While rereading Gordon Clark’s God’s Hammer, I was impressed with the forward written by one of the Bible’s great recent champions, Harold Lindsell. Lindsell writes,
At the heart of the Christological discussion lies the question: From whence do we get our knowledge about the person and work of Jesus Christ? The answer is simple enough. The only Jesus the Church has known or can know is the Jesus of Scripture. Thus if Scripture tells us what we need to know about the second person of the Trinity, we are still left with another question: Is the source (i.e. the Bible and its sixty-six books) from which we get out knowledge about Jesus a reliable book? This opens the door to three possibilities:
1. The Bible is free from all error in the whole and in the part.
2. The Bible is free from error in some of its parts, but it is false in other parts.
3. The Bible is totally unreliable and cannot be depended on for any truth.
Whoever chooses any one of these propositions depends on some basic presupposition from which the inquirer starts. In our modern world there are basically two ways men write theology, and each involves a presupposition which ends up in quite different ways.
In all probability a majority of the scholars in the West today would choose option 2. Marxists and many people who adhere to the Unitarian Universalist denomination would more likely choose option 3.
But whoever writes theology properly starts with the presupposition that the Bible is a divine book. They do not deny that there were human authors who were involved in the inscripturation of the Word of God. The writers of Holy Writ were divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit so that they were kept from writing anything that was false. The divine authorship by the Holy Spirit guaranteed that the final product would be the errorless Word of God even as the historical Jesus was the sinless Son of God who was conceived by the same Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Since God cannot lie, no part of Scripture is false. The omnipotent God of Scripture has not stuttered in his speech.
There is no more important doctrine that the doctrine of Scripture. Get it right, your understanding of other doctrines will tend to be sound. Get it wrong, and you’re hopelessly lost in a sea of subjectivity. Those who claim Christ while attacking his Word are like the double minded men of James. Unstable in all their ways, they will receive nothing from the Lord.
Lux Lucet 