To rob the Church of the truth gleaned through the exegesis of Scripture, passages are wrested to diminish the substantive or intrinsic significance of the written word. For instance, counsel, covenant, truth, judgments, testimonies, and law are considered subjects taught uncoupled from the ontological character of God’s written word. These subjects may be pure and preserved but the words themselves which teach us possess no transcendent qualities, e.g. purity, holiness, eternality, immutability. The law will be fulfilled but jot and tittle preservation are not in hermeneutical view per Matthew 5:18. Theological purity is conceded but the purity of the very words of the which the theology is sourced is denied. Simply put, the Holy Bible teaches us holy things but the words that comprise the Bible are not intrinsically holy. A brief perusal of modern commentaries will sufficiently demonstrate this bifurcation. At best Scripture is a blend of man’s words and God’s words. The quintessential error of this modern hermeneutic is the belief that Scripture is not inspired, it is not God’s word, it is the word of Moses, David, Paul, etc. all men with a limited understanding of the world around them and prone to mistakes. Inerrancy, then, takes on varying applications governed by externally applied criteria.
Historic protestant orthodoxy exegetically maintained, rather, that the penmen wrote as secondary authors was God’s word, and as Primary and creative Author, the Holy Spirit protected the writing from all error which is the essential sum and substance of the orthodox definition of immediate inspiration. The channel of counsel, covenant, truth, righteous judgments, testimonies, and law is the pure, holy, eternal, and immutable written words of God.
The egregious modern error of decoupling the written word from the Holy Spirit resulted in the preeminence of the human element of the reconstructed notion of inspiration at the expense of omitting the primary and creative role of the Holy Spirit in the writing of the autographs. Essentially, the novel theological formulation of inspired Scripture is practically a thoroughly human, phenomenal document that teaches good, pure, and true lessons. The new phenomenal notion holds that Matthew 5:18 may be a written record of the words of Christ, subject to the findings of the textual apparatus but Matthew 5:18 is not the very words of Christ. From this interpretive paradigm shift liberty was given popular venues to say such things as “this passage may be better rendered” and “oldest and best manuscripts omit verses 9-20” as if the words of the Holy Spirit are now subject to the judgment of the teacher or preacher because Scripture itself is considered to be on a par of equality with the speaker.
There can be and is no middle ground when describing immediate inspiration. If Scripture is not God’s word, then Christianity is not theologically grounded but anthropologically sourced. Consider how nonchalantly interlocutors of pre-critical theological formulation dismiss any truth of Scripture’s own self-testimony – the self-attesting, self-authenticating, self-interpreting of Scripture, and how unreasonably they discount pre-critical exegesis of passages that speak the divine character of Scripture, see Ward and White. What we have witnessed and are witnessing is the normalizing of the secularization of Scripture. Because no middle ground exists between theologically grounded Christianity and anthropologically sourced “christianity,” the role of the pre-critical apologist is to appeal theologically and exegetically to the covenant keeper with robust arguments with the explanatory scope to answer and refute the secularization of the faith once delivered to the saints.
Standard Sacred Text.com 