Life According to B.B.

The Authority and Inspiration of the Scriptures by Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921)

The following is a portion of a short essay originally published in the Westminster Teacher, September 1889. The electronic edition of this article was scanned and edited by Shane Rosenthal for Reformation Ink. It is in the public domain and may be freely copied and distributed.

"If, then, the apostles were appointed by Christ to act for him and in his name and authority in founding the Church—and this no-one can doubt; and if the apostles gave the Scriptures to the Church in prosecution of this commission—and this admits of as little doubt; the whole question of the authority of the Scriptures is determined. It will be observed that their authority does not rest exactly on apostolic authorship. The point is not that the apostles wrote these books (though most of the New Testament books were written by apostles), but that they imposed them on the Church as authoritative expositions of its divinely appointed faith and practice. Still less does the authority of the Scriptures rest on the authority of the Church. The Church may bear witness to what she received from the apostles as law, but this is not giving authority to that law but humbly recognizing the authority which rightfully belongs to it whether the Church recognizes it or not. The puzzle which some people fall into here is something like mistaking the relative “authority” of the guide-post and the road; the guide-post may point us to the right road but it does not give its rightness to the road. It has not “determined” the road—it is the road that has “determined” the guide-post; and unless the road goes of itself to its destination the guide-post has no power to determine its direction. So the Church does not “determine” the Scriptures, but the Scriptures the Church. Nor does it avail to say in opposition that the Church existed before the Scriptures and therefore cannot depend on them. The point is, whether the Scriptures are a product of the Church, or rather of the authority which founded the Church. The Church certainly did not exist before the authority which Christ gave the apostles to found it, in virtue of which they have imposed the Scriptures on it as law."

To be continued...