Do We Act As If We Really Believe That “The Bible Alone, And The Bible In Its Entirety, Is The Word Of God Written”? -- By: Wayne Grudem

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 43:1 (Mar 2000)
Article: Do We Act As If We Really Believe That “The Bible Alone, And The Bible In Its Entirety, Is The Word Of God Written”?
Author: Wayne Grudem


Do We Act As If We Really Believe That “The Bible Alone, And The Bible In Its Entirety,
Is The Word Of God Written”?

Wayne Grudema

I. Introduction

Do we act as if we really believe that “the Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written”? I am quoting, of course, from our ETS doctrinal statement that each of us affirms by personal signature every year. That statement is based on and rightly derived from passages of Scripture such as 2 Tim 3:16, “All Scripture is θεόπνευστος (‘God-breathed’),” and, as such, it all shares the characteristic of being the very words of God.

But do we ponder the implications of this stupendous affirmation? We are saying that throughout the entire history of the world, and throughout all written documents of all civilizations, the eternal, omnipotent Creator of the universe, the God who will one day judge every human being who has ever lived—this God who is over all has given the human race just one collection of his written words: This book. The Bible.

The Bible alone is the Word of God written. There are no other written words of God anywhere else in the entire world. And the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God written. Every single bit of this book in the original documents has a fundamentally different character from every other bit of writing in the entire world.

Now do we act as if we really believe this, that “the Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written”? In many ways, we do. We write commentaries by the hundreds, massive commentaries. I picked up Greg Beale’s commentary on Revelation 1 the other day in the bookstore and wondered if they were going to sell it by the pound. We produce Bible translations, many very good translations. We require Greek and Hebrew in our seminaries because we take the Word of God seriously. We require courses in exegesis and in exegetical preaching. We require faculty members at our colleges and seminaries to hold to Biblical inerrancy.

The result of all of the detailed attention that we pay to the Word of God is seen in the book displays here at this conference. This is another indication of the value we place on the Word of God, for there are more Christian books

available in English in the United States today than in any other culture in any other country at any other time in the history of the world. Ps 90:17 is a prayer, “L...

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