Authority and Authorship

Does the Bible simply give to us the assorted collection of insights or the wisdom of a primitive Jewish people? Or do we have here a written document whose author is actually God? Growing up outside of the church, I did assume that the Bible was merely a collection of wisdom, mythology and rules written by men. I was unaware that it claimed to be the very words of God himself. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Knowing that the Bible, unlike all other books, is inspired by God, our Creator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, changes everything and changes how we view the Scriptures.

All week, R.C. Sproul is helping us to see the Bible correctly. He's responding to critics and explaining how it is that we receive the collection of books contained in the Bible. But today, he considers the Bible's claim that all Scripture is inspired by God.

Here's Dr. Sproul. In our first session in our study of the authority of Scripture, we spent some time going over the historical background for the crisis of authority that we face in the church and also in the world today. You recall I made mention of the fact that Luther coined the phrase sola scriptura by the Scriptures alone, which became one of the battle cries of the Protestant Reformation. And as time was running out in that first segment, we were discussing the meaning of the term authority, and I defined the word authority at that time briefly by saying the right to impose obligation. And we looked, for example, at the episode of the encounter Jesus had with the centurion, who knew what it meant to be under authority, to be able to say, go, and people would go and so on. Now, I want us to notice here something of irony in this word authority. We have an expression in our culture that we call the golden rule, and the facetious definition of the golden rule is that the golden rule says whoever owns the gold rules.

I remember Karl Marx made the observation that whoever owns the means of production controls the world, and I understood that long before I ever studied anything of Karl Marx. I understood it as a kid when we were playing ball on the street in the sand lots around Pittsburgh, and we didn't have the opportunity or the privilege to have umpires monitoring and acting as arbiters in our disputes. And there were those occasions when both sides were equally convinced that they were right and the other was wrong. Out I said, it's safe he says.

Out I say, safe he says. We have that kind of a dispute. How do you settle it? Well, the way we settled it was whoever owned the bat and the ball was right, because it's my ball, it's my bat, I'm safe.

You know, if I'm not, the game's over. And that's the way we did it. And we understand that there's a certain authority that goes not only with ownership, but, here's the play on words, with authorship. And so the question of the authority of the Bible is inseparably related to the question ultimately of the authorship of the Bible.

Where did this book come from? Does the Bible simply give to us the assorted collection of insights or the wisdom of a primitive Jewish people? Do all we have here are the opinions like shadows in Plato's cave, of ancient prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and so on? Or do we have here a written document whose author is actually God? Historically, the confession of the church has been precisely that.

And again, the Latin terminology that has been used to confess it historically are words like this, that the Bible is the vox dei, or the verbum dei, the voice of God, or more commonly, the Word of God. Well, is it the Word of men, or is it the Word of God? That's the crux of the whole dispute.

Well, it's the crux. It's not the totality of the whole dispute because we do have people today who say, yes, they believe that the Bible is the Word of God, but it's not altogether true. We'll consider those theories later as it's inconceivable to me that something could be the Word of God and be anything less than the truth, but there are some who claim to conceive of it. In any case, the crux of the issue for most people is what is the source? Whose words are these ultimately?

No one is arguing that I know of that the Bible came to earth on a parachute out of heaven. And on the first page of it says, what follows is this book that I have written with my finger. Please pay attention to observe all of the content therein. Sincerely yours, God. Now, we know that this book was not penned by God as far as being the proximate cause of its compilation or its origin, but when we say that it is the Word of God, we mean something more than that, acknowledging fully that its actual writing was accomplished by human beings. Now, I'd like to look at a couple of places in the Scripture where this issue of authorship becomes crucial. When Paul writes to the church at Rome, the very beginning of that epistle, as was his custom, he identifies himself as the author and then gives certain greetings to his friends who are going to receive the epistle. And Romans 1 begins with these familiar words, Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. Again, it's a very simple greeting where he's identifying himself as the author. But in that single verse, ladies and gentlemen, is a plethora of vital information regarding the authority of Scripture, not to mention the importance of the very concept of apostleship, which we will look at, I hope, if time permits, later on.

But the phrase here that captures my attention for now is the final phrase. Paul says that he's called as an apostle, he's been set apart, he's been consecrated for what? For the gospel of God. The gospel of God.

So what? Well, when we say that the New Testament gives to us the gospel of Jesus Christ, what do we understand that to mean? We mean that the gospel is the good news about the person and work of Jesus. And so when we say the gospel of, what we usually really mean is what? The gospel about. But the grammatical structure of this comment that Paul makes here in Romans does not allow that understanding of of here.

Here, this is the of that is possessive. When it says the gospel of God, the best way to translate that, turn it around, is to say not the gospel about God, but God's gospel. Paul's saying as an apostle, I am set apart to announce God's announcement. So that here the gospel is not the gospel about God, but it belongs to God.

That is, He is the source of the announcement. Recently I was doing a Bible study in Luke and was looking at the first chapter of Luke's gospel where, of course, Luke rehearses the episodes relating to the enunciation of the angel Gabriel to Zacharias, while Zacharias was ministering in the temple and Gabriel comes to him and says that he and his aged wife Elizabeth are going to have a child, and the child is going to be the herald of the Messiah. It's going to be John the Baptist and all of that. And when Gabriel makes this announcement to Zacharias, Zacharias is flabbergasted. He's thunderstruck. Not only is he terrified by the presence of the angel, but he stands there in stark unbelief at the credibility of this message. I'm going to have a son.

My wife is too old to have children. She's barren and so on. And he protests to Gabriel by saying to Gabriel, but I am an old man. You know what Gabriel says back? He says, and I am Gabriel. I come from the immediate presence of God.

What's the significance? Gabriel says, I am an angel, a messenger from God. Don't tell me you're too old. If you think that your age means that my announcement, my report, my message can't possibly be true because you're old and fragile and frail and your wife's beyond the age of childbearing. Zacharias, consider the source of this message. I'm Gabriel. I come from the presence of God. Don't you see what he's saying to Zacharias?

The message I give you has the highest possible authority. Zacharias says, oh, and that's about all he said for nine months as you remember the story. Well, when we consider the question of biblical authority, some people say, why do we get so exercised about it? Isn't this whole debate about Scripture just a tempest in a teapot? Even my own beloved professor in graduate school in the Netherlands couldn't understand the mentality of American Christians who fought so much about the question of the infallibility or inspiration or inerrancy of the Bible. He couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, and I remember having a discussion with him in his home about this on one occasion, and basically his perception was that the American mentality when debating the question of the authority of the Bible is sort of a game of cops and robbers, the good guys and the bad guys, and he thought, he said, this problem with people getting all worried about whether or not the Bible's true is an unhealthy kind of Greek Aristotelian pursuit or desire for certainty, which takes away from faith.

So basically the attitude, what difference does it make whether it's impeccable in all that it teaches? It's a matter of faith. We don't have to have absolute certainty. Well, you know, as much as I disagree with my beloved professor on his view on that question, I have to admit to this much that there should be no reason why we have to have an infallible historical source for reasonable knowledge about Jesus of Nazareth. I can conceive theoretically that God could have worked out the drama of the person and life of Jesus to the cross, the resurrection, everything, and have a bunch of fallible people writing their accounts of it and making minor errors and discrepancies and contradictions here and there and testing our faith at that point to see whether or not this is credible. We don't demand infallibility from Herodotus or Tacitus or Thucydides or Xenophon or Josephus, and they deliver far less than infallibility.

We know that. We don't expect infallibility from Plato or Aristotle or Immanuel Kant. Nevertheless, we give them great credence when the weightiness of the things that they teach convince and persuade us. So why couldn't that be the same with Scripture? Why do we have to be paranoid about making sure there aren't any mistakes and so on in the Bible?

And I can understand that He's saying, except for one cardinal point, and that is the claims that Scripture makes for itself. Now, somebody walked up to me and said, look, I'm not exactly sure what I saw last week. In fact, I have to doubt my own eyes because I've never had an experience like this before, but for what it's worth, my testimony that I would give in a courtroom to the best of my recollection is that this gentleman that I witnessed be killed. I saw him put a spear in his side. I saw him take the body down. I saw them wrap the body for his burial, and I saw them seal the body in a tomb. And I know you're going to think I've lost my senses, but the other day I heard some people saying that he came out of that tomb after three days and was seen by 500 people, and yes, last night I saw him.

That's all we had. I would still want to hear more. This man could be credible, could be a believable source, even though his message certainly strains all credibility because he would be talking about the miracle of miracles, wouldn't he?

Somebody actually coming back from the dead. But now suppose, on the other hand, that man came over and he said, now I'm going to write this account, and I'm writing to you saying that this is the Word of God. And then I saw that that witness who bore witness to the most important event in human history made mistakes. Insignificant mistakes, minor errors of history, of truth. What would happen to our confidence in his claim to be speaking with the authority of God? You see, I do expect human beings to make mistakes. I don't expect God to make mistakes. And if the Bible claims to be the Word of God and is not the Word of God, it could still be generally true, but this claim at least would be exposed as being a fraud.

And I'll have to tell you, I'm from Missouri. I would not devote my life to worshiping and serving a man about whom all that I know comes from a source that is proven to be fraudulent. I'd have to crucify my mind to give my life to a Jesus. And the only thing I know about Jesus is rooted and grounded in this biblical record, and if the biblical authors who tell me the story about Jesus claim to be giving the Word of God and it's not the Word of God, then I'm just simply not going to listen to it.

It's that simple. Now, let's be clear about something. In my judgment, just because a book claims to be the Word of God does not make the book the Word of God. I could write a book and say, this is the Word of God. You would know instantly that it wasn't the Word of God, because you know me. I hope anybody would recognize instantly that it wasn't the Word of God.

But how much would it cost me? How hard is it to say, this is the Word of God? Anybody could say that. Saying it is not making it so. But you see what becomes the stakes when somebody does make the claim, and the Bible makes that kind of a claim.

And that's what I want us to see here briefly this evening. Let's look, of course, to the most well-known text, that in 2 Timothy, where Paul is writing to his beloved son in the faith, and presumably this is at the very end of Paul's life, and he's charging Timothy with the sacred responsibilities to carry on and so on. And he says to him in the third chapter of 2 Timothy, in verse 13, he says, Evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. It's interesting to me that in the New Testament to deceive people, to be deceitful, is described here as being characteristic of evil personalities. I know the word evil is an archaism in our vocabulary today. We don't go around and say that guy's evil, that person's evil, that woman's evil. We may say that they're corrupt or something like that, but evil.

The New Testament doesn't shrink from it. They say these people are evil people because they deceive. Now, what is a deception? A deception, beloved, is a distortion of truth. The one thing that mystifies me every day of my life as a theologian is how lightly the Christian world esteems truth. But the New Testament puts a premium on truthfulness, and now as Paul is passing on the baton, as it were, to Timothy, they say, Be careful, evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

You, however, continue in the things that you have learned and have become convinced of knowing from whom you have learned them. When I was a child, and sometimes I would be the victim of an insensitive insult, you know, you go through those painful years of adolescence, and first thing, you know, when your adult teeth come in, they come in crooked. Kids start calling me Bucky Beaver. Hey, buck teeth, boy, that used to just wound me. And I can remember coming home and crying. My mother said, Why are you crying?

I said, Because so-and-so called me Bucky Beaver. And my mother's panacea for all insults when I was a child was this phrase that she repeated endlessly. Son, she said, Consider the source. I didn't even know what those words meant, you know, consider the source. What does she mean, consider the source? In other words, she said, Before you get hurt by what somebody says, consider who it is that is saying it.

I've done that all my life. I have to listen to criticism from people, and there are certain people who when they criticize me, my ears jump off my head. I want to make sure I hear every single word of the criticism. I put so much value in their judgment. There are other people who can criticize me until the cows come home, and it will go in one ear and out the other because they don't have credibility with me.

We're all like that. We consider the source. And Paul says, Timothy, I want you to stay in those things that you have learned and have become convinced of and remember where you learned it, from whom you've learned it. Now, maybe Paul's simply referring to the source of his grandmother, but I think it's more than that. He says that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Jesus Christ. And then comes the classic statement, 2 Timothy 3.16, all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness that the man of God may be adequate and equipped for every good work. All Scripture, all of the grafe, which in this context can only refer to one body of literature, it literally means all of the writings, but it's a technical term at this period that can only refer to the sacred writings. And, of course, the primary focus of what Paul is speaking about here is the Old Testament, though the term grafe doesn't necessarily exclude the writings that are now being produced as New Testament. As elsewhere, one apostle speaks of the other apostle's writing and concludes it under the rubric of grafe. Just like the rest of the Scripture, just like the rest of the writings.

So even the apostles recognized each other's writings as belonging to that category of grafe of sacred Scripture. Now, the point that Paul makes here is this, that all of the grafe is theopneust in the Greek. It says here, that's the translate, inspired by God. I'll have to be honest with you ladies, but I don't like that translation.

Never have. The late Benjamin Warfield wrote a magnificent essay on this word theopneust and pointed out that the literal meaning of this Greek word is God breathed. One last point, 2 Peter chapter 1.

No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. It is the origin of Scripture in God and in His care, in which is grounded the authority of Scripture. When we consider the weight of the reality that Scripture is God breathed, it should challenge us and motivate us to make sure we're actually picking it up and reading it regularly.

That was R.C. Sproul from his series, Hath God Said, and you're listening to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. As you think about and plan upcoming Bible studies in small groups, perhaps this week's series, Hath God Said, would be of help because the authority of the Bible is always under attack and being undermined in some way. You can request the complete series at renewingyourmind.org with your gift of any amount. You'll receive a digital copy of the study guide as well to help you whether you use it in a small group or for your own personal study. So request your copy today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343 and we'll send you the two DVD set and give you digital access to all of the messages and the study guide. The Bible is God-breathed, but how did we get these 66 books? That's what R.C. Sproul will unpack tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .