Authority of the Bible

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

— 2 Timothy 3:16 (ESV)

The authority of the Bible is the doctrine that Scripture, as God’s own word, is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule for what Christians are to know, believe, and do.¹ Scripture’s authority does not depend on the testimony of any church or person but rests wholly on God, its author.² Authority is distinct from the related questions of inspiration, how Scripture came to be, and inerrancy, whether it errs: it concerns the claim Scripture makes on believers once its divine origin is granted.

Confessional Definition

The 2nd London Baptist Confession opens by stating that “the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith and Obedience,” adding that natural revelation, though it displays God’s “goodness, wisdom and power… to leave men unexcusable,” is “not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and His will, which is necessary unto Salvation.”¹ Scripture’s authority “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth it self) the Author thereof; therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”²

The confession distinguishes the grounds that commend Scripture to belief from the ground of full assurance of it. Church testimony, “the Majesty of the stile,” the harmony of its parts, and “the full discovery it makes of the only way of mans salvation” are “arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence it self to be the Word of God,” but the believer’s “full perswasion, and assurance of the infallible truth” of Scripture comes only “from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our Hearts.”³ Evidences persuade; only the Spirit’s internal testimony grounds full certainty.

This authority attaches to a defined body of writing. The confession lists the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as “given by the inspiration of God, to be the rule of Faith and Life,”⁴ and excludes the Apocrypha by name as uninspired, “no part of the Canon (or rule) of the Scripture,” carrying “no authority to the Church of God” and to be treated as “other humane writings.”⁵ Because Scripture alone is invested with this authority, “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture it self”: an obscure passage is to be searched out “by other places that speak more clearly,” not settled by an outside interpretive authority.⁶

Two implications follow. First, sufficiency: “the whole Councel of God concerning all things necessary for his own Glory, Mans Salvation, Faith and Life, is either expressely set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new Revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”⁷ Second, finality: Scripture, not “Decrees of Councels,” “opinions of antient Writers,” or “Doctrines of men,” is “the supream judge by which all controversies of Religion are to be determined,” the authority “in whose sentence we are to rest” and “into which… our faith is finally resolved.”⁸

Biblical Basis

Paul tells Timothy that “all Scripture is breathed out by God (θεόπνευστος) and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The word rendered “breathed out by God” is passive, not active: Scripture is the product of God’s breath, not merely a writing that happens to be “inspiring.”⁹ Peter makes the same point from the human side of the process: “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20-21).

Christ himself treats Scripture as unable to fail: “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). The prophets make the same claim for God’s word as the final court of appeal for his people: “To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn” (Isa. 8:20). Paul commends the Thessalonians for receiving his preaching “not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God” (1 Thess. 2:13), locating Scripture’s authority in its divine source rather than in the human messenger who delivers it.

Historical Development

The Reformation reversal

Medieval Catholic theology held that the church conferred authority on Scripture: “it was the Church… that conferred authority on Scripture because it was the Church that birthed Scripture and determined its canon,” making the church, not Scripture, “the foundation for faith.”¹⁰ The Reformers reversed this relationship, holding that Scripture is authoritative because God is its author and because it is, in itself, self-attesting rather than church-conferred.¹⁰ Herman Bavinck traces this claim to Calvin’s own vocabulary: “Scripture’s authority… arises from its own content; it is not granted by the church’s decision. This is what the Reformation teachers such as Calvin meant when they spoke of Scripture, through the work of the Holy Spirit, as self-authenticating (αὐτόπιστος).”¹¹ This testimony, Bavinck adds, “is not a private inner illumination but the experience of all Christians,” and, against the rationalism of the Socinians and Remonstrants, not merely “an illumination of the intellect.”¹¹

The Enlightenment challenge

Scripture’s authority came under sustained scrutiny with the rise of modern biblical criticism. Deists such as Anthony Collins and Voltaire, and German critics including J. S. Semler and J. G. Eichhorn, raised questions about the text’s historical veracity that “led to attacks on the inspiration and authority of the Bible.”¹²

Princeton’s articulation

Responding to this scrutiny, the Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield grounded Scripture’s authority in its divine origin: “the Scriptures owe their origin to an activity of God the Holy Ghost and are in the highest and truest sense His creation. It is on this foundation of Divine origin that all the high attributes of Scripture are built.”¹³

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism

Roman Catholic theology locates Scripture’s authority within a “trifold authority structure” of “Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium (the church’s teaching authority),” with the Magisterium alone holding “the right to interpret Scripture and tradition” and “the sole authority to define what writings constitute Scripture and tradition in the first place.”¹⁴ Michael Kruger quotes H. J. Adriaanse’s summary of this position: “Catholic Theology… has solved the canon problem with a plea to the authority of the Church.”¹⁴ Karl Rahner: “[Scripture] exists because the church exists.”¹⁴

Neo-orthodoxy

For Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Rudolf Bultmann, a text does not possess the status of God’s word as a fixed property; it “becomes” the word of God during an existential encounter with the reader. Barth states: “Discovery of the canon… is to be understood only as an event.”¹⁵ Avery Dulles summarizes the implication for Barth’s own view of the canon: “the canon was charismatically determined. In certain books the church heard God speaking; in others it did not.”¹⁵

Objections and Responses

Grounding Scripture’s authority in Scripture’s own claim to divine origin is circular reasoning. Michael Kruger grants that appealing to an ultimate authority to authenticate itself will “sound a bit circular to some,” but argues the circularity is unavoidable for any genuinely ultimate authority: “If we try to validate an ultimate authority by appealing to some other authority, then we have just shown that it is not really the ultimate authority.”¹⁶ He argues further that Rome’s own model fares no better on this point: “If the Scriptures cannot be known and authenticated without the authority of the church, then you cannot establish the authority of the church on the basis of the Scriptures. You cannot have it both ways.”¹⁷ Having “chided the Reformers for having a self-authenticating authority (sola scriptura),” Rome’s Magisterium “has engaged in that very same activity by setting itself up as a self-authenticating authority (sola ecclesia).”¹⁷ Kruger cites Avery Dulles quoting Georges Lienhard’s own discomfort with Rahner’s version of the Catholic view: “For Rahner, the Church produces the Bible; it is difficult to see how the Church is not primary, the Scriptures secondary.”¹⁷

Appealing to “the inward work of the Holy Spirit” for full assurance of Scripture’s truth is indistinguishable from a bare subjective feeling. Kruger answers that the Spirit’s testimony is not itself the ground of belief but the assurance that rides on Scripture’s own objective, self-evidencing qualities, quoting Bavinck’s own image for the relationship: “Scripture and the testimony of the Holy Spirit relate to each other as objective truth and subjective assurance… as the light and the human eye.”¹⁸ On this account a believer need not be able to introspectively isolate the Spirit’s witness from every other experience for the Spirit to, in fact, be at work: the belief is warranted by Scripture’s own qualities, not by the believer’s success at identifying a distinct inner sensation.¹⁹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 5, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 3, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 9, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 10, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩
John Thomas English III, “The Evangelical Doctrine of the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 11-12. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 6, “Faith.” ↩ ↩²
English, 12. ↩
Benjamin B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: P&R, 1980), 280, quoted in English, 16. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩²
Kruger, chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩
Kruger, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, quoted in Kruger, chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩
Kruger, chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩