R.C. Sproul

That is, the church is always called to undergo reformation and always called to check her own creeds and confessions to make sure that they are in conformity to sacred Scripture.

And virtually every Protestant church that has a creed or confession that is unique to their communion will go to great pains to say that their own confessions are not infallible and do not carry the weight of Scripture, except insofar as they faithfully reproduce the doctrines of the Scripture, because the overarching principle is affirmed, namely that the Bible alone

is that written source that has the authority of God Himself, the authority to bind our consciences absolutely.

And though we are called to be submissive to lesser authorities and respectful of other authorities,

In my own church, I am called to submit to the authority of the presbytery or to the session of the local church.

There are all kinds of levels of authority, and I'm told that if I find in conscience I can no longer genuinely submit, then it is my duty to withdraw from that communion peaceably.

But otherwise, I am not to disturb the peace of the church by acting in direct conflict to the confessions or the government of the church.

And yet at the same time, the church says, we know our confessions could be wrong, and some of the ordinances of our church are possibly incorrect.

but this is what we believe to be the true, and as long as you're going to serve here, you have this obligation to submit to it.

It's not that sola scriptura eliminates other authorities, but what it says is there's only one authority that can absolutely bind the conscience, and that authority is sacred Scripture, and that all controversies over doctrine and theology must be settled in the final analysis by Scripture.

Now, there are other aspects, as I said, about this sola besides the business of being the only source of written revelation, and second, the only authority that can bind absolutely, but not the only authority at all, but also involved in this affirmation in the 16th century was a clear affirmation that the Bible is the Vox Dei,

or the verbum Dei, the Word of God or the voice of God, being infallible and inerrant because it comes to us by the superintendence of God the Holy Spirit.

that the Bible is inspired in the sense that its author ultimately is God, even though it is transmitted through human writers.

The ultimate source of its truth and of its content comes from God, and God, of course, is infallible.

Human writers in and of themselves are fallible.

But the view of historic Protestantism was that God so assisted the weaknesses of our fallen humanity as to preserve the Bible from the corruption that one would normally expect to find from the writings of human beings by his divine superintendence and by the special ministry of the Holy Spirit himself.

and so that even though the Bible comes to us in human words and by human authors, it is considered to be of divine origin.

Now, I realize that in light of the dispute in our own day over the infallibility of the Scripture and the inspiration of the Scripture and the inerrancy of the Scripture, words that have engendered all kinds of theological controversy,

There have been those who have protested loudly that the very idea of an infallible or inerrant Scripture was not something that was taught and embraced by the magisterial reformers of the 16th century, but was the result of the intrusion of a kind of Protestant scholasticism that came to pass in the 17th century, which is called the Age of Reason.

where these rationalists were so concerned about certainty that they had almost a psychological or emotional need for certainty to such a degree that they invented this concept of inerrancy and infallibility.