The Bible They Cannot Know, Part 3: Probability Cannot Speak with Divine Authority

A useful servant becomes an unlawful master

Christians need not despise ordinary means. We compare handwriting, examine history, learn languages, consider context, and weigh testimony in daily life. The church may use such means when she collates manuscripts, exposes a corrupt translation, or defends the text she has received. Human investigation can be a useful servant.

It becomes an unlawful master when it is made the court that determines whether God has spoken and what He has said. That is the decisive error of the critical-text position. It makes historical probability—not the self-attesting Word of God received by the church—the final test of a reading's authority.

This is why the word autonomous is important. Autonomy does not mean that a scholar never prays or never affirms orthodox doctrine. It means that, in the act of deciding the text, his method claims the right to stand above the Word and to judge it by criteria that are not themselves derived from a known Word of God. The text may be accepted after it satisfies the method; the method is never required to submit to the text as already God's authoritative speech.

The formal parallel with atheism is clear. The atheist evaluates every alleged revelation by standards he sets for himself. The critical-text advocate, at the disputed point, evaluates every alleged word of God by standards he sets for textual reconstruction. In each case, human judgment is supreme. The difference is that the latter often continues to use Christian language while denying the church a definite text to which that language may be finally accountable.

Why “the best reading” is not enough

A critic may respond: “We do not claim certainty; we seek the best reading on the evidence.” That statement is candid, and it exposes the problem. The best reading according to whom? By what fixed, revealed, and universally binding standard? And what happens when a later editor judges the evidence differently?

If the answer is that the reading remains open to revision, then the church's authority remains open to revision. The present text can direct faith and practice only provisionally. A preacher may declare a reading on Sunday and discover on Monday that a future edition has placed it in brackets, moved it to a footnote, or replaced it. The church is not thereby being humbled before God. She is being made dependent upon the shifting conclusions of an academic process.

Nor does a high percentage of confidence transform probability into revelation. There is an infinite difference between these two statements:

“God has said this.”

“On present evidence, this is probably what God said.”

The second statement may be a responsible report of scholarly uncertainty. It cannot serve as the ground of divine authority. A preacher cannot bind the conscience with a probability. A confession cannot be “probably” the Word of God at the very point where it says the Holy Ghost speaks. Faith is not an educated wager upon the current state of the apparatus.

The problem of mutable canons

The critical-text method relies on canons of internal and external evidence: age, geographical distribution, scribal habits, transcriptional probability, intrinsic probability, genealogical theories, and editorial assessments. None of those observations is useless. But none is self-interpreting, and no collection of them provides an invariant, revealed rule by which every textual decision can be made.

Methods change. The relative value assigned to manuscripts changes. Theories of textual families and genealogy change. Editors disagree, and successive editions alter the text. The argument does not require us to prove that every change is wrong. It requires only this observation: a rule whose wording may be changed by a later scholarly consensus cannot be the final, settled rule by which that consensus is judged.

Here the critical-text advocate faces a circle. He needs an authoritative Bible to establish the theological claims he uses: inspiration, preservation, the work of the Spirit, the nature of the church, even the duty to seek truth. Yet at the very point where he must identify the Bible, he appeals to a method whose authority rests on human judgment. He then uses the reconstructed Bible to commend the method that reconstructed it. The text is made to validate the tribunal that declares which of its words belong to it.

This is not solved by calling the process “science.” Science can describe the behavior of created things; it cannot make itself the source of a divine norm. The question is not whether data exist. The question is whether data may be made the ultimate judge of God's speech. Facts are creatures of God, and man's interpretation of facts is morally and intellectually accountable to Him. There is no neutral territory where man may suspend God's Word until scholarship gives Him permission to speak.

Scripture's account of certainty

The Reformed confessions do not ground the authority of Scripture in a public vote, an academic consensus, or an internal feeling severed from the text. Westminster 1.5 says that the church is moved by many “high and heavenly” evidences to a high and reverent esteem of Scripture; nevertheless, its full persuasion and assurance of Scripture's infallible truth and divine authority is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in the heart. The Spirit does not bear witness by and with an unknowable autograph.

Whitaker makes the same distinction. The church's testimony is a real and good external argument; it can direct a hearer to the Scriptures and restrain a contentious opponent. But the authority of Scripture does not hang upon a variable human judgment. Scripture is God's Word because God is its author, and the Holy Spirit gives believers full assurance of that fact. The church receives and commends the Scripture; it does not manufacture Scripture's authority.

The critical-text position transposes that order. It makes an ever-changing scholarly judgment the practical cause of textual authority in the church. The doctrinal words may remain orthodox, but the method has put human judgment in the place which the Confession reserves for “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” as the supreme judge of controversies (WCF 1.10).

The real issue

The issue is not whether scholars are sinners. Ministers, elders, translators, and confessors are sinners too. The issue is whether God has given the church a Word capable of judging them all. If the answer is no—if the final text must always be generated by their probability judgments—then no man can finally be corrected by Scripture itself. He may only be corrected by the current editorial consensus about Scripture.

That is the epistemic structure of unbelief. It does not cease to be such because it uses the name of Christ, quotes many true verses, or produces a text that is often close to the received text. Wherever it denies a present, identifiable Word of God and substitutes man's revisable conclusion, it reasons as though God had left no supreme verbal authority above man.

The next article will show why this leaves the critical-text advocate borrowing capital from the very Bible whose public identity his method has placed beyond certainty, and why the confessional doctrine of preservation is the only coherent alternative.

Sources

• Holy Bible, Authorized Version: Romans 3:4; 1 Corinthians 2:12-14; 2 Timothy 3:16-17.
• Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.5 and 1.10.
• William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, Question III, especially his argument that the church's testimony is an occasion and external argument, while full assurance rests on the testimony of the Holy Spirit.