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.

"Apostolicity thus determines the authority of Scripture; and any book or body of books which were given to the Church by the apostles as law must always remain of divine authority in the Church. That the apostles thus gave the Church the whole Old Testament, which they had themselves received from their fathers as God’s word written, admits of no doubt, and is not doubted. That they gradually added to this body of old law an additional body of new law is equally patent. In part this is determined directly by their own extant testimony. Thus Peter places Paul’s Epistles beside the Scriptures of the Old Testament as equally with them law to Christians (2 Pet 3:16); and thus Paul places Luke’s Gospel alongside of Deuteronomy (1 Tim 5:18). Thus, too, all write with authority (1 Cor 14:37; 2 Cor 10:8; 2 Thess 2:15; 3:6-14)—with an authority which is above that of angels (Gal 1:7, 8), and the immediate recognition of which is the test of the possession of the Holy Ghost (1 Cor 14:37; 2 Thess 3:6-14). In part it is left to be determined indirectly from the testimony of the early Church; it being no far cry from the undoubting universal acceptance of a book as authoritative by the Church of the apostolic age, to the apostolic gift of it as authoritative to that Church. But by one way or another it is easily shown that all the books which now constitute our Bible, and which Christians, from that day to this, have loyally treated as their divinely prescribed book of law, no more and no fewer, were thus imposed on the Church as its divinely authoritative rule of faith and practice."

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