Inspiration

The Preservation of Scripture

By SharperIron Wed, 04/01/2009 - 12:00am

Note: This article is reprinted from The Faith Pulpit (August 1999), a publication of Faith Baptist Theological Seminary (Ankeny, IA).

The Message of 2 Timothy 3:16-17

686044__it_is_finished_.jpg“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16). Another way of saying this would be, “all Scripture is God-breathed,” or “all Scripture comes from the mouth of God.” This means God is directly responsible for causing the Bible writers to put down everything that He wanted written without error and without omission. But what of the Bible I hold in my hand? Is it God’s Word? Can it be trusted? The answer is yes! Both truths—the inspiration and inerrancy of the original manuscripts and the trustworthiness of the Bible in my hand—must be acknowledged. To affirm the inspiration and inerrancy of the original writings while casting doubt on the authority of the Bible that is available to us is just plain silly. Can you really imagine someone seriously saying, “I have good news and I have bad news: the good news is that God wanted to give us a message and therefore caused a book to be written; the bad news is that He didn’t possess the power to preserve it and therefore we don’t know what it said!” A view of inspiration without a corresponding view of preservation is of no value.
read more

  • 1305 reads

Directions in Evangelicalism, Part 2

By Kevin T. Bauder Tue, 12/16/2008 - 1:00am

In The Nick of TimeRead Part 1.

Biblical Criticism

In the middle of the 1970s, a book by the editor of Christianity Today announced that the evangelical world was in the middle of The Battle for the Bible. Harold Lindsell made public what most observers already knew, namely, that some professing evangelicals were denying the inerrancy of Scripture. He was particularly concerned because he thought that a denial of inerrancy would necessarily lead to a rejection of other important doctrines. Scholars such as Jack Rodgers and Donald McKim, however, insisted that a strong view of biblical authority could be maintained even if the Bible contained a few errors of fact.

For more than thirty years, evangelicals have been debating whether a person who denies inerrancy should be recognized as an evangelical. In the meanwhile, the dominance of the New Hermeneutic has almost made discussions of inerrancy obsolete. The reason is rather simple: if meaning is person-relative, then truth is person-relative. If truth is person-relative, then error is person-relative. If error is person-relative, then discussions about inerrancy simply do not make sense.
read more

  • 990 reads