That brings us to the last attribute of Scripture: authority. You could likely make the case that this is the fundamental attribute from which the other four stem. Scripture as authority means that it speaks with solid credibility and legitimacy to all that it addresses. Scripture as authority means that it demands something of its readers, something that other books don’t demand. Scripture insists that its readers submit to it. The reason Scripture makes such a unique demand is that it makes a unique claim in reference to its authorship. Scripture claims to be the word of God, to be an inspired text. Scripture’s authority derives from its authorship, which leads you back to those two words that Warfield engaged and that dominate the discussion relating to Scripture in the modern world—inspiration and inerrancy. Chapters 3 and 4 take up the discussion of inerrancy; this chapter and the next concern inspiration.

The Challenge of the Modern Age

Scripture’s unique claim on its readers and its unique authorship make it a bit of a challenging book in the modern age. That’s actually an understatement. Scripture’s uniqueness is at the heart and center of the challenge it faces in the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel introduced a philosophy of history that became quite popular during and after his lifetime. The particular idea is that ideas evolve through a process that he calls the dialectic. One idea dominates the prevailing worldview and outlook, which Hegel called the thesis. A different idea begins to counter that prevailing idea, which Hegel calls the antithesis. Over time and usually involving painful adjustments the two ideas begin to merge, which he terms a synthesis. The new synthesis becomes the thesis, which, you guessed it, eventually faces a new antithesis, and the process continues on and on. Hegel saw this process as always spiraling up, as always making progress.

To illustrate Hegel’s theory, consider how Karl Marx applied it to economics. According to Marx, feudalism (the thesis) reigned in the medieval era, followed by capitalism (the antithesis) in the modern era, which then, after battling it out, merged into socialism (the synthesis). Another illustration concerns the one Hegel himself used. The ancient world, Hegel observed, was the mythological age, the age of gods (the thesis). The latter ancient era and the medieval period may be marked as the religious age, the age of the one God (the antithesis). Hegel declared the modern age as the age of science (the synthesis). In Hegel’s worldview, there’s always progress. It makes no sense whatsoever to look in the rearview mirror. It’s silly, infantile, to live in the past. Now comes the application to how the Bible gets perceived in the modern world. The Bible belongs to the past, not to the present. As an ancient book, it does not speak with credibility and legitimacy (authority) to life in the modern world.