Warfield on Scripture

I’ve just finished reading the 456 pages of B. B. Warfield’s Revelation and Inspiration (the first volume of the OUP edition of his works), with a view to writing up his doctrine of Scripture.

My 23 pages of scrappy notes (mainly quotations) are available here and below are a few highlights.

Warfield’s scholarship is obvious immense and his defence of The Church Doctrine of the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture is compelling and stirring stuff. Its not always concise but its often eloquent. Still worth a look, I reckon.

I guess the next task is to move onto whatever secondary literature I can find about Warfield’s doctrine of Scripture.

As I mentioned before, I’ve got some questions about what Warfield says about the prophetic mode of inspiration and how the prophets received the Words of God entirely from outside themselves and were not involved in its composition.

I think Professor Tony Lane has suggested that Warfield under-estimates the humanity of Scripture, so that’ll need following up.

And I might need to get into the evidentialist / presuppositionalist debate about apologetics: is Warfield’s defence of the trustworthiness of the Bible and inerrancy too rationalistic and should it all be rather more Van Tilian? Van Til wrote the introduction to Warfield’s The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (which virtually reproduces the OUP Revelation and Inspiration) so I’m looking forward to that.

Here are some of the best or most striking bits:

Particularly magnificent is the first part of ‘The Inspiration of the Bible’ (p51ff).

“… over against the numberless discordant theories of inspiration that vex our time, there stands a well-defined church-doctrine of inspiration.” (p52) - the universal conviction of the church since the beginning as to “the divinity of the Scriptures”.

“What this church-doctrine is, it is scarcely necessary minutely to describe. It will suffice to remind ourselves that it looks upon the Bible as an oracular book, - as the Word of God in such a sense that whatever it says God says, - not a book, then, in which one may, by searching, find some word of God, but a book which may be frankly appealed to at any point with the assurance that whatever it may be found to say, that is the Word of God.” (p52)

“We know how, as Christian men, we approach this Holy Book, - how unquestioningly we receive its statements of fact, bow before its enunciations of duty, tremble before its threatenings, and rest upon its promises.” (p53) – It is our support in trial, our trust, guide, comfort and strength.

“… this attitude of entire trust in every word of the Scriptures has been characteristic of the people of God from the very foundation of the church.” (p53)

* * *

“Scripture is conceived, from the point of view of the writers of the New Testament, not merely as the record of revelations, but as itself a part of the redemptive revelation of God; not merely as the record of the redemptive acts by which God is saving the world, but as itself one of these redemptive acts, having its own part to play in the great work of establishing and building the kingdom of God.” (p107)

* * *

“The Church, then, has held from the beginning that the Bible is the Word of God in such a sense that its words, though written by men and bearing indelibly impressed upon them the marks of their human origin, were written, nevertheless, under such an influence of the Holy Ghost as to be also the words of God, the adequate expression of His mind and will. It has always been recognized that this conception of co-authorship implies that the Spirit’s superintendence extends to the choice of the words of the human authors (verbal inspiration), and preserves its product from everything inconsistent with a divine authorship – thus securing, among other things, that entire truthfulness which is everywhere presupposed in and asserted for Scripture by the Biblical writers (inerrancy). Whatever minor variations may now and again have entered into the mode of statement, this has always been the core of the Church doctrine of inspiration. And along with many other modes of commending and defending it, the primary ground on which it has been held by the Church as the true doctrine is that it is the doctrine of the Biblical writers themselves, and has therefore the whole mass of evidence for it which goes to show that the Biblical writers are trustworthy as doctrinal guides. It is the testimony of the Bible itself to its own origin (p173) and character as the Oracles of the Most High, that has led the Church to her acceptance of it as such, and her dependence on it not only for her doctrinal teaching, which is looked upon by her as divine because drawn from this divinely given fountain of truth.” (p174)

* * *

The fallacy of “Christ versus the Apostles”:

“… we have no Christ except the one whom the apostles have given us.” (p187)

“… the cry, “Back to Christ!” away from the teaching of His apostles, whose teaching He Himself represents as His own, only delivered by His Spirit through their mouths, is an invitation to desert Christ Himself. It is an invitation to draw back from the Christ of the Bible to some Christ of our own fancy, from the only real to some imaginary Christ.” (p189)

* * *

“The weight of the testimony to the Biblical doctrine of inspiration, in a word, is no less that the weight to be attached to the testimony of God – God the Son and God the Spirit.” (p213)

* * *

“… the Spirit who is in all spheres the executive of the Godhead.” (p280)

* * *

“It would be difficult to invent methods of showing profound reverence for the text of Scripture as the very Word of God, which will not be found to be characteristic of the writers of the New Testament in dealing with the Old. Among the rich variety of the indications of their estimate of the written words of the Old Testament as direct utterances of Jehovah, there are in particular two classes of passages, each of which, when taken separately, throws into the clearest light their habitual appeal to the Old Testament text as God himself speaking, while, together, they make an irresistible impression of the absolute identification by their writers of the Scriptures in their hands with the living voice of God. In one of these classes of passages the Scriptures are spoken of as if they were God; in the other, God is spoken of as if He were the Scriptures: in the two together, God and the Scriptures are brought into such conjunction as to show that in point of directness of authority no distinction was made between them.” (p283)

“… a habitual identification, in the mind of the writer, of the text of Scripture with God as speaking…” (p284)

“The two sets of passages, together, thus show an absolute identification, in the minds of these writers, of “Scripture” with the speaking God.” (p284)

“… living words still speaking to us… the ever-living Scripture” (p300)

“… Scripture an oracular book, and all that it says, God says to him” (p330)

* * *

“It is by no means to be imagined that it is meant to proclaim a mechanical theory of inspiration. The Reformed Churches have never held such a theory: though dishonest, careless, ignorant or even over-eager controverters of its doctrine have often brought the charge…. explicit in teaching that the human element is never absent. The Reformed Churches (p397) hold, indeed, that every word of the Scripture, without exception, is the word of God; but, alongside of that, they hold equally that every word is the word of man…. the marks of fervid impetuosity of a Paul – the tender saintliness of a John – the practical genius of a James…. Though strong and uncompromising in resisting all effort to separate the human and divine, they distance all competitors in giving honor alike to both by proclaiming in one breath that all is divine and all is human.” (p398)