Reason.

J.I. Packer has written:

“‘Reason’ means reasoning, as ‘faith’ means believing and trusting. The first is the mark of men, as distinct from beasts; the second, of Christians, as distinct from unbelievers. As there can be no faith without thinking (for truth must be known before there can be trust), so for the Christian there should be no thinking without faith (for thoughts that do not express faith are sin¹). The Christian’s intellectual vocation is to think about all things in such a way that his life of thought is part of his life of faith and homage to God. Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 128.)
¹ Cf. Rom. xiv. 22, 23.

Certainty.

J.I. Packer has written:

“Now, it is this catholic doctrine that explains the certainty and confidence of Evangelicals as to the divine truth and trustworthiness of the Bible, some, as we saw, think this robust confidence unwarrantable, and explain it as a sociological phenomenon—a piece of wishful thinking prompted by the craving for certainty which we all feel, adolescents especially, in our unsettled and rootless age. Evangelicals, it is said, cling to the idea of biblical infallibility as drowning men cling to a straw—not because it is worthy of their trust, but because they want something to cling to and there is nothing else within reach. We can now see how perverse a misunderstanding this is. The evangelical certainty of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture is of exactly the same sort, and rests on exactly the same basis, as the Church’s certainty of the Trinity, or the incarnation, or any other catholic doctrine. God has declared it; Scripture embodies it; the Spirit exhibits it to believers; and they humbly receive it, as they are bound to do. It is not optional for Christians to sit loose to what God has said, and treat questions which he has closed as if they were still open. The truth is that the evangelical doctrine of Scripture is an article of catholic faith, and the evangelical confidence in its truth is part of the Church’s Spirit-given assurance of faith. It is strange that those who think Evangelicals odd for being sure of the biblical doctrine of Scripture do not see that so-called ‘biblical theologians’ who are not sure of it are much more odd. It is stranger still that those who accuse Evangelicals of ‘heresy’ for their view of the Bible should fail to grasp that it is not Evangelicals, but they themselves who have parted company with the historic catholic faith. One recalls the fond mother who watched the parade and concluded that all were out of step except her Johnny.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 122-123.)

Biblical criticism.

J.I. Packer has written:

“A century of criticism has certainly thrown some light on the human side of the Bible—its style, language, composition, history and culture; but whether it has brought the Church a better understanding of its divine message than Evangelicals of two, three and four hundred years ago possessed is more than doubtful. It is not at all clear that we today comprehend the plan of salvation, the doctrines of sin, election, atonement, justification, new birth and sanctification, the life of faith, the duties of churchmanship and the meaning of Church history, more clearly than did the Reformers, or the Puritans, or the leaders of the eighteenth-century revival. When it is claimed that modern criticism has greatly advanced our understanding of the Bible, the reply must be that it depends upon what is meant by the Bible; criticism has thrown much light on the human features of Scripture, but it has not greatly furthered our knowledge of the Word of God. Indeed, it seems truer to say that its effect to date has been rather to foster ignorance of the Word of God; for by concentrating on the human side of Scripture it has blurred the Church’s awareness of the divine character of scriptural teaching, and by questioning biblical statements in the name of scholarship it has shaken confidence in the value of personal Bible study. Hence, just as the Mediævals tended to equate Church tradition with the Word of God, so modern Protestants tend to equate the words of scholars with the Word of God. We have fallen into the habit of accepting their pronouncements at second hand without invoking the Spirit’s help to search the Scripture and see, not merely whether what they say is so (in so far as they lay Bible student is qualified to judge this), but also—often more important—whether God’s Word does not deal with more than the limited number of topics with which scholars at any one time are concerned. The result of this negligence is widespread ignorance among Churchmen as to what Scripture actually says. So it always is when the Church forgets how to search the scriptures acknowledging its own blindness and looking to God’s Spirit to teach it God’s truth. There is no more urgent need today than that the Church should humble itself to learn this lesson once more.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 112-113.)

A need to know basis.

J.I. Packer has written:

“God, then, does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith. And He leaves unsolved some of the problems raised by what He tells us, in order to teach us a humble trust in His veracity. The question, therefore, that we must ask ourselves when faced with these puzzles is not, is it reasonable to imagine that this is so? but, is it reasonable to accept God’s assurance that this is so? Is it reasonable to take God’s word and believe that He has spoken the truth, even though I cannot fully comprehend what He has said? The question carries its own answer. We should not abandon faith in anything that God has taught us merely because we cannot solve all the problems which it raises. Our own intellectual competence is not the test and measure of divine truth. It is not for us to stop believing because we lack understanding, or to postpone believing till we can get understanding, but to believe in order that we may understand; as Augustine said, ‘unless you believe, you will not understand.’ Faith first, sight afterwards, is God’s order, not vice versa; and the proof of the sincerity of our faith is our willingness to have it so.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 109.)

The Word of God.

J.I. Packer has written:

“Because Evangelicals hold that the biblical writers were completely controlled by the Holy Spirit, it is often supposed, as we saw, that they maintain what is called the ‘dictation’ or ‘typewriter’ theory of inspiration—namely, that the mental activity of the writers was simply suspended, apart from what was necessary for the mechanical transcription of words supernaturally introduced into their consciousness…”

“Those who credit Evangelicals with belief in ‘dictation’ often appeal to the thought of accommodation as the correct alternative to that view, but in so doing they misunderstand the biblical idea of accommodation no less seriously than they misunderstand the biblical idea of complete divine control. They speak as if it were self evident that a revelation of truth transmitted through the instrumentality of sinful men would suffer in the process. We are told that, since the biblical writers were imperfect creatures, morally, spiritually and intellectually limited, children of their age and children of Adam too, it was inevitable that crudities, distortions and errors should creep into what they wrote. It is claimed that this is a liberating notion which throws a flood of light on the real character of Scripture, and makes possible a great advance in theological understanding…”

“The twin suppositions which liberal critics make—that, on the one hand, divine control of the writers would exclude the free exercise of their natural powers, while, on the other hand, divine accommodation to the free exercise of their natural powers would exclude complete control of what they wrote—are really two forms of the same mistake. They are two ways of denying that the Bible can be both a fully human and fully divine composition. And this denial rests (as all errors in theology ultimately do) on a false doctrine of God; here particularly, of His providence. For it assumes that God and man stand in such a relation to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If a man acts freely (i.e., voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism. It is Deism which depicts God as the passive onlooker rather than the active governor of this world, and which assures us that the guarantee of human freedom lies in the fact that men’s actions are not under God’s control. But the bible teaches rather that the freedom of God, who works in and through His creatures, leading them to act according to their nature, is itself the foundation and guarantee of the freedom of their action. It is therefore a great mistake to think that the freedom of the biblical writers can be vindicated only by denying full divine control over them; and the prevalence of this mistake should be ascribed to the insidious substitution of deistic for theistic ideas about God’s relation to the world which has been, perhaps, the most damaging effect of modern science on theology. When the critics of Evangelicalism take it for granted that Evangelicals, since they believe in complete control, must hold the ‘dictation’ theory, while they themselves, since they recognize accommodation, are bound to hold that in Scripture false and misleading words of men are mixed up with the pure word of God, they merely show how unbiblical their idea of providence has become. The cure for such fallacious reasoning is to grasp the biblical idea of God’s concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man’s own mind.”

(Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 78-82.)