I recently spent a very happy day with Dr Garry Williams at The John Owen Centre studying the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. (That's to say: Take the sentence "The Bible is the word of God"? How does that statement relate to other areas of theology - like what God is like, and the acts by which he makes himself known in history? What do we mean when we say "The Bible is the word of God"? What are we not saying when we say that? What biblical data would support that assertion?) A happy, and a very useful, day.
I particularly enjoyed a quotation from Benjamin Warfield. Think, for a moment, about the fact that there are relatively few passages in Scripture that were written primarily so as to lay out our understanding of Scripture. Try and name a few. There are plenty of passages that talk about the Bible, but most of them say things about the Bible in the process of making another point that was more pressing for the author.
However, that is not a problem. What we do have are lots and lots of texts that teach a view of Scripture almost in passing, or that assume a view of Scripture, or that reinforce a view that we might learn elsewhere. And there are loads of such passages! Some people try to explain such texts away, by taking one or two and showing that they don't really teach that "The Bible is the word of God".
Warfield writes, (in his Works, volume 1, page 66):
‘The effort to explain away the Bible’s witness to its plenary inspiration reminds one of a man standing safely in his laboratory and elaborately expounding—possibly by the aid of diagrams and mathematical formulae—how every stone in an avalanche has a defined pathway and may easily be dodged by one of some presence of mind. We may fancy such an elaborate trifler’s triumph as he would analyse the avalanche into its constituent stones, and demonstrate of stone after stone that its pathway is definite, limited, and may easily be avoided. But avalanches, unfortunately, do not come upon us, stone by stone, one at a time, courteously leaving us opportunity to withdraw from the pathway of each in turn: but all at once, in a roaring mass of destruction. Just so we may explain away a text or two which teach plenary inspiration, to our own closet satisfaction, dealing with them each without reference to its relation to the others: but these texts of ours, again, unfortunately do not come upon us in this artificial isolation; neither are they few in number. There are scores, hundreds, of them: and they come bursting upon us in one solid mass. Explain them away? We should have to explain away the whole New Testament. What a pity it is that we cannot see and feel the avalanche of texts beneath which we may lie hopelessly buried, as clearly as we may see and feel an avalanche of stones!’
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