…the Church’s fundamental response to the Enlightenment Bible must be refusal: The Enlightenment Bible is not our Bible. Scripture has many authors, it makes use of many sources, and it is written””if we may be excused an unhelpful anachronism””in various genres. Academic scholarship has pointed all of this out, sometimes with insight, often to the point of tedium, and at times quite erroneously.
Yet Christians believe that the Bible is a unified book of books with theological and literary coherence. We believe that the Bible is such because the same God who spoke the world into existence spoke again and again through angels and prophets to Israel, and spoke again in the last days through his Son who is his eternal Word. This divine author did not grope from beginning to end, or vice versa, but knew the end at the beginning because he is the Lord who is, who was, and who comes.