"Fundamentalism" and the Word of God

J. I. Packer

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1958
• ISBN:
  9781467421249
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

This modern classic by the author of Knowing God provides a comprehensive statement of the doctrine of Scripture from an evangelical perspective. J. I. Packer explores the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" and offers a clear and well-reasoned argument for the authority of the Bible and its proper role in the Christian life.

CHAPTER IV

SCRIPTURE

I want to know one thing, the way to heaven.… God himself has condescended to teach the way.… He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book: At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be Homo unius libri.… I sit down alone: only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His book; for this end, to find the way to heaven.… Does any thing appear dark and intricate? I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights.… I then search after and consider parallel passages.… I meditate thereon.… If any doubt still remain, I consult those who are experienced in the things of God: and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach.

JOHN WESLEY

And now, O Lord God, thou art God, and thy words are true.

2 SAMUEL vii. 28, RSV

THE evangelical view of the Bible has come under fire in this controversy, and it is desirable, as the next step in our argument, to re-state it. We have just established the principle that Scripture, ‘God’s Word written’, is the final authority for all matters of Christian faith and practice; and we must follow the method which this principle dictates. Accordingly, we shall ask Scripture to give account of itself, and test human ideas about it by its own teaching. ‘Scripture’ is a biblical concept; and it is the biblical doctrine of Scripture which Evangelicals are concerned to believe. We shall now try to see what that doctrine is; and our study will show us, incidentally, what reply Evangelicals should make to those who upbraid them for holding theories of dictation, or inerrancy, or literalism.

We must first be clear as to the nature of our task. Our aim is to formulate a biblical doctrine; we are to appeal to Scripture for information about itself, just as we should appeal to it for information on any other doctrinal topic. That means that our formulation will certainly not give a final or exhaustive account of its subject. All doctrines terminate in mystery; for they deal with the works of God, which man in this world cannot fully comprehend, nor has God been pleased fully to explain. ‘We know in part’¹—and only in part. Consequently, however successful our attempt to state the biblical doctrine of Scripture may be, it will not put us in a position where we ‘have all the answers’, any more than a right statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, or providence, would do. We do not, in fact, expect to give all the answers, and a mere complaint that we leave some problems unsolved will not, of itself, be valid criticism of what we say, any more than it ever would be of any theological exposition; for incompleteness is of the essence of theological knowledge. This, of course, is to a greater or less degree the case with all our knowledge of facts. We never know everything about anything. But clearly, when we creatures come to study the Creator and His ways, we must expect our knowledge to be more fragmentary and partial, and further from being exhaustive, than when we study created things. We make no apology, therefore, for leaving some questions unanswered. All that we are trying to do here is simply to find and demarcate the Bible’s own attitude and approach to itself, and to present the relevant biblical material from a properly biblical perspective, so that the scriptural way of regarding and employing Scripture may become clear. The sole test of the adequacy of our account will be this: are we putting matters as the Bible itself puts them? Scripture itself is alone competent to judge our doctrine of Scripture.

The relevant evidence for our purpose is the New Testament doctrine of the Old. Since the two Testaments are of a piece, what is true of one will be true of both. The biblical concept of ‘Scripture’ will cover all that falls into the category of Scripture.

Space does not permit a full-length treatment, but we shall try to sketch out at least the main points in the Bible’s view of the following three topics: its divine origin; its nature as the word of God; and its interpretation.

I. THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF SCRIPTURE¹

It is customary to use the term inspiration to refer to the divine origin of Scripture. The biblical warrant for this is the phrase ‘given by inspiration of God’ which is used in the Authorized Version to render the adjective theopneustos in 2 Tim. iii. 16. As B. B. Warfield showed, this Greek word actually means ‘breathed out by God’—not so much in-spired as ex-spired; so that the text explicitly teaches the divine origin of ‘all Scripture’—here, the written word of the Old Testament.² As we have seen already, the divine origin of the Old Testament is everywhere assumed in the New Testament.

When we use the phrase ‘inspiration of Scripture’, the noun may be taken either passively, as meaning ‘inspiredness’, or actively, as denoting the divine activity by which God-breathed Scripture was produced. In this sense, inspiration is to be defined as a supernatural, providential influence of God’s Holy Spirit upon the human authors which caused them to write what He wished to be written for the communication of revealed truth to others. It was a divine activity which, whether or not it had any unusual psychological effects (sometimes it did, sometimes it did not), effectively secured the written transmission of saving truth; in this respect, it is something quite distinct from the ‘inspiration’ of the creative artist, which secures no such result, and it is more confusing than helpful to try to relate the two things together. It is true that some of those who were ‘inspired’ in the theological sense were also ‘inspired’ literary artists in the secular sense—Isaiah or John, for instance; but this comparison obscures the point of the idea of inspiration put forward in 2 Tim. iii. 16, which is simply of a divine activity that produced Scripture—one, in other words, which involved human writers as a means to an end, but which actually terminated, not on them, but on what they wrote.

Inspiration did not necessarily involve an abnormal state of mind on the writer’s part, such as a trance, or vision, or hearing a voice. Nor did it involve any obliterating or overriding of his personality. Scripture indicates that God in His providence was from the first preparing the human vehicles of inspiration for their predestined task,¹ and that He caused them in many cases, perhaps in most, to perform that task through the normal exercise of the abilities which He had given them. We may not suppose that they always knew they were writing canonical Scripture, even when they consciously wrote with divine authority; and it is not obvious that the writers of, for example, the Song of Solomon, Agur’s testament (Pr. xxx), Heman’s black Psalm (Ps. lxxxviii), or Luke’s Gospel (written, the author tells us, because ‘it seemed good to me’), were aware of any directly supernatural prompting at all. Scripture also shows us that inspired documents may be the product of first-hand historical research (as Luke’s gospel is²), and of direct dependence on older written sources (as Chronicles depends on Kings), and even of wholesale borrowing (compare 2 Peter and Jude). Moreover, it appears that biblical books may have passed through several editions and recensions over the centuries before reaching their final form, as the book of Proverbs certainly did.³

a. Dictation?

Because Evengelicals hold that the biblical writers were completely controlled by the Holy Spirit, it is often supposed, as we saw, that they maintain what is called the ‘dictation’ or ‘typewriter’ theory of inspiration—namely, that the mental activity of the writers was simply suspended, apart from what was necessary for the mechanical transcription of words supernaturally introduced into their consciousness.¹ But it is not so. This ‘dictation theory’ is a man of straw. It is safe to say that no Protestant theologian, from the Reformation till now, has ever held it; and certainly modern Evangelicals do not hold it. We are glad that Dr. Hebert, at least, recognizes this.² It is true that many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians spoke of Scripture as ‘dictated by the Holy Ghost’; but all they meant was that the authors wrote word for word what God intended. The language of dictation was invoked to signify not the method or psychology of God’s guidance of them, but simply the fact and result of it; not the nature of their own mental processes, but the relation of what they wrote to the divine intention. The use of the term ‘dictation’ was always figurative, and the whole point of the figure lay in the fact that it asserted this relation. It was never used with psychological overtones. The proof of this lies in the fact that, when these theologians addressed themselves to the question, What was the Spirit’s mode of operating in the writers’ minds?, they all gave their answer in terms not of dictation, but of accommodation, and rightly maintained that God completely adapted His inspiring activity to the cast of mind, outlook, temperament, interests, literary habits and stylistic idiosyncrasies of each writer.

b. Accommodation

Those who credit Evangelicals with belief in ‘dictation’ often appeal to the thought of accommodation as the correct alternative to that view, but in so doing they misunderstand the biblical idea of accommodation no less seriously than they misunderstand the biblical idea of complete divine control. They speak as if it were self-evident that a revelation of truth transmitted through the instrumentality of sinful men would suffer in the process. We are told that, since the biblical writers were imperfect creatures, morally, spiritually and intellectually limited, children of their age and children of Adam too, it was inevitable that crudities, distortions and errors should creep into what they wrote. It is claimed that this is a liberating notion which throws a flood of light on the real character of Scripture, and makes possible a great advance in theological understanding. But does it? It certainly gives the theologian an easy way out when he meets passages that do not square with his idea of what the Bible tells us, or ought to tell us; but is the practice of dismissing awkward details as human corruptions of the pure word of God a biblical way of treating Scripture? It is irrelevant and mischievous to appeal in this connection, as some do, to the example of Christ and the apostles in setting aside Old Testament regulations; for they did this because they recognized that the time had ended for which those regulations were meant to be binding, not because they doubted their divine origin.

In fact, this ‘liberating notion’ is a mistaken idea which reflects a thoroughly defective approach to the written Word. For, in the first place, it flatly contradicts the New Testament witness that every part of Scripture has a divine origin and all that is written (pasa graphe) is theopneustos.¹ And, in the second place, it plainly implies that God was somehow constrained, hampered and indeed frustrated in His revelatory purpose by the quality of the human material through which He worked. But this is to deny the biblical doctrine of providence, according to which God ‘worketh all things after the counsel of his own will’.² The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. ‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth.’³ He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule sinful human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and Scripture tells us that this is what in fact He did. We are to think of the Spirit’s inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers’ own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God’s work. Thus, quotations from the Psalms in Acts are described both as David’s words, the issue of his own God-given knowledge and God-guided reasoning, and as God’s words spoken through David’s mouth.¹ David was a sinful man; but his words in these cases were the words of God.

c. Providence

The twin suppositions which liberal critics make—that, on the one hand, divine control of the writers would exclude the free exercise of their natural powers, while, on the other hand, divine accommodation to the free exercise of their natural powers would exclude complete control of what they wrote—are really two forms of the same mistake. They are two ways of denying that the Bible can be both a fully human and fully divine composition. And this denial rests (as all errors in theology ultimately do) on a false doctrine of God; here particularly, of His providence. For it assumes that God and man stand in such a relation to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If man acts freely (i.e., voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism. It is Deism which depicts God as the passive onlooker rather than the active governor of His world, and which assures us that the guarantee of human freedom lies in the fact that men’s actions are not under God’s control. But the Bible teaches rather that the freedom of God, who works in and through His creatures, leading them to act according to their nature, is itself the foundation and guarantee of the freedom of their action. It is therefore a great mistake to think that the freedom of the biblical writers can be vindicated only by denying full divine control over them; and the prevalence of this mistake should be ascribed to the insidious substitution of deistic for theistic ideas about God’s relation to the world which has been, perhaps, the most damaging effect of modern science on theology. When the critics of Evangelicalism take it for granted that Evangelicals, since they believe in complete control, must hold the ‘dictation’ theory, while they themselves, since they recognize accommodation, are bound to hold that in Scripture false and misleading words of men are mixed up with the pure word of God, they merely show how unbiblical their idea of providence has become. The cure for such fallacious reasoning is to grasp the biblical idea of God’s concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man’s own mind.

d. The Analogy of the Person of Christ

A further way in which some critics try to make the point that they do justice to the human character of the Bible, while Evangelicals do not, is by comp...