Systematic Theology 1 | Lecture 3

Good morning. Good to see you here. Welcome back. Scripture, theology, anthropology, otherwise known as ST1. Believe it or not, in a semester that's 13 weeks. Remember, one week for the midterm. You'll take the midterm, and then you'll be done. So, really, 12 weeks of lecture. This is week three. So, sad as it sounds, after today, a fourth of the way through this class. So, we need to try to get to about a fourth of the way through this big outline, which means attempting to finish. Probably going to this morning. We left off the doctrine of scripture, the perfections or the attributes of scripture. We looked at its necessity, and we'll pick up with sufficiency, clarity, and authority.

Let me pray as we get started. Father in Heaven, no doubt we come from many different places, not only physically and on the map, but where we've been the last week, mentally or or spiritually. Great joys, sorrows, worries, pains, experiences we'd like to forget, ones we'd like to repeat. So help us now in these hours together. Sometimes the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak to sit and to think and to listen and learn for these hours together. So help us that our time would not be wasted. You'd give me strength, the right words to say in the right way to say it, and help us to listen and think together that we may know more of you, more of your word, maybe better equipped to pass on the faith to others. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Doctrine of scripture. Remember the helpful acronym, SCAN: Sufficiency, Clarity, Authority, Necessity. Taking those in a different order, we did necessity, and now sufficiency. Perfections, attributes.

You could reason that necessity might be the challenge for the non-Christian. The Bible, what do I need it? Authority, perhaps you think, is a challenge for liberal Christians. I mean, I know this is for non-Christians, well, but liberal Christians who may no longer affirm the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture. If clarity, as we'll come to, perhaps is a challenge for Roman Catholics with their understanding that it takes the magisterium to help understand and help explain, otherwise we're left with all of these rival interpretations. I think you maybe could argue that sufficiency is really the challenge for many rank-and-file Evangelical Christians, sort of people that you'll minister to. That is to say, that most people in the churches that you'll be in, yeah, they believe the Bible is necessary. They're in Bible studies. They believe that the Bible's authoritative and perfect. Uh, probably some fuzziness here on this clarity, but yes, I need the Bible. Uh, I, I don't need the Pope to tell me what the Bible means. I got my Bible. But when it comes to sufficiency, is the Bible really enough? Does the Bible really speak sufficiently on all matters of faith and practice? We'll explain in a moment what that means and doesn't mean. But let's turn to Hebrews chapter 1. Hebrews chapter 1. This famous opening paragraph to the book of Hebrews, the first four verses.

"Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs."

Hebrews, and some of you maybe have had your Hebrews class here before, but you probably all read it. Hebrews is a book from start to finish about the superiority of Christ. And each chapter unfolds: Christ is superior to the, the temple, to the sacrificial system, to the priests, to Moses, and on and on. It's about the superiority of Christ, and it establishes this by proving that in Christ, we have the fullness and the finality of God's redemption and of God's revelation. Let me say something about how those terms all fit together: the finality and the fullness of God's redemption in God's revelation. Look how this argument unfolds in Hebrews chapter 1. So, everything is pointing to Christ. Everything is completed in Christ. I think we understand the fullness piece. There's lots of that language in the Gospels: "play-row," "completed," "fulfilled." It's, it's bound up, it's wrapped up, it finds its fullness in Christ. But we tend to forget the finality. So, God has made himself known. He has come to the earth in the person of his Son, died for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven, reigns in Heaven. So that his work is finished.

So, look here at this contrast: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways." So, we have this contrast of this time. Look at what happened long ago. In the implied contrast is now, we have something different. So, what happened long ago? "Long ago, at many times and in many ways." So, long ago, how did God speak? God spoke long ago at many times and in many ways. So, he spoke by dreams and visions and Urim and Thummim and authoritative prophets. Long ago, in this category, God spoke in many different ways. The contrast is now: "last days." So, here we see that "last days" is not so much something that you're, you're looking for some sign in the Middle East that we're now entering the last days, but eschatologically, we are in the last days. That's what Peter says in his sermon at Pentecost. The last days, meaning we're in this age now of the Spirit, where there is no other redemptive work left to be accomplished before Christ returns. We are in these last days. The former days, "last days." "He has spoken to us by his Son." So, before God spoke many ways, now the contrast is he speaks in one way. He speaks by his Son. So, that means we have no need for another prophet like Muhammad. So, in Islam, there's great respect for Jesus. He's a great prophet, but there's another prophet. Or in Mormonism, you have the very elaborate, you have the, the 12, and you have new apostles, you have continuing revelation. That's one of the fundamental differences between Christianity and Mormonism is this continuing authoritative revelation. Hebrews says, "No, we now have one way by which God speaks to us, and it is by his Son."

So, we understand the finality of redemption. No one would likely say that we need someone else to come and atone for our sins. "Tetelestai," it is finished. That's what Christ said on the cross. So, we understand that the redemptive work has been accomplished. But redemption and revelation must go together. Think about it: in scripture, redemption is always a revelation. So, the classic example of redemption in the Old Testament is the Exodus. And the New Testament is often looking back to the Exodus, and that it tells us something about God, about the heart of God, about what God accomplishes. So, that redemptive activity of delivering God's people from Exodus was also a revelation about the character of God. Returned from exile, that act of redemption was a revelation. And supremely so, redemption on the cross is also a revelation. It reveals to us, it communicates to us something about the awfulness of sin, about the person of the Son, about the work that he accomplished. So, redemption in history always reveals to us. And conversely, the point of revelation is ultimately to redeem. When Moses reveals the way of God, or reveals the Ten Commandments, or the prophets come with a word from the Lord, or John the Baptist announcing repentance for the forgiveness of sins, or Christ, or the apostles, whenever there is a revelation, it is not simply "Hear ye, hear ye, I want you to get some information down there'll be a test later." The revelation is always for the purpose that God's people might be redeemed, that they act upon that revelation, they repent, they turn from their sins, they find salvation and deliverance, and they go off and live a life of obedience. So, redemption always reveals. Revelation is always toward the aim of redemption. So, they go together. And here's the argument of Hebrews: that all of this comes together in the person of the Son. He is both. He is God's full and final act of redemption for fallen sinners and God's full and final revelation of himself, his salvation, and his glory. We would likely not say redemption is somehow incomplete. Say, "Well, that demeans though the work of Christ on the cross." But of course, in saying that redemption is complete, we must also be saying then that revelation is complete. Because if there is still revelation to be had, then there is still something to be known about this way of redemption.

Here's what John Frame says: "Nothing can be added to the redemptive work, and nothing can be added to the revelation of that redemptive work." Nothing can be added to his redemptive work. We get that. And nothing can be added to the revelation of that redemptive work. So, as you keep Hebrews in mind here, go back to the, the passage we just looked at very briefly at the end of class last week, and that's John chapter 16, to see what Jesus says about the promise of the Holy Spirit. John 16. This is in chapter 14 and 16. Let's just look at 16, verse 12.

"John 16:12: I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."

Christ envisions that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost cannot ultimately be separated from his redemptive work here, heading to the cross, because the, the coming of the Spirit will reveal to the apostles what they need to know about the person and the work of Christ. See, they're going to get to the cross, and as we know, they're still somewhat clueless there at that moment. And they, Peter denies him beforehand, and they're all fleeing and scattering. And even when they see him, they don't recognize him at first, and Thomas doubts. So, they're not getting it, even though they have the supreme act of redemption. The resurrection must be bound up with the Ascension and with the coming of the Holy Spirit, because that whole redemptive event is necessary to give to the apostles the revelation of that redemptive event. So, John 16, as I said last week, is not a promise to every single Christian, "Well, Jesus says that he's going to send the Spirit to lead me into all truth. He's going to give me special messages, and he's going to give me inner impressions, and he's going to tell me what restaurant I should go out to eat this week, and who I should marry." No. It is a promise to the apostles that they will be given the Spirit so that they can understand and then fully communicate the finished work of Christ.

So, you go back to the Hebrews argument: "Long ago, God spoke in many ways. Now he speaks in one way." You might think, "Well, are you saying God doesn't speak because we don't have the Son on Earth?" But we must think carefully about how he speaks. He speaks through his Son. And how does God speak through his Son? The Son who is now in Heaven? Well, one way to try to process that is think about the three offices of Christ: Prophet, Priest, and King. In a way, Christ has finished his work in each office, and yet he continues to work through that finished work. So, there's a kind of "already and not yet" with the Prophet, Priest, and King. Think about the kingship of Christ. Hebrews 2:8 says, "He's seated. He reigns." But the inauguration of that reign is not the same as the consummation of that reign. That's why Hebrews 2:8 says, "Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him." So, Christ has been given all authority on Heaven and Earth. His kingship is unrivaled. The god of this age has been defeated. And yet, we don't see everything in subjection to him. So, his work as King is established and, in one sense, complete, and yet it needs to be brought to its final consummation. Or the Priestly work. Look at chapter 2, verse 3: "How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit." So, this once-for-all sacrifice of Christ is finished. It's completed. It's been attested. And yet, we still must declare it. That's what he's saying. It was declared at first, but now the writer is declaring it to his audience so that they will not neglect it. So, the work is done, but we must still bear witness to that work. And then think about Christ as Prophet. God has decisively spoken in his Son. What does it mean that "in these last days he has spoken by his Son"? Well, it means most obviously through the words that the Son spoke, that he taught. But also, he has spoken through his Son by the redemptive work he accomplished, and then by the apostolic revelation to bear witness to that work. All of that is God speaking through his Son. Literally, the Son opened his mouth and said things, and some of those things are written down in scripture. But God also spoke through his Son by what the Son did. And in that work of redemption, cannot be separated from what the Spirit inspired apostles have communicated about that work. Because we wouldn't know anything about the work of Christ, or about the spiritual significance of the work of Christ, if the apostles had not been inspired to write it down. As you know, Jesus didn't leave a book. I suppose we could know something very mysterious from a few Roman sources that there was this person called Christ, and some people were worshiping him, there was some following, some sect of the Jews. But apart from the Spirit-inspired writings of the apostles and those in their network, we would not know the words of Christ, the work of Christ, or what this has meant.

So, all of this is drawing us to the argument that when Hebrews says, "God speaks to us in these last days by his Son," but the words the Son said, by the work the Son did, and by the Spirit leading the apostles to explain that work, well, what does that mean? That that means what we have in our Bibles. That that's what we have about God speaking through his Son. God has decisively spoken in his Son by showing us all we need to know, believe, and do. There's nothing more to say. And yet, God does speak through what he has already written down. So, there's nothing more to say, but God continues to speak through what he has already written down.

Just look at a couple of places in Hebrews. Look at Hebrews 3:7: "Therefore the Holy Spirit says, 'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'" You notice the verbal tense there? Doesn't just say, "as the Holy Spirit inspired the Psalmist to write down," but "as the Holy Spirit says." This is what God is saying. He's saying scripture. The Holy Spirit is speaking. Chapter 3, verse 7, through the words that have already been inspired and written down. Or similarly, chapter 4, verse 12: "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." So, the word is living and active. So, when you pray for a sermon, for those who will preach, I'm sure I've said this before, but I try to make sure now, I, I don't use this language. You'll be tempted to to pray something like, "Lord, as we come to your word, so we come to the sermon, would you make this word come alive to us?" You don't have to pray, "Make this word come alive." You say, "Lord, would you make dead people come alive?" Because the problem is not that the word needs to be vivified. It's that God's people need to be vivified. Whether you do anything right or not, the word is living and active. The word doesn't need help to come alive in the preaching or in the service. Dead sinners need to come alive. But the word is living and active.

Here's what Bavinck says, commenting on John 16:14: "The Holy Spirit no longer reveals any new doctrines, but takes everything from Christ. In Christ, God's revelation has been completed. So the Holy Spirit, who comes after Christ, is explicitly the Spirit of Christ, and his work is to apply the blessings of Christ, glorify the person of Christ, and explain all that Christ is and has accomplished."

So, just a few summary sentences here, then we'll see what, what questions or clarifications you have. The argument of Hebrews is that Jesus is superior to angels, prophets, rituals, everything that has come before. Why? Because in Jesus, we have the fullness. Everything before was partial. Before we had shadows, now we have substance. The fullness and also the finality of God's redemption and revelation. So, Hebrews is telling us, you don't need priests. That's why I'm Pastor Kevin, not Priest Kevin, because we don't need any more priests. Priests administer sacrifices. We don't have priests because we don't have sacrifices, because the sacrifice has already been accomplished. It's the difference between the Catholic Church where the Eucharist takes place on an altar. Why an altar? Because what takes place on altars is sacrifices. Priests administer sacrifices. The work of Christ is represented as a propitiatory, unbloodied sacrifice in Roman Catholic theology. So, don't call, when you, if you're administering the Lord's Supper, don't call it an altar. It's not an altar. You want to call it an altar, you're gonna have to become a Catholic. It's a table. It's the Lord's table, because we have a meal there. There's no need for an altar because there's no need for sacrifices. There's no need for priests. There's no need for a temple. That's all the redemption and revelation that has already found its fullness and finality in the Son. And so, in these last days, he speaks to us not in many ways, not in various ways, but by his Son. And he speaks to us through his Son by the revelation of his redeeming work that we find first in the Gospels, then explained by the Spirit through the apostles in the rest of the New Testament.

So, go back here. We'll talk about sufficiency. The argument I'm trying to make theologically, so someone may say, "Well, give me the one Bible verse that proves this." That's not so much one Bible verse as it is a much more important theological superstructure. Scripture is enough because the work of Christ is enough. They stand or fall together. The Son's redemption and the Son's revelation must both either be complete or both be insufficient. Cannot have a complete redemption and an insufficient revelation. They stand or fall together. And as such, there is nothing more to be done for our salvation. We probably all believe that. And there is nothing more to be known for our salvation and for our Christian walk than what we see and know about Christ in this book. And as we'll, as we'll see later this morning, in a different part of the lecture, and we'll go to the Westminster Confession, we need to have a proper understanding of sufficiency. To say the Bible's enough doesn't mean the Bible tells you everything you want to know about everything. It doesn't tell you how you change the oil in your car. It doesn't explain everything that's going on in the human body. So, we must not misunderstand sufficiency. The Bible is enough. Notice how I said it: "for our salvation and for a Christian walk." The Bible is as completely sufficient to tell you how to be saved and how, how to live a life pleasing to God. And I say this is often the Evangelical problem because if you look, even today, if you want to be discouraged sometime, you know, try to find at any moment the top 10 best-selling Christian books. There has never been a Kevin DeYoung title on that list, probably never will be. The closest in recent years to a, to a good book that you've probably read that was on that list was "Gentle and Lowly," that sold a bunch of copies. But usually, it's "Jesus Calling," "Jesus Calling Diary," "Jesus Calling Coloring Book," "Jesus Calling Connect the Dots." It's like "For Jesus Calling," and then it's a Joyce Meyer book, and then it's something else. And it, it's not Spurgeon's not on there. You don't even get John Piper or Tim Keller on there.

Many of you have encountered Sarah Young's book, "Jesus Calling," which is, I don't know her, I'm sure she's a very well-intentioned believer in Jesus, but this perennial best-selling book is a series of letters ostensibly from Jesus to the believer every day. "Jesus Calling." You can get a personalized message from Jesus. And so it's written in this vein of, "Here's what Jesus is saying to you." So, it's, it's invariably a very encouraging word for you each day. And that's been immensely popular in lots of PCA churches, lots of Evangelical, lots of Reformed churches. And it undercuts the sufficiency of scripture, actually. Kathy Keller wrote a nicely critical review of that. You can Google "Jesus Calling" and Kathy Keller wrote a critical review of that whole genre for this very reason that it undercuts the sufficiency of scripture. Yes, we want God to speak to us. Here's how he speaks to us: we open this book. And we'll look in particular after the break at the Westminster Confession, because like sufficiency, the confession helps us have a right view of clarity. Clarity does not mean everything in the Bible is completely clear the first time you read it. What it means is that if you use the proper means, and you're humble and thoughtful and prayerful, that the way of salvation can be clearly discerned. Clarity doesn't mean anyone who's learning to read can flip open to Ezekiel and go, "Ah, that makes perfect sense." No. It means that you don't need sophisticated intellectual training in order to read the Bible, know who Jesus is, know how to be saved, and know how to live as a Christian.

Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 30. Deuteronomy 30, verse 11. Deuteronomy 30. So, here we are, the end of the Pentateuch, ramping up this Mosaic Covenant. Notice what the Lord says about this law. Deuteronomy 30, verse 11:

"For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near to you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it."

Now, set aside some of the questions we encounter in covenant theology about how to understand the Mosaic Covenant and in what sense is Moses saying that the Mosaic Covenant is doable. Set that aside and just think about the implications of what he's saying. This commandment is not far off. It's not up in heaven. It's not across the sea. God's word is not unintelligible. It's not so esoteric that you have to travel across heaven and earth in order to get it and bring it back. It's accessible. It's in front of you. You can see it. You can hear it. You can do it.

Here's what Calvin says: "God does not propound to us obscure enigmas to keep our minds in suspense and to torment us with difficulties, but teaches familiarly whatever is necessary according to our capacity." And consequently, the ignorance of the people. The clarity of scripture is fundamentally about the character of God. Has God given to us a book that he means for us to understand, or has he wrapped himself in so many enigmas and mysteries that only the experts who have multiple degrees in Hebrew and Mesopotamian culture and Second Temple Judaism and, uh, Greco-Roman philosophy, only they can truly understand the word? Calvin, of course, not. God has not hidden his word in some inaccessible place. Think of the language of light in the Psalms, for example. Psalm 119:105: "The word is a lamp to our feet, a light to our path." Psalm 119:130: "The unfolding of your word gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple." Psalm 19: "The law makes wise the simple" (verse 7). "Enlightens the eyes" (verse 8). The word of God is not seen as something dark and impenetrable, but as something that illumines the darkness. It gives you light. What point would there be in God uttering promises if he didn't think that his people could actually understand them? All throughout the Bible, God is coming to his people. He's either warning them with words or he is comforting them with words. So, implicit is that God believes his people can appropriate and understand his words. People sometimes say, "Oh, you Protestants, you think God can be captured by your human language." Well, no. Whoever said captured? No, we don't believe we can exhaustively understand God and his ways, but his word always accomplishes its purposes. Isaiah 55: "The word of God never returns empty." Think of the very beginning: "Let there be light." It's a quote, Larry the Cucumber from the old VeggieTales. God said, "Then there was." "Let there be light." There was no sense that the nothingness deliberated and let's consider whether there should be light or not. God spoke, and it came to be. Such is the power of God's word. He calls out the stars each night by name. The voice of Jesus: "Lazarus, come forth." As the old preacher quipped, it's a good thing that Jesus said, "Lazarus, come forth," for if he had just said, "Come forth," all of the dead in the earth would have been raised in that moment. Such is the power of the word of God. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The long-lost word in the Old Testament was still clear. Remember, the book of the law was rediscovered in Josiah's day, Second Kings 22, and then the people read it. Most scholars think that was Deuteronomy. They understood it, and they knew what to do in response. It wasn't that they found this book and said, "This is absolutely impenetrable. I have no idea what to do." No, they read the text, and they understood, "We are really in big trouble because we have not been doing these things."

Turn to Nehemiah chapter 8. Great text about the, the work of preaching and about the clarity of God's word. Nehemiah 8, verse 5.

"Nehemiah 8:5: And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people. And as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, 'Amen, amen,' lifting up their hands, and they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. And Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the law of God, clearly, they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading."

I love verse 8. There's a lot of important truth in verse 8. First of all, you get what I think is the clearest definition of expositional preaching. I know a lot of the, the homiletical books get very elaborate definitions, and they have their place. But here's the simple definition: what you're doing in preaching, you're reading from the book, and you're giving people the sense of it. You read it, you say, "Let me give you the sense." But notice, thinking here about the clarity of scripture, "the people understood the reading." It's important here, the clarity of scripture doesn't mean we no longer need teachers. The priesthood of believers means, yes, people can read the Bible for themselves, but it doesn't mean that God set aside the need for teachers. There were teachers here who, who helped them understand it. But then notice, it doesn't say, "and they understood an interpretation of it." We'll get up to that after the break. One of the main defeater arguments about Christianity in our day is, "Well, all you guys just have all your interpretations, and all you really have are interpretations." Well, it doesn't say that they gave an interpretation. It says they gave the sense, and they understood the reading. There was a fixed meaning to the text. The, the, the priests and the, and the Levites gave it to them, and they were able to understand it.

Dozens of times, Jesus will appeal to a text from the Old Testament, thinking that that settles the matter, which implies that Jesus believes the Old Testament was authoritative, and he believed that it was understandable. Think of Matthew 9. Jesus says, "Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.'" Jesus assumes you can understand the Bible. Six times, Jesus says to his opponents, "Have you not read?" suggesting, "If you knew your Bibles better, you would not be making this mistake." Jesus often referred to the scriptures for the veracity of his teaching. The apostles approached scripture in the same way. They quoted to it, alluded to it, reasoned from it, all with the assumption that these references could be understood. And so, here's the point: this doctrine of clarity, or you'll encounter the older word, "perspicuity," which for being a word that means clarity, isn't very clear. But perspicuity of scripture, it's fundamentally about the nature and character of God.

One of this was a surreal experience years ago when the emergent church stuff was going on. I was in East Lansing. This was 2008, 2009. I had gotten to know a professor at Michigan State University. He was an anthropology professor. Anthropology departments in major universities is not usually a hotbed of reformed evangelical Christianity. But this guy was a believer. And his anthropological research was on evangelicals, or sort of the animals that were weird. Let's try to. So, he did this lunchtime lecture. He said, "He didn't go to our church, but I met him a few times. So, Kevin, you want to come to my lecture?" So, he's doing a lecture at MSU, an anthropology lecture on the emergent church. And he was, of course, you know, anthropology majors and professors, they had, they had no idea what this was. And in particular, he wanted to talk about evangelical understandings of human language. And I'll never forget, because it was a, it was a kind of a class this big, and maybe 40 people or something in there, eating their lunch, listening to it. And he gave a nice lecture, and he played a clip from Brian McLaren about the United, or maybe it was Rob Bell, I can't remember, about the inadequacy of human language to communicate the divine. And people were like, "Oh, that made sense to them." Then he played a clip from John MacArthur. There was audible laughter through the whole clip. And not like, "Haha, I'm with you, but you're stupid" kind of laughter, as they listened to this clip, because he was in, you know, typical, like, full froth MacArthur going at it about God's word and everything is God's word and he means to speak to us. And, and without trying to say which one he was for, and he was sort of a left-leaning evangelical, I wasn't quite sure exactly what he thought. But he did do a good job of presenting both positions. And the point he made about what MacArthur was saying: he says, "You need to understand that for these conservative evangelical Christians, they believe that God actually communicates himself through human language because..."

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"...they believe that God has given human language as a gift with the purpose of divine revelation." So, all these anthropology people are saying, "Well, of course, human language is so imperfect and ambiguous, and of course you can't, you know, you're just always grasping at the divine." But the point is, well, what does it say about God if God is not strong enough and powerful enough to speak through this gift of language? This is the point. I don't know if any of you have encountered it now, but Carson, D.A. Carson's book, "The Gagging of God," which was about postmodernism, which five, ten years ago seemed like it was passé, but now you go back to it and you think, "Oh, this is still going on." Some of these, a lot of these debates about standpoint epistemology and how we know what we know. And the title is "The Gagging of God" because his central thesis was that in postmodernism, which reduces, which obliterates metanarratives and reduces everything to just your perspective, your lived experience, he's saying we're effectively saying God no longer can communicate to his people.

The illustration that I often give, maybe some of you have encountered this, this, uh, Doggerel poem. It's like a hundred years old now. "The Blind Man and the Elephant." How many of you have read this before? Maybe I've shared it in another class. It's very bad poetry, but it's worth reading.

"It was six men of Hindustan to learning much inclined,

Who went to see the elephant, though all of them were blind;

That each by observation might satisfy his mind.

The first approach'd the elephant, and happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side, and once began to bawl:

'God bless me! but the elephant is very like a wall!'

The second, feeling of the tusk, cried, 'Ho! what have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear,

This wonder of an elephant is very like a spear.'

The third approach'd the animal, and happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands, thus boldly up and spake:

'I see,' quoth he, 'the elephant is very like a snake.'

The fourth reached out his eager hand, and felt about the knee,

What most this wondrous beast is like is mighty plain, quote he,

'It is clear enough the elephant is very like a tree.'

The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, said, 'Even blind men can tell

What this resembles most; deny the fact who can?

This marvel of an elephant is very like a fan.'

The sixth no longer had begun about the beast to grope,

Then seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope,

'I see,' quoth he, 'the elephant is very like a rope.'

And so these men of Hindustan disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong;

Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong."

Here's the moral: "So oft in theologic wars, the disputants i' the end

Rail on and utter ignorance of what each other mean,

And prate about an elephant, not one of them has seen."

The point you get, he makes it very clear, I didn't leave anything to the image. So, points for perspicuity in the poem, that this is what we're like in theology. This is what we're like in religion. We're all blind. None of us have seen God, and we all sort of grow up about it, and we get it. We get a part of God. And just like the blind men of the elephant, they're absolutely convinced without a doubt it's a wall, it's a fan, it's a snake, it's a rope. But they're blind. They don't really know. And that's what we are with religion. We've never seen God, and we're arguing about something that we don't really know.

Two major problems with this poem. One, sort of more of a philosophical problem: the poem is told from the standpoint of omniscience. That is, the narrator of the poem knows exactly what the elephant is. So, someone out there understands. Not everyone is blind, because the narrator can see. So, set that aside. Here's the, the bigger problem, and it comes to our doctrine of revelation. Six blind men, and it's a fan. What if, however, the elephant speaks? What if the elephant speaks? What if the elephant says, "I'm not a wall." "Oh, you're very mysterious." And at that point, is the man, "Wow, he's so humble, mysterious." Is he really humble, or is he hard of hearing? If the elephant says, "I'm not a snake. I'm not a rope. I'm not a fan. I'm not a wall. I am an elephant. That's my side. That's my ear. I'm gray. I'm two stories tall. I weigh two tons. I am an elephant." Hmm.

The little poem has no doctrine of revelation. And this is why the doctrine of clarity, even more, you know, what we're all attuned to the doctrine of authority, because that's the modern problem. That was not the problem in the, I mean, in the Reformation, they didn't, nobody was saying the Bible wasn't true. No one was saying the Bible was, was fables or it couldn't be trusted. The question was, could you understand it? So, you cannot separate your epistemology from your theology. Epistemology is how do we know what we know, from your theology. So, the question is, is God big enough to speak, and is he good enough to communicate who he is to his creatures? Or does God give us commands that are so mysterious we can't understand them, and his revelation just gives us more questions than answers?

So, what's at stake? The Reformers said is whom God is for. That is, is the Bible not safe in the hands of the lay people? It's only for pastors and priests. It's only can be guided by the magisterium. You need to be a scholar. You have to have a background in Greek and Hebrew and Second Temple Judaism and the ancient Near East and redaction criticism and source criticism and form criticism. You're saying, "Yeah, right. Why am I in seminary?" No, it's good for you to know all that. But ordinary people can understand the Bible. Here's what Sproul says: "What kind of God would reveal his love and redemption in terms so technical and concepts so profound that only an elite corps of professional scholars could understand them?"

So, just finish with this story. You've heard from William Tyndale, of course. He translated the Bible. Tyndale was attacked by a priest for his beliefs and his interest in translating the scripture into the common language. That was controversial, translating from Latin, from Greek and Hebrew, but not just in Latin, into the vulgar tongue, the common language of the people. Tyndale famously said, "If God spare my life before many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of scripture than you do." And it cost him his life. He died by strangulation. His corpse was burned in the city square. Quite fittingly, Tyndale's last recorded words: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes. Open his eyes. Let him see. Let him see the truth. Let him understand." And that's our prayer as we read the Bible. Open our eyes. This is light, not darkness. Our eyes are dark, and God can open them so that we can see wonderful things from his word.

All right, you've indulged me to go over our allotted hour. Let's be back in seven minutes to talk about the authority of scripture. We have a little over 40 minutes, and we're going to try to make our way through authority and then, as you look at your outline, Jesus and the Bible, which really is kind of a wrap-up of talking about the authority and the attributes of scripture. And then after the big break, we'll do our best to hit those last two topics.

So, the authority of scripture. Turn to Second Peter chapter 1. We could turn to Second Timothy 3. We'll mention that in a moment, but Second Peter chapter 1 is the other classic text on the authority of scripture. Verse 19:

"And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."

We're going to dip in and out of this passage under this topic of authority. I want to make three statements about the authority of scripture. Three statements about the authority of scripture. First, scripture is the word of God. We sound obvious, but it's not to too many people. I've heard of the name Karl Barth, one of the most famous theologians, most influential theologians in the history of the church, Swiss theologian from the 20th century. In the movement, Neo-Orthodox, is often associated with Karl Barth. Neo-Orthodox because Barth was reacting against Protestant liberalism. So, he was critical of liberal theology, which understood, following Schleiermacher and many others, that understood religion as a matter of human consciousness, and that religion is about a feeling of absolute dependence. That was Schleiermacher's understanding. Barth rails against that liberal impulse that reduces God and reduces revelation to merely human experience or consciousness. So, he's critiquing liberalism. It's called Neo-Orthodox because he's not reiterating, however, a classic doctrine of scripture. And for most of us, if we've heard of Barth, we probably think, "Well, Barth's a liberal." He was not exactly a liberal, but he's not a go-to guy for our theological tradition. His view: yes, there is this word above us and beyond us, and we need God to speak. So, he's got a big Christ, he's got a big view of God and revelation. But for Barth, "the Bible contains the word of God," or "the Bible becomes for us the word of God," or "the event in which God speaks to us through the Bible, that is the word of God." It's a very important nuance there. I said under this first point, "scripture is the word of God." Barth recoiled from that dogmatic assertion, arguing instead, "No, yes, the word of God is powerful, living, active, but, and yes, the Bible contains the word of God, but the word of God is not these words." But rather, sometimes people will use the charismatic event, the, the herald, "kerygma," is a herald, the "kerygma," the preaching. So, the event of reading the word of God. Yes, God uses the Bible, but it's in that event, that charismatic event, that the Bible becomes the word of God and speaks to us. What's important here is that even in Barth's conception, Neo-Orthodox, there is a distancing from the authority of the written words on the page of scripture. You see this today. Even if in our circles, it's not so much your church people are quoting to you Barth, but you will find it will come back every generation. There'll be some, you know, hot, fresh, new Christian Living book that sounds really super spiritual, say, "God can't be confined to the words of a page," or "If human language can contain God, then he wouldn't be God anymore." That sounds very humble, but it's misleading. No one is claiming God is captured. Or people sometimes say, "You evangelicals, you think God is contained by little black lines put together on a white piece of paper. That's your God." Well, that's reductionistic. No one is reducing the artifact itself of ink and paper to divine. But what we are saying is the very authority of God and the authority of these words on this page are the same. In these verses, the written words of God contain the very authority and the force and the character of God himself.

So, back in our text, verse 19: "We have the prophetic word more fully confirmed." Verse 20: "Knowing first of all, no prophecy of scripture..." Graphic. So, this prophecy of scripture, this is explicitly referring not just to oral traditions, not just to a speech event, but to a written text. And "prophecy" doesn't just mean, well, something about the second coming, but the whole scripture. The prophetic word is a way of referring to inscripturated revelation. Peter is thinking specifically about a text. The word "scripture" is the word of God. So, the authority resides in the texts and words and sentences and paragraphs, not in our existential experience of those things. So, it's the difference between saying there is an objective authority and a subjective authority. There's a reason why people are are prone to like the view that says the word of God comes to us in an event, because it puts aside the objective authority of words. Because as soon as you say, "Well, the words themselves have the very authority of God," then you are saying that there is something outside of us that can speak and can judge. There is something, if it's, if it's a text, then there's some stable, fixed meaning. And people are drawn to a view of inspiration that is more subjective than objective. Peter says, "This is the word of God." Verse 19: "Let's pay attention to it. It will light your way." "Will rise in your hearts." Don't have time to get into that. I think it's a reference to Christ, the inner state of believers when Christ returns. So, the goal of this revelation is not merely information, but worship. Pay attention to the written words of scripture.

Second statement here, talking about authority. So, the Bible.

Is the Word of God? Second, the Word of God was spoken and written down by means of concursive operation. Concursive operation is the technical language. What that means is that God used the intellect, the skills, the personality of fallible men to speak and write down what was entirely divine. This is one, one view. Come back to it in a moment of how God inspired the authors of the Bible. It is sometimes called dynamic operation or a dynamic view of inspiration. This is the view of Frederick Schleiermacher, mentioned him often, considered the father of liberal theology. And it's often taught, implicitly at least, by liberal theologians. According to this view, the biblical authors came under divine influence to write down exalted works of religious insight and life-giving spirituality. So this theory does not argue for God's direct influence upon the biblical authors, but rather insists a generic illumination enlightening their consciousness. So if a liberal theologian might wax very eloquent about, "Yes, I believe in the inspiration of the Bible. Of course, I believe in the inspiration of the Bible. I believe that the biblical authors were inspired," but it's of a type that Wendell Berry is inspired, or Emily Dickinson is inspired. It's a kind of enlightened state of consciousness. And it might be to a greater degree than Homer or Herodotus, but it's of a similar type. The biblical inspiration on this view differs in degree from the Spirit's work in our own lives, but it's not fundamentally different. A dynamic view of inspiration does not deny the Bible as a special book, but it does not require that the words of scripture be strictly speaking divine, let alone infallible or inerrant. As you can see, how it's an easy step from a dynamic view of inspiration to say, "Well, what the biblical authors were doing is really illuminated by the Spirit. They were writing down their sense of religious consciousness, and it's very important for us, and it gives a lot of good insights into the divine, into the human spirit. But yet, in our day, we too need to rewrite and repackage and repurpose according to new insights into the human spirit." That's the, the classic view of theological liberalism. You have a, a kernel and you have a husk, or you have the religious idea and then you have the terms and the human language describing it. And it's this sort of ineffable experience here, and then of course, all of your words are going to be around it. So it's, it's conservative Christians who are always fighting about these words, who are just different ways of describing some indescribable religious sense.

A dynamic view of inspiration. At the other end of inspiration, you will often find this asserted to be the view of conservative Christians, of Old Princeton, of inerrantists. According to this view, the words of scripture were taken down by the biblical authors as if they were writing dictation. A court stenographer, just, "Okay, God, let me hold, hold on. Corinth. Corinth. Got it. Corinth. C-K. Oh, that's right. In Greek. Okay." So we're just writing down by mechanical dictation. Now, it's true, Calvin has some passages where he describes inspiration in similar terms, but he's not describing the means of inspiration, he's describing the result. So he'll say, "Scripture is so authoritative, it's as if the apostles were scribes of the Holy Spirit." He's describing the outcome, he's not describing the actual process of mechanical dictation. Mormons, uh, uh, Muslims with the Quran and the mechanical dictation view. So when Joseph Smith wrote down the Golden Plates, he's just getting from the angel, "Here's what you write down." Someone just telling you and you're writing it down. Is that inspiration? That's not what we believe about the Bible. Not that God sometimes wasn't speaking, but we believe, or wasn't maybe speaking in an audible voice. But we don't think that everyone, no, that Paul's letters, was he was just writing to Galatians, "God was speaking in his ear"? Now, we believe that God so superintended the process, he used their personalities. That's why different authors have different vocabulary. Isaiah is very high and exalted Hebrew, and Amos, this shepherd from Tocoa, is more rustic. John uses lots of *pistis* and *pistuo* language of faith and believing. Paul uses a lot of *dikaiosune* – justification, righteousness language. Mechanical dictation theory has more in common with Muslim and Mormon views of revelation than historic Christian teaching. But you need to be aware of it because you will often get that as, as really a slander of an evangelical view of inspiration.

So back to concursive operation. According to this view, God did not move the pens, or like it typing on a keyboard. He did not whisper in their ears. But instead, here's what Berkhof says: "He acted upon them in an organic way, in harmony with the laws of their own inner beings." God uses their skills, their personality, their intellect to write down what was entirely divine and infallible. So can you say the Bible is human and divine? Yes, as long as we put some guardrails around that. Christ is human and divine, and we understand that he's human and divine, and he never sinned, and he was perfect. In the same way, you can say scripture is human in that it uses human words, it was written down by human beings. Luke talks about how he investigated these things, he's a scholar, he's talking to eyewitnesses. So they used a process to write it down. So it's human, so long as we understand it's divine, insofar as everything they wrote down was superintended by the Holy Spirit and free from any error. Again, the passage from Second Peter is key. Verse 21 tells us, "Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." The verb "they are carried along" is the Greek word *pheromenoi*, not *phero*, *pheromenoi*, which is used earlier in the verse as "produced." It's the same word translated as "born" in verse 17 and in verse 18, which is important. The words from heaven, and here's Peter is talking about the Mount of Transfiguration, and the words of the prophet written down in scripture came from the same place. Uses the same word. It's translated differently, but *phero*, the voice born from heaven, and the words of scripture carried along by the Holy Spirit, they both came from God, born of God, spoken, written down through the instrumentality of men. The words of scripture, at the same time, by virtue of being carried along by the Holy Spirit, are nothing less than God's own words. By means of this concursive, *con* – that Latin prefix means "with" – "cursive" operation.

Third statement then under this category of authority: the Bible is without error. You see in verse 20, "knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation." Meaning they didn't just get a word from the Lord and then get confused about what it meant. This was not their own idea. Verse 21 goes even farther: "No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man." Warfield, in his classic book on the inspiration and authority of scripture, says, "It is not the result of human investigation into the nature of things, the product of its writer's own thinking. This is as much as to say it is a divine gift." So when we assert that the Bible is without error, inerrant, what we mean is simply that the Bible does not make any mistakes in all that it means to assert. Now, the Bible uses phenomenological language: sun up, sun down. "People, some, ah, they're the Bible. The Bible makes mistakes. Bible's not an error." Well, your iPhone, not in this class because you're not allowed. You go to your weather app, and it says sunrise, sunset. "Stupid Steve Jobs, I can't believe he's leading us all astray." We use phenomenological language of how things are. The Bible speaks in approximations. So the Bible speaks according to its own genre. So to affirm the inerrancy of scripture does not mean that if the Bible rounds up a number, no, we allow for the ways in which human beings communicate. But it means that if you go with what the Bible is teaching, you will never be led astray. And there are many texts we could use to show the Bible's without error. But the simplest argument is this: the scripture did not come from the will of man. We see that here. It came from God. And if it entirely came from God, then it must all be true. "Let God be true and every man a liar." If it really came ultimately through human instrument, but not through human investigation, it came carried along by the Spirit. If it came from God, it must have all of the veracity and authority of God himself. Here's Calvin for that: "We will never come well prepared to read it except thou bringest reverence, obedience, and docility. But just reverence then only exists when we are convinced that God speaks to us, and not mortal men." I love what J.I. Packer, uh, you're familiar with *Knowing God*, but this is a great book, lesser known, and I think it's out of print even, but it's called *Truth and Power*. It's one of the best books on the authority of scripture. Let me read this paragraph to you. He says, "Any degree of skepticism about the portrait of Christ, the promises of God, the principles of godliness, and the power of the Holy Spirit as biblically presented has the effect of enslaving us to our own alternative ideas, and we miss something of the freedom, joy, and vitality that the real Christ bestows." So he's making the argument, inerrancy is not about boxing you in. Inerrancy is what gives you real Christian joy, freedom. He continues, "God is very patient and merciful, and I do not suggest that those who fall short here thereby forfeit all knowledge of Christ, though I recognize that when one sits loose to scripture, this may indeed happen. But I do maintain most emphatically that one cannot doubt the Bible without far-reaching loss, both the fullness of truth and a fullness of life. If therefore we have at heart spiritual renewal for society, for churches, and for our own lives, we will make much of the entire trustworthiness, that is the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, as the inspired and liberating word of God."

You have people balk at the word "inerrancy," and they prefer the word "infallibility." Matthew Kirk, does this still happen in the UK? And what's the argument? This is an errancy is a, uh, American invention or something? No, not quite. Just that, um, just the availability. That's right. Yeah. And because it was room for a number, right? So inerrancy, infallibility, I think it's a distinction without a difference. For something to be infallible, it does not fail, it does not err, it does not make mistakes. I, I don't see that the words in themselves mean something different. But you find sometimes people associate inerrancy with either a very rigid view such that you don't allow for approximations, or your whole faith is going to be thrown overboard trying to figure out how many angels were there at the tomb, because one text is one angel, another one says two angels. And we would say, well, there's ways to harmonize that. And perhaps one gospel author only mentioned one angel, but wasn't denying that there were two. And there's ways to harmonize these different things. So inerrancy is sometimes associated with a very unsophisticated, thank you, rudimentary view of inspiration that doesn't allow for any differences in human language or genre. And so they prefer an infallibility. But also, as Matthew was saying, in some contexts, then infallibility becomes sort of the wiggle word to say, "Well, you know, the Bible's infallible because I, you know, that means every, everything about the truth of of God, man, salvation is true. But inerrancy means everything the Bible says about science and chronology and history. Well, we don't necessarily believe that." And that's a mistake. Because here's, here's Packer's point. As soon as you say that, they sound reasonable at first. "Well, yes, it's, it's, it's God, man, salvation, that's the stuff that's all trustworthy." Well, you are then putting yourself in authority over God's word. Now you become the determiner of, "Well, that's the really important stuff in scripture, and that's the stuff that's kind of not so important." People use arguments that are less than meets the eye. People say, "Well, the Bible is not a science textbook." Never said it was. Of course, it's not a science textbook. But that's different than saying that anything the Bible therefore says about the natural world, we can discount. "Well, the Bible's not a history textbook." It's not. And yet the Bible speaks about history, assuming that what it says is true and meaningful and can be ascertained and does not make any mistakes. And we'll see in a moment that was Jesus' view of the Bible. So inerrancy, infallibility is to assert that everything the Bible means to say is true, is in fact true. Now, the reason I say it that way is, well, you can't quote from one of, you can't quote from the devil, say, "Well, that's what the Bible says." What does the Bible mean to communicate in that story? Everything the Bible affirms is true, is true.

The classic texts. Now, come to it. Second Timothy 3:16. You know it: "All scripture is breathed out by God." *Theopneustos*. Thank you. *Theos*, God. *Pneuma*, the word for spirit, for wind, for breath. It is breathed out by God. Not just the theological parts. Paul doesn't tell Timothy, "All of the scripture that has to do with God, man, and salvation is breathed out." No, "all scripture." Breathed out. History, philosophy, every word of the Bible. And notice that the Bible is not just inspiring in an active sense, meaning the Bible inspires you, but this word *theopneustos* in Second Timothy 3:16 means the Bible is inspired in a passive sense. So the inspiration is a past, established fact, not a future hope or occurrence. We're not saying the Bible is inspiring, scripture is inspiring, you're going to be inspired by it. No, it *is* inspired. It is God-breathed. Every bit of scripture is God exhaling. So the authority you give to God speaking must be the authority you give to his word. This high view of scripture as the inerrant, breathed-out word of God has been the position of Christians from the beginning. There was a famous or infamous book, it's often called the Rogers-McKim proposal, more liberal PCUSA theologians. This was what, 70s or 80s? And they argued that this whole inerrancy idea was owing to Old Princeton. Old Princeton is just sort of, you got to hear the Imperial Death March, and it's it's bad. Old Princeton is where you got this idea. And Calvin, the Reformers, they had a different, much more expansive view of of inspiration. That was the Rogers-McKim thesis. John Woodbridge absolutely demolished that and showed without a doubt that this view of scripture as infallible and inerrant was not an invention in 19th-century America. Clement of Rome, from the first century, described "the sacred scriptures as the true utterance of the Holy Spirit." Irenaeus, in the second century, claimed "the biblical writers were incapable of a false statement." Origen, in the third century, "the sacred volumes are fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, and there is no passage either in the law or the gospel or the writings of an apostle which does not proceed from the inspired source of divine truth." Augustine said in a letter to Jerome, "I have learned to ascribe to those books which are of the canonical rank and only to them such reverence and honor that I firmly believe that no single error due to the author is found in any of them." Sounds like inerrancy. Aquinas said, "The author of Holy Scripture is God." Calvin said, "If we follow the scriptures, we will quote be safe from the danger of erring." Later, he said, "We ought to embrace without finding fault whatever is taught in scripture." Another Calvin: "We owe to scripture the same reverence we owe to God." Another Calvin: "In scripture, God opens his most hallowed lips." This has been the position of the Christian church until the last two and a half centuries, that everything the Bible says is from God, and therefore is true. My very first church in Iowa, I had a, one of our deacons come up to me. I said, "Why didn't you go to our denominational seminary?" I wasn't, I didn't, wasn't trying to throw our school under the bus, but I said, "Well, I, I didn't go to our denominational seminary because, for example, there would be nobody at that seminary who would believe in inerrancy." I said, "What's inerrancy?" I said, "Inerrancy is just the view that everything in the Bible is true, and the Bible makes no mistakes." And he said, "I thought that was Christianity." "Exactly. That's that's right. That's why I didn't go there." Christians of every tradition until fairly recently have assumed the complete trust and faithfulness of scripture.

Which leads us here in our last 10 minutes to just wrap this up by talking about Jesus and the Bible. On a, very quickly, just highlight four passages to give you something of Jesus and the Bible. First, look at John 10:35. John 10:35. Jesus is having this argument with the Jews. They want to stone him because he's just said in verse 30, "I and the Father are one," and they understand that he's making a claim to deity. So Jesus wants to defend this idea that you can claim equality with God. And so he quotes, let's pick up verse 34. "Jesus answered them, 'Is it not written in your law, "I said, you are gods"?' If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, scripture cannot be broken. Do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" There's a lot going on here in this passage. So, *rheth*, what Jesus is quoting from, "I said you are gods," comes from Psalm 82, verse 6. Now, that's hard to interpret in itself, but it seems that the psalmist is using the designation *elohim*, gods. Could be in reference to angels. I think it's in reference to earthly magistrates, that in a sense, these earthly authorities are like gods, in some, obviously not ontological sense. So here's Jesus' point. He's not trying to say that they were ontological deities, these magistrates. What he's trying to do is puncture their pretension. They're saying, "You're getting hung up on me calling myself the Son of God." That word "god." But it says in the scripture, it uses that word *elohim*, gods, to refer to these earthly rulers. So, so don't try to, don't kill me just because I use that word when it says so in scripture about these other people. And we all know, "scripture cannot be broken." What's telling there is Jesus, like any good logical argument, he works from what his the shared assumptions with his audience, namely the authority of scripture. That's not up for debate. What they're arguing about is, can Jesus call himself the Son of God? So he goes to what they all agree on. They all agree the scripture cannot be broken. Same word used in the Sermon on the Mount. It can't be loosed, annulled, destroyed, eradicated. It cannot be broken. And notice what Jesus is doing. He makes his argument based on one word from the Hebrew Bible. "I said that you are gods." *Elohim*. Sayoi, in the Greek, gods. This is why we affirm verbal plenary inspiration. Verbal, meaning it's not just the ideas of the Bible that are inspired, or the the overarching truth, but the words are inspired. And plenary, meaning all of the words. Jesus makes his point based on one word of scripture. And it's not, it's from a very obscure, in fact, somewhat hard to understand, out-of-the-way Psalm. He's not going to one, he's not going to the story of the Exodus, or the Ten Commandments, or Isaiah. He's going to Psalm 82, verse 6, to make his point. It shows that Jesus' view of scriptural authority, and the view he knew his Jewish audience shared, was that one word from their Bible was authoritative to settle this dispute. They all affirmed a verbal plenary inspiration.

Here's a second passage: Matthew 5:17-19. Won't spend time here. You're familiar with this from the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:17-19: "Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." *Iota*, a dot. Scholars debate what's meant there, whether it's to, the the *yod*, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, or it's actually *to*, and the dot, maybe to a verbal marking, or you know, in Hebrew, that, you know, a *resh* and a *dalet* just has like that little difference. Or in English print, if you know the difference between serif font and sans-serif. Serif has the little, the little edges on all of the letters, and sans-serif is, you know, when you write an email, you don't want to be taken seriously, you need to use Comic Sans or something that doesn't have that. That Jesus is talking about these teeniest little marks. He says the authority of God's word is so absolute, the smallest letter, the little teeny hooks, jots, and tittles will not pass away.

Matthew 12:38-42. Matthew 12:38 through 42. This is where Jesus again, he's in argument, and he references the story of Jonah. "Teacher, we wish to see a sign." Jesus isn't even, "An adulterous generation seeks for a sign, and no sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation." I mention this passage because people sometimes say, "Well, we know that, I mean, Jonah in the belly of the fish, that was a story. We don't have to believe that was historical fact." There's lots of things in the Old Testament that were there as sort of literary devices. Except that Jesus clearly refers to this as a historical event. People say, "Well, how do you know that? He may just, just like you may reference Mark Twain, or you may reference Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and no one thinks that you think there was a historical personage. Or you may reference something from *Lord of the Rings*. Everyone understands you're just making a literary reference." Could Jesus be doing that? Well, clearly he's not, because he doesn't just reference the story. He says, "The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment." So it's one thing is to make my point, I say something about the, the Ring Race and *The Fellowship of the Ring*, and okay, that's, I remember that movie and that story. It's another if I say, "And the men of Gondor will rise up in judgment upon you." You know, Professor, that didn't really happen. I know Amazon is spending one billion dollars to make a prequel TV series. I didn't see it, but it's not real. Jesus clearly thinks this is history, and these were men from history.

Last text before I let you go for your break: Matthew 19:4 and 5. Jesus, this is his argument about divorce with the Pharisees. Verse 4: "He answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"?'" Why is that important? If we had time to go back to Genesis 2, you'd realize that that quote there from the end of Genesis 2 is, is not attributed to any particular speaker, just part of the story. It's the narrator who's giving that line. And therefore, "a man shall leave his father and mother." It's not a voice from heaven, it's just the narration in Genesis 2. And yet, notice what Jesus says: "Have you not read? He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said..." Who said? The Creator said. The Creator said this. Now, there's no place in Genesis 2 where some voice from heaven announces this. Jesus can equate a verse from the Old Testament, given there by Moses, as the very words of the Creator himself. The Creator said that. You can go to any part in your Bible, Jesus is assuming, and read it and say, "You know who said that? God said that. The Creator said that." That's the essence of Jesus' doctrine of scripture. And there's no indication he thought his Jews had a wrong view of scripture. No indication that Jesus thought that, "Well, you know, you really got everything mixed up. Deuteronomy wasn't really written until post-exile, and these prophets didn't really write this, and there were actually three Isaiahs." And no, he embraces what every first-century Jew would have thought about their own biblical storyline. Jesus will reference the human authors, Moses, Isaiah, David, Daniel, but they are in the background. Mark 12:36: "David himself in the Holy Spirit," or Hebrews 3: "The Holy Spirit says," or Romans 9:17: "Scripture says to Pharaoh," Galatians 3:8: "The scripture preached the gospel beforehand." All of those are passages where scripture and God are used interchangeably. Not because the actual artifact of paper and pen and very nice goat skin, this one's very nice, you can sleep on this, is divine, but because the authority we give to God must be the authority we give to this book. When Jesus is battling the devil in the wilderness, you remember what does he do? This is the Son of God. Could have called down legions of angels. Could have summoned plagues. Three times he quotes Deuteronomy to the devil. He says, "It is written." Even Jesus, in fighting the devil, says, "Here's my supreme weapon. Here's the decisive, authoritative voice of God. It's the scripture." Rebellion against scripture is rebellion against God. The Bible can no more fail, falter, or err than God himself can fail, falter, or err. The first temptation was to doubt God's word in the garden. Jesus' temptation, as the second Adam, was also to doubt God's word. And so he quotes Deuteronomy to the devil: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." Do you see how Jesus is fulfilling where the first Adam failed? First Adam is presented with, "Has God really said?" He doubts God's word. He plunges all of humanity into sin. The second Adam is tempted, same temptation, and he comes with God's word. He says, "No, no, it is written: 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" No, we are standing on the word of God. So our authority comes from God's word, and our view of scripture's authority should be nothing less than what Jesus himself believed. All right, be back here at 11:03. I'll give you your three minutes back. 11:03.

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Good to have you back. Okay, we have this last session here this morning, and we'll see how well we can do with these last two topics under the doctrine of scripture. Try to move quickly through this topic: the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. That is a phrase from Christian Smith in his book called *The Bible Made Impossible*. Maybe some of you have heard of the name Christian Smith, sociologist, who is is most well known in sort of seminary circles for his earlier book about the religious life of students and teenagers, *Soul Searching*. He coined the phrase "moralistic therapeutic deism." So he's got a knack for these identifying phrases. He calls pervasive interpretive pluralism, however, he is labeling this phenomenon as one of the chief deficiencies of an evangelical view of scripture. I don't think it is. It was incidental that at this same time, Christian Smith was becoming Catholic. So in this book, *The Bible Made Impossible*, he argues that this problem, PIP, pervasive interpretive pluralism, is the great bugaboo of an evangelical doctrine of scripture. And you can summarize the objection like this: "You've all heard it. If the Bible is so clear, why are there so many different interpretations?" Or, "That's great that you have this inerrant Bible, but nobody agrees on what it says." He gives a number of pieces of evidence for pervasive, so widespread, interpretive pluralism. Limitless interpretation. So he says, "Think about all the mistakes in Christian history. Wasn't it the case that Christians used to support slavery? Or they believed the Earth was flat? Or they believed in geocentrism?" One could point to, just for example, a very fine commentary from Anthony Thiselton on First Corinthians. I remember looking at in First Corinthians 15, Paul's that statement there about baptisms for the dead. I think he has 30-some different interpretations of what that means. Or here's a classic example you've probably all encountered. You've seen those multiple view books: four views of the Millennium, and three views of, two views of, of women's ordination, and four views of free will. There are more than 30 of those available. And I understand why people find them useful to a degree. You sort of line up, here's the different options, and then they respond to each other. And it's very neat and convenient. I've never been a huge fan of those books because I think they erode people's confidence in the clarity of scripture. That if you have 30 books on your shelf that are multiple view books, you, you can't help but conclude, "I guess there's really no right answers to a lot of these questions." Or point to all the denominations. I have the book, they update it almost every year, *The Handbook of Denominations in the United States*. There are more than 200 denominations, Christian denominations in the United States. The last time I checked, there were some 27 just different Baptist ones, and there's probably almost that many Presbyterian ones. In some ways, it can be the single biggest defeater to Christianity. You try to explain your beliefs, you state your reasons, you talk about history, theology, exegesis, and the other person just, "That's just your interpretation." I spent three years of seminary for that. I remember again, back in the heyday of the immersion church, I was speaking at this conference. This was the biggest bust of a conference I've ever been at. They, they would always have, I don't know if they still do this, Christian Book Expo, which was like an industry conference for Christian publishers. It's kind of an insider event. Well, they, one year, 2008, 2009, I don't remember, decided to make it, uh, open to the public. They rented out the massive, like, downtown Dallas Convention Center. I mean, it was just sprawling. And they had just every, you know, every publisher seemed to have their authors in there to do something. I'll never forget, I was in a room, it must, there must have been a thousand seats, and I'm not exaggerating. There are more people in here right now than were in that place. It was cavernous. And it was a quasi-debate. Me and I remember who else, I think Scott McKnight was there. And it was sort of a, a panel/debate about the emergent church. This thing was a complete bust. And I remember afterward, a guy came up to me, and it was one of those incidences you'll probably see it in pastoral ministries sometimes, where there's like a guy going kind of bonkers, and his wife was standing there like, "I've seen this before. Please, please just stop." He was really fired up. And I was, I think of myself as a pretty calm person, but I could feel myself getting really frustrated and upset. And because we kept going down this cycle, and he would say, "You know what? You're giving your Western Enlightenment patriarchal something, something view of reason." And I, and I'd say, "But, but Paul reasoned in the lecture hall of Tyrannus for three years. He reasoned before Felix and Festus. It's good." And he would just say, "Well, that's just your interpretation of those passages." It says the word, "He reasoned." That's all. The Paul seemed to think that the Bible had a meaning to it, and he could draw a meaning from it, and he could reason from it. And say, "Well, that's just your interpretation." What Paul's interpretation was. And you could see how it became a very unprofitable discussion. The only, I was so frustrated. The only highlight of that trip is it was my, I think, my only time meeting, well, at least in having a personal conversation with J.I. Packer. And the, uh, you know, I, so I've come out, the emergent book, Moody, the publisher was, you know, "Oh, you, you should meet Dr. Packer." Well, of course, I want to meet J.I. Packer. And Jay Packer doesn't want to meet me, but that's fine. And I don't think he had read the book, though. He apparently read every book because he blurbed the back of it. He didn't abort that one. But I'll never forget the publisher is here's Kevin D. Young, he's written this really helpful book on the emergent church. J.I. Packer, I won't try to do his his British accent, but he said, "The emergent church, there are ways in which one can lose sight of the Christian gospel, and they have found one of those ways." It was just a perfect J.I. Packer sentence about the, I said, "I didn't need to read the book. It's right there." Uh, my other J.I. Packer story. I remember him speaking at a conference, I think it was a Desiring God conference. And, you know, when you're J.I. Packer, and you're whatever, he wasn't, in probably his 70s, you just think, "This is going to be the last time we ever hear." Well, he kept living and living and living. But he came out, he was actually quite a boring speaker. He's a brilliant writer, but, you know, reads a manuscript. But he's J.I. Packer, and he got just a thunderous applause, standing ovation. And he said something like, "Hi, before I begin, I should say two things. To give that sort of response to a speaker is something like encouraging of great vanity and pride and arrogance. And second, I must say that I rather enjoyed it." It was just great. So I have, there you go. You can feel justified and enjoying, should you ever, I've never received it. So, Christian Smith captures this frequent objection with his phrase, pervasive interpretive pluralism. How do we make sense of the fact that there are so many interpretations? Are we just left to throw up our hands and say, "I guess all we have are interpretations"?

Ten quick responses. Ten quick. One response: We need to have a proper understanding of the sufficiency of scripture. A proper understanding of sufficiency of scripture. This is what I mentioned earlier. Here's the Westminster Confession, 1:6: "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture." Notice this: "There all things necessary for his glory, man's salvation, faith, and life." That's what the Bible is sufficient to do. In Christian Smith's book, he'll talk about ridiculous books supposedly giving the Bible's inspired diets, or the Bible's authoritative opinion on the federal budget, or the Bible's guide to alternative medicine. Well, of course, if we think that the Bible says everything about everything, we're going to have all sorts of interpretations. But if we can at least say, "Well, what does the Bible mean to communicate?" So, a proper understanding of the sufficiency of scripture.

Second, we need a proper understanding of the clarity of scripture. Here's Westminster Confession, 1:7: "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." So the evangelical doctrine of scripture does not say any one of any understanding can open any passage of the Bible and it's all clear. The Westminster Divines say what's necessary to be known, believed for salvation are clearly propounded in one place of scripture or another, so that by ordinary means, you can get a sufficient understanding. So it's a very nuanced definition of clarity. So we fully acknowledge some things in the Bible are hard to understand. Second Peter 3:16: "Peter says there are some things in Paul's letters that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures." That's a remarkable statement. One, it's remarkable because Peter says about Paul, he, he says, "and the other scriptures." So Peter already recognizes Paul's letters are scripture. That's remarkable. Second, praise the Lord for Peter saying there are some things in Paul's letters that even Peter thought, "That's, I gotta think twice about that." Paul. Peter said there's some things hard. But then here's the third remarkable thing. Notice what he says next. He doesn't say there are some things hard in Paul's letter, and all we really have are our interpretations. He says, "hard, which unstable, ignorant people twist to their own destruction." So Peter recognizes they're hard, but there is a correct understanding because these people have twisted them. Everyone in the history of the church who's arguing about something of theological importance is almost always arguing about scripture. If you're going to throw up your hands and say, "Well, you know, they got verses, they got verses," you are not going to come to a conclusion about anything. You don't think the Pelagians had verses? You don't think the Arians had verses? Of course they did. Peter says you can have a different interpretation and it be mistaken.

All right. Three, we need a proper understanding of *Sola Scriptura*. We believe in *Sola Scriptura*. Sometimes people will distinguish between *Sola* good and *Sola* or *Nuda Scriptura*. Scripture on meaning the Bible is the final authority. The Bible has authority over creeds and councils and catechisms and popes. But not *Sola*, meaning you just got you and your Bible and nothing else. Or *Nuda*, meaning it's just the Bible with any other sort of intellectual recourse. No, we believe there's no authority beyond the Bible, but we acknowledge other authorities. Parents have authority, governments have authority. We submit ourselves to the authority of elders. We ascribe to the Westminster Standards, if you're a Presbyterian, or to the Council of Nicaea authority. So we're not saying that we can't use subordinate authority. We're just saying scripture always has the final authority. So this helps us when people have a thousand different interpretations. We say, "Well, we can narrow this a bit if we look at the best of our own tradition."

Fourth response to pervasive interpretive pluralism: We need a proper understanding of the history of the church. I have a whole lecture on this, which doesn't really fit into any of the ST courses, but I simply want to make the point that the church has been around for 2,000 years. Multiply human beings by 2,000 years, and you will find every kind of stupidity that's bound to happen. It's cherry-picking. Say, "Well, the church, look at, bump, bump, bump, Flat Earth, Galileo, Crusades." Okay, you took three things out of historical context, some incorrectly, out of 2,000 years of a global movement. That hardly means all we have are interpretations. And let's not be ignorant about some of those statements. Columbus was not the first person to think the world was round. The Venerable Bede, B-E-D-E, I wish my parents had named me Venerable, it's a great first name. The Venerable Bede, so this is 8th century, taught the world was round, as did Bishop Virgilius of Salzburg in the 8th century, Hildegard of Bingham in the 12th century, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. All four of them are Catholic saints. They all taught the world was round. Every educated person in Columbus's day knew the world was round. It is a myth passed on from just a few predominant sources that everyone was believing in a flat Earth. They were not. Jeffrey Burton Russell argues that during the first 15 centuries of the Christian era, "nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the Earth spherical, and by the 15th century, all doubt had disappeared." The most popular medieval textbook on astronomy, written in the 13th century, was entitled *De Sphaera*. Generations before Columbus's voyage, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, Chancellor of the University of Paris, said, "Although there are mountains and valleys on the earth for which it is not perfectly round, it approximates very nearly to roundness." So it is a myth that the supposed wise men of Spain challenged Columbus that he was going to fall off the face of the Earth. They did not say the Earth was flat and he would fall off. They challenged Columbus because they thought he had greatly underestimated the circumference of the earth, which in fact he had, which is why he did not hit India, he hit the West Indies, which was not at all India. But now they are recall too that on almost any of these science questions, the scientific community was wrong for a long time. So the scientific community used to believe in geocentrism, used to believe in spontaneous generation, used to have very erroneous views of where plagues came from. So if you're going to ding the church for being wrong on things, it wasn't the church to the exclusion of, quote, "science." And where the church has been wrong, for example, on slavery, let's not misread that history as well. It wasn't wrong for centuries after centuries. It isn't as if the church was for 1850 years saying, "We like slavery, we like slavery, we like slavery." Oops, "We don't like slavery." That's not what happened. Edward Frazier, who's a, uh, Roman Catholic philosopher, he has a new book. It's a little book. I, I forget the exact title, but it's something like, *The Catholic Tradition and Critical Race Theory*. So it's a lot about those two things. But one of the things he does in that book is he shows all of the statements, and particular, he's looking at the Catholic tradition, and he's not saying they got everything right, but statements for centuries after centuries against racism, against race-based slavery, against slavery in the Middle Ages. It wasn't that the church had this wrong for most of its history. In fact, because we need to be honest about some of our own history, it was a particular slice of time from about 1800 about the 19th century, largely in the American South, where they became a very vigorous defense of slavery. That was the exception, not the rule. The Bible clearly condemns man-stealing. You see that in the Old Testament. We see that in First Timothy chapter one. So all this is to say, there's much more examples we could give about how people get Galileo wrong, how they, uh, get the Scopes Monkey Trial wrong. But we need to understand our own history. There's plenty of bad things, lots of bad things. But sometimes we are very quick as Christians to believe the worst interpretation of those events.

Fifth, we must not exaggerate our differences. Certainly, there are lots of disagreements. But if you look at Christians and churches and denominations, if you, if you were to take churches, denominations, who all believe what we've just been talking about last week and this week, basically agree on sufficiency, clarity, authority, necessity of scripture, if you, if you were to get that lined up, you would find that those Christians agree on a whole lot more than they disagree on. Out of those 27 Baptist denominations, I didn't do a scientific survey, there's probably 20 of them are evangelical. And of those, they probably all believe the same thing about Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the atonement, heaven and hell, original sin, the resurrection, faith, repentance, and probably a dozen other of the most essential things. Yes, there are very important differences, but let's not exaggerate them. To say there are 200 denominations sounds just super discouraging. But you have to realize why there are different denominations. It's not always that it was a rank schism. Denominations formed over different ethnicities, over different languages. My whole tradition that I came from was because Dutch people came to America that they wanted to speak, as long as they could, the language of angels, Dutch. They held on to it, and so they had their enclave. And that happened in this country in particular with all sorts of language and ethnic groups, different rates of Americanization, different regions of the country. The Reformed and Presbyterian are different denominations because Presbyterianism developed in the British Isles, and Reformed as a denomination developed on the continent, with France and Germany and the Netherlands, in different geographic places that get multiplied over times. So we don't want to exaggerate the differences, as they are real differences.

Sixth, we should recognize that pervasive interpretive pluralism is not a Christian problem, it is a human problem. Perhaps this helps you just have these sort of conversations with the college student. It exposes that what we're dealing with here is a problem for every human being, not so much a problem with scripture. You know what human beings disagree on everything. The internet has showed us everything. I mean, Tim Keller could quote a Bible verse, and half the internet is, "That guy, whatever happened to him?" We disagree on everything. I, yeah, this shows. I grew up in Michigan. It's born in Illinois, so I know this is news to some of you. How many of you...

Up in the south, I won't ask how you learned about the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States. I can tell you, I learned about the Civil War in one very simple way: the good guys won. That's just the way I learned it. Lincoln was the greatest American. It went George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, MLK, sort of boom, boom, boom. That's how I learned it.

When I started reading books on Lincoln, I realized not just maybe Southerners, but a whole some conservatives who think Lincoln was a bad liberal because he expanded the power of the federal government. What? People don't like Abraham Lincoln? I thought this was like one thing: Jesus rose from the dead. Abraham Lincoln was a good guy. I didn't know. But actually, there's a lot of people that say something different.

Okay, I remember, uh, AP Physics class in high school. I have a very good science teacher, and he told us. He said, "Be wary when anybody on the news reports what science is." Because he said, "Here's how science actually works: somebody publishes something in one journal, and then for the next 20 years, everyone pokes holes in it, and then it gets refined." And then you realize, "Oh, that actually, uh, fat is good for you. Sorry to ruin your life, but it is good for you." Now, and, uh, you should have milk. You shouldn't have milk. Eggs? No, no eggs. Lots of eggs. We don't know. So science is not settled.

There are all sorts of books explaining what, how did the financial meltdown happen in 2008? There will be all sorts of books about what went wrong with the pandemic.

I'm a Chicago White Sox fan because I was born in Chicago. So I read about the Black Sox Scandal. They bet on the World Series in 1919. There's a whole genre of books on Shoeless Joe Jackson. Was he really guilty? Of course he wasn't. He was just innocent. He didn't know what he was doing. Every point of human knowledge.

Now, here's one of the Catholic responses. That's why you need a magisterium, the Tradition, capital T, because then you have an authoritative pronouncement on what scripture teaches. I understand the visceral re- why you might be drawn to that. Here's the problem. A Catholic scholar, but I read enough Catholics. I read lots of people I like and respect. I read Catholic journals, and you know what? They don't agree on what the Pope says. They don't agree on what the magisterium says. They don't agree on what the papal encyclical says.

So it's easy to think the Catholic Church, they have a certain institutional unity, but any of you who have been a part of the Catholic Church, or know you note, there is just as much diversity in the Catholic Church as there is in the Protestant Church. They have conservatives and liberals. They have, "We should only do this in Latin." "No, you're not allowed to do this in Latin." They have all the same kinds of diversity. The magisterium has not solved that intellectual problem.

Seven. We must distinguish between meaning and significance. Christian Smith, in his book, lists 17 different readings. He calls them readings he's heard or seen on John's story about the Samaritan woman at the well, John 4. At first glance, you think, 15 different readings of the woman at the well? We can't agree on anything. But you realize they're not really differences about the meaning. Their differences about the significance.

So someone goes to John 4 and says, "You know what this passage is about? The nature of God. God is Spirit." John 4:24. Someone else preaches from John 4 and says, "This is about worship. You worship on that mount. I'll tell you how God wants worshipers in spirit and truth." Someone else says, "This is about how we engage with the culture by asking good questions." Someone else says, "This is about evangelism. This is how you talk to non-believers." Someone else says, "This is how you elevate the the position of women when no one else wanted to talk to this woman." Well, are those really mutually exclusive interpretations? Are those different ways of finding significance in that story? Different potential applications? Just because the different sermons have different homological points doesn't mean that we don't have an evangelical doctrine of inspiration.

Eight. Remember I said it's an eight. Christians come to different conclusions on scripture for several reasons. For several reasons. Sometimes we simply haven't looked hard enough at an issue or at a text. Hopefully, we're all humble enough to say, "Oh, I never really looked into that." Sometimes we disagree because we're bound by our own tradition, and our tradition can be dead or alive. The tradition could be our confessional tradition, or it could be the tradition of what our social media friends tell us we should think. Sometimes Christians disagree because the effects of sin have distorted our interpretive abilities. And this is important. Sometimes Christians disagree because, lo and behold, one side is wrong and one side is right.

Now, hopefully, we are humble enough to be open to correction, but hopefully, we're also forthright enough to think that we can come to conclusions. You may have heard before the famous line from G.K. Chesterton, who said, "We are in danger of, uh, he said, we have put humility on the wrong place. We have put it on the organ of knowledge instead of the organ of ambition." Humility is meant to govern ambition, and we've put it on knowledge. And then, as famous line, "As we are in danger of making a race of men too meager to believe in the multiplication tables." I don't know, who am I to say, "You know what? Five times four is." That's not humility.

We all come to a place where we think, "Well, humbly before God, seeing through a glass dimly, here's why I think this is correct." This is what people have always done in the history of the church. They believe the Bible because they believe that the Bible teaches this particular point. Here's what Augustine says on Christian, his book on Christian Doctrine, quote, "What difficulty is it for me when those words can be interpreted in various ways?" So, ah, Augustine is dealing with the same thing, pervasive interpretive pluralism, provided only that the interpretations are true. In Bible study, all of us are trying to find and grasp the meaning of the author we are reading, and we believe him to be revealing truth. We do not dare to think, he said, anything which we either know or think to be incorrect.

Sometimes it's church history is so helpful. It doesn't always answer all the questions, but at least shows us, ah, this is not new. They had many interpretations of the Bible back in Augustine's day, and you know what Augustine said? Some of those interpretations are wrong.

Which leads to the ninth point. We must remember that at some point, everyone wants to affirm that scripture says something clearly, whether others disagree or not. So, for example, in Christian Smith's book here, where he's talking about pervasive interpretive pluralism, he comes around to say, "Well, there are some things, however, that the Bible is abundantly clear." He says, "For example, on money and possessions, about how we should help the poor." Okay, that that may be true. But why is it that all of us, when it comes then to our issue, suddenly the Bible is, "Well, obviously that point's not up for debate"?

Brian McLaren, emergent days, wrote a whole book criticizing modern people for being so sure about the Bible and pinning everything down, our own interpretations, elevating them to the standard of authority. And yet, he then wrote a book called "The Secret Message of Jesus," and he argued for his reading of the kingdom was right because, quote, "it accounts for more of the details included in the text than a bad reading." Yes, that's what we're all doing. We're all trying to say this accounts for more of the text than the bad readings do.

It's true, some things in the Bible are clear, and some things are less clear. I don't have trouble people arguing that something is clearer or not. The problem is when people aren't actually arguing their case, but they're just pushing aside beliefs to say, "Well, there's a million interpretive theories out there, so let's not get worked up over this." Like I said earlier, if that's what you do, you give up intellectually. Just throw in cash in your tips. You know what? You may think, "Well, it's just a little, you know, there's a lot of smart people disagree about homosexuality." And I know a lot of nice people disagree. A lot of PhDs who agree, and they got Bible verses. They got Bible verses. So I guess if you got PhDs on both sides and Bible verses on both sides, and nice people on both sides, then you can't come down on the side. If that's your standard, you won't have the deity of Christ. You won't have the resurrection. You won't have sin. You won't have heaven. You, you will not have anything. Because they, you know, there's a lot, anybody can get a PhD. They give out a lot of those. And there's a lot of nice people out there, well-meaning people.

Sooner or later, everyone wants to come down on something. And if you just throw up your hands whenever there's multiple interpretations, you'll have nothing left.

And then final point. We should have the same confidence in the Bible that Jesus had. Again, we don't have to turn there, but that passage from Matthew 19, where the Pharisees are asking about divorce. Isn't that wasn't that a question of pervasive interpretive pluralism? If you know some of the history, you know there was the Rabbi Shammai and there was the Rabbi Hillel, and there were two different schools. And Hillel had the more liberal, loose interpretation of Deuteronomy in the grounds for divorce, and the Shammai school had a more narrow, conservative interpretation. The Pharisees are asking a very legitimate question. We have different rabbinical traditions which understand the erwa de Bar, something indecent in in Deuteronomy, in different ways. And Jesus doesn't simply say, "Yeah, you're just all we got are interpretations." He, he more or less sides with the Shammai school against the Hillel school. And he says, "You shouldn't divorce except on the grounds of sexual immorality." He says, "There is a right and wrong way to view this." We should have the same confidence in the Bible that Jesus had.

Now, that this is not going to, you are still going to have different interpretations. And sometimes you will say, "I'm 80% sure of this interpretation." I think there is a problem with some Christians who present every doctrine that they are 1000% sure of. Every doctrine, and disagreement on every one of those doctrines is tantamount to not being a Christian. That's that's that's not honest. Uh, that's a mistake. And when you preach, you know, it doesn't make good preaching to preach on percentages and on hunches. But you should. I mean, I, I hope I've done this. I try to be honest when I'm going through a text. I say, "If it's particularly difficult, here's some good people say this. Here's some good people say this. Here's, I'm, I'm not entirely sure, but here's why I'm on this side." If you do that every week, it destabilizes people. But if you do that from time to time, it actually can help your people feel like, "Ah, my my pastor, my college leader, uh, he's being honest. He's really doing his homework in studying this, and he's going to be honest with me and help me understand and see the issues in scripture." And then the challenge is when you, you know, are preaching and you want to get with all the thunder and the lightning, do that on the stuff that's that you are 100% sure on. Don't do that on a, you know, if you're preaching on Paul's statement about baptisms for the dead, and you're going for 50 minutes, and everything human history depends upon that. Yeah, well, a lot of people have not been sure what Paul is talking about. So don't make major rhetorical force on minor points or absolutely self-assured statements on issues of some debate.

But neither should we be skeptics. That's the famous debate between Luther and Erasmus, where Luther said, "The Holy Spirit is no skeptic." Erasmus, for all of his brilliance, was something of that quintessential scholar who always wanted to have both and always wanted to see it both ways, never wanted to come down onto some settled position on things. And Luther, who was so different, very different, said, "The Holy Spirit's no skeptic." And you don't get into the pulpit to preach your your doubts and your wonderings, but to give an authoritative word from the Lord.

Questions? Comments? A final topic is this question of Canon. If only we had some Canon experts around here. We do, uh, with Dr. Krueger, of course, who's written so much and so well on this. We'll just get started here in the last 10 minutes or so, and I know you spend a good deal of this in your Gospels class, but there's often a section in in Systematic Theology on Canon, and some repetition is good for the soul. So let's just think about this, and we'll wrap up next week.

The Bible, as you know, is a single book made up of many books. 39 books in the Protestant Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament, 66 books. The collection of authoritative books is called a Canon. A Canon means a fixed rule, a standard. We've been, today people talk about the Canon of Western literature. Good Christians think about the Bible a lot, and we've been talking about this authority and inspiration of the Bible, but there's another question that comes in. Sometimes it comes from Catholic scholars, say, "Well, that's very fine and good, but how you have an inerrant Bible, but how do you know you have an inerrant collection of Bible books? How do we know all this that we've been saying about the Bible? How do we know this actually should be our Bible?" Because we don't believe that somebody found these on gold plates like Ju like Joseph Smith. Mormons. We don't believe that it was taken down by dictation like Muhammad. So how do we know that we have the right book? So it's some cheeky observer has said, "How do you know that your table of contents are inherent?" That's the question of the Canon.

Three questions come to mind, and we'll move from simplest to most complex. First question: How did we get our present Canon? Second: Should we have a Canon? And third: How do we know the right books are in the Canon? Let's see if we can just tackle this first question, which is a question of history. How did we come to get our present Canon?

Quick 10-minute overview. Historically, how we came to our present Canon. Let's start with the Old Testament. We know Jesus and the apostles recognized the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament. They all had, they operated with this assumed authority. We also know their Hebrew Bible consisted of the 39 books we call the Old Testament. Now, they were ordered differently. They weren't, they didn't count to 39 because some of them were together. They were in a different order, but the same books in their Hebrew scriptures. So, 90, and it was thought for a long time that this Council of Jewish elders fixed the Old Testament Canon. But now it appears the council was less decisive, and the Canon was already well established. And this makes sense because Jesus and the apostles are before AD 90, and they're operating with a shared understanding of scripture. But there was this council in 90 AD, perhaps some final ratification of what constituted the Hebrew scriptures.

The question of Apocrypha. Sometimes this is used as an adjective, the apocryphal gospels. Other times it's used as a formal set of books called the Apocrypha. That is, certain inter-testamental books which are in the Catholic Bible and not in the Protestant Bible. Tobit, Judith, the Greek ending of Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, First and Second Maccabees, First and Second Esdras, the Prayer of Manasses, Manasseh, and the Greek Orthodox Church also includes Third and Fourth Maccabees and Psalm 151. How do we account for this difference? That these other inter-testamental books, the Apocrypha, are not in our Protestant Canon? Lots that could be said, and thankfully, we also have a Septuagint expert here. Two quick reasons, though: One, they are not in the Hebrew scriptures. They were not in the Hebrew scriptures. Second, they are in a way in the Septuagint. This is where we have to understand Jerome translated the Apocrypha and included them in the Vulgate, but made clear that these were to be in a different class. So over time, copies weren't as careful to include Jerome's distinctions, and readers of the Latin Bible could no longer see the difference between the two sets. Um, so I, I missed both there. I'm talking about the, the Latin Vulgate here, not the Septuagint. The Latin Vulgate. You know that the Latin Vulgate is the dominant translation until Tyndale, Wycliffe begin translating into the vernacular. Jerome, contemporary with Augustine, translates the Apocrypha. He includes it in the Vulgate and adds some marginal notation that these are in a different class of books. Over time, copies are made, that marginal notation is lost, and it simply becomes a part of the Vulgate, which becomes a part of the Catholic tradition. These books of the Apocrypha, the Belgic Confessions, can be valuable at times to understand history during this inter-testamental period, but they should not be ranked with the same authority as the other books of the Hebrew scriptures.

More is usually said about the New Testament, not that the Old Testament isn't important, but or you got that debate about the Apocrypha, and there's just less that's been written about it. And part of that's because there's less demonstrable history to try to trace this out. We can see in the New Testament itself that there is an expanding Canon. For example, 2 Peter 3:16, we just looked at earlier. Peter says, "Paul's writings they misinterpret, as they do the other scriptures." So Peter already assumes that there are new scriptures, and Paul's writings are one of them. Or 1 Timothy 5:18. "Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the scripture says, 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,' and 'the laborer deserves his wages.'" That saying, "the laborer deserves his wages," does not come from the Old Testament. "The ox," don't muzzle the ox, does the laborer deserves his wages? Is at least a an approximation of a saying of Jesus from the Gospels. And yet Paul introduces both as "the scripture says." So we already see in the New Testament letters themselves, they have an expanding sense of Canon. And this makes sense. 2 Corinthians 3 talks about the old covenant and the new covenant. Well, good covenant theologians know what comes with a covenant. Covenant documents. When there is a new covenant arrangement, that covenant Lord is going to establish those covenant promises, those covenant obligations, with new authoritative covenant documents. So instinctively, they would have thought, "There is now a new covenant superseding the old covenant, so surely there will be some new covenant documents."

The tracing out of the history goes something like this. When you get past the New Testament, Papias, P-A-P-I-A-S, Papias around 110 gives anecdotal reference to the four Gospels. The earliest New Testament manuscript is a papyri fragment from the Gospel of John dating to the early earliest part of the second century, the 100s. By 130 AD, the four Gospels and the 13 Pauline Epistles are accepted in various parts of the church. There is an important document we know as the Muratorian Fragment, dates to around 200, which includes the four Gospels, Acts, 13 Pauline Epistles, First and Second John, Jude, and the Revelation of John. And then four other books are mentioned: the Epistle to the Laodiceans, which this fragment rejects as a Pauline forgery. The Shepherd of Hermas, which it says is used in private but not in public worship. The Revelation of Peter, which is said, "though some of us think it should not be read in church." So there's a debate. And then the Wisdom of Solomon, one of those books from the Apocrypha, which was included because it was probably a part of these disputed books. So this Spirit fragment by 200 is providing a fairly comprehensive list of what will end up in our New Testament. Origen, around 250, mentions the four Gospels, Acts, 13 Pauline Epistles, First Peter, First John, Revelation of John, and then disputed. He says Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Second and Third John, Jude, Shepherd of Hermas, Letter of Barnabas, Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, and the Gospel of the Hebrews. Eusebius, writing 325, in his Church History, he lists a similar, he almost done. He puts them into four different categories: Recognized, Disputed, Rejected, and Heretical. In the category of Recognized, he says four Gospels, Acts, Epistles of Paul, which now he includes Hebrews as an Epistle of Paul, First John, First Peter, and Revelation. In the Disputed books, he says he thinks they're canonical and they're known to most people, but he says there's still some disagreement. He includes James, Jude, Second Peter, Second and Third John. In the Rejected books, which he says there's some helpful material, but they're not canonical, he includes Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and the Gospel of the Hebrews. And then in Heretical, which he calls forgeries and quote, "altogether wicked and impious," he includes the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Matthias, the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of John.

What's important, and we'll come back to this next week, it can seem destabilizing if you think, "Wow, this has taken a long time, and there's a lot of books floating around here, and maybe Dan Brown was right, and the church just sort of took a just a vote and make push cram some books into the Bible." We'll come back to all that next week. But here's what's encouraging to notice in all of these lists, Muratorian Fragment, Origen, Eusebius, never once has there been any book in the recognized category except for the books that are recognized. So it was never like, "Yeah, they picked the Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, The Apocalypse of Peter." For a time, those were there. Now, what we have are clearly from the beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Pauline Epistles, First John, Revelation of John, and they were really dealing with a handful of other documents which are less clear to the church initially.

The earliest complete Bible that we have dates to around 350 AD, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Of course, that's not the title. They're called that because they're in the Vatican, and one is found out Sinai. And then finally, Athanasius's Pascal Letter in 367 presents the Canon accepted in the East. He says, "These are fountains of salvation. They who thirst may be satisfied with the living words, and these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of holiness." In 382, at the Synod of Rome, the present Canon is accepted in the West. And it's a Synod of Carthage in 397, accepted by the entire church. So by 367, Athanasius's letter in the East, 382, Rome in the West, 397, Carthage, over the entire church, that's the basic historical outline of how the books of the Bible came to be seen as canonical. That history is not largely in dispute. The more difficult questions are the final two questions: Should we have a Canon? And how do we know that the right books are actually in the Canon?

What a cliffhanger! Come back next week. We'll wrap that up, and then we'll make a turn into, I don't want to say the fun stuff. That this hasn't been fun. It has been. But the doctrine of God. This has been the easy stuff. Doctrine of God is the good, head-splitting stuff, and we'll get into that next week.