Quote 3460
Before all else, Protestantism is, in its very essence, an appeal from all other authority to the divine authority of Holy Scripture.
B.B. Warfield
Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Section 2Other Quotes from the Author & Topic
Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, because He takes away sin; and you and I are workers for peace when we preach His Gospel, which is the Gospel of peace just because it is the Gospel of deliverance from sin. Sin means war, and where sin is, there will war be. Righteousness means peace, and
there can never be peace where righteousness has not first been
realized.Faith and Life
The glory of the incarnation is that it presents to our adoring gaze not a humanized God or a deified man, but a true God-man.
And here we have already exposed the reason why no Christian Church can take up the position recommended to it on the strength of a declaration attributed to Abraham Lincoln. This declaration is to the effect that a simple requirement of love to God and our neighbor constitutes a sufficient foundation for a church, and the churches would profit by making the profession of such love, or of the wish or purpose to cherish such love, their sole qualification for membership. The moment a church took up such a position, however, it would cease to be a Christian Church: the core of Christianity is its provision for salvation from sin.
A glass window stands before us. We raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond. So there are two ways of looking at the world. We may see the world and absorb ourselves in the wonder of nature. That is the scientific way. Or we may look right through the world and see God behind it . That is the religious way.Selected Shorter Writings - I
For the Reformation is nothing other than Augustianianism come to its rights: the turning away from all that is human to rest on God alone for salvation.
God's breath is the irresistible outflow of His power. When Paul declares, then, that "every scripture," or "all scripture" is the product of the Divine breath, "is God-breathed," he asserts with as much energy as he could employ that Scripture is the product of a specifically Divine operation.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Section 2
"concursive operation."... It has been common to speak of the Spirit's action in this form of revelation, therefore, as an assistance, a superintendence, a direction, a control, the meaning being that the effect aimed at --the discovery and enunciation of Divine truth --is attained through the action of the human powers --historical research, logical reasoning, ethical thought, religious aspiration --acting not by themselves, however, but under the prevailing assistance, superintendence, direction, control of the Divine Spirit.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Ch 1
If we are to hold to nothing that is questioned, we shall hold to nothing at all: we shall be as beasts which are beyond good and evil.
A beginning was made already in the eighth century of translating the Bible into the vernacular languages, and by the end of the Middle Ages it was accessible to Frenchmen and Germans, Englishmen and Bohemians, Spaniards and Italians and Poles in their own tongues.The Bible the Book of Mankind
It was no accident that the Christian Bible was a Greek Bible. Greek was at the time the lingua franca of the civilized world, and the universal gospel naturally clothed itself in this world-tongue.The Bible the Book of Mankind
Where the Spirit is, there is the church; outside the body of the saints there is no salvation.
[General and Special Revelation] The one is addressed generally to all intelligent creatures, and is therefore accessible to all men; the other is addressed to a special class of sinners, to whom God would make known His salvation. The one has in view to meet and supply the natural need of creatures for knowledge of their God; the other to rescue broken and deformed sinners from their sin and its consequencesRevelation and Inspiration p.6
It is its conviction that there is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ's sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only 'when we believe.' It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be. It is always on His blood and righteousness alone that we can rest.Miserable-Sinner Christianity in the Hands of the Rationalists, chapter III in Perfectionism, Part One, vol. 7 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (New York: Oxford University Press, repr., 2000), 113-114
What it says of Scripture is, not that it is "breathed into by God" or is the product of the Divine "inbreathing" into its human authors, but that it is breathed out by God, "God breathed," the product of the creative breath of God. In a word, what is declared by this fundamental passage is simply that the Scriptures are a Divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Section 2
The effort to explain away the Bible's witness to its plenary inspiration reminds one of a man standing safely in his laboratory and elaborately expounding -possibly by the aid of diagrams and mathematical formulae -how every stone in an avalanche has a defined pathway and may easily be dodged by one of some presence of mind. We may fancy such an elaborate trifler's triumph as he would analyze the avalanche into its constituent stones, and demonstrate of stone after stone that its pathway is definite, limited, and may easily be avoided. But avalanches unfortunately, do not come upon us, stone by stone, one at a time, courteously leaving us opportunity to withdraw from the pathway of each turn: but all at once, in a roaring mass of destruction. Just so we may explain away a text or two which teach plenary inspirationInspiration and Authority of the Bible, Section 2
plenary inspiration of the Bible, i.e. the doctrine that the Bible is inspired not in part but fully, in all its elements alike, -things discoverable by reason as well as mysteries, matters of history and science as well as of faith and practice, words as well as thoughts.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Section 2
This church-doctrine of inspiration differs from the theories that would fain supplant it, in that it is not the invention nor the property of an individual, but the settled faith of the universal church of God;Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Ch 2
"The law," on the other hand, means in this New Testament use, just the whole body of the authoritative instruction which God has given men.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Ch 1
The whole nomenclature of prophecy presupposed, indeed, its vision-form. Prophecy is distinctively a word, and what is delivered by the prophets is proclaimed as the "word of Jehovah."Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Ch 1
One of the most grievous of the effects of sin is the deformation of the image of God reflected in the human mind, and there can be no recovering from sin which does not bring with it the correction of this deformation and the reflection in the soul of man of the whole glory of the Lord God Almighty.Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Chapter 1
Revelation thus appears, however, not as the mere reflection of the redeeming acts of God in the minds of men, but as a factor in the redeeming work of GodThe Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Chapter 1
Without general revelation, special revelation would lack that basis in the fundamental knowledge of God as the mighty and wise, righteous and good, maker and ruler of all things, apart from which the further revelation of this great God's interventions in the world for the salvation of sinners could not be either intelligible, credible or operative.The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Chapter 1
the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion. Or rather, to speak more exactly, it announces itself as the revealed religion, as the only revealed religion; and sets itself as such over against all other religions, which are represented as all products, in a sense in which it is not, of the art and device of man.The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Chapter 1
The difficulties we feel with regard to Predestination are not derived from the Word. The Word is full of it, because it is full of God, and when we say God and mean God - God in all that God is - we have said Predestination.Selected Shorter Writings - I
The English word "God" is derived from a root meaning to call, and indicates simply the object of worship, one whom men call upon or invoke. The Greek word which it translates in the pages of the New Testament, however, describes this objection of worship as Spirit; and the Old Testament Hebrew word, which this word in turn represents, conveys, as its primary meaning, the idea of power. On Christian lips, therefore, the word "God" designates fundamentally the almighty Spirit who is worshiped and whose aid is invoked by men.
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