"It is one thing to say elevated things about Scripture, quite another to let scripture have its say. Evangelicals are not content to admire Scripture. To acknowledge the supreme authority of the Bible is to let it have the final word in matters concerning Christian faith and practice-indeed, in all areas of life to which it speaks. The Bible’s authority is the medium by which God exercises his own authority, that is, his rightful power to determine belief or command action and to expect obedient assent. The Reformers took a decisive step in proclaiming the final authority of Scripture over tradition. ‘’Sola scripture’’ means that neither oral traditions, nor the magisterial teaching authority of the Roman Catholic church, nor new Spirit-given revelations can supplement the Bible (“it is written”). On the contrary, Scripture, as the product of God’s authorship, is sufficient, authoritative, and infallible-the later concept signaling its utter trustworthiness in guiding the church to knowledge of God and salvation in Christ. Since the Reformation, evangelicals have tried to balance the supremacy of Scripture alongside other authoritative sources of theology with varying success, with some favoring church tradition, others personal experience, and still others the leading of the Holy Spirit. In modern times, the most precarious balancing act involved revelation and reason, especially when the Bible became a document of the university and began to be read “like any other book.” Confronted with an academic tide of historical criticism, some evangelicals modified their position on biblical authority, arguing that the Bible speaks reliably only on matters off faith and salvation. As to history, geography and cosmology, the Bible is as weak as any other human text. Others, such as the Princetonian theologians Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield, responded by attacking head-on this skeptical attitude towards the Bible’s historical reliability. They developed the doctrine of infallibility further, making the Bible’s utter truthfulness in matters salvific and scientific alike more explicit by speaking of inerrancy and claiming that thought “the word [inerrancy] sis 19th century... the belief it expresses is as old as Christianity.” Contemporary inerranists typically acknowledge ancient literary conventions (e.g., nonchronological narration) and phenomenological language (e.g., the sun “rising”), recognizing the assertion of the Bible’s utter truthfulness presupposes right interpretation."