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Attacks on the Authority of
Scripture by Apostates
Paul Ferguson
The Bible is God’s infallible
revelation of Himself to mankind. The Scripture makes it very clear that its
every Word is essential. All of our doctrines, standards, convictions, and
our practices are derived from the Scriptures. The doctrine of the
Sufficiency of Scripture enables us to confidently appeal to these Words to
determine all of our theological and doctrinal boundaries. God’s revelation
is authoritative, sufficient, and clear—and ultimately necessary for our
existence (Job 23:12; Prov 29:18; Isa 46:10; Amos 8:11; Matt 5:17–18;
16:1–4; John 10:35; Rom 1; 2 Tim 3:15; Titus 1:2; Heb 6:13). The whole
system of God’s truth is set forth in the Holy Bible as God’s inerrant,
infallible and plenary Word. Even Peter acknowledged the supremacy of
Scripture over his wonderful experiences with Christ in 2 Peter
1:16-18. Commentator Samuel Cox wrote, “Peter knew a sounder basis for
faith than that of signs and wonders. He had seen our Lord Jesus Christ
receive honor and glory from God the Father in the holy mount; he had been
dazzled and carried out of himself by visions and voices from heaven; but,
nevertheless, even when his memory and heart are throbbing with
recollections of that sublime scene, he says, ‘we have something surer still
in the prophetic word.’ … It was not the miracles of Christ by which he came
to know Jesus, but the word of Christ as interpreted by the spirit of
Christ.”
Rationalistic Modernism
Today, many a compromising
church have accommodated themselves to rationalistic modernism to the point
that they no longer hold absolute positions, save perhaps for religious
pluralism and the Golden Rule. However, the advent of relativism especially
in the textual issue is an insidious adversary, for it rejects the real
possibility of absolute truth, even if it promotes infinite forms of
meaning. One apologist once described this pattern as the “treason of the
intellectuals.”
Since the Word of God is our
only effective offensive weapon, it would be wholly inconsistent with the
character of God to send us out into battle with a sword that is not
dependable and uncertain. The Word attests to Christ, and Christ attests to
the Word—in fact Christ was the Word made flesh! All of Scripture was
inspired by the Holy Spirit to set forth God’s unique system of truth and
thus the system of truth is self-attesting. Robert Reymond shows how
absolutely vital the Scriptures are, “We must not forget that the only
reliable source of knowledge that we have of Christ is the Holy Scripture.
If the Scripture is erroneous anywhere, then we have no assurance that it is
inerrantly truthful in what it teaches about him. And if we have no reliable
information about him, then it is precarious indeed to worship the Christ of
Scripture, since we may be entertaining an erroneous representation of
Christ and thus may be committing idolatry. The only way to avoid this
conclusion is to keep the Christ of Scripture and the Scripture itself in
vital union with each other—the former the Giver of the latter—and to affirm
that the latter is true because it was inspired by the former who is Truth
itself (John 14:6).”
Theologian John Murray makes
it clear the desperate state of mankind without the Scriptures,
“Without Scripture we are excluded completely from the
knowledge, faith, and fellowship of him who is the effulgence of the
Father’s glory and the transcript of his being, as destitute of the Word of
life as the disciples would have been if Jesus had not disclosed himself
through his spoken word.… Our dependence upon Scripture is total. Without it
we are bereft of revelatory Word from God, from the counsel of God
‘respecting all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith
and life.’… It is because we have not esteemed and prized the perfection of
Scripture and its finality, that we have resorted to other techniques,
expedients, and methods of dealing with the dilemma that confronts us all if
we are alive to the needs of this hour … let us also know that it is not the
tradition of the past, not a precious heritage, and not the labours of the
fathers, that are to serve this generation and this hour, but the Word of
the living and abiding God deposited for us in Holy Scripture.”
False Worldviews
As a consequence of the
Fall man is estranged from the God of
Scripture, giving rise to the many false worldviews that have arisen
throughout history. Man’s ability to think logically has been impaired
but not erased by the Fall. The consequence of this is that often man’s
reasoning is flawed, and can even be logically valid but from the wrong
premises. Therefore, it is foolish to make Holy Scripture subordinate or
equal to human reasoning.
Throughout the Scriptures, we see perennial
attacks by the devil and rebellious mankind on God’s authority.
The very first textual
critical attack on God’s Words came in
Genesis when we are told a serpent who “was more subtil than any beast of
the field which the LORD God had made” cast doubt by posing the question,
“Yea, hath God said?” Satan’s strategy deals in doubt and cultivates it by
attacking the certainty of God’s Word by changing the truth, which is seen
in his temptation of Eve (Gen 3) and of the Lord Jesus (Matt 4). It should
be also noted that Eve also was a critic by adding to the Words of God. Like
our modern textual critics, Satan and Eve did what they wanted to do with
God’s Words.
The Bible is very clear that
the Devil hates the Word of God. He utilized Rome to burn some copies, but
his main attack was on the text itself. We are told that Satan questioned
it, misquoted it, took it out of context, and attempted to get someone to
doubt God’s promises (Gen 3, Matt 4, and all of Job). The Apostle Paul warns
of those who “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served
the creature more than the Creator” as heading towards apostasy (Rom 1:25).
As a consequence, today most
professing Christians lack a coherent Biblical worldview. Many set up
a buffer zone between the parts of the Bible they accept and the parts they
reject. The reality of objective truth is denied as the
Postmodern Church turn to feelings and experiences in replacement for truth,
and exchange worldviews as quickly as they try on new clothes. It is
increasingly difficult to defend the true faith to a world and a Church that
is unwilling to make any judgment concerning truth. We must, however, assert
the infallibility of Scripture over the fallibility of human science and we
must never allow the latter to drive our interpretation of the Biblical
text. In other words, we are not integrationists who accept such as
synthesis. We cannot don God-denying glasses with the unbeliever and then
try to point God out using them. As Douglas Wilson eloquently put it,
“The Bible meets no standard; the Bible is the standard. Conservative
defenders of the Word too often act like the Bible is an exceptionally
bright student, always acing every test we might devise for it. But the
tests we devise are always skewed, and the very idea of testing here is
deeply problematic. We have the whole classroom turned around. Our propeller
heads in the back row – the scientists – were not enrolled in order to grade
the teacher. And those in the second row – the textual critics – need to
quit passing notes and listen some more. … The Bible is not a grab bag of
infallible truths, thoughtfully provided by God so that we could have an
axiomatic starting point for our subsequently autonomous reasoning. The
Scriptures are authoritative. We are men, with our breath in our
nostrils. We are creatures with little pointy heads. Further, to complicate
matters further, we are sinful creatures. We must be under a complete
authority, full authority, exhaustive authority. The charge will of course
be that we have embraced obscurantism. We are opposed to science, or health,
or worse yet, to good food, wholesome air and bright sunshine. But we should
remain content, whether the slander sticks or not. As creatures, we cannot
function without an ultimate court of appeal. This is true of every man,
believing or unbelieving, and the only choice we have is whether or not that
ultimate court will be the Scriptures. But surely it should be considered
odd when Christians deny that ultimate place to what God has told
us.”
Our Only Defence
The great attack in the last
days is on the existence of God by atheists, and the authority of Scripture
by textual critics. There is a need to build a Biblical defence to these
assaults using the Biblical presuppositional approach through the
“spectacles of Scripture.” Our defence of the faith should have no different
ultimate authority than our method of expounding the faith. The Lordship of
Christ demands we articulate and practice a Christian apologetic, Bibliology,
art, science, and music. In doing so, we need to honour God’s Words above
the words of any man. We trust His promises and wisdom above that of any
man.
- Published in
The True Life
BPC's Weekly, Volume 6 Number 46.
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