 The Confession starts with the doctrine of revelation , or how people can know about God . The divines believed knowledge of God was available to people through nature as well as the Bible , but they also believed that the Bible , or Scripture , is the only way in which people attain saving knowledge of God . The doctrine of Scripture was also a particularly important area of debate at the time . Scholars had begun to argue that the Hebrew vowel points , marks added to the text to aid in pronunciation , of the Old Testament were probably not part of the original . This caused significant debate between Reformed <unk> and Roman Catholics . Catholics argued that such a discovery demonstrated the need for an authoritative <unk> to interpret the Bible as opposed to the Protestant doctrine of <unk> , that the essential teachings of the Bible could be interpreted by anyone . English Reformed writers in particular took up the work of defending the Reformed doctrine . The divines had a strong view of the inspiration of the Bible , and believed that God revealed himself in the propositions found in Scripture . While the issue of biblical <unk> , the belief that there are no errors in the Bible , did not arise until the eighteenth century , the divines clearly did not believe the Bible to contain any errors . Many of the divines held a rather mechanical view of biblical inspiration , believing that not only the words and ideas but also the letters and vowel points of the Hebrew text were inspired by God . On the other hand , they acknowledged that the text was written by humans in their own styles . They did not make any distinction between essential and incidental matters with respect to biblical inspiration . 
