What place does the Bible have in the Christian faith? Historic Protestantism has considered it to be God’s written revelation, and therefore the only ultimate standard for faith, Christian life and the organisation of the church.

1 Sola Scriptura

In Protestantism, the (Protestant) Bible, Old and New Testaments, are commonly referred to as “Scripture”; traditionally, “Scriptures” refers to the Old Testament in general.

According to the biblical testimony itself, Christian faith has an existential, consubstantial relationship with Scripture. We read, for example, the following exhortation addressed by the apostle Paul to his disciple and collaborator Timothy:

14 You, stay in the things which you have learned, and which are certain, knowing from whom you have learned them; 15 from childhood you have known the holy letters, which can make you wise unto salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete and ready for every good work.

2nd Epistle of Paul to Timothy, Chapter 3, verses 14-17

So what place should the Christian Bible have in the faith? The historic Protestantism of the Reformation regarded the Bible as God’s written revelation, to the extent that this “return to Scripture”, as it is sometimes called, is one of its main distinctive features. The historic expression “Sola Scriptura”, “Scripture alone” in Latin, is in fact one of the “five solae“, Latin formulae forming the pillars of Protestant doctrines of salvation; it affirms that the Bible is the ultimate authority – i.e. the last authority – in matters of Christian faith and life, and we might add in matters of church organisation, thus severing a centuries-old Roman Catholic tradition, which elevated the rest of Christian Tradition to the level of Holy Scripture.

2 Developments in Protestant doctrine

Protestantism in its various forms has evolved on the question of the nature, function and scope of Scripture. Protestant orthodoxy (the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment) adopted from the outset the previous strong biblical view of Scripture as “inspired”, and therefore without error in its original form (known as “inerrancy”). This position has been adopted for the most part by today’s evangelical Protestantism, and is one of its distinctive traits. Liberal Protestantism, the traditional modern transformation of historic Protestantism, on the other hand, with the advent of Enlightenment rationalism and under the essential influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, has moved towards a “deconstruction” of Scripture. With the advent of ” higher biblical criticism “, today’s traditional Protestantism has in fact rejected the plenary (i.e. full) and verbal (down to the letter) inspiration of Scripture (in its originals), in favour of analysing it from the angle of documentary theories, the most famous of which is perhaps the documentary hypothesis. These naturalistic theories sometimes result in questioning the traditional attribution of the biblical books to their supposed authors, sometimes in extracting sections considered to be “mythological”, in order to retain only certain texts, or even certain words, considered to be “authentic”. Today, broadly speaking, only so-called evangelical Protestantism supports the orthodox doctrine of the inspiration of Sacred Scripture (in its originals), and even the reaction to Protestant liberalism, with its excesses and abuses, of a ‘neo-orthodox’ Reformed theologian like Karl Barth, only leads to a conception of Scripture as a ”testimony to revelation” (Karl Barth, Dogmatics).

3 The doctrine of plenary inspiration

Our understanding of the nature, function and scope of Scripture plays a decisive role in our theology and spirituality.

The doctrine of plenary inspiration has several advantages: it is based on biblical assertions, it provides an objective framework of revelation facing man, and it ensures that this written revelation can be faithfully transmitted from one generation to the next. This doctrine also poses several problems: the existence and reconstitution of the original biblical texts, the external determination of a canon of biblical texts, and the interpretation of inerrant texts presenting multiple difficulties.
But the modern liberal alternative, while it also has certain advantages (conformity with modern rationalism, resolution of difficulties by “demythologisation”, freedom of interpretation), rests on naturalistic presuppositions that undermine the very foundation of faith and the possibility of an objective and objectifiable revelation that can serve as a constant witness to the man who interprets it. Biblical interpretation itself, an activity with an irreducible subjective dimension, is confronted with the problem of identifying revelation within Scripture, which is thus subject to human judgement.

Conclusion

The doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Sacred Scripture, a jewel in the crown of historic Protestantism and the foundation of the unrestricted interpretation of the Bible, thus appears to be the most perfect foundation of a Reformed Christianity anchored in an objective revelation, acquired once and for all. However, it is a question of proposing a rational, rather than rationalist, version of it, which takes account of the immanent and transcendent dimensions of Scripture, and is articulated with a sound theory of its canon and interpretation.