Excerpt:
Introduction to Francis Turretin's 21 Questions on The Doctrine of Scripture
by Paul Rittman

Reading Reformed works on Scripture (here I would group Calvin's Institutes, William Whitaker's Disputations on the Holy Scriptures, as well as Turretin) can be very illuminating, and presents a rather different perspective on Scripture than many modern writers (1). While this article is providing a brief introduction to Turretin, what I'm saying below could just as well be said of the others mentioned above.

One theme is the presuppositional approach to the Bible, which was used in addition to the more evidentialist approaches more popular now. Presuppositionalism, as a methodology, is not merely something that the Reformers utilized. It was foundational to Reformation theology (2). Look at Turretin's thoughts on the Bible's inspiration, for example. In question He doesn't attempt to prove its inspiration, or even, simply to demonstrate that such a view is reasonable (in contrast to modern evangelicals, who will argue that it is reasonable to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and that prophetic writings were indeed written before the events predicted, and so, based on these premises, that the inspiration of the Bible is a valid conclusion). Instead, Turretin (in Question 6, Section 8) places the Bible's inspiration in the Aristotelian category of First Principles (which have to be assumed, and cannot be proven or disproven). He also writes of the witness of the Holy Spirit, in the minds and hearts of the regenerate, to Scripture's inspiration(3). Both of these approaches are presuppositional, as opposed to evidential. In short, they are part of a paradigm or world-view, as opposed to propositions that can be proved or disproved to skeptics.

A second approach taken by Turretin might be surprising to those who have not studied Reformation bibliology-its "tiered" understanding of authoritative Scripture. In contrast to the Roman theologians of their day (and the KJV advocates of today), Turretin held that the original Hebrew and Greek readings had not been lost, but were located in the majority of the manuscripts that were available. He did not argue that any or every copy was perfect, but only that such errors could be easily straightened out by a diligent sifting through the various manuscripts. Turretin was very clear that if the original readings had in fact been lost in the course of history, there would be no way of knowing which readings were in fact original, and no way of knowing whether in fact the Latin Vulgate was or was not, a pure copy of the original texts. He didn't simply uphold the value of Bibles translated into the common tongue, over against the Vulgate. He also argued that the Vulgate itself was a corruption of the original text, which could be known and determined by comparing the Hebrew and Greek readings with the Vulgate. This primacy of the original languages was necessary for any certainty about the accuracy of translated Bibles. And so Reformed bibliology recognized a tiered system of authority.