What is the Bible? Your answer to that question reveals one of the most important things about you.
Almost 50 years since the publication of Edward Young’s influential Thy Word Is Truth, the title of which was derived from Christ’s declaration to the Father in John 17 (“Your word is truth”), the time has come for a fresh, contemporary, and comprehensive treatment showcasing the breadth and depth of Reformed reflection on Scripture over the past 500 years. And Thy Word Is Still Truth: Essential Writings on the Doctrine of Scripture from the Reformation to Today (P&R, 2013) is nothing if not comprehensive.
Weighing in at 1,392 pages, this towering tome is an anthology of texts—chapters, excerpts, articles, essays, confessions—demonstrating the robust unity on bibliology that has always marked the Reformation tradition. With 64 chapters and contributions spanning from Martin Luther to John Frame, this heavily commended volume (no fewer than 32 endorsements) is a vital resource on the nature and purpose and beauty of holy Scripture.
I talked with editors Richard Gaffin and Peter Lillback about Thy Word Is Still Truth, why post-conservatives might not read it, Peter Enns and Christian Smith, and more.
The scope of Reformed reflection on Scripture over the past half millennium is massive. How did you choose which material to include and which to omit?
Our book is a compendium of resources from the Reformed tradition, apart from the opening excerpt from Luther and several other items. No doubt many valuable materials on Scripture are present outside the Reformed tradition in others stemming from the Reformation (Lutheran orthodoxy for one). Our focus reflects the institutional identity of Westminster Seminary and its Reformed confessional commitment to the Westminster standards, subordinate to the sole final authority of Scripture.
Our aim has been to include the most important resources from the Reformed tradition in its breadth, with an accent on materials from Old Princeton and Westminster. Even with this aim, not everything that could have been profitably included has been. However else one may judge the book, it is already “massive”! But we hope not to have omitted anything that should’ve been included.
To what extent was the controversy at Westminster involving Peter Enns a backdrop to this project?
That controversy (see “Part Twelve: The Westminster Controversy”) was a factor. We have a concern to make clear where the seminary stands today on the doctrine of Scripture and basic issues of its interpretation. We’re also concerned with the myopia that often occurs in controversy, the result of which is to dismiss, diminish, or forget the theological giants on whose shoulders we stand as we wrestle with the issues before us. It’s critically important to remember that we are asserting with them, in Christ’s words, that “God’s word is truth” (John 17:17). Nevertheless, the controversy is only in the background making up a small part of the contents of the volume.
A friend lamented the fact that post-evangelical or post-conservative Christians won’t likely read this book or engage with its contents. He suggested that the subject of Scripture, particularly on the issue of inerrancy, is one about which conservatives constantly engage their opponents while the reverse seems rarely to occur. Is there merit to this observation? If so, why do you think it’s the case?
This is a fair observation. Some will dismiss the book as passé and the view of Scripture it presents as not worth engaging since they no longer have, if they ever did, an adequate understanding of Scripture as God’s Word. To affirm Scripture as the Word of God in a biblically requisite fashion, based primarily on its explicit self-witness to its divine origin and consequent authority, is to affirm that “God (who is truth itself) [is] the author thereof” (Westminster Confession 1.4). What divine authorship means—to employ the classical distinction—is that God himself is the primary author, while the human writers are secondary authors used by God as his instruments. As primary author, God is ultimately accountable—with nothing less than authorial accountability—for the origin of each of the biblical documents in its entirely, both as to written form as well as content. So, on the issue of infallibility (or inerrancy), if there is error in the Bible, then it is God—not the human authors he utilizes—who is ultimately in error.
Post-evangelicals or post-conservatives characteristically lack any meaningful recognition of the Bible’s divine authorship, if they affirm it all. They represent the contending view, what might be dubbed the “witness model” understanding of Scripture’s origin. According to this view (Barth is a fountainhead figure), the biblical documents are of solely human authorship. They are no more than human witnesses to revelation and so, assessed as such, are in error on many more or less important matters.
How would you respond to the argument, popularized by Christian Smith in The Bible Made Impossible, that the preponderance of interpretive disagreements over various texts renders the evangelical view of Scripture’s clarity and inerrancy practically meaningless?
Briefly, it’s hard to improve on the way the concern of Smith and others is addressed in sections 7 and 9 of Westminster Confession, chapter 1. The confession recognizes difficulties in Scripture: “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all.” At the same time, the confession does two things: it sees the way forward in addressing these difficulties and at the same time puts them in perspective, both of which are notably lacking in Smith’s argumentation. The way to work at resolving difficulties: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.” The balanced and constructive perspective on these difficulties: “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” This is the clarity Scripture claims for itself. And, as the confession makes clear earlier in this chapter, the work of the Holy Spirit is necessary for perceiving this clarity, and he ensures it will be by those whom he wills to perceive it.
Also, it’s hardly gratuitous to observe that Smith appears to be blind to the fact that the “pervasive interpretive pluralism” he’s so exercised about in his mischaracterization of evangelical biblical interpretation as a whole is clearly not absent as one surveys the wide range of past and current Roman Catholic biblical interpretation.
What errors concerning the doctrine of Scripture are most “live” today? What are some errors on the horizon that these historic sources can help us prepare for and answer?
A basic error remains the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible in which, at least for its most self-aware and consistent practitioners, “critical” is understood in terms of the interpreter’s autonomy and obligation to stand above Scripture and judge whether its truth claims are in fact true. Sometimes evangelical roots are left behind for this approach—with its decided rejection of divine authorship—by those who had the impression the Bible was “dropped straight down from heaven” and have eventually been awakened to the undeniable human authorship and historically situated origins of the biblical documents.
A crucial challenge for sound biblical interpretation is to adequately honor the divine authorship of the text in a way that does justice to the human author. The umbrella-like statement that opens Hebrews shows us the way: its nuclear assertion is “God has spoken” and this divine speech has taken place “by the prophets” and “at many times and in various ways.” God’s saving self-revelation is a historical process, a process marked by multiple human authors and different genres. Further, this history, of which Scripture’s own production is a part, has reached its “last days,” its final consummation, “in his Son.” The fruitful task for exposition and preaching that’s true to Scripture is to explore the redemptive-historical unity of the Bible and its macro-coherence in Christ. Thy Word Is Still Truth provides many resources that will be an invaluable aid for that task.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
