Review Essay, Keeping the Balance

Infallibility Another question that must be settled is this: given that all the Bible is inspired, is it all true? On the one hand, if the Bible isn’t infallible, “How may a book containing errors be the starting-point for our knowledge of God”? On the other hand, wouldn’t infallibility seriously detract from the “human” side of Scripture, which is evident,and which Christians maintain? Cameron now turns back to the previously suspended discussion of the origin of the Bible and the method by which it came to be written. There are two issues to note.

Firstly, to claim that the Bible is inspired is not to claim that it was dictated to a human typewriter. Claims about its origin and claims about the method of its production are not to be confused. Simply because the human writers were “consciously involved” in the composition of Scripture, but at the same time wrote down “precisely what God had intended that they should”, it does not follow that there was some high-handed “over-riding …of the personality of the human author. On the contrary, that very personality is the product of the careful preparation of the sovereign God”, who caused the right men in the right places at the right time with the right endowments and the right impulses to write books that He wanted to be written.

Secondly, it does not follow that “an infallible book, however produced [must] be a less than human work—because it is more than human”. To be fallible is not the same as actually making mistakes. The liability is not the same as the act. The fact that the Scriptures were written by humans does not prove that mistakes exist—it only proves that, in the absence of any other influence to prevent them, there might be. “But this corrective influence is supplied by the Divine element”.

Revelation Finally, if we grant that the Bible is inspired and inerrant, we have to consider its purpose before we try to theologise from it. “God ‘breathed out’ this collection of books” in order to reveal Himself, because humanity, through its fall, had lost its communion with God.

Tags: balance, carl trueman, christian student, daniel strange, david field, intervarsity, phillip duce, theology, theology degree

Category: In Depth, Spring 2006