The ambition of this book is to describe how the Bible can be self-authenticating. This is intended to answer the worry of how the Bible can be known to be true, be known to be the inerrant word of God, without recourse to heavy intellectual research and argumentation. This is not to say that the author rejects historical reasoning or defences of the canon and text of the Bible. He devotes Part 2 of his book to questions of the formation of the canon and textual criticism, and he devotes Part 3 to common arguments for the authority of Scripture from Jesus’ estimate of the Old Testament and the apostolicity of the New Testament. Yet such arguments and evidences are in danger of being incomplete and rest upon a good deal of knowledge. How does the average believer come to accept the Bible as the word of God?
The question of direct awareness of the divine character of the Bible may seem to put us in the same territory as Reformed Epistemology, and Piper does base one chapter on the ‘Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit’. However, Piper’s answer is not that of Reformed Epistemology, or at least not that of Alvin Plantinga, that the Holy Spirit witnesses to the believer that the Scriptures are true. The answer of Piper, broadly, is that the Bible exhibits the titular “peculiar glory”, which can be seen to be divine and so self-authenticates the Bible’s divine origin. This peculiar glory, if I understand the author correctly (and I’m not sure I do), is the way in which God subverts expectations by reaching into history and touching humans in the everyday. In Part 5, the author describes how this peculiar glory can be seen in the various aspects of the Scriptures.
It may be the philosopher in me, but this all seems to me to be rather woolly and inexpertly articulated. Whilst Piper multiplies examples of what he calls “peculiar glory”, he never seems to tie down a definition as to what it actually is (and what it isn’t). It is also not clear on what basis one should conclude that it testifies to the divine origin of the Bible. The “peculiar” aspect of the “glory” implies that it does not meet with our a priori expectations of divinity, so in what sense can it be the litmus test of divinity? If the argument amounts to know more than “the Bible presents a really nice description of who God is and what he does” then it doesn’t really amount to anything at all.
I do not doubt there is a degree of self-authentication in the way that the Bible interacts with believers. It is important that in some sense the Bible has the “ring of truth” or “makes sense” but what Piper has done seems so poorly articulated that it adds almost nothing to the discussion. Despite the high praise of the book on the back cover, I personally cannot understand how this book can be helpful either for apologetics or for strengthening believers.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)