The doctrine of Scripture — revelation, and why the Bible is enough

Every Christian lives by some authority. When a question comes — what is God like, how am I saved, whom may I marry, is this prophet genuine — something settles it. For some it is the pastor, for some the family, for some the most recent voice on social media. The doctrine of Scripture asks what should settle it, and why.

This article is about revelation in general and the Bible's place within it. How the Bible came to be written — inspiration and inerrancy — is covered in its own article; here we will only touch on it.

God makes himself known

Christianity begins not with human searching but with divine speaking. We know God because he has chosen to show himself. Theologians distinguish two ways he does it.

General revelation

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). Creation itself is a kind of speech — "there is no speech, nor are there words", David says, and yet "their voice goes out through all the earth" (Psalm 19:3-4).

Paul builds an argument on this. God's "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Add to that the moral law written on the heart, to which conscience bears witness (Romans 2:14-15).

General revelation is real, universal and enough to leave everyone accountable. African traditional religion has long known a Supreme Being — Olodumare, Chukwu, Ngai — and missionaries did not need to introduce the idea of a Creator. But general revelation has limits. It tells you that God is powerful and that you have fallen short. It does not tell you his name, his plan, or how a guilty person can be forgiven. The sky does not preach the cross.

Special revelation

So God also speaks particularly: to Abraham, through Moses, by the prophets, in mighty acts like the exodus — and finally in a person. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2).

Notice the contrast. The earlier speaking was partial and varied; the speaking in the Son is final. Jesus is not one more prophet in the line. He is the word to which all the prophets pointed (John 1:1, 14).

Where do we meet that word now? In Scripture. The Old Testament is the record and interpretation of God's earlier speaking; the New Testament is the apostolic witness to the Son, written by those he commissioned. The Bible is not the only way God has ever revealed himself, but it is the only form of special revelation we now possess that is fixed, public and checkable.

The four attributes of Scripture

If the Bible is God's word written, certain things follow. Protestant theology has traditionally summarised them under four headings. They are worth knowing by name, because each one answers a different mistake.

1. Necessity — we need it

Without special revelation we could not know the gospel. "How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?" (Romans 10:14). Nature tells you God exists; it does not tell you that Jesus rose.

Necessity also means the Christian life needs Scripture continually, not only at conversion. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). Jesus quoted that while starving in the wilderness. Scripture was not decoration for him; it was food.

2. Clarity — we can understand it

The older word is perspicuity: Scripture is clear enough, in what is necessary for salvation, that ordinary believers can understand it. "The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple" (Psalm 119:130).

This was one of the explosive claims of the Reformation. If the Bible is clear, then a farmer can read it and know the gospel without depending on a priest to decode it. William Tyndale, according to John Foxe's account, told a learned opponent he would cause a ploughboy to know more of Scripture than he did. That is the doctrine of clarity with its sleeves rolled up.

The Westminster Confession (1646) states it carefully:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.— Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.7

Notice what this does not say. It does not say every passage is easy, or that you need no teachers, or that you will never be wrong. It says the Bible is not a code that only specialists can crack.

3. Sufficiency — it is enough

This is the attribute most under pressure today. Sufficiency means that Scripture contains everything we need to know for salvation and for living a life that pleases God. Paul says Scripture makes us "wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" and equips the believer "for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Not most good works. Every one.

Sufficiency does not mean the Bible tells you everything — it will not teach you engineering or which job offer to accept. It means that nothing God requires of you is hidden somewhere else. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law" (Deuteronomy 29:29).

The practical force is liberating. No pastor, prophet or tradition can bind your conscience with a duty God never gave. If a church says you must pay a fee to be prayed for, wear certain colours, avoid certain foods or obey a "divine instruction" on whom to marry, sufficiency says: show me where God said so. If he did not, you are free.

4. Authority — it has the last word

Because Scripture is God speaking, it carries his authority. To disbelieve or disobey it is to disbelieve or disobey him. Jesus treated it so: "Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35). He settled arguments with "it is written" and "have you not read?"

Authority is not the same as being the only voice. Christians rightly listen to creeds, teachers and the wisdom of the church. But when those voices conflict with Scripture, Scripture wins. Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521 said that unless he was convinced by Scripture or plain reason, his conscience was captive to the word of God. That is the shape of biblical authority: not "I may believe whatever I like", but "I am bound to this, even against the powerful".

Sola scriptura — and what it is not

The Reformation slogan sola scriptura, "Scripture alone", is often misunderstood by its friends and its critics.

It means that Scripture is the only infallible rule and the final court of appeal for faith and practice. It does not mean Scripture is the only authority of any kind. The Reformers quoted the church fathers constantly, wrote confessions, and gladly confessed the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds. Tradition is valued as a secondary, fallible authority — a wise elder you listen to carefully, not a judge who can overrule the law.

Some writers distinguish this from solo scriptura: the idea that the individual, with a Bible and no one else, is the final judge of what it means. That approach ignores two thousand years of Christian reading and usually ends in each person's private opinion. It is not what the Reformers taught, and it is why the same Protestant movement that championed the open Bible also produced catechisms, confessions and trained ministers.

Catholic and Orthodox views, fairly stated

Catholics do not believe the Bible is merely human or that the church is above it. Vatican II's Dei Verbum (1965) teaches that Scripture and Tradition flow from the same divine source, and that the teaching office of the church serves the word of God rather than standing over it. Their concern is that Scripture needs an authorised interpreter, and they point to texts like 2 Thessalonians 2:15, where Paul commends traditions passed on "by spoken word or by our letter".

The Orthodox see Scripture as the heart of Holy Tradition, the living memory of the church, guarded through the ecumenical councils and expressed in worship. They are wary of setting Scripture against the church that read, copied and canonised it.

The Protestant reply is not that these concerns are foolish. It is that the spoken apostolic traditions Paul mentions are no longer accessible to us except through what was written; that councils and popes have contradicted one another, while Scripture does not contradict itself; and that Jesus himself held the authoritative religious leaders of his day accountable to the written word (Mark 7:8-13). The question is not whether the church matters. It is whether anything other than Scripture can be infallible.

Scripture and "thus says the Lord"

In many African churches, the most immediate question about Scripture is not Rome but the prophet. Words of knowledge, dreams, visions and personal prophecies are part of ordinary church life, and some of what is said is attributed directly to God: "the Lord says you will travel this year", "God told me this marriage is not his will", "the Spirit has revealed that your aunt is behind your troubles".

How does the doctrine of Scripture apply? Here Christians genuinely differ, and both sides should be stated fairly.

Two honest positions

Cessationists hold that the revelatory gifts — apostleship, prophecy in the sense of new revelation, tongues — served to establish the church and its Scriptures and ceased with the apostolic age. On this view, what is called prophecy today is at best Spirit-prompted application of Scripture, and at worst presumption.

Continuationists, including Pentecostals and charismatics, hold that the gifts of 1 Corinthians 12–14 continue until Christ returns (1 Corinthians 13:8-12). Many careful continuationists — Wayne Grudem is a well-known example — argue that New Testament prophecy is different in kind from Scripture: it is a real prompting from God, but reported in fallible human words, and so must be weighed (1 Corinthians 14:29). It never carries the authority of "it is written".

The striking thing is how much these two positions agree on the point that matters most. Neither accepts that new revelation can add to the faith "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Neither allows a prophetic word to stand above the Bible. Both say: test it.

How to weigh a word

A simple pattern drawn from Scripture:

1. Does it agree with Scripture? God does not contradict himself. A word that requires what the Bible forbids, or forbids what the Bible allows, is not from him (Galatians 1:8).
2. Does it exalt Christ? The Spirit's work is to glorify Jesus (John 16:14). A message that centres on the prophet's power, or on wealth and victory without the cross, should make you cautious.
3. Is it weighed by others? Prophecy in the New Testament is spoken in the gathered church and tested by it (1 Corinthians 14:29-33), not whispered privately to bind one person.
4. Does it bind your conscience? If a word demands obedience as though God's own commandment were at stake, sufficiency says you may decline. God has already told you what he requires.
5. What is its fruit? "You will recognise them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16) — both the prophet's life and what the word produces in the hearers.

Byang Kato, the Nigerian theologian who served as general secretary of the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) and then of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar before his early death in 1975, warned that African Christianity would be strong only if it stayed anchored in the Bible as its final authority. He was not opposing the Spirit. He was insisting that the Spirit's own book be allowed to govern the church he indwells.

Why it matters

The doctrine of Scripture can sound like an argument for theologians. It is in fact a doctrine of freedom and security.

It frees you from every voice that would bind you with burdens God never placed: the prophet who demands a seed offering, the tradition that adds rules, the culture that subtracts commands. It secures you, because the foundation of your faith is not a feeling, a vision or a personality, all of which change, but a word that "stands for ever" (Isaiah 40:8).

And it puts the Bible back where it belongs — not on the shelf as an object of reverence, nor on the pulpit as a springboard for something else, but in your hands, open, read, believed and obeyed. "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105). A lamp is no use if you leave it switched off.