Dr. Settle’s ministry included pastorates in Texas and South Carolina; terms on boards of educational institutions; working in church and parachurch ministries; editing publications, particularly during the background and formative yeas of the PCA; and he was moderator of the General Assembly in 1980.

It started in the Garden of Eden. The serpent was craftier than all the other creatures and he used his skills when he asked Eve in Genesis 3:1, “Yeah, hath God said?” When God presented our first parents with the law against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Satan cleverly questioned the truth of what God had said. As Solomon says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Man, as male and female, has been questioning the truth of God’s revealed word ever since. Whether it was Israel’s skepticism regarding Moses’s authority as the voice of the Lord; God using an astute donkey to speak to not so astute Baalam; or the Lord sending Jonah into the digestive tract of a great fish to convince him to preach to Nineveh; “Yeah, hath God said?” has continued its doubting trail through Scripture and into church history. Challenges to the doctrines of inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, and whether the Scripture is the very word of God have both fused and fractured Christianity throughout its history. Paul G. Settle found himself within a controversy that he grasped was simply the same thing all over again, “Yeah, hath God said?”

Pastor Settle’s years of ministry required many duties. He was an elder, husband, pastor, father, preacher, counsellor, broadcaster, writer, teacher, seminary professor, administrator, coordinator, moderator, apologist, shepherd, and editor. One publication for which he was an editor was Contact: Presbyterian Churchmen United, which ran 1970-1973. In one of his own articles he clearly expressed the issue at the heart of the controversy among Presbyterians that would lead to founding the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in 1973. The title was, “The Underlying Issue,” and apologist Settle, after an introductory paragraph simply takes readers back to those familiar words of Genesis 3, “Yeah, hath God said?”

Has God spoken? Has He caused His mind and will for the Church to be committed to writing? Do the words of the Bible—in their construction and combination with relevant words, clauses, sentences—represent God’s very own revelation to mankind?

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