Scriptures selfattesting authority question doctrine truthfulness Scriptures

76 What Books and Words Make Up the Christian Scriptures?
had a meaning in their action, and God had a meaning in their action.
The two intentions were both real and simultaneous.
Jonathan Edwards has a dramatic way of describing the interplay
of the simultaneous divine action and the human action. For example,
in relation to our sanctification he says,
We are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we
do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we
act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only
proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are
in different respects wholly passive and wholly active. 3
And in this concurrence of the divine and human activity, our activity
is really ours, bearing all the marks of our own personality. Sinclair
Ferguson points out how this is true in the creation of inspired Scripture
as well:
Undoubtedly the human writers of Scripture were conscious that
they were expressing their own thoughts as they wrote. But at the
same time they were under the sovereign direction of the Spirit.
Theologians call this two-dimensional reality “concurrence.” 4
In this way, we can understand that the words of Scripture are both
divinely determined and yet truly of human origin. They are really
God’s words and man’s.
Does It Make Sense to Affirm the Inerrancy
of Manuscripts We Don’t Have?
Since the words of Scripture are so important to Jesus and his apostles,
we must ask, therefore, whether we have access to the words that the
inspired authors wrote. This question leads us into the field called “textual
criticism,” which refers to the branch of biblical scholarship that
specializes in studying the ancient manuscripts of the Bible to discern
how similar to the original manuscripts are the Greek and Hebrew texts
we use today.
3
Jonathan Edwards, Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, vol. 21, The Works of Jonathan Edwards,
ed. Sang Hyun Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 251.
4
Sinclair Ferguson: From the Mouth of God: Trusting, Reading, and Applying the Bible (Edinburgh:
Banner of Truth, 1982), 11.