So far much of the article has been on the side of definition and assertion. In the next sections of the article, Hodge and Warfield offer proofs and evidence. They start with the text of Scripture itself and its self-claims. The New Testament authors “continually assert” that the Old Testament is the word of God. The apostles, the writers of the New Testament, also consistently claim to speak for God. Hodge and Warfield next point to Scripture’s congruity despite its having so many human authors over such a long stretch of time. They also refer to the work of others who demonstrate Scripture’s compatibility with the natural sciences. Finally, they turn to church history, running through the litany of those from the church fathers on down through the Reformers who held to Scripture as the very words of God. They reach the following conclusion concerning the inspired and inerrant text: “This has been from the first the general faith of the historical church and of the Bible-loving, spiritual people of God. The very letter of the word has been proved from ancient times to be a tremendous power in human life.”

Having said all this, Hodge and Warfield can now turn to the issue of criticism, the section of the essay entitled “Critical Objections Tried.” After this essay, Warfield returned to the subject of critical objections and responses again and again. In summarizing his contributions here, a number of things can be noted. First, Warfield does not advocate a naive view of inspiration or of biblical studies and scholarship. Warfield was well schooled in the difficulties and problems the text presents to biblical scholars. He was well aware of discrepancies in the biblical narrative, be they the different numbers given in Old Testament accounts or problems of harmonizing the Synoptic Gospels. He was well aware of the problems of textual criticism. Scholars sometimes refer to this as “lower criticism,” the challenge of the differences between manuscripts of the Bible in the original documents. Warfield wrote a book on textual criticism and was so bold as to publish an article showing why the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20) is inauthentic and should be discarded. He even admits that this means “we have an incomplete document in Mark’s Gospel.” What’s more, Warfield published this article in the very conservative and very fundamentalist Sunday School Times. Moisés Silva, himself a rather prominent New Testament scholar, has come to the conclusion that Warfield has espoused anything but a naive view of inspiration, adding, “The contemporary debate regarding inerrancy appears hopelessly vitiated by the failure—in both conservative and nonconservative camps—to mark how carefully nuanced were Warfield’s formulations.”¹⁰

Warfield offers a succinct treatment of the challenges raised by higher criticism in his 1894 article in The Presbyterian Review, “The Divine and Human in the Bible.” The Bible is fully and entirely human and fully and entirely divine continuously and harmoniously. This again is Warfield’s doctrine of concursus. Warfield puts it this way: the Bible is “a divine-human book in which every word is at once divine and human.” Ignoring this in either direction, Warfield observes, ends in disaster.