The Bible understood as the Scriptures of the church

Once again, the effort to take seriously the confession of a canon offers another alternative in respect to the inspiration of Scripture. The doctrine of inspiration is an attempt to deal adequately with the medium of revelation. The mistake of employing such a concept as inerrancy, among other things, was in its defining of the medium apart from its canonical context. In our opinion, the claim for the inspiration of Scripture is the claim for the uniqueness of the canonical context of the church through which the Holy Spirit works. Although there are innumerable other contexts in which to place the Bible—this is part of the humanity of the witness—divine inspiration is a way of claiming a special prerogative for this one context. The Bible, when understood as the Scriptures of the church, functions as the vehicle for God’s special communicating of himself to his church and the world. This understanding of the Scripture’s uniqueness remains a statement of faith. It neither requires a hidden apologetic nor must it be reformulated to accommodate itself to every new phase of the scholarly debate.

Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (p. 104)