. Henry’s points on verbal inerrancy summarized in Integrative Theology I think are particularly good: first, the Bible teaches truth in matters of science, history, theology and ethics; second, God’s truth resides in the words, propositions and sentences; third, only the autographs are error free.

I’d like to now explore the analogy between God’s logos theou (ontological word incarnate) and the rhema theou (epistimological word inscripturate).God uses analogous language throughout Scripture in making Himself known to finite, fallen beings. For example, He likens Himself to a person with physical and relational attributes such as fatherhood. Analogies point us to resemblances or similarities we can get a handle on God’s eternal verities. While analogies can be pushed only so far, they nevertheless provide us I think a sense of familiarity and encouragement for our growth and witness.

Donald Grey Barnhouse is helpful in this regard when he writes in The Invisible War: “Just as the Holy Spirit came upon the womb of Mary, so He came upon the brain of a Moses, a David, an Isaiah, a Paul, a John and the rest of the writers of the divine library. The power of the Highest overshadowed them, therefore that holy thing which was born of their minds is called the Holy Bible, the word of God. The writing of Luke will, of course, have the vocabulary of Luke and the work of Paul will bear the stamp of Paul’s mind. However, this is only in the same manner that the Lord Jesus might have had eyes like His mother’s or hair that was the same color and texture as hers. He did not inherit her sins because the Holy Spirit has come upon her. If we ask, how could this be, the answer is God says so. And the writings of men of the Book did not inherit the errors of their carnal minds because their writings were conceived by the Holy Spirit and born out of their personalities without partaking of their fallen nature. If we ask, how could this be, again the answer is God says so.”

What often strikes me as quite odd is how unflinchingly many seem to accept the great mystery of the Incarnation, the God-man Jesus Christ, the second Adam without sin, but who stumble or protest the equally held truth claim of Scripture that God also perfectly communicated Himself through human speech and written words. Both propositional truths - what Jesus said about Himself being the perfect imago Dei (“He who has seen Me has seen the Father” -Jn 14:9) and what Scripture says about itself as perfect explanation of God’s nature, character and will - are foundational doctrines of the faith which are inextricably linked. “Scriptures are spoken of as they were of God; in the one sense, God is spoken of as if he were the Scriptures; in the two together, God and the Scriptures are brought into conjunction as to show that in point of directness of authority no distinction was made between them.” (B.B. Warfield). The Logos, for example, refers to the person of Christ in two passages (Jn 1:1-10; Rev 19:13) but to information in many other passages. In studying these passages I was struck by the irony of Lk 5:1, “One day as Jesus was standing by Lake Gennesaret with the people crowding around Him listening to the word of God [logos]. Here we seem to have the person logos and communication logos linguistically linked - a case of revelation both as meeting and knowing.

Jesus Christ lived a sinless and truthful life fully human and fully God without tension or contradiction between the two natures. Scripture, likewise, as fully human and fully divine is errorless and truthful without tension and contradiction in its two natures.

God made impeccable use of both the material form He created from the dust and the cognitive capacity He gave His creature to think and to communicate so that the Logos would be the most complete, intimate, and personal expression of Himself.

Simply, God sovereignly chose the frailty of the human form and the frailty of human words to reveal himself. He shared our flesh and spoke our language. By uniting with both, He perfected both making them what He in the beginning intended them to be - acceptable for our fellowship with and worship of Him. Jesus’ person is divine and His humanity is only an aspect of it, not disassociated from it. Likewise, the Bible as a human book is one aspect of its divine character.

The Holy Spirit was the means whereby both the Living Word of God and the written Word of God came into the world. The overshadowing of Mary seems to echo the Holy Spirit’s “brooding over”the creation of the world which was pronounced to be “very good”. The Holy Spirit’s operation in the Incarnation and inspiration ensured that in God’s self unfolding there would be no corruption by human agency. (While Christ was never corrupted, we can only speak of Scripture as such in its original writings). What was infallible was the encoding of the text, not its decoding. The work of the Holy Spirit whether in creation, in the Incarnation, in regeneration and sanctification, or Biblical inspiration is consistent, coherent, infallible and “very good”.

That is why I think challenges to the virgin birth and inerrancy are such watershed issues because they take straight aim at the Holy Spirit’s work. Ascribing to the activity of man what God alone has done perfectly is the measure of apostasy.

The analogy tells us something about the reality of the union between the divine and the human in other dimensions. We see the same divine-human process evident in the mystical union between Christ and the believer and Christ and His church and in the Holy sacraments.

As discussed in class form criticism says the Biblical record was created by men to fit their needs. The Bible contains words about our moral intuition of God that help deal us with our religious feelings. There’s also the idea that some of the thoughts behind the words, not the words themselves, may be inspired with a certain deep experiential insight. Neoorthodoxy says that the word of God comes to man through subjective, experiential encounters. The Bible then is a fallible record of these encounters and it becomes the Word of God as the reader derives a spiritual experience from a particular passage after wrestling with it.. In other words the Scripture is a witness about revelation and not revelation itself. For Scripture to do anybody any good, one has to wade through it so that God can strike you with His grace in it. Barth put it this way, “When divine revelation meets us and we respond in faith and obedience, the Bible becomes the word of God.” (Integrative Theology).

“Though the Bible brings us inspired revelation from God, it comes to us through finite men who could not comprehend its fullness. Just as light is reflected by the glass through which it passes, so ‘we see through a glass darkly’ and only 'know in part’. Divine revelation is sometimes distorted or at best abstracted by the personalities through which it comes. Though we do have a conceptual truth in Scripture, it is only obscured by the medium through which it shines.” ( Michael J, Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture)

For the neoorthodox and liberals even the reliability of revelation of certain events and encounters with God by an ancient people is always questionable because the experience was transmitted through the instrumentality of sinful men. Karl Barth asserted “It is quite impossible that there should be a direct identity between the human word of Holy Scripture and the word of God in it.” (Integrative Theology). Reacting to the being used as a “paper pope”, Barth maintained that since to err is human, a human book (even, if also a divine book) must contain errors in history, science and theology. (Here I might add that as we discussed in class humans don’t always err. If people can do something flawlessly with their structural abilities, how much more could they be capable of under the active influence of the Holy Spirit).

Therefore, according to this Higher Criticism, the imperfections of the Biblical writers allowed errors, distortion, and exaggerations to creep into their writings. What we have then is a collection of writings based on human observations, impressions, opinions and testimonies of primitive people as a witness to God’s revealing Himself. As discussed in class, the liberals and neo’s tend to redefine Biblical words to suit their own ideas and purposes. This has been a convenient cop out to rationalize or dismiss the many uncomfortable passages in Scripture. Even more importantly it flatly contradicts what the Bible says about itself, including what Jesus said about it.

It is on this point - what Jesus believed and taught about Scripture - that inerrancy is the strongest and its critics have their most difficult, if not impossible, obstacle. Jesus believed and taught the historicity, inerrancy and authority of all Scripture. He began His public ministry quoting Isaiah 61:1-2 and ended it on the cross with five of His last seven statements coming from the Old Testament. Integrative Theology calls what Jesus taught about his teaching to be one of the most important yet ignored matters in contemporary theology. Lewis and Demarest write that Jesus taught the following:

He constantly and unequivocally used Scripture to make His moral, ethical and theological points (even down to use of a single Old Testament word) and identified it with Himself and He with it. “Don’t think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Mat 5:17-19); “Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away” (Mk 13:31); “It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law” (Lk 16:17); “Scripture cannot be broken.” (Jn 10:35).

“Jesus so identified himself with Scripture and so interpreted his ministry in light of Scripture that it is impossible to weaken the authority of one without at the same time weakening the authority of the other.” (Jim Boice, Foundations of Biblical Authority). On this point, I don’t think we have that option; Jesus did not intend it so.

If Jesus taught erroneously, then His claims about Himself would be false and therefore a sin. If He were a sinner, He would not qualify to be our sin bearer. In His human nature, while not omniscient Jesus was nevertheless infallible. Everything He said was true including His statements about Scripture. It seems to me you cannot have Jesus as Lord of your life and deny the Bible. You cannot separate Christ and the Bible. “Jesus regarded himself and his message as inseparable. It is not His teaching which made Jesus so remarkable although these would be enough to give Him distinction. It is a combination of teachings with the man himself. The two cannot be separated.” (Kenneth Scott Latourette, from Evidence Demands a Verdict).

Critics often contend that the Bible is limited because Jesus was limited in what He knew. They say we can trust Him on the spiritual things but not in history, science and the like. As a practical matter, how and where would one draw the line between the spiritual and the historical? Nevertheless that kind of thinking is exactly what Jesus took on in John 3:12 when He said if you won’t believe Him when He talks about earthly matters, how can you believe Him in moral and spiritual matters.

Somehow if critics believe that Scripture, as a human book errs, they ought to by the force of their reasoning, to believe also that Christ, as man, sinned.

Norman Geisler in When Critics Ask makes this point about the analogy of the “Two Words of God”: “While neo-evangelicals say that error in the Bible is due to the introduction of human thought and human language, they must somehow account for the fact that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine yet without sin. In both cases the human and divine are wedded yet the human aspects have no imperfections. This suggests that sin and error are not necessarily consequences of humanity; they are only accidental. God can produce a Person and a Book that are without error.” Hoekema makes the same point, “sin is accidental, not essential to man which makes redemption possible. Human beings can again become sinless without ceasing to be human.”

Similarly to the critics of inerrancy who equate God’s accommodating Himself to human language with necessity of Scriptural errors, Dr. John Gertsner writes: “The Accommodation non sequitur; the Bible’s representing God as accommodating himself to human language has occasioned the logical leap that His Word contains error, because accommodation to human language involves accommodation to human error. Obviously, this is not right. It does not follow that because God accommodates himself to human language he must accommodate himself to human error...it does not follow that since God inspired men, he would be incapable of keeping them free of human error in writing.” (John Gertsner, Foundation of Biblical Authority)

God is simply not frustrated or confused in His stooping to use human language (He in fact invented it, of course) to convey His truth inerrantly. Calvin compared God’s action to that of a mother who uses baby talk in communicating with a child. It is no doubt limited, for the child can not communicate at the mother’s level, but it is nevertheless true communication. It is true and understandable as far as it goes. “The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant woman’s breast, and later an arrested field preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that he should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other.” (C. S. Lewis. in Montgomery’s God’s Inerrant Word) As Jesus adapted Himself to the human level, he did not accommodate error. In prayer to the Father, for instance, he exclaimed, “I gave them the words you gave me...Your word is truth.” (Jn 17:8, 17).

Another objection made is that inerrancy denies or restricts the author’s free will, as if freedom is defined as having the presence of error or sin. How then can the authors, if they were not robots, be free and responsible while writing words that were at once human and divine? The answer is that God can do what no man can; control the activity of persons without infringing upon their freedom.

In their writings Scripture writers had a varying number of options or contingencies from which they could freely choose. The contingencies were real and their choices were real. Yet whatever was chosen to write down was God’s plan. Hoekema talks about man being created in a state of integrity, having “ability not only to make choices, but to make right choices.” This is the same for all of our actions. The contingencies in life are real yet we remain responsible for the choices we make. . Without the Holy Spirit, a person is not free to choose or incline himself to those things that would please God and would be consistent with God’s desire for his life (Ro 8:8). Unless and until he is liberated he is a slave to sin and to error. In the case of the authors of Scripture, the Holy Spirit’s superintendence gave them true freedom to do what was truly pleasing and acceptable to God. It should seem that like the regenerated person who is posse non peccare the writers were set free as well in their being able not to err. “There is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act which inspired the text.” (A. W. Tozer, Divine Conqueror)

“We are to think of the Spirit’s inspiring activity, and for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality as concursive i. e. as exercised in, through and by means of the writer’s own activity and the writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elected and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God’s work.” (J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God)

While divine control excludes free exercise of man’s natural powers, divine accommodation to their free exercise would exclude complete control of what they wrote. All of this assumes God and man cannot be both free agents in the same action i. e. if man is free, God is not free and vice versa. Yet in the freedom of God who works in and through His creatures to lead them to act according to their nature, He guarantees freedom of their action. God’s concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man’s own mind. Finally, there is the matter how rebels against God pen such Holy lines unlike any found in the annals of human history. The great Puritan author Thomas Watson in A Body Divine wrote the following: “I wonder whence the Scriptures should come, if not from God. Bad men could not be the authors of it. Would their minds be employed in inditing such holy lines? Would they declare so fiercely against sin? Men could not be the authors of it. Could they write in such a strain? or could it stand wither their grace to counterfeit God’s name and put “Thus saith the Lord” to a book of their own devising.”

For sure there would no confident way to answer who Jesus really is, or God’s will or anything about ultimate reality. Left without absolutes and only practical success as our measure and guide, there would be no transcendent, objective basis for morals and ethics. Indeed, all things would e permissible.

Yet because Scripture has God as its source and its guarantor, it can not err. It is infallible in that it is wholly trustworthy and reliable. It is inerrant in that it is wholly true. It is both inerrant and infallible because God can not deceive or lie or act in any manner inconsistent with His holy character. Like the Living Word of God to and for which it testifies, the Bible is consistent, coherent and has integrity to be the perfect vessel, without blemish, to transmit God’s transforming life to us.