Scottish Presuppositionalism

Like any other of the great doctrines of the Word of God that of its own Inspiration was to be derived directly from the statements which we find it making on the subject. Thus it is that we reach a doctrine of the Person of Christ or of the work of the Holy Ghost or of Justification by faith. It is when the various statements of the sacred writers are carefully weighed and compared that on these subjects we come to a decision as to what on a conjunct view of the evidence should be held to be the Christian Faith. Rays of light from a variety of texts and contexts are seen to converge or to come to a common focus. This gives us the truth that is regulative for Christian thinking. The doctrine of Inspiration is in no different category. Like all the other doctrines of the Faith it can be profitably formulated only when we are sure of our ground in authority. For as a doctrine it is to be discussed as a thing possessed with authority only among the believers in the witness of the word. What the word teaches controls the faith of the Church, or at least it ought to do so. In controversy with avowed unbelievers it is not on the inspired character of Scripture but on its truth that Christians first lay stress. It is only when their opponents come to own that truth that they will accept its witness when it tells about itself. The campaign of opposition to the doctrine of the fully inspired character of Holy Writ when it is carried on within the Churches proceeds logically on a refusal to accept the truth of the claims which the Apostles made on their own behalf. In taking this line it not only aims its blow at the common faith of Catholic Christendom in regard to the inspired and consequently divinely authoritative character of Holy Writ; it strikes also at the substantial truth of the Christian archives. It is only when we set aside the witness and authority of the Apostolic word that we refuse to own Scripture as the Word of God.

The Churches of Scotland [circa mid-19th century] were but ill prepared for the day that had overtaken them. As they wavered and halted they let a tendency that was inimical to their ancestral Faith find a home in their bosom. For they lost sight of the essential simplicity of the Christian position. When John tells us that he wrote his Gospel that we might believe, with the record of his signs, that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that believing we might have life in His name, he thought that the witness borne by his fellows and himself was ground enough for the faith of Christians to build upon. Christian faith has through the ages responded to this claim and this claim was that not only of the Apostle, but of the Holy Ghost who spoke in Him. For it is undoubtedly the mind of the Spirit that the evidence which he thus bore to the truth as it is in Jesus should suffice as a ground of faith for the Church of God to the end of time and to the ends of the earth. What was thus in the Gospel claimed by an Apostle for the witness of his writing, he and his fellows could claim for their teaching in the Epistles. They spoke not in the words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Ghost teaches. This was what Paul could say, and we find John in the same vein adding: ‘We are of God, he that knoweth God heareth us” he that is not of God heareth not us.” Not to hear the Apostles proves that one is not of God. Now claims of this kind were in full keeping with the promises given to the eleven by their Lord in the Upper Chamber at Jerusalem.

There has been from the beginning a Holy Catholic Church—define it how we may—to whose care and keeping the New Testament books were committed, and from whose hands in successive generations its children have received them as being alike in their witness and in their teaching the crystallized and perpetuated ministry of the Apostolic band. As many as are willing to sit at the feet of the Apostles, as they thus by their written word continue to bear witness and to teach, will learn to treat the Old Testament Scriptures as it is plain the Lord and His Apostles did. They will accept both Testaments as the Word of God. Here we have the common view of Holy Writ as it has been throughout historical Christendom. It is on this view that the whole structure of Church Confession and of Christian Theology is built. To maintain the superstructure we must defend the substructure.
--John McLeod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History, p.311-313