56 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
our final authority. Our authority now becomes our own ideas of the
direction the New Testament was heading but never quite reached.
This has not been the historic position of Bible-believing Protestant
churches. In fact, they have opposed such a position. In order to guard
against making our authority something other than the Bible, major con-
fessions of faith have insisted that the words of God in Scripture are our
authority, not some position arrived at after the Bible was finished. This
is the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, or “the Bible alone,” as
our ultimate authority for doctrine and life. The Westminster Confession
of Faith says:
The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own
glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in
Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced
from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added,
whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.^7More recently, the widely acknowledged Chicago Statement on Biblical
Inerrancy said:
We affirm that God’s revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progres-
sive. We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revela-
tion, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any
normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New
Testament writings.^8But this trajectory position would have the later standard (the supposed
“goal” to which the New Testament was headed) contradict earlier rev-
elation (which limited certain roles in the church to men).
The doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society says:
The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God writ-
ten and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.^9(^7) Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 3, paragraph 6, italics added.
(^8) Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, article 5, cited in Journal of the Evangelical
Theological Society 21/4 (December 1978): 290-291.
(^9) From the Evangelical Theological Society website (www.etsjets.org, italics added, accessed
2-18-06).