The Authority of Scripture

The Bible is a collection of various writings that make up the Scriptures of Christianity.  But what does it mean to call the Bible “Scripture”?  At the risk of oversimplification, I will distinguish between five basic Christian positions on this issue:

1. Scripture is an expression of the human religious experience of people in the past which we in some way resonate with today.  (Theological Liberalism)
2. Scripture is a human witness to God’s actions and God’s revelation of Himself in history, but is not itself Divine revelation.
3. Scripture is the authoritative word of God, but because of its human authorship, there may be some theological errors mixed in; we can recognize a part of Scripture as in error if it is not consistent with what the rest of Scripture as a whole says.
4. Scripture is the authoritative word of God, and is therefore infallible in all of its theological teachings.  However, due to its human authorship, it may contain incidental errors with regards to history or science.  (Infallibility)
5. Scripture is the authoritative word of God, and is therefore inerrant in all of its assertions on any topic.  (Inerrancy)

Position 1 falls outside the bounds of genuine Christian orthodoxy, since it substitutes faith in God’s Word, God’s revelation, and God’s mighty acts of salvation for an abstract human religiosity that is really something entirely different from historic Christian faith.  Positions 2 through 5, though, could all fall within the bounds of genuine Christianity.  In this post, I will argue that position 2 is false, and that Christians should accept Scripture as the authoritative word of God, as held by positions 3 through 5.  

Jesus and Scripture

Many Christians seem to think that the first step is to convince someone that the Bible is the word of God; then, they will believe that Jesus is Lord because the Bible says so.  This approach, I would argue, is completely backwards.  It is unlikely that anyone will be convinced that the Bible is the word of God unless they first accept that the Christian Gospel is true.  

The basic message of the Christian Gospel is that Jesus the Messiah is Lord.  Through His life, death, and resurrection, He has brought salvation to the world, and He will one day return from His ascension into Heaven in order to make all things new.  This means that all people everywhere are called to submit to His Lordship, join the community of His disciples, the Church, and thus be saved.

If we accept this Christian Gospel, then we must accept that Jesus, as God Incarnate, has all Authority.  We must accept all of His teachings as true and Authoritative.  So if we want to know what Christians should believe about Scripture, we should begin with what Jesus has to say about Scripture.

If we know anything about the historical Jesus, we can know that Jesus believed the Old Testament Scriptures to be Authoritative.  In His theological teachings and debates, Jesus time and again appealed to and cited the Old Testament Scriptures in order to prove a point.  It is clear that Jesus firmly believed that simply pointing out that in the Scriptures “it is written” was a sufficient argument to establish that something is true (Matt 4:4, 7, 10, 21:13, 22:29-32, 41-45).  Jesus repeatedly taught that the prophecies of Scripture had to be fulfilled (Matt 11:10, 26:24, 31, 54; Mark 9:3, 14:49; Luke 22:37, 24:44; John 13:18, 17:12).  He explicitly stated that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).  All of this makes clear that Jesus accepted the Scripture principle: whatever Scripture teaches, God teaches.  In other words, Scripture is the word of God.

Some have tried to argue that Jesus only seemed to accept the Scripture principle in order to accommodate His conversation to the common Jewish attitudes of the time.  But Jesus was perfectly willing to scandalize His contemporaries by flouting Jewish traditions (Matt 12:1-14, 15:1-20; Luke 13:10-17, 14:1-6) and severely criticizing the religious authorities of His day (Matt 16:1-12, 21:12-13, 28-46, 23:1-36; John 9:39-41).  If He disagreed with the traditional Jewish view of Scripture, He would have said so.  Instead, Jesus declared, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matt 5:17-18).  The Authority Jesus claimed for Himself (Matt 7:28-29; 9:6, 28:18) was an Authority equal to that of the Old Testament Scriptures, not an Authority that contradicted it.

Now, Jesus did not provide an explicit list of exactly which writings He considered to be part of the Old Testament Scriptures.  However, we can say with certainty that He at least accepted the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, and Daniel as Scripture.  We cannot say with 100% certainty that Jesus accepted the rest of the Old Testament as Scripture, but it is the most reasonable assumption to make, since that was the canon of Scripture accepted by the Jewish people around that time.^[1]Whether Jesus accepted as Scripture the writings of the Apocrypha, which form part of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canon, but not the Jewish or Protestant Old Testament canon, is an open … Continue reading  

The Apostles and Scripture

At first, the Church had no New Testament.  Its only Scriptures were the Old Testament Scriptures, and the Church added to them the oral teachings of the apostles about how those Scriptures had been fulfilled in and through Jesus.  The New Testament Scriptures were written over the course of the first century, and then gradually copied, circulated and collected, until the church reached a final consensus about the exact extent of the New Testament canon in the fourth century.  

Unlike with the Old Testament Scriptures, we do not have any explicit statements from Jesus about the authority of the New Testament as Scripture.  This is because, at the time of Jesus’s public ministry, the New Testament had not been written yet.  Even in the New Testament writings themselves, it is rare to find an explicit claim that the New Testament writings are Scripture; the only clear case of this is when 2 Peter refers to Paul’s writings as part of the Scriptures (2 Pet 3:15-16).  Thus, admittedly, the recognition of the New Testament as the Authoritative word of God is not as certain as the recognition of the Old Testament as the Authoritative word of God (It is important to point this out to those modern Christians who would dismiss the Old Testament and affirm the New Testament as their only real Scripture).

However, there is still good reason to accept the New Testament as Scripture.  We may not have any recorded statements of Jesus about the New Testament, but we do know that He appointed His twelve apostles as authorities over His Church.  An “apostle” is a messenger or envoy of God who authoritatively speaks God’s word.  Jesus added to His twelve apostles the apostle Paul, to whom He directly appeared after His resurrection.  In his epistles, the apostle Paul frequently mentions His status as an apostle, and appeals to his apostolic authority in addressing disputes within the church (1 Cor 4, 9:1-18; 2 Cor 10-13:10; Gal 1:11-2:8; 1 Thess 2:6-13; 1 Tim 2:7).  The teachings of the apostles are the authoritative word of God.  It is these authoritative teachings of Jesus’s apostles that are contained in the New Testament, either directly (e.g., Paul’s epistles), or indirectly by an associate of the apostles (e.g., Luke-Acts).  

Now, someone might object that the apostles could have just made up the idea that Jesus appointed them to teach the word of God with His Authority.  Theoretically, this is possible, but, if we have already accepted the basic message of the Christian Gospel that only reaches us through the teachings of the apostles, it seems much more reasonable to accept the teachings of the apostles as a whole, including their claims to apostolic authority.  The Gospels are very honest about the failings and weaknesses of Jesus’s disciples during His public ministry (e.g., Mark 14:27-72), and Paul is very honest about the evils of his earlier life as an anti-Christian persecutor of the Church (1 Cor 15:9-10).  The apostles gained nothing for themselves by their positions of leadership in the Church, except for increased hardship and suffering (2 Cor 11).  We have no reason to doubt the honesty of the apostles, and every reason to believe they were telling the truth.  Since the New Testament is a record of the teachings of the apostles, it should be recognized as the authoritative word of God.

Someone might object that we cannot be certain that all of the New Testament is Scripture, since there was disagreement about the exact extent of the New Testament canon in the early church.  However, we do know that the four Gospels and Paul’s epistles were acknowledged as Scripture very early on, and only a few of the other New Testament writings were disputed for any significant length of time.  Since the Church reached a universal consensus about the New Testament canon in the fourth century, the most reasonable thing to do is to accept this canon on the basis of the authority of tradition, especially since the early Christians were much closer to the apostles and had access to many apostolic traditions to guide them in their decisions that we do not have.  We should accept the New Testament along with the Old Testament as the authoritative word of God.  

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