It seems to be a fad today to say that Jesus was not only God, but man. Somehow or another this is supposed to mean that Jesus could have been mistaken on a few things, and so Scripture could be mistaken on a few things due to Scripture being from God through man.

This is actually an old error in new packaging, as most heresies are. B.B. Warfield spoke concerning this saying,

It has been customary among a certain school of writers to speak of the Scriptures,

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

because thus “inspired,” as a Divine-human book, and to appeal to the analogy of

Our Lord’s Divine-human personality to explain their peculiar qualities as such. The

expression calls attention to an important fact, and the analogy holds good a certain

distance. There are human and Divine sides to Scripture, and, as we cursorily

examine it, we may perceive in it, alternately, traits which suggest now the one, now

the other factor in its origin. But the analogy with Our Lord’s Divine-human

personality may easily be pressed beyond reason. There is no hypostatic union

between the Divine and the human in Scripture; we cannot parallel the

“inscripturation” of the Holy Spirit and the incarnation of the Son of God. The

Scriptures are merely the product of Divine and human forces working together to

produce a product in the production of which the human forces work under the

initiation and prevalent direction of the Divine: the person of Our Lord unites in itself

Divine and human natures, each of which retains its distinctness while operating only

in relation to the other. Between such diverse things there can exist only a remote

analogy; and, in point of fact, the analogy in the present instance amounts to no more

than that in both cases Divine and human factors are involved, though very

differently. In the one they unite to constitute a Divine-human person, in the other

they coöperate to perform a Divine-human work. Even so distant an analogy may

enable us, however, to recognize that as, in the case of Our Lord’s person, the

human nature remains truly human while yet it can never fall into sin or error because

it can never act out of relation with the Divine nature into conjunction with which it

has been brought; so in the case of the production of Scripture by the conjoint action

of human and Divine factors, the human factors have acted as human factors, and

have left their mark on the product as such, and yet cannot have fallen into that error

which we say it is human to fall into, because they have not acted apart from the

Divine factors, by themselves, but only under their unerring guidance.

Revelation and InspirationVolume 1, pg 81; Benjamin B. Warfield. COPYRIGHT, © 2003, BY DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS, DALLAS, TEXAS, USA

~ Originally posted at Pastoral Musings