Continuing our discussion of John Baillie’s views on revelation (see here) let’s turn to his thoughts on the Bible as the vehicle for revelation. Recall that for Baillie, revelation is God’s self-disclosure to humanity, and that this self-disclosure is mediated through the events of salvation history as they are interpreted and understood by the prophetic and apostolic witnesses:

We have accepted the view that the completed act of divine revelation consists in the intercourse of event and interpretation. God’s revealing activity is recognised by the Christian not only in the mighty acts which He performed for our redemption but in His illumination of the prophetic and apostolic mind. He so chose Israel that He not only led them out of Egypt but also enabled Moses and the prophets to grasp the significance of that exodus. He so loved the world that He not only sent His Son but at the same time enabled the apostles to grasp the significance of that mission. (Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 110)

Turning to the Bible, Baillie says that it is the record of the witness to God’s saving acts:

After the illumination was the witness. The illumination as integral to that to which the witness was borne, but the witness itself came afterwards. There was indeed a spoken witness before there was a written one, but it is with the latter that we are at the moment concerned. The Bible is the written witness to that intercourse of mind and event which is the essence of revelation. (p. 110)

This might lead us to think that the Bible is to be thought of as a purely human witness to revelation and that there is no room for talk of the Bible’s “inspiration,” but Baillie continues:

The witness itself is a human activity and as such fallible. Nevertheless we cannot believe that God, having performed His mighty acts and having illumined the minds of prophet and apostle to understand their true import, left the prophetic and apostolic testimony to take care of itself. It were indeed a strange conception of the divine providential activity which would deny that the Biblical writers were divinely assisted in their attempt to communicate to the world the illumination which, for the world’s sake, they had themselves received. The same Holy Spirit who had enlightened them unto their own salvation must also have aided their efforts, whether spoken or written, to convey the message of salvation to those whom their words would reach. This is what is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture. (p. 111)

What Baillie is at pains to deny, though, is the doctrine of plenary inspiration, or inerrancy, which he defines as the view that “the control exercised by the Holy Spirit was so complete and entire as to overrule all human fallibility, making the writers perfect mouthpieces of the infallible divine self-communication.” (p. 111)

What is at issue here, it seems to me, is a particular case of the more general question of how we understand God’s sovereignty and his action in the world. Does God act in such a way as to override all human freedom, or does his revelation depend in some measure on a free human response? If we say the latter, then it seems there has to be room for fallibility in the biblical witness. God’s self-communication was conveyed through human beings with their inherent limitations of knowledge, understanding and ability to communicate. Nevertheless, Baillie still wants to say that the biblical writers were inspired, it’s just that inspiration does not render their humanity inoperative. As Augustine said of John the Apostle, “Because he was inspired he was able to say something; but because he who was inspired remained a man, he could not present the full reality, but only what a man could say about it.”

If we’re going to talk about the “infallibility” of the Bible at all, it would seem, on Baillie’s account, to mean something like “a trustworthy and reliable witness to God’s revelatory acts and their proper meaning.” In a sense, the authority of the Bible is de facto before it is de jure, at least as far as we’re concerned:

The Scriptures are holy because they are the vehicle through which the Gospel is communicated to us. We know nothing of Christ except what comes to us through the Bible, all later communication of Christian knowledge being dependent upon this original record. Hence there is no outside standard by which we can measure the adequacy of the Biblical communication. The judgement we pass upon its details can only be in the light of the whole. (p. 117)

To be a Christian just is to take the Bible as normative in its revelation of God’s will, purpose and character.

But this immediately raises the question of whether we must (or can) separate the inspired parts of the Bible from the uninspired, fallible bits. Baillie suggests that whatever some may have claimed, in practice no one regards all parts of the Bible as equally inspired:

We may safely accept Luther’s criterion that the revelatory quality of each part of the Bible is to be judged according to the measure in which it “preaches Christ” (Christum trebit)… There are indeed many things in the Bible that seem to have no revelatory quality at all, yet no exercise could be more unprofitable, or indeed more artificial, than to try to make a list of them. (p. 119)

He even seems to suggest that any part of the Bible is potentially revelatory, since God can, in principle, speak to us anywhere, but no Christian actually finds all parts of the Bible revelatory, much less equally revelatory.

Nevertheless, we will be required to separate the husk from the kernel when we reject, e.g. the “three-storey” cosmology of some of the biblical writings, or its apparently pre-Copernican astronomy. Even the most conservative believer does some of this.

What Ballie’s account does, I think, is provide us with a way of understanding revelation that puts the Bible in its proper light. If we understand revelation as God’s self-disclosure, then we will see the Bible as inspired and authoritative precisely as it is the vehicle of that self-disclosure, rather than as a sacred and infallible textbook of geology, biology, history, et cetera. This view of revelation tends to render moot debates about whether the Gospel chronlogies can be precisely harmonized or how Cain found his wife. Baillie concludes that “instead of saying that ‘Scripture as a whole is the Whole with which Revelation is to be identified,’ we shall prefer to say of Scripture, as itself says of John the Baptist,…He was not that light, but was to bear witness to that light.” (p. 125)