Austin's Blog

Robert L. Reymond begins with what the Bible says about itself. God is actually there and “…if God has revealed truth about himself, about us, and about the relationship between himself and us in Holy Scripture, then we should study Holy Scripture.”[1] He begins his discussion not arguing to the existence and authority of God but from the existence and authority of God. He examines various Old Testament passages (Exo. 4:10-16, 7:1-4; Deut. 18:14-21; Hab. 2:2-3; Jer. 1:4-10) as well as New Testament passages (Gal. 1:11-2:11; 1 Thess. 2:13; 2 Pet. 3:15-16) to illustrate that the Bible exists as a revelation of and from God himself. The Bible “…tells a story that people simply could not and would not have known without divine aid. God was its Author and Source. He had to tell it to them.”[2] The Bible is self-attesting and needs no further standard to verify its authority.

Christians ought to accept the Bible because Jesus of Nazareth affirmed and authenticated its message. He often argued from an Old Testament passage as the basis for his own teaching and understood his ministry as a climax and fulfillment of covenantal promises made to Israel in the past by Yahweh. Reymond writes:

Because the Holy Scriptures, although written by men, are more fundamentally God’s Spirit-inspired, imperishable, coherent Word, they are intrinsically authoritative and man’s only infallible rule for faith and life. Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, whom his Father raised from the dead on the third day after death, regarded the Scriptures precisely this way and declared them to be such.[3]

Jesus argued that the Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35) and came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill and uphold it (Matt. 5:17-18). He often responded to questions with the refrain, “Have you not read [the Scriptures]” (Matt. 12:3, 19:4, 21:16, 22:31) which assumes man’s responsibility to know and obey the Bible. Again, Dr. Reymond notes:

The entire Bible is revealed, inspired, and authenticated by Christ as God’s Word, and identified by the New Testament writers with the living voice of God. We can conclude that the infinite, personal God has spoken to men propositionally in Scripture. The one who makes the Word of the living God the foundation of his or her life stands on solid ground indeed, having both an authoritative basis for knowing what to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of mankind and a normative ground for the theological task.[4]

We acknowledge the authority invested in the Scriptures in light of how Jesus Christ handled them. No earthly advocacy is needed for divine approval exists within the sixty-six books of the Bible.

Like many other theologians, Dr. Reymond highlights Scripture’s self-authenticating, self-evidencing, self-attesting, and self-validating character. Commenting on The Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 1:5, he says, “It recognizes that the Word of God would, of necessity, have to be self-authenticating, self-attesting, and self-validating, for if it needed anyone or anything else to authenticate and validate its divine character—based on the principle that the validating source is always the higher and final authority—it would not be the Word of God.[5] He also maintains that the Spirit has to move within someone’s mind to fully and finally believe the claims of Scripture. Not all affirm the Bible’s authority because of the noetic effects of sin, the deceitful work of Satan, and the decree of God exercised within the ministry of the Spirit.

Dr. Reymond explicitly rejects the task of the classical apologist who uses arguments of probability to defend and uphold Scripture’s authority. In fact, he believes to do so is a failed attempt to ingratiate ourselves to unbelievers writing, “…to regard the Bible as only a generally reliable library of ancient documents composed by human authors, as even some evangelicals are willing for the unbeliever to do (at least at first) as part of their apologetic strategy, is to overlook the most fundamental fact about the Bible and the Bible’s major claim about itself.”[6] He lists a few examples of these lines of argumentation from the Ligonier apologists and theologians R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner. The problem with such arguments is they do not yield certainty but mere possibility, which is unconvincing and less than what is already claimed by the Scriptures themselves (Luke 1:1-4). Furthermore, many of the premises have counter-understandings that would invalidate the argument at its conclusion.

Verficational apologetics which seek to show the Bible’s consistency and internal order are also rejected by Dr. Reymond. The problem with applying “self-consistency” (the horizontal test of not violating the law of non-contradiction) and “outside-consistency” (the vertical test of not contradicting science, archeology, sociology, etc.) is it imposes a standard outside of itself which proceeds from sinful, autonomous man. It also can only provide possibility and the conclusions are based upon peoples’ prior, religious commitments. We believe the Bible because of the authority of God himself.

[1] Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. (T. Nelson, 1998), xxxi.

[2] Ibid., 25.

[3] Ibid., 44.

[4] Ibid., 49.

[5] Ibid., 80.

[6] Ibid., 4.