Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 08:1 (NA 2023)
Article: Retrieving The Bibliology Of John Owen
Author: Jeffrey T. Riddle

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Retrieving The Bibliology Of John Owen

Jeffrey T. Riddle*

*Dr. Jeffrey T. Riddle is Pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, VA, and Adjunct Professor of New Testament at International Reformed Baptist Seminary (IRBS).

With the beginning of the twenty-first century, a crisis of biblical authority has arisen among contemporary Reformed and evangelical Protestants, including confessional Baptists. This crisis has demonstrated itself on several levels. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the chief point of controversy regarding the Bible revolved around the concept of the “inerrancy” of Scripture.1 The term “inerrancy,” borrowed from the field of astronomy, had been introduced by B. B. Warfield and others in the nineteenth century, and subsequently embraced by many Protestants, often as a replacement for the older term “infallibility.”2 Much of the shift in nomenclature came

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in answer to challenges that began to arise in the modern era regarding the transmission of the text of Scripture. Modern textual critics pointed to the vast number of variants that exist in the history of the transmission of the handwritten manuscripts of the text of Scripture. How could one meaningfully describe Scripture as “infallible,” or speak of it as having been preserved by God’s “singular care and providence,” given the vast number of these textual variants?3 Warfield’s response was to suggest that the Scripture had not been preserved in the existing apographa (copies) but only in the no longer extant autographa (originals), which must be reconstructed using the

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“science” of modern textual criticism.4

There are at least two significant problems, however, which have since been recognized with respect to Warfield’s innovation. First, Warfield’s approach represents a pronounced deviation from that of the Protestant orthodox men who served as the framers of the classic English Protestant Confessions. Richard A. Muller notes their adherence, not to a modern reconstruction method devoted to recovery of the autographa, a la Warfield, but to “the legitimate tradition of Hebrew and Greek apographa” yielding a received Protestant text. Muller notes:

This case for Scripture as an infallible rule for faith and practice and the separate arguments for a received text free from major (i.e., non-scribal) errors rests on an examination of the apog...