“Baptists And Biblical Authority” -- By: Clark H. Pinnock
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 17:4 (Fall 1974)
Article: “Baptists And Biblical Authority”
Author: Clark H. Pinnock
JETS 17:4 (Fall 1974) p. 193
“Baptists And Biblical Authority”
Associate Professor of Theology Regent College, Vancouver, Canada
Introduction
The nature of biblical inspiration and the extent of its authority has been the center of a vigorous controversy amongst Baptists, as it has been in every major Christian body, for over a hundred years. Let me start off on an autobiographical note. I myself was brought up in a Baptist congregation in Toronto, Canada, which was under the influence of the progressive theological views which had swept through scholarly Baptist circles in North America in the first decades of the 20th century, and were being disseminated at that time from the Canadian Baptist Seminary at McMaster University. I do not owe my conversion in 1949, humanly speaking, to that congregation or its ministers, but rather to a teacher in our Sunday school who, though deeply troubled by the lack of sound biblical preaching in the pulpit, continued to teach the Word of God to his intermediate class of boys, aged 12–14. From the very beginning of my consciously Christian life given this church situation, I was aware of the need to be alert to defections from the true faith and to maintain a theologically sound testimony. I can well recall a lectureship on biblical subjects sponsored in one of the Toronto Baptist churches by the McMaster faculty in which higher critical theories regarding the Pentateuch, the Book of Daniel, and the Psalms were put forth to a congregation of laymen. I can remember feeling then at the age of fifteen, as I still do today, how destructive to our confidence in the reliability of the Bible some of these views were, and how, upon seeking out reaction from other laymen present, I found that they either shared my concern and horror or else regarded the whole matter as the province of biblical scholars whom they trusted meant no harm. (Trust is ordinarily a high Christian virtue. But on some occasions it can be quite dangerous. Alas, even Bible professors do not always deserve to be trusted, myself included, but must earn that right by being themselves faithful to Holy Scriptures and thus worthy of trust.) It was a source of puzzlement to me to see how the Baptist faith which I had been told rested squarely and solely upon the unique and final authority of the Bible would be able to survive the new view of that Book that was being presented. Even today I do not believe that the educated Baptists who espouse the doctrine of a fallible Bible have yet been able to allay the fears of the people in the churches completely as to what the new theology means and where it leads. I do not believe that they can.
In the first section of my paper (1) I wish to define the Scripture principle to which all Christian people, including Baptists, ...
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