A Call to Confidence in the Bible, Part 1

 

Beginning today and over the next few months, David and I, Lord-willing, will be teaching a series on the reliability of the Bible, the Christian Scriptures.  We want to build confidence in the Bible, or the Holy Scriptures.  By the Bible we mean that collection of writings which has been collected into the Old and New Testaments, the Old Testament consisting of 39 books (from Genesis to Malachi) and the New Testament of 27 books (from Matthew to Revelation).  These are writings that have been communicated to us through over 40 different human authors who wrote on three different continents over a period of about 1500 years.  The Bible consists of various genres, including law, history, prophecy, poetry, epistle, gospel, proverb, and apocalypse.  It is a unified story about God’s plan of salvation and his purpose for our lives.  Ultimately, it is the revelation of his glory through his Son.  J. I. Packer put it this way: Scripture is “God the Father preaching God the Son in the power of God the Holy Ghost.  God the Father is the giver of Holy Scripture; God the Son is the theme of Holy Scripture; and God the Spirit, as the Father’s appointed agent in witnessing to the Son, is the author, authenticator, and interpreter of Holy Scripture.”[1] 

During this study, we will be looking at the reliability of its canon, as embraced by most Protestants.  That is to say, we want to argue that the list of books in our Bibles is a complete list, and that there is no book that isn’t there and should be, and no book that should be there but isn’t.  Second, we will be looking at the reliability of the Bible in terms of its history.  The Christian religion is different from almost every other religion on the planet because its major claims are historical claims, claims like “Jesus Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, and was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, but rose from the dead on the third day.”  In fact, the apostle Paul says that this claim is the essence of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:1-5).  If you don’t believe that, you are not even a Christian.  So it’s not a matter of indifference whether or not we believe in the historical claims of the Bible.  We want to argue that the Bible is absolutely reliable in its historical claims.  Third, we want to argue for the reliability of the preservation of the Bible to us.  The first books of the Bible were written about 3500 years ago, and the last about 2000 years ago, and the question therefore arises whether or not the writings of the Biblical authors have been accurately preserved.  Some, like NT scholar Bart Ehrman, would say that we can have no confidence in the text of the Bible in the sense that we can have no real confidence that the text of the original autographs has been preserved to the present day.  We want to argue that Ehrman and others like him are wrong, and that there is a massive amount of evidence that what Moses and Paul wrote can still be read today.  Finally, we want to argue that the translations of Scripture are reliable.  We of course will be primarily considering the Bible as it has been translated into English.  We can thank God for the rich heritage of English Bibles, and for the fact that God has raised up so many great scholars through the years who have faithfully translated the text of God’s word to us in readable English.

There are other things we could say.  At first, we thought about including the reliability of the Biblical message, but although that would fit logically in this series, and perhaps make it more complete, we realized that it really is a series all its own, and that we would need more than just a couple of lessons devoted to it.  In some sense, that is the whole compass of Biblical apologetics!  So not this time, but maybe at a later date.

So we will be defending the reliability of the Scriptures.  But why are we doing so?  Why are we devoted so many weeks to this topic?  Is it important?  That is the question I want to address and answer today.  I want to argue that this is one of the most important things we could possibly talk about, and it is something that we all need to be convinced of in our minds.  So before we begin to look at the details, I want to step back and see why as Christians we must be convinced that the Bible is reliable, and in particular that we can really believe that it is the word of God to us.

Today, we will be looking at the Biblical call to have confidence in the Bible, to believe in and obey the Bible.  In doing so, I want to two main reasons we should do so.  First, we want to start with the Bible’s own claim is that it is the word of God.  Given this claim to be the word of God, we can see that the only rational response to it is one of trust and obedience.  This is not only the rational response, but also the response that the Bible itself commends to us.  Then we will end by showing that the abandonment of this trust and obedience is not inconsequential, and leads to serious and terrible doctrinal and ethical aberrations.  This is a serious issue.  And it is a present issue.  This is not hypothetical, because there are pressures coming from multiple directions upon Christians seeking to separate them from a firm conviction of the truthfulness of the Bible and its message.  And these pressures are not only coming from outside the church but from within it as well, not only from the liberal wing of the church, but from some self-professed evangelicals.  So this is certainly a relevant issue for the church today.

The Bible’s own claim as to its nature as the word of God.

There is a diversity of opinion on what the Bible is.  In fact, we can see this by considering four very different but current attitudes towards the Bible in our day.  

First, there are those who claim that the Bible is nothing more than useless fables.  This is the typical position of those who do not think the Christian religion is true at all.  The Bible is just a book written by men and nothing more.  Those who are in this category not only claim that it was written only by men, but what they had to say is no longer worthy of our attention or notice.

Second, there are those who think that the Bible is full of useful fables.  They might think God has something to do with the book, and may even call it inspired, but they do not believe that the authors of Scripture were ever able to transcend their own understanding and culture and times to communicate the true words of God.  Many theological liberals want to still use the language of Scripture, but they want to fill it with different meanings that are suitable for our own modern times.  For them, there is no fixed meaning to Scripture, but rather it is evolving along with everything else.

Third, there is the Neo-orthodox position.  The 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth was one of the initial developers of this view along with Emil Brunner.  He was willing to call the Bible the word of God, but only in a specialized sense.  He believed the Bible was God’s word in the sense that God used it to reveal himself to man.  But he did not believe that the Bible was the inspired and inerrant word of God.  He did not believe that the very words of Scripture are the words of God.  He believed the Bible was still a very human book full of errors.  I think one way to get at what he believed is that God reveals himself through the Bible, but not in the Bible.  He believed, as Stephen Wellum summarizes, that “Scripture is a ‘witness’ to God’s word that may ‘become’ God’s word.”[2]   Thus Barth will say, “The men whom we hear as witnesses [in the Bible] speak as fallible, erring men like ourselves.  What they say, and what we read as their word, can of itself lay claim to be the Word of God, but never sustain that claim.  We can read and try to assess their word as a purely human word.”[3] 

It seems to me that there are many evangelicals today who want to embrace a form of this position.  Wellum cites Kenton Sparks, Greg Boyd, and Peter Enns as representative examples.[4]   They still want to call the Bible the word of God, and still call it divine, and say that God uses the Bible to act in our lives, but they do not think the Bible is the inspired and inerrant word of God.  But, as we shall see, this falls far below what the Bible itself says about itself.

Fourth, there is the orthodox view, which says that the Bible is the very word of God, that the words that are on the pages of Scripture are God’s words, that the men who penned the words were guided and led by the Holy Spirit so that God got exactly what he wanted to be written.  As a result, the Bible is the word of God, inspired by him, and therefore infallible (it cannot fail of its purpose, cf. John 10:35), and inerrant (it contains no errors).  This is the view that we will be defending.

Why do we believe this?  We believe this primarily because the Bible everywhere claims that it is the word of God. Every part of the Bible claims to be the word of God, and it has been accepted as such by the church from the very beginning.  For example, the phrase, “Thus saith the Lord” occurs 432 times in the King James Version (417 times in the ESV text of the OT).  The phrase, “God said,” or “the Lord said” occur (according to www.biblegateway.com) over 1000 times.  This is clearly a book that records the words of God.

Now it could be claimed that this just represents parts of the Bible, and that these sayings of God are just glued together by the words (and interpretations) of men.  However, we know that Jesus had the OT as a whole (we will make a case for this later), and viewed all of it as Scripture.  He said to his apostles shortly before his ascension: “And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, [this three-fold description of the OT encompasses all the books that we have in the OT today] concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Lk. 24:44-45).  

And when he quoted the Scriptures, he always ascribed it to God as the author.  For example, when he quoted Genesis 2:24, our Lord introduced it as the very words of God: “And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” (Mt. 19:4-5).  What’s interesting about this is that when our Lord claimed that “he which made them at the beginning” (i.e. God) said what was said in Genesis 2:28, the verse in question was not explicitly said to be God’s word there.  On the face of it, it could have been Moses’ reflection upon God’s institution of marriage.  But Jesus recognizes that Moses’ reflection is still God’s word.  All the law, all the writings, all the prophets, are God’s words according to Jesus.

The apostle Paul backs this up when he says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).  All Scripture – that is, all the OT, and by extension the NT as we will argue in a bit – is inspired by God.  Or better, breathed out by God, so that the words of Scripture are the very words of God.

Also, Peter puts it this way: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:19-21).  Notice how the apostle does not allow any part of the Scriptures to be “of any private interpretation” by which he means that the Scriptures do not come from the prophet’s own mind but come to us as they were guided by the Holy Spirit so that what they wrote were indeed God’s own words.

The question is whether or not we can consider the NT in this way, and the answer is that we can.  We can because of the promise of Christ, who promised that after he had gone away, “when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come” (Jn. 16:13).  This is best to be taken to refer to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the apostles to enable them to teach and write the truth about Christ.  This is what is given to us in the NT.  The apostle Paul concurs when he says that 

God hath revealed them [gospel truths] unto us [the apostles] by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual (1 Cor. 2:10-13).

Paul is explicitly saying that what God did for the prophets he was doing for the apostles.  He tells the Ephesians, how that “by revelation he [God] made known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ) which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Eph. 3:3-5).

It is not surprising, then, that the NT authors themselves recognize other NT authors as writing Scripture that is on the same level in terms of authority as the OT itself (cf. 1 Tim. 5:18; 2 Pet. 3:15-16).  And so because Paul was writing the words of God, he could say, “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord” (1 Cor. 14:37).  And he could write to the Thessalonians, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe” (1 Thess. 2:13).

The Bible therefore comes to us, as a whole, as the word of God.   These are the inspired words of God.  It means that the words on the page are the words that God intended to put there.  This doesn’t mean that the Scriptures don’t have a human element to them.  It doesn’t mean that the human authors couldn’t draw on their experiences and learning and knowledge in the writing down of Scripture.  It doesn’t mean that the Bible was simply dictated by God (although parts of it certainly were, like the Ten Commandments).  But it does mean that through the instrumentality of human authors, God was able so to guide them that they wrote exactly what he wanted them to write.

The fact that the Bible is the word of God means that the Bible is infallible and inerrant.  The infallibility of the Bible means that the Bible can be relied upon to make good its claims.  It will be true to its assertions and its claims.  The inerrancy of the Bible means that the Bible is without error.  This is true because God is always reliable and always true, and we cannot separate God from his word (see Heb. 4:16).  It seems to me that both these claims are the immediate consequences of inspiration.  It is, in fact, what our Lord said about Scripture, that it cannot be broken (Jn. 10:35) and that one jot and one tittle would never pass away from the law until all was fulfilled (Mt. 5:17).  Paul said, of the oracles of God (the Scriptures), “Let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4).

Some say that the Bible can’t really be a human document without having errors.  “To be human is to err” they say, and since the Bible was written by men it will contain the faults and foibles of them.  But this does not follow.  To err is not necessary to be human.  After all, Christ was fully human and he never erred or told a falsehood, consciously or unconsciously.  Behind this claim is a fundamentally faulty view of God and his providence, and a failure to grasp the truth that God in his sovereignty can so guide the apostles and prophets so that what they wrote was really their word and yet at the same time God’s word as well.

Some also try to discount a belief in the inerrancy of Scripture by saying that it is a recent invention.  However, this is just not the truth.  Stephen Wellum presents us with an impressive list of theologians in every age who argue for the Bible as the true words of God, infallible and inerrant.[5]   Here  are just a few:

Clement of Rome, writing ca. AD 100: “You have searched the Scriptures, which are true, which were given by the Holy Spirit; you know that nothing unrighteous or counterfeit is written in them.”

Irenaeus, writing between AD 125 and 202: “We should leave things of that nature to God who created us, being most properly assured that the Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and His Spirit.”

Augustine (354-430): “I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error.  And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.”

Anselm (1033-1109): “For I am sure that if I say anything which is undoubtedly contradictory to Holy Scripture, it is wrong.”

Francis Turretin (1623-1687), who said that the authors of Scripture “were so acted upon and inspired by the Holy Spirit (as to the things themselves and as to the words) as to be kept free from all error and that their writings are truly authentic and divine. . . .  The prophets did not fall into mistakes in those things which they wrote as inspired men (theopneustos) and as prophets, not even in the smallest particulars; otherwise faith in the whole of Scripture would be rendered doubtful.”

If the claim of the Bible that it is the word of God is true then the only rational response is one of confidence, trust, and obedience.  

Now someone could respond at this point that other books claim to be God’s word as well, so how do we come to determine who is right?  And the answer is that any book claiming to be God’s word is going to evidence itself as such.  Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, and his miracles evidenced him to be that.  In the same way, the Bible not only claims to be the word of God, it shows itself to be such.

What are the evidences?  Here is how the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith puts it: 

We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church of God to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, and 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, and many other incomparable excellencies, and entire perfections thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.[6]

The last thing said here is important.  Since we live in God’s world, and are made in God’s image, we should intuitively recognize God’s word.  Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (Jn. 10:27).  We should not divorce this hearing of Jesus’ voice from his written word.  But we are sinful creatures, and sin is by its very nature deceptive, we are easily blinded from seeing God’s word to be what it is.  This is what the apostle Paul said: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Cor. 4:3-4).

So what overcomes this blindness?  It is the inward work of the Holy Spirit, “bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts” to give us that “full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof.”  This means that in the final analysis, the only way we can truly know the truth is through spiritual regeneration.  But that does not mean that we can’t show the truth that the Bible is God’s word through evidence, and that is one of the things that we are trying to do in this study.[7]   Ultimately, any book claiming to be God’s word will stand up to scrutiny.  Other books fail the test here, whereas the Bible is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.  

On the other hand, when we consider other holy books, we see that they do not stand up to scrutiny.  For example, the holy books of Hinduism and Buddhism cannot give the kind of revelation from God that is inerrant and infallible and provides universal truth for the simple reason that their understanding of the being of God is too diminished to allow for such a thing.  As for Islam, their holy book does claim to be revelation from God, but it is filled with historical errors.  For example, it claims that Jesus didn’t die on the cross, a claim that is a cross-purposes with the Biblical record itself which predates the Qur’an by hundreds of years,[8]  but also by contemporary secular accounts of the death of Jesus (Tacitus, for example, agrees that he was crucified during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate).  

This not only is the rational response, but it is the Biblical one.  We are constantly called to have confidence in God’s word above all other words.  As the prophet Isaiah put it, “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?  To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isa. 8:19-20).  Paul put it this way: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8-9).  We cannot be faithful and obedient followers of Christ if we do not trust and obey the word of Christ.  To hear the word of God is to hear Christ; to reject the word of God is to reject him.  This is why John wrote, “We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error” (1 Jn. 4:6).

The Seriousness of the Issue

Finally, why are we doing a study on the reliability of the Bible?  We are doing it because if you don’t trust in the Bible you won’t really embrace its message, and it is the message of the Bible, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).  If you don’t trust the Bible, you won’t embrace it as the good authority over our lives.  If you don’t trust in the Bible, you will end up waffling on all sorts of doctrines and end up denying the foundations of the Christian faith.

I’m not saying this because this is just what I think will happen.  It has already happened in the Christian church, and it is happening again today.  In the 1920’s, there was a great split in the Christian churches of our country over key doctrines of the Christian faith.  It had really been percolating for some time, and the origins of it go all the way back to the Enlightenment.  But it really began to gain steam in the late 19th century.  It was the debate over the central issues of the Christian faith, as a new liberal Christianity emerged still claiming the name of Christian, but denying the key doctrines of the gospel.  Liberal Christianity still used the language of orthodox Christianity, but underneath the language was a reinterpretation of that language that denied many of the historical events of the Bible, the supernatural element of the Christian faith, including all the miracles of the Bible.  It denied the virgin birth of our Lord, his death as a substitutionary atonement for sins, his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven.

But underneath all that was the denial of the Bible as the word of God, inspired, infallible, and inerrant. Because liberal Christianity denied that the Bible is really the word of God and true in all its parts, it was able to pick and choose from the Christian faith what it wanted to keep and what it wanted to discard.  In the 1920’s, J. Gresham Machen argued in his book Christianity and Liberalism that the liberal Christianity that was taking over the churches was not just a different flavor of the one religion of Christians everywhere, but that it was in fact a different religion.  And he noted that what made it a different religion was not just differences on this or that doctrine, but a difference in the foundation of the Christian religion itself.  Whereas true Christianity bases its faith upon the Bible, liberal Christianity based its faith upon human emotion and feelings.  “It is no wonder then,” he wrote, that liberalism is totally different from Christianity, for the foundation is different.  Christianity is founded upon the Bible.  It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life.  Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.”[9] 

But one hundred years after Machen published his book in 1923, we are seeing the same thing again among many evangelical Christians.  Fundamental doctrines are again being denied.  For example, in our day, very prominent evangelicals are denying the existence of Adam and Eve or that they were the progenitors of the human race.  Kenton Sparks  spoke at the 2023 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society arguing that we have to take a non-historical view of Adam and Eve.[10]  I think he would call himself an evangelical, yet it is clear that he does not believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  And this is not just reserved to debates among scholars.  I recently heard of an elder in a conservative church who not only stepped down from being a pastor but stepped away from the Christian faith altogether, at least partly because he could no longer accept that Genesis told the truth about human origins.  In fact, there is an evangelical ministry called Biologos which exists just to convince Christians that we can’t take Genesis literally and that evolution is true.  So this is a real danger for the church today.  What this amounts to is that we are being told by evangelicals that we can’t believe what the Bible says.  This is exactly what liberals said a century ago.  We are seeing the same thing unfold again.

Part of the problem is replacing the authority of Scripture with other authorities, like the current scientific consensus.  This was a particular problem in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it continues to be a problem in our day as well.  For example, scientists will tell us that genetics proves that the current human population could never have emerged from just two individuals, like Adam and Eve.  Those who are overawed by the authority of such scientists will be tempted to abandon the Bible over their claims.  Some in fact do.  I’m not of course saying that we should be obscurantists, nor that science hasn’t at times helped us correct misinterpretations of the Bible, which is precisely what happened with the Copernican Revolution.  But we must never think that science can ever have the authority that God’s word has.  For one thing, scientists are not unbiased observers, but filter everything they see through a host of presuppositions, many of which are not scientific to begin with.  The statements of scientists, though they are often baptized with a sort of infallibility, should never be taken as such.  But the Bible is the inspired and infallible word of God.  We must always hold its authority over any other authority.  

But it’s not just that doctrines are under attack through the attack on the trustworthiness of Scripture.  Ethics are also under attack as well.  This, it seems to me, is the peculiar trial of our times.  There are many who are willing to be perfectly orthodox when it comes to Nicaean orthodoxy, but who are willing to through everything overboard when it comes to sexual ethics and are willing to embrace everything the culture is throwing at us when it comes to the LGBTQ movement.  Why is this happening?  How is it happening?  It is happening because they have come to believe that the Bible can no longer be taken seriously in its moral directions.  They are taking their cue, not from the authority of Scripture, but from the authority of the current cultural consensus.  

This is so dangerous because, as our Lord told would-be followers in his day, “Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Lk. 6:46).  In other words, you can be perfectly orthodox as respects the person of Christ: you can call him Lord and embrace all the truths about his person and work.  You can even claim to be “gospel-centered,” but if you refuse to obey his word, and that includes what he and his apostles had to say about sex and marriage, you cannot be his disciple.  But that is exactly what is happening today.  And it goes back to being loosey-goosey on the word of God.

So this is a serious issue.  It is serious because everything important to our faith as disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ is downstream of our commitment to Scripture.  Spurgeon lamented over the lack of Biblical faithfulness in his day, as well we might in our own day: “The latter-day gospel is not the gospel by which we were saved. To me it seems a tangle of ever-changing dreams. It is, by the confession of its inventors, the outcome of the period, the monstrous birth of a boasted ‘progress,’ the scum from the caldron of conceit. It has not been given by the infallible revelation of God: it does not pretend to have been. It is not divine: it has no inspired Scripture at its back.”[11] 

If we are to maintain our witness, let alone see a revival of true religion in our day, if we are to see the lost saved, and our young people come into and stay in the church, then we must be firmly committed to the authority of the good word of God.  It was the first principle in the Protestant Reformation: sola Scriptura, “by Scripture alone.”  Everything else flowed from that.  Martin Luther, in his famous speech before Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521, put it this way: “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have often contradicted themselves: my conscience is captive to the word of God.”  May we too be men and women who consciences are captive to the word of God.

[1] J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), p. 97.  Qtd. in Stephen Wellum, Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, Vol. 1 (Brentwood: B&H Academic,  2024), p. 179.

[2] Wellum, p. 231.  The quote is the title of a subsection where the main words are capitalized, and so I have removed the capitals to make it part of a normal sentence.  

[3] Quoted in Wellum, p. 229.

[4] Ibid., p. 241-244.

[5] Wellum, p. 259-264.  The following quotations are taken from these pages.

[6] Chapter 1, paragraph 5.  See https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-1

[7] I borrow this helpful distinction between knowing and showing the truth from William Lane Craig.  See his book Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway,1994), p. 31.

[8] Muhammed died in AD 632.

[9] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 67.  This is a new edition of the original book which was first published in 1923.

[10] He was an invited guest, so not a member of ETS, which requires one to affirm the inerrancy of Scripture.

[11] From his sermon, “A Dirge for the Down-Grade, and a Song for Faith,” preached on April 18, 1889.  See https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/a-dirge-for-the-down-grade-and-a-song-for-faith/#flipbook/