Beliefs About Scriptural Authority

Excerpt from John D. Woodbridge post:  Evangelical Self-Identity and the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Identifying and adhering to central church doctrines and confessions is a very important thing for us even if we uphold Scripture as our ultimate, final authority. The enterprise can provide us with a better understanding of our own evangelical theological self-identity. Do our beliefs about scriptural authority, for example, reside within identifiable central teachings of the historic Christian church? If they do not, we may have become doctrinal innovators regarding our views of Scripture despite our intentions to uphold orthodox Christian teaching.

Heeding and adhering to central church doctrines and confessions can also help steer us away from theological mishaps. In the volume The Mark of Jesus, Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School, describes well the value of statements of faith:

How do such statements of faith serve the cause of evangelical unity? Perhaps they are best compared to the guardrails that help a driver especially in bad weather, to negotiate the treacherously narrow road and hairpin curves of a dangerous mountain highway. Such guardrails establish limits that protect us from the dangers of the gaping ravines to the right and to our left. Only a fool with suicidal tendencies would want to drive across a range of mountains such as the Alps in Switzerland without guardrails. It would be equally foolish, of course, to mistake the guardrails for the road, for when we start driving on the rails it is certain that catastrophe is imminent!

For the Christian there is only one road. Jesus said, “I am the way [road] and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Or, as Augustine put it, Christ is “both our native country and himself also the road to that country.” This analogy is not a perfect one, of course; still, we might push it a little further to say that the Bible is our road map, a divinely given and indispensable resource that helps us to find the road and keeps us on it while the Holy Spirit helps us to see both the road and the guardrails [statements of faith] and to keep both in proper perspective.4

In this essay, I will reiterate the thesis that biblical inerrancy has been a church doctrine or Augustinian central teaching of the Western Christian churches, including evangelical Protestant churches. Consequently, evangelicals who affirm the doctrine of biblical inerrancy are by no means doctrinal innovators. By biblical inerrancy, I mean in shorthand the doctrine that the Bible is infallible for faith and practice as well as for matters of history and science.5 By the expression church doctrine, I am referring to a widespread shared belief of Christian churches that have had a historical existence in the West.6

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