Sola Scriptura, Draw the Line

More Wilson, this is still the battle of our day. By what standard? Who says? This is the question you better get right or the battle is over before you start. It's God's Word or your on top of sand.

Refined Seven Fold
Topic: Old Table Talk Articles

In the contemporary debate on the authority of Scripture, the only real concern I have with words like inerrant or infallible is that they are not strong enough. The doctrine of sola Scriptura has two components. The first is that Scripture is the only infallible authority we have. The second is that Scripture is the only ultimate spiritual authority we have. Much of our twentieth century scriptural controversies have swirled around the first issue when our time would have been better spent on the second. If the question of ultimacy (and the resultant authority) is not settled properly, any infallibility we affirm will not help us any.

It is the difference between a student who gets a one hundred percent on the test, and the teacher’s template for correcting those tests. The former happens to be inerrant, the latter (as far as the analogy goes) is inerrant by definition, in principle. 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....

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