Thread: The Inerrancy of Scripture - An interesting argument

Was reading Vos' Commentary on the WLC with my wife tonight and he made an interesting argument. Not sure it's watertight but it's interesting:

Why must a book which gives all glory to God be genuine?

It must be genuine, that is it must be what it claims to be, the Word of God, because no one but God could have had a motive for writing it. Wicked men would not write a book which condemns wickedness and gives all glory to a holy, sin-hating God. Good men could not write a book on their own initiative and represent it falsely as the Word of God, for if they did that they would be deceivers, and therefore not good men. For the same reasons neither devils nor holy angels could have written it. Therefore God is the only person who could be the real Author of the Bible.

It's the sort of argument that is better put: This is EXACTLY the book that the GOD it describes would have written.

I'm not sure it is the case that a devil wouldn't present a lying representation of a God that didn't exist.

This is one of the traditional proofs for the divine authority of Scripture. We see from Paul's Pharisaic days what influence limited religious conviction can play on producing wicked works from a genuine and zealous advocate. For that reason I think the argument is better stated when it traces the authority of Old and New Testaments back to the Lord Jesus Himself, as the Prophet of the Church. The impossibility of His being mistaken in such a matter is generally accepted, so that people are left with the choice of accepting His claims on the merit of His character or rejecting wholesale Him and His message so as to deny all possibility of truth. This is basically the dilemma the Lord set before Pilate.

Originally Posted by armourbearer

This is one of the traditional proofs for the divine authority of Scripture. We see from Paul's Pharisaic days what influence limited religious conviction can play on producing wicked works from a genuine and zealous advocate. For that reason I think the argument is better stated when it traces the authority of Old and New Testaments back to the Lord Jesus Himself, as the Prophet of the Church. The impossibility of His being mistaken in such a matter is generally accepted, so that people are left with the choice of accepting His claims on the merit of His character or rejecting wholesale Him and His message so as to deny all possibility of truth. This is basically the dilemma the Lord set before Pilate.

That is exactly what happened to me during my conversion in middle age. It hit me like a ton of bricks that Jesus testified to the truth of Scripture. I was faced with the same dilemna: either reject Jesus as authority or take what he said to be true. Praise God his Spirit brought me under his authority.

On the other hand, my wife, who was converted a mere few months before me, was overwhelmed by the other argument. She had a Christian friend who told her that the Bible is THE Word of God. So my wife decided to sit down and read it for herself. She got through Genesis 1 and said to herself, "Uhoh, Cindy is right, this is the Word of God."

Wow. Never heard that before but it sounds pretty solid.

Man...that is a seemingly wonderful description. I like it.

Praise God for His holy Word

Interesting argument......

Don't know enough about the Qur'an but could this argument be used for it?

What little I do know of the Koran is that it promotes and encourages wickedness on the part of it's adherents, so I would think this argument could not be used in it's defense.

I think CS Lewis makes this argument in one of his most famous quotes:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

- C.S. Lewis

Originally Posted by tellville

Don't know enough about the Qur'an but could this argument be used for it?

Perhaps similarly but not quite. The false god of the Qur'an's view on sin is pretty soft. No sacrifice for sin is necessary and certainly nobody needs to stand in the place of a Muslim for his inability to be righteous.

Hard-core atheists and evolutionists would poke holes in this argument by saying that belief in a supreme being confers some sort of evolutionary advantage. So they would say that the "motive" for writing the Bible comes from a evolutionarily driven desire to have an all-powerful creator. Obviously this makes no sense on a variety of levels.

Going along with Vos and the OP, the most striking thing about the Bible is that from a human perspective it is counter-intuitive to starting a fictitious religion. All of the authors and heroes (except Jesus) are horribly flawed, from Adam and Eve all the way through the disciples and Paul. The only common thread is the grace of God in using these imperfect humans. As Rich says in his post, either the Scriptures were written by evil men, which fits the description of everyone in the Bible except Christ, or good men doing a poor job of pulling off a wicked scheme, which would make them wicked (and incompetent) as well. The only plausible explanation for the Bible is that it is God-inspired truth.

Mason,

I agree it makes no sense for an evolutionist to try to argue that way. A pagan deity makes sense if you buy into the "...we're frightened by lightning so let's make up god to explain it..." myth but why would someone invent a God that is more frightening than nature (Mark 4:41)?

Originally Posted by Semper Fidelis

Mason,

I agree it makes no sense for an evolutionist to try to argue that way. A pagan deity makes sense if you buy into the "...we're frightened by lightning so let's make up god to explain it..." myth but why would someone invent a God that is more frightening than nature (Mark 4:41)?

Right, I agree. In fact, I would go so far as to say if God didn't exist humans would never have come up with the idea of Him on their own - particularly in an infinite, all-powerful being. Belief in God is too great of an abstraction and too unfathomable for humans to invent if He didn't exist. Of course I can't prove that, but to me it makes sense - how could random biochemical reactions imagine the idea of God?

Good men could not write a book on their own initiative and represent it falsely as the Word of God, for if they did that they would be deceivers, and therefore not good men.

What about men who thought they were writing a divinely inspired book? They would not be willfully deceiving anyone, because they themselves would be mistaken.

After all, many militant nonbelievers shrug Christians off as delusional. And all it would take is a delusional person to start it off, because other people could buy into the religion.

Of course, at this point, we're reaching low probabilities, but I'm trying to see what weaknesses the argument has.

Originally Posted by Confessor

Good men could not write a book on their own initiative and represent it falsely as the Word of God, for if they did that they would be deceivers, and therefore not good men.

What about men who thought they were writing a divinely inspired book? They would not be willfully deceiving anyone, because they themselves would be mistaken.

After all, many militant nonbelievers shrug Christians off as delusional. And all it would take is a delusional person to start it off, because other people could buy into the religion.

Of course, at this point, we're reaching low probabilities, but I'm trying to see what weaknesses the argument has.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the weakness of the argument. It could be the case that the men writing the Bible were writing what they thought to be divinely inspired. We would say, for example, that Joseph Smith probably falls into the camp of writing a text that he thought was divine. Ultimately, it is not possible to know the motives of someone like Joseph Smith...perhaps he was trying to deceive...however, that fact doesn't remove the possibility stated in your excepted to Vos' argument.

I don't believe we can escape the fact that ultimately, the source of convincing for one's mind / soul regarding the Bible being God's word resides in the Holy Spirit. There is no proof in the Enlightenment sense of proof...at least not for we who rely on the words of the closed canon rather than being like OT / NT believers who saw the acts of God in history.

I really like the Vos book!

Muhammad set out the right for "god" to be contradictory and capricious. There's no holiness or consistency to be found there.