Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 04:2 (Oct 1961)
Article: The Bible In Today’s Dialogue
Author: Samuel J. Schultz

BETS 4:2 (Oct 1961) p. 5

The Bible In Today’s Dialogue

Samuel J. Schultz

Chairman’s address to the mid-western Regional meeting of E.T.S., at Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, May 12, 1961.

Interest in the Bible is universal. No other literary production has merited such constant and continuous consideration by scholars as well as laymen. Each new translation and revision represents the current concern to convey the message of the Bible to the common man.

Although the Bible has always had an important and unique place in Christianity, the role of the Scriptures has varied from time to time. This changing attitude toward the Bible has been reflected in Christian education, preaching, scholarship and the practical use made of the Bible by the laity.

Two basic attitudes toward the Bible have been apparent in the history of Christianity. The principle of sola Scriptura has always had its advocates since the Reformation. They hold to the supernatural Biblical revelation as infallible. One phase of Protestantism to the present day is represented by those who accept the Bible as inerrant propositional revelation.

The opposing view has had many and varied representatives in Protestant scholasticism. The extreme rational approach regarded the Bible merely as a book of human production while others recognize selected parts of the Bible as of divine origin.

Today, when religion has a more popular recognition on college and university campuses, when church membership has reached unequaled records, when American politics is marking a new frontier and science is rapidly marking advance in the space age, we do well to take inventory in the realm of Biblical scholarship. Are the two basically opposite views in evidence in today’s dialogue regarding the Bible? Have recent decades of study and reappraisal resulted in a synthesis of these diametrically opposite views?

In the wake of the Reformation the Bible was made available to the common people by means of numerous translations in printed form. A church-going and Bible reading populace accepted the Scriptures as reliable history as well as a sufficient guide to life. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century the prevailing view of the Bible held that it contained a timeless, universal and final teaching.

At the turn of the nineteenth century several trends were developing that affected a change in attitude. The German philosopher, Hegel, who has been acknowledged as the intellectual father of the modern point of view, held to the human mind as the final and ultimate authority. In the theology of Schleiermacher, the authority of either reason or revelation was brought into question, making the inner experience of t...