Fascinating David.
What does concursus mean? I can’t even find a useful definition in my usual on-line dictionaries.

Doctrinal disagreements, like the one currently going on between Piper and Wright, assume inerrancy. They assume that every jot and tittle of scripture is exactly where it is supposed to be and the debate centers on interpreting those jots and tittles. What did Paul mean, exactly, in this section of Galatians, or that section of Romans. If we replace inerrancy with something like you mention, could you please explain how this would alter the nature of disagreements between men like Piper and Wright, or between guys like Luther and Erasmus on the specific meaning of “Righteousness of God”
It seems to me that when the framework is inerrancy that every word, every case ending, everything about the text is highly important. How would that change with your interpretation?

I find a lot to like in this approach, though I have some concerns. I surprise myself somewhat by arguing for a more divine origin than this framework seems to require (I am usually arguing the other ‘human’ side of the coin). God didn’t pick the Bible at random, which he presumably could do through the Holy Spirit as this suggests, speaking to us through Henry V or Huckleberry Finn or the R volume of an encyclopedia. The Bible is not just what God chose to use, but is a record (however human) of God’s interaction with his chosen people and especially as Jesus.
I agree that God’s inspiration continues as we read the text, especially in community, and is in fact a necessary ingredient if the text is really going to be Scripture for us. That said, I still think inspiration involves something that happened as the texts were being written and edited. I am not arguing for anything like verbal plenary inspiration. It may in some places be as simple as human beings writing down, under their own power and in their own words, what they experienced God doing. But just like with the discussion about origins and creation, we have to recognize layered causes. It is not a zero sum game. Seeing Scripture as more human does not make it less divine. Indeed, it becomes more expressive of the incarnate God we worship.

Robin,
In case your question doesn’t get answered, I would say that reducing or discarding the practice of proof texting would be one manifestation of Scot’s approach to Scripture – and this would be a very good thing. A reduced focus on systematic theology would also result – also a good thing. Instead, scholars and laypersons alike could approach the Bible holistically, attending to broader themes than being caught up in theological minutiae. Biblical scholarship that sheds new light on the cultural and historical background in which a text was written, perhaps altering how we understand the specific import and meaning of the text, could be welcomed rather than treated with suspicion.

@Robin – NT Wright is not, in my understanding, an inerrantist. In fact, I think what I’m trying to suggest here is largely consistent with Wright’s little book on scripture (title escaping me at the moment). I think you have a good instinct here in that the organic content matters. It matters that we understand what Paul was trying to communicate. Building doctrine however then involves discerning what the Spirit is saying through what Paul was trying to communicate. It is a “theological” reading of the text in which the text is taken up into the economy of salvation in ways that transcend but do not eviscerate the intentions of any particular human “author”. I think this is a very “conservative” position that avoids some pitfalls ofscholasticism.

…sorry, I see here that this is actually dopderbeck’s posting under Scot’s profile.

@RJS – concursus is the idea that in the inspiration of scripture God employed secondary causality to produce the very words of the text that God desired – I.e. that God concurred with the human authors in the production of the text itself. I do think that a doctrine of scripture that wrestled with God’s sovereignty must employ some such notion. However, Garfield’s approach can justifiably be criticized, imho, as being very close to a kind of mechanical dictation.

David, let me see if I’m following you rightly. Scripture is “inerrant” towards its purpose, which is directing us to trust Christ (a la John’s gospel), and forming him functionally within us. Scripture does this as we take it for what it is, which is both (i) a collection of human writings of a variety of genres (not of which are modern scientific journals or journalism), and, more importantly, (ii) a creation and instrument of the Spirit for the above purpose.
Further, because neither the Spirit’s nor the human contributors’ purpose is the same as modern journalism or scientific journals, we shouldn’t approach or ‘judge’ scripture that way. Rather, we should approach scripture with the following in mind: the human authors’ limitations and purpose (sometimes revealed by the author expressly and/or by genre) and, more so, with the larger purpose of the Spirit.
So what what we might call ‘errors’ from a journalistic or scientific text standpoint are really failures on our end to appreciate what scripture is and what it is given by the Spirit and its human authors to do.
Am I getting you or leaving anything important out?

David,
Like T (#8), I want to see if I am getting your main idea. On the human side of Scripture creation, we can argue for what is in and the best readings of the extant manuscripts. We can note precise arguing with minute things, e.g., Paul writing to the Galatians that “…the Scripture does not say ‘and to seeds’ meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed,’ meaning one person…”(Gal 3:16). But this does not mean we invest “inerrancy” in the sacred documents, but inerrancy resides in the dynamic interplay of the received documents (confirmed by the Church), the ministry of the Spirit and the reading (believing) community/or reader. For us (Protestants) we want to know the boundary of the specific documents (“the writings”) and generally it is 66 books, not 78, and not the sacred literature of other religions or Shakespeare’s plays or movies like *Matrix.* So, inerrancy is more personal and relational, than doctrinal and static. Am I following you?

David (#5)
Wright’s book is titled “The Last Word” (in the US at least).
I posted on it here: The Bible and Authority
It is a good little book. Wright has a high view of scripture, but is not tied up in the American debates on inerrancy.

Great post. Another example:
One of my favorite movies is Gettysburg. Watching Gettysburg is a much different experience than reading stacks of official documents and eyewitness accounts about the battle.
Some scenes in the movie depict events that did not occur or did not occur at the time the movie presents them. Some characters are composite characters or characters created to aid the flow of the story. Almost none of the dialog is historically correct because no one was there to record precisely what was said.
Yet few would disagree that Gettysburg gives a far better sense of the the overarching significance of events and the meaning behind the events than does a tedious dry reading of historical facts.
We make movies about historical events all the time and seem to have little problem such creations. Criticism usually comes when we don’t like the particular meaning to events by the film, not because the movie is factually imprecise.
Do we really think pre-literate cultures were consumed with generating dry factually precise accounts of events … scrubbing stories of all “factual errors?” What if many of the biblical stories are the pre-literate oral versions of our modern day “historical movies?” What does it mean to ask about inerrancy in such a context?

Dopderbeck said ?Scripture unfailingly – infallibly – directs us to faith in Jesus Christ and to living conformity with the image of Christ.?
Not even close. There are many who have clearly failed to recognize the voice of god in the scriptures and therefore used the text to commit crimes and offences against many.
If we are to look at scripture being infallible then we should probably look at the effect that scripture has had on the people who use it. Certainly there are those who seem to ?get it? and there are those who don?t. So not only is scripture fallible, it seems to me that it can be and is downright misleading to many. I can?t seem to see how that could have any sort of infallibility, it is most decidedly fallible.
Now one could argue that it is the interpretation of humans that is fallible and not the scripture, but that?s like saying I have a wonderful car but I am unable to drive it. It is clearly not a wonderful car for me.
I don?t know if I have a wax ear on this (or is that a tin nose), but it seems to me that scripture is inspirational. Inspired and inspirational. That does not imply its interpretation will be correct, only that it will beg interpretation.

DRT #12
Is the problem that scripture failed to lead us or that we failed to follow scriptures lead? This is a bit like investing all my funds in one stock against the advice of my financial planner and then when that stock tanks concluding that my financial planner is was fallible.

@T and John F. — T, I like what you’re saying here, but it sounds like a restating of conservative evangelical genre criticism, which I’m trying to get beyond a bit (not to discard, but to get beyond). John, I think your term “dynamic interplay” is a good one and gets close to what I’m trying to communicate.
@DRT — obviously, you are correct about the many historical errors of the Church (I am reading Thomas Asbridge’s new book on the Crusades right now, which highlights this problem perfectly….). This is certainly the Achilles Heel of any “dynamic” theology of scripture. The response has to be that it is not the Spirit who failed, but the Church. When I say the Spirit speaking through scripture unfailingly leads the Church, I don’t mean to say that the Church therefore is perfect. As Barth would say, we (the Church) must return “again and again” to scripture because we so often fail to hear and obey.
All these comments illustrate that we have to deal with a constellation of doctrinal issues whenever we try to construct a doctrine of scripture. It isn’t just about “inspiration,” it’s also more broadly about “revelation” and about ecclesiology and harmatiology and soteriology….. In other words, we have to talk about the “location” of scripture in God’s saving economy.

@Tim
“A reduced focus on systematic theology would also result – also a good thing. Instead, scholars and laypersons alike could approach the Bible holistically, attending to broader themes than being caught up in theological minutiae.”
You then introduce another conflict. What constitutes “minutiae” and what constitutes “narrative”? As I have seen this discussion play out, this becomes a proxy for the same disagreements (rules governing sexual behavior are minutiae, while mandates to feed the poor are narrative).
Part of the problem is that there is no one way to approach narrative. What constitutes a theological imperative narrative? A certain number of re-iterations? Larger stories devoted to the issue? Does Jesus have to reference it specifically?
Do certain styles of writing carry more literal weight? Wouldn’t such an approach essentially require decades of intense study before we can assign a level of authority to this or that section of scripture? Or do we find people we respect who have done the leg work, and take their word for it?
If the latter, how is that substantially different from the current approach?

Michael #13, I don’t think we even have to go that far to see the problem. People of good conscious routinely misinterpret scripture, often to the pain of others. All we have to do is look at the plethora of interpretations to realize it is quite subjective.
Moreover, the interpretation varies by the individual even when the individual is intensely trying to find and follow god’s will. The notion that a strongly held belief arrived at through intense confrontation with a infallible text is in itself the truth can be quite dangerous and I feel we should avoid all language to that effect.
So how do we tell the difference between people who know the true meaning of scripture and those who don’t? Which infallibility is true?

“Do we really think pre-literate cultures were consumed with generating dry factually precise accounts of events … scrubbing stories of all “factual errors?”
Christians have, for centuries, invested quite a bit of effort in scrubbing factual errors from the Bible. I see no reason why this would not have held true for God’s faithful in pre-literate societies.

dopderbeck @14 said: “It isn’t just about “inspiration,” it’s also more broadly about “revelation” and about ecclesiology and harmatiology and soteriology….. In other words, we have to talk about the “location” of scripture in God’s saving economy.”
I am viewing the ‘ologies you quote to be uses for the text, not attributes of the text. I think the point of the main post is to say thinks about the attributes of the text and in that case I would say it is inspired and inspirational, and is useful for inspiration concerning the various ‘ologies.
The location is for central inspiration concerning various ‘ologies.
Ever since we had the conversation regarding the first post in the Weslyan quad I have been trying to figure out the big difference in view. I think of the scripture being the least authoritative of the quads because the true meaning of scripture can never be objectively known. Therefore the role it plays in the economy of god is to form a base for inspiration, tradition, reason etc. By making it infallible or inerrent we then effectively put our reason as the most important element because each can claim that they are plainly reading the text and therefore are in possession of the infallible position. This effective usurpation while pretending that it is the text that is saying the conclusion is downright dangerous! If we are going to put our reason above the text then let’s do it plainly so we can examine it.
The text is a bunch of writing on paper. It is nothing. The bible is the interpretation of the writing on the paper and it is not infallible.

DRT,
I don’t think there’s too much of a problem saying that scripture itself should be primary, while recognizing the reality that some parts of what scripture is seeking to communicate will be harder to discern, with more risk of error, than others. It’s not true that scripture is “nothing” or that everything is wide open to the interpreter. For instance, someone can tell me that the scriptures, rightly interpreted, don’t even mention a person called Jesus, let alone say anything about his life, death and resurrection and their significance. No one sane and literate would believe such a claim because the text makes a wide range of claims about God and other things that really aren’t up to interpretation, assuming sanity. If your premise is that the scriptures say nothing that can’t be interpreted away, then your argument makes sense. But I don’t buy your premise.

@ kevin s. — but there is also more than one way to approach any kind of text. Take the entire collection of Biblical texts about marriage and divorce, for example. What are they? Are the all “legal” texts? Is Jesus teaching on the Mosaic law of divorce itself a new “law,” or is it some kind of “midrash” on the Mosaic law, or something else? Are the different Jesus sayings about divorce compatible with each other, and if the pornea clause is an exception, when does it apply? And does Paul expand the permissible reasons for divorce or not? Or is Paul’s epistolary teaching about divorce not a “legal” text? What is the relation of the Mosaic law in general to Jesus and Paul’s view(s) of the Law and to ethics under the new covenant? What for that matter is the relation between Jesus and Paul’s seemingly different views of the Mosaic Law?
I’m not highlighting this to argue for any particular view of divorce and remarriage, or for any kind of revisionist view of sexuality, but just to point out that complexity is always with us.

T#19
OK, I went too far and clearly the text is something. But I do contend that it is remarkably opaque once you get past the acknowledgement that it talks about Jesus.
My premise is that the text cannot be infallible or inerrant if people cannot interpret it or gain the infallible meaning from it. Further, the notion of infallibility or inerrancy is disingenuous since one can never know if they have that position so it is a net negative to call it that.

@dopderbeck #20
I agree that that is a complex issue, but I’m not sure how it is resolved by a narrative vs. minutiae dichotomy. Can you explain?

#16 DRT and #21
“Moreover, the interpretation varies by the individual even when the individual is intensely trying to find and follow god’s will. The notion that a strongly held belief arrived at through intense confrontation with a infallible text is in itself the truth can be quite dangerous and I feel we should avoid all language to that effect.”
The Scripture is infallible. No interpreter is infallible.
I sense the issue you have is not with the infallibility of Scripture but with people who justify their absolutist positions, claiming to have the mind of infallible Scripture.
Here I return to the notion of holding positions with tentative finality. I can never be thoroughly certain I’ve achieved perfect discernment. That should keep me open to further learning. But I can’t put every aspect of life on hold while I achieve perfect discernment. I must act. Therefore, I must approach life with some sense of finality on my positions. I act, which leads to reflection, which refines my next action, which leads to further reflection and so on. Scripture is our tutor.
Yes, Scripture does often seem opaque and mystifying. And when I was a child trying to learn from my parents I frequently messed up, not understanding things in context, unable to weigh competing concerns, and so on. Their instruction and modeling was opaque and mystifying. But that doesn’t mean my parents were fallible in what they were trying to teach me.
Now my human parents were indeed fallible in some of what they taught me. My point would be that God is infallible and that Scripture is infallible in what it teaches us about God, faith, salvation, and discipleship. Thus, Scripture is our infallible tutor. All Christian discernment must be in dialog with this infallible tutor, all the time recognizing that our best efforts to understand the tutor may be mistaken.

@kevin (#22) — it isn’t. The point is that the same criticism you make against scripture-as-narrative can be invoked against scripture-as-law or scripture-as-propositional-manual or whatever.
@Michael (#23) — good comment. But in light of my post I’d offer this nuance: The Holy Spirit is our infallible tutor, and the instrument of the Spirit’s teaching is the Holy Scriptures, such that the Bible’s character as unique, unfailing and true derives from the ongoing action of the Spirit.
There’s an important nuance here for me: the Bible is not infallible in an ontological sense as it sits on the shelf, as though we could open it to any random page and select from it some scattered propositions, all of which would correspond to everyday empirical observations in any and all fields of human rational inquiry. That is the view of scholasticism.
Rather, the Bible is infallible as it is employed by the Spirit in the economy of God’s salvation to teach us. “Word” and “Spirit” cannot be separated in God’s action of “revelation,” and the proper “location” of scripture is Church proclamation. This nuance on the one hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in “scientific” exegesis — which rules any Divine agency in connection with the text out of court — and on the other hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in very conservative evangelical approaches ala the Chicago Statement.
BTW, for a great example of the rationalism of “scientific” exegesis, check out this article in the current edition of Biblical Archeology Review, in which any belief in divine agency with respect to the Biblical text is branded as fundamentally irrational.

“All Christian discernment must be in dialog with this infallible tutor, all the time recognizing that our best efforts to understand the tutor may be mistaken.”
Amen.

dopderbeck,
I understand that you don’t want to do away with genre considerations but without the Spirit being involved at the authorship level why does genre of the text matter?
Without some level of human/Holy Spirit co-authorship how is the aim of leading people to faith in Christ and to be conformed to his image achieved?
Do you think the Spirit guided the collection of the canon? If he was involved at the collection level why not at the co-authorship level?
I am trying to wrap my brain around the view or scripture you are describing.
How would it impact interpretation of Paul and James regarding faith and works? Would we need to form theology the fits both writings or do we just say James had his views and Paul had opposite views and the Spirit will help us discern between these two view points?
Respectfully,
Cam

As much as I enjoy this type of topic, such discussions raise an even more fundamental one for me: How much does God actually care about how accurately we understand the nature of the Bible? When good and simple followers of Christ have trouble reading and understanding even the basic meaning of the translated language, is it likely that God expects most people to understand the subtleties we are discussing here? If not, does he really desire an elite class of smart people to function as intellectual priests for the masses? What does he require of us in these matters?
Going back to #19 and #21, what does seem pretty clear is that the Bible contains a lot of passages not only about Jesus but about loving God and serving “one another.” If we were doing those things more consistently, perhaps we would grow in the superior knowledge of God himself, taught by the Spirit himself. And perhaps God might later shed more light on the rest of our Bible mysteries.

Cam,
I don’t think that this view impacts the interpretation of Paul and James. But I also think that the idea that they have opposing views is the result of a reformation misinterpretation of Paul.

RJS,
It is fair to say Paul’s faith and works of law (national identity) and James’ faith and works (resulting actions) are different things.
My question was more to do with how do we form theology given a view of scripture where God isn’t a co-author. Do we need to consider the rest of scripture when interpreting?
God breathed is a tough term. Is Barth’s view more closer to God collecting the books of the canon and then the Spirit reveals Christ through those sole human works? So scripture isn’t so much God breathed but God breathes as it is read.
I guess I am having trouble grasping this.

One more try.
Premise – why would god limit himself to the scripture. I contend he would not and therefore they cannot be infallible.
Premise – God would not give us something to debate if what his infallible will was to have the debate, not the answer to the debate. The bible is more about questions, directions, considerations, not answers. Infallibility is something left to god. And I guess that is the point, that god in essence “did” the text. But it is plain that the text is not consistent. Therefore, if one were to adopt the infallibility hypothesis one would have to reject the notion that god is consistent in the way we understand consistency. Therefore, I consider it much more likely that god inspired the scripture in a way that provokes, and provokes, and.. to give us a direction toward understanding. If that is the common definition of inerrency or infallibility then we need to find a new word. Perhaps, inspired directionally, or god given thoughts….we cannot understand what it SAYS! WE can’t. Sorry for the caps but it is obvious that we can’t. The infallibility is perhaps the gesticulations it makes toward the truth. But that is not what most mean by inerrency and infallibility. Those words are one step removed and obliterate the truth if you believe in the way I do (an perhaps you do not). Remember, satan knows scripture better than any of us. That’s not what it is about.
Off the soap box…whew.
It still makes sense to me to say the inspired writing of the bible will give us a window into god unlike any other text. It is the purpose of these writings to do this. Why do we have to go the next step an claim infallibility????
Finally – a decent Captcha – Constructing nuacts

Cam,
Well David will have to answer for himself – but I think that different parts of scripture are inspired in different ways. I am not comfortable with the idea that scripture is only God breathed as it is read.
All of scripture is inspired in the collection into the canon, but there is more to it. The histories (Samuel, Kings, Chronicles) are distinct from the prophets, say Isaiah, not simply as a matter of genre but also as a matter of purpose and form. It is not necessary to attach the same kind of inspiration to recorded history as is attached to the words of a prophet of God. The proverbs and psalms are human responses to God and his work in creation – again, the idea of inspiration requires refinement.
In the letters of Paul and James (to choose specific examples) we have direct teachings about God, responses to specific circumstances, and asides among other things. Paul can be inspired (taught by God)in his teaching about God and the redeeming work of Christ – but use contemporary examples and situations. His illustration need not be mechanically inspired and his understanding of them need not be inerrant as long as they get the point across.
A one-size fits all view of inspiration seems to me part of the problem.

RJS (#31) — actually even Warfield recognized that the manner in which God inspired the writers of various parts of the Bible differed — and made the same distinction about prophets and NT writers (see McCormack’s discussion of this on p. 60 of the “Evangelicals and Scripture” volume).
And, the view I’m trying to explore here isn’t that scripture only becomes God-breathed as it is read. It’s more subtle than that, and has to do with what McCormack calls the “ontology” of scripture. Probably better to let McCormack speak for himself here (pp. 62-64 of the essay):

For Warfield . . . once the last of the writings found in the New Testament canon was finished . . . revelation was complete. As complete, it was — from that point on — the secure ‘possession’ of men. . . . For Barth, by contrast, what completes the circle of revelation is the creation of the human subject who hears and receives the word of God in faith and obedience, which means that the work of the Spirit in revelation is not complete once the Scriptures have been written. To use the traditional language, illumination is just as decisive a moment in the process of revelation as inspiration.

McCormack further explains how Barth’s prioritizing of Christology facilitates an ontology of scripture that incorporates both its human and divine elements:

As the Word of God in the sign of this prophetic-apostolic word of man, Holy Scripture is like the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ. It is nether divine only nor human only. Nor is it a mixture of the two nor a tertium quid between them. But in its own way and degree, it is very God and very man, that is, a witness of revelation which itself belongs to revelation. Now, to be sure, the “union” of the divine and the human in Scripture (of God’s Word and human word) does not result in the divinization of the human element any more than it does in the case of Christ’s humanity.

McCormack notes — and I agree — that there is not a huge gulf between the view he is proposing and the conservative evangelical view. However, he goes on to distinguish the “essentialism” inherent in Warfield’s view from the “actualism” underlying Barth’s, and suggests that Barth’s insight about prioritizing Christology in the doctrine of revelation was correct — and that seems right to me as well.
But I really encourage everyone to read the essay. It’s to my mind a sterling example of careful and nuanced theology.

“illumination is just as decisive a moment in the process of revelation as inspiration”
I think that makes sense to me, but I’m still getting hung up on what the nature of “inspiration” is in this view. If the text is not fully human, then in what way is it inspired? If it is inspired, why would it err? And if it errs in particulars, how are we to know that it does not err in the whole?
I have a lot of uneasiness when it comes to the “dynamic” part of all this. The Holy Spirit is the part of Christianity I think I am the most confused about. I have an almost knee-jerk reaction to most anything involving the “work” of the Spirit. I think this stems partly from being a scientist and a bit more rationalistic and partly because I don’t really have much experience with the Spirit (I think anyway, I really don’t know how to tell). Hence, the Bible is my firm connection with God, experiencing him through his word. It definitely doesn’t seem ideal but I don’t know what else to do, it certainly seems like the Bible is the only thing that one can ultimately fall on.

#24 dopderbeck
“Rather, the Bible is infallible as it is employed by the Spirit in the economy of God’s salvation to teach us.”
I agree about the role of the Spirit but being Presbyterian I’m reticent to be too explicit about the Spirit. Someone might think I’m pentecostal, for God’s sake!
Seriously, I almost included a statement about the role of the Spirit in my comment but didn’t. I fully agree. The Scripture is opened to us through the Spirit.
Captcha: bxrbrood modernist

Not to dilute this very important conversation.. it reminds me of the time I produced Charlton Heston in a reading of Crispin’s Day with the Sacramento Symphony. He missed a page turn, went back to the prior page, and RE-read the entire page (as I cringed). This was a live event that went horribly wrong.
Somewhere, there’s a lesson here on “infallibility” vs. our deeply fallible reading of the text.

@John (#35) — too funny!
@JHM (#33) — good comment. Folks who lean more towards Warfield on this point usually share your concern about the Bible as a fixed standard of reference. It is a fair concern and indeed was one of the basic theological issues implicated in the Reformation. Without the Church’s Magesterium, the Reformation emphasized the primacy of scripture (sola scriptura). All of us who are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, it seems to me, need to have some similar kind of understanding.
But, the Magesterial Reformers also were clear about the need for “illumination” by the Spirit in order to fully understand what the text is teaching. So, at least for the Magesterial Reformers, “sola scriptura” was never divorced from the ongoing action of the Spirit in illuminating the reader as to the text’s meaning. For them, scripture was fixed, but the human understanding of the text was not fixed, because understanding came not through human reason but through the illumination of the Spirit.
I think it’s difficult for us to put ourselves back into the Magesterial Reformer’s shoes to imagine why they had to make these moves. Their break from the Roman Church was monumental — far more traumatic than, say, some theologian today losing a job at a fundamentalist school because his doctrine of scripture smells fishy to them. The religious power, wealth and authority of the Roman Church from the time of Augustine to the time of the Reformers was truly universal in the West (though of course the Papacy had endured various crises mostly relating to relations with secular rulers). They had to explain why the institution was heir to the line of Bishops going back to Peter, that was extolled by all the great Patristic minds including Augustine, that produced the ecumenical councils, was no longer authoritative.
Their views, which we protestants today take for granted, were shockingly radical: the Bible, read by ordinary people aided by the Holy Spirit, was the final word. But if that was so, how could they explain centuries of the Roman Church getting it wrong and reading the Bible incorrectly? They had to argue that in more recent times, the Papacy and the Church had become corrupt, to the extent that the Spirit was now leading the invisible Church — a new concept — in a radically different direction. They could not neatly separate Word and Spirit because otherwise they’d be left to contend with the Roman Church’s magesterial interpretation of the Word.
By the 19th Century, Warfield and others like him were dealing with a different problem: the discoveries of science and the rise of higher criticism in protestantism. One could argue, in fact, that Warfield’s view reflects a later scholasticism that downplayed (but even then, didn’t eliminate) the Magesterial Reformer’s emphasis on the Spirit.
In this regard, we have to bring in the notion of the “perpiscuity” of scripture. For scripture to function as a final authority without a Church Magesterium, scripture must be clear or “perpiscuous.” The Magesterial Reformers held that scripture was sufficiently clear that anyone could learn by reading it the basics of salvation. This did not mean, however, that all parts of scripture were equally clear or easy to understand — indeed, many parts of scripture remained opaque without lots of study and the Spirit’s illumination.
The later scholastic Reformed divines, and the 19th Century Princetonians, including Warfield, agreed with this notion of perpiscuity, but arguably they expanded it somewhat by tying it to the prevalent “common sense realist” epistemology of their day. They assumed that the meaning of scripture would be evident to anyone with common sense once the necessary background information was understood. This assumption also carried with it a certain view of language and authorship that presumed essentially a one-to-one correpsondence between the “meaning” of a text and the “author’s” “intentions.” And this in turn reflected an assumption about the “authorship” of the various Biblical texts — that for the most part we can identify an individual human “author” of the various parts of the Bible (e.g., Moses as author of the Pentatuech). In effect, they tried to combat the higher critics on their own turf, using the tools of common sense realism.
It’s debateable whether the Princetonian Divines’ views were fully consistent with the Magesterial Reformers. From my reading of Luther, at least, I don’t think so. Luther was, in my view, quite pre-modern in his understanding of divine action and language. Calvin perhaps was more essentialist, but when you start reading the Institutes for the first time (at least for me) Calvin’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit is substantial.
None of this is to suggest that Barth’s “actualism” simply recovers the ground of the Magesterial Reformers. Barth is taking a different tack than Warfield in response to 19th and 20th century liberal protestantism, and is also working from a different, European intellectual milieu. As I’ve begun reading Barth, however, I’ve been struck by his continual references to Luther and by the extent to which Luther and Barth’s thought are consonant.
All of this long-winded comment is to say this: yes, the stability of revelation is an important concern. Yet, at the same time, the ongoing work of the Spirit in relation to scripture has always been an important Reformational theme. (Actually it’s always been an important theme in Catholic and Eastern theology as well….)
So why would the nuanced view of Barth that McCormack offers and that I’m exploring here matter? I think it matters if you are trying to deal with the scholarship about the Bible’s human construction and sources with integrity.
Take as just one example the debates about the “days” of creation. If you are a Warfieldian and not a YEC, eventually you’ll have to argue that “the author” of Genesis 1 “intended to communicate” a non-literal message about the “days.” That’s a tough row to hoe, not the least because we have no certain idea about the origins and authorship even of the canonical form of the text (though there are good, but debated, reasons to believe it was redacted by a “Priestly” community later in Israel’s history). (If you want to assert that Moses is basically the sole author of the Pentateuch, then you really have to reject essentially all contemporary scholarship about those texts and retreat into an intellectual bunker, which in my mind is not an option).
If you’re more of a Barthian, you’ll probably be more comfortable acknowledging that there is no single identifiable “author” of the Gen. 1 narrative, and that the many people and communities responsible for the construction and transmission of the story — in its earlier oral forms and then eventually, probably much later, in its final redacted canonical form — may have had very different ideas about the meaning of the “days.” We understand this text as “non-literal” not necessarily because we know for sure what some “original author” intended, but because the Spirit has been working in the Church to supply more information about the text, its relation to other ANE creation stories, and about the natural world, and is leading the Church to develop an understanding of what God reveals about Himself through this text. You could look at this under the rubric of “illumination,” but it seems to me this requires the kinds of untenable assumptions about authorship that I mentioned above. But either way, the organic text remains central and the Spirit’s action is essential.

Great conversation. I’m wondering if the economy of words like “infallible” and “inerrant” has run its course. Even with all the debates regarding scripture over the last 500 years, we have not set aside the Bible in favor of reading from Harry Potter or the Republic (Plato is one of my captchas).
I believe our conversation will become even more fruitful when we consider the contexts where scripture is utilized. When we think about the Bible as it is read when we gather for worship, when it is proclaimed from the pulpit, the question of what the Scriptures actually are becomes much more acute. As a preacher am I called to teach the Bible on Sunday mornings? Or am I called to proclaim Jesus Christ? What exactly are the Scriptures doing on Sunday morning (or, more correctly, what is God doing)? How those questions are answered go a long way in indicating what sort of book God has given us.
On another note, my most depressing Jesus Creed moment came when I read the BAR article link (above #24). How is it that John Calvin and Karl Barth did not end up like that guy? I’m convinced it is because they had to preach. What a different book we have when two or three are gathered.

dopderbeck,
I think you have dealt with most of my questions. I think you are talking about both a view of the nature of scripture and a hermeneutical approach, right? They end up being linked.
Do you think authorial intent still matters? Just weighted differently?
In discussions about inerrancy and infallibility, the only way it made any sense was in terms of authorial intent or more specifically Authorial intent (Big A=God) opposed to (little a=human). Since the bible is both human and divine in authoriship the inerrant/infallible message is tied up in understanding what message God intended us to get–the Big “A”uthorial intent. We start with the “a”uthor(s) intent, context, culture, and worldview as inputs into interpretation but ultimately we need the Spirit to guide us to this Big “A”uthorial intent.
As the same time we should expect an amount of accommodation (even as a part of the human author’s intent) through which God’s intended message is conveyed. All language involves accommodation of the original idea for clear communication.

@Kevin S.
It seems that several people have commented in answer to your initial question to me. I agree with several of their points, but to keep my own answer to the point, I would say two things:
1) I think the Protestant doctrine of perpiscuity needs to be re-examined in light of the severe fragmentation of Protestant views since the reformation, as well as in light of new Biblical Scholarship that calls into question old views. Even outside historical critical scholarship, things like The New Perspective on Paul challenge doctrine that has been accepted for centuries. My own view is, even on issues such as the finer points on salvation, scripture is not perpiscuitous. Nevertheless, I do think that if one did their absolute best though to follow Jesus’ wholeheartedly as a disciple with an honest approach to his teachings as well as the apostles’, that they shouldn’t have any concerns as to their own salvation even should they be wrong on some details concerning how salvation actually works.
2) This one’s short and sweet There’s no reason to expect that interpreting the Bible should be easy.