DAY 229
CHALLENGE
“We don’t need the Church to help us identify Scripture. God’s word is self-authenticating.”
DEFENSE
This makes for good rhetoric but does not stand up to examination.
The word of God is powerful (Ps. 33:6; Eph. 6:17; Heb. 4:12), but this does not mean it is self-authenticating. Scripture records that even prophets could be mistaken about whether a word they heard came from God (1 Sam. 3:2–9).
Taken literally, the claim that Scripture is self-authenticating would mean that the text of Scripture has certain qualities that prove it to be (that is, authenticate it as) the word of God. What might these be?
According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, “the heavenliness of the matter [in the Bible], the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God” (1:5). This is stirring rhetoric, but it can’t be cashed out in practical terms:
- It is impossible to state a list of objective literary qualities that characterize all the books of the Bible and only the books of the Bible.
- Even if one did so, one would need to argue why this collection of qualities shows it to be the word of God.
- And why couldn’t someone write new literature that also displayed those qualities? If so, such writings would also self-authenticate as the word of God and would be new scriptures.
For a closed canon, one thus would need to specify a set of literary qualities that not only marked out the Bible as unique and as the word of God but that would also be impossible to duplicate.
This is not possible, as shown by the fact that nobody really applies this test. Those who claim Scripture is self-authenticating (including the authors of the Westminster Confession; see Day 236) end up appealing to factors other than the text, such as the witness of the Holy Spirit, meaning that the text is not self-authenticating.