2019 Leadership Summit: Alec Ryrie, How Do You Know the Bible is the Word of God

the next speaker is going to take two of us to introduce I also be say this because I have the privilege of also facilitating the presentation after lunch I'll say more but I just want to tell you this that our next speaker is here because of Amazon I can tell you this Amazon Amazon has a wonderful way that when you buy a book on Amazon they'll tell you you might consider other books well I vote bought a book on Martin Luther back in 2017 by an Oxford scholar and a Melinda Roper I saw it and Andrews board I loved Andrews board meeting when there was a bookstore at Andrews University and I saw this book I liked that book I pick up the thick book and read it I was enjoying it so much I said one of the books should I be reading about the Reformation and in that I came across a book called Protestantism the faith that changed the modern world and I'll tell you more about that at lunchtime after lunch because we have something special for each of you but that's why I became acquainted with our speaker and in the credits of that book he gives credit to Washington Adventist University in the book because dr. Alec Riley was a speaker yeah aw you were yeah table WP player dr. I react see presented lecture part of lecture series Aquila lecture series a couple years ago and I think he was re was referred to you by dr. David trim so I might ask David to come up and help us with this introduction kind of keep my comments brief David has more technical details but Alec is a professor of history and religion and David can tell us more dr. Ian please thank you it's a pleasure to to introduce professor Alec Ryrie who is I think one of the leading historians firstly of the English and British Reformation but increasingly one of the leading historians of religion not just limited to the British Isles his PhD or rather actually it's not a PhD it's a DPhil from the ox University because Oxford is particular and they have to have their own acronyms and me a PhD isn't good enough so they have a de Phil in theology from San Cross College Oxford his PhD examined how early English Protestant reformers interacted with that interest in King Henry the eighth he taught at the University of Birmingham from 1999 to 2006 and since then has been professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University in England for three years he was head of the department of theology and religion he's president of the ecclesiastical history Society one of the leading academic societies of in religious history and co-editor of the Journal of ecclesiastical history he's published seven books two of them are monographs one is a textbook for books though are superbly researched but are written for a wide readership and they've been published by presses such as Oxford University Press Random House Penguin and Harvard University Press and they include the book that elder widely mentioned be Protestants the radicals who made the modern world which is published in 2017 for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation but takes the story from Luther in Germany up to the present day in spans Asia Africa and the Americas and includes some very astute assessments I may say of seventh-day Adventists his latest book just out is unbelievers the religious quest to abolish God he was elected a fellow of the British Academy this year which was one of the highest honors in in British scholarship but also he is a believer himself and I actually recall talking with Alec around the time he moved from Birmingham in the history department to Durham in the theology department and he said something along the lines of I think I've established now my credibility is an historian so now I can do what I'm more interested in which is teaching in the theology department and he's interested in it because he himself is a believer he is a reader in the Church of England which is effectively a lay preacher and though his theological views would differ in some ways from my own and from Adventists he believes in Jesus Christ and that's the most important thing we have in common one reason our pioneers always call themselves the seventh-day Adventist denomination not the seventh-day Adventist Church is because they recognize that the church is the Church of believers in Jesus Christ so we historically thought of ourselves as a denomination within the church and alec is a member and a believer in the church and that's one reason I know that elder widely was was pleased to invite him to speak that and the fact that he really is an absolute expert so in passing over to him we are going to be in very good hands [Applause] thank you all that's a dancing introduction to follow I'm honored by the invitation to be here today to be part of of this event I'm also very conscious that I'm an outsider so with a view to lowering your expectations after that let me start by telling you what I am and what I'm not I am I'm an Anglican or at least I'm a member of the Church of England which I would argue is not quite the same thing I can happily talk about that later the event anybody's interested and I'm not a theologian I am like David a historian and that means that what I'm fundamentally interested in is people is my fellow believers in the past and even in our own times rather than in the abstract intricacies of what they believe and in the particular part of the history of Christianity that I'm most at home in is the Reformation era the age when the Protestant tradition in all its breadth and depth and glory and shame came into being we in the Church of England are heirs to that Reformation although not unproblematically so you in the seventh-day Adventist Church are also heirs to it again with the odd bump along the way as we were hearing earlier so what I'm here to do today is to talk about our shared heritage and what it might mean to us I'm not I should say gonna be talking about the Adventist story in particular for all that it's a subject that I'm interested in for the very good reason that probably everybody in this room knows more about it than I do I'm going to be talking about the wider Protestant inheritance both the aspects of it that seemed to me worth celebrating and treasuring and the parts that are more problematic for us and in the first of the two lectures I'm gonna be presenting today this morning I'm gonna be keeping my eye firmly on the history will be staying mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries looking at material that I think is important and interesting in its own right I hope so but is also formative for modern Protestantism whether in its Adventists its Anglican or many other varieties and this afternoon in the second lecture I'm gonna be taking a longer perspective and bringing some parts of the story up to the present and maybe thinking briefly about how that affects the dilemmas that we face of how to be faithful stewards of the gospel in the times and places where we are called to serve now unavoidably I'm gonna do this from an Anglican perspective as the man said I can do no other but the more I've learnt about the Adventist story and its modern developments the more familiar it seems to me so I hope that this view from outside will be of some use or at least some interest and as the great Puritan Divine's used to advise anyone who is listening to an untried preacher I hope that you'll be able to pick out the kernels of nourishment and to forgive and ignore the the plentiful chaff surrounding it okay with Martin Luther in his great book the liberty of a Christian written in 1520 this is what he says one thing and one thing alone is necessary for life justification and Christian Liberty and that is faith right grace the Most Holy Word of God the gospel of Christ the soul can do without everything except the Word of God without which none at all of its once I provided for but having the word it's rich and once for nothing now as you know as David was saying earlier Luther summed up his theology in this pair of principles that give us the title for our proceedings today Sola scriptura and Sola fede and which sometimes have added to them grace alone Christ alone glory to God alone but those first two are at the heart and you'll notice that these are different kinds of principles these two the relationship between them between faith and the word these two things each of which is said to be alone that already tells you or in store and slightly strange territory the relationship between them is something that I'm gonna be coming back to during these lectures for now what I want you to notice is that as Luther presents it here in 1520 its scripture that comes first that's the foundation in this telling on which everything else is built and he goes on to explain that the reason faith matters is that faith is the only and exclusive means through which we can receive the word we need the word alone faith alone as the only means we can get it and this is what he goes on to spend the bulk of that book Liberty for Christian talking about but in doing that he skates over a different a more awkward question what is this word of God anyway and what does the word of God have to do with the texts contained in the 66 books of the old and new testaments now most Protestants not all have generally been of the view that those two categories the Word of God and the contents of the Bible map perfectly onto each other but that's not a view that has commanded universal assent from Christians generally and it's also not self-evidently true or at least it's not self-evidently true to everybody and since as I say its foundation I think it's a genuine the important problem and that problem the way that that problem was thrashed out in particular by the first few generations of Protestants who explored most of the features of it that might still trouble us today that problem is my subject for this first lecture forgive me if this seems to you like a subject too simple and obvious to be worth addressing the fact that makes it worth our attention I think is the very fact that it seems so simple and obvious to many people and not to others okay but a wider context this the early church inherited from Pharisee Judaism a view of the books of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture those who questioned that and it was questioned in the early church were refuted by a number of arguments of which the simplest and most effective was that Jesus himself plainly treated the Hebrew Bible as inspired Scripture and if it's good enough for him it's good enough for us whether that same status extended to the deuterocanonical books that Protestants call the Old Testament Apocrypha that was unclear from the beginning Protestants who tend to be dismissive of those books should at least remember that when the New Testament quotes the old it quotes the Greek translation of it the Septuagint and it quotes it as if it were authoritative Scripture not merely a translation of it and then within the first century itself some of the writings associated with the Apostles are being treated as Scripture second Peter famously uses that word about Paul's writings there's a remarkable degree of agreement actually about the emerging canon of the New Testament about what what should be in but there's also a definite zone of uncertainty about that Canon in the early church a handful of books whose status was questionable including some that eventually did and some that eventually didn't make him to make make their way into the New Testament that we have in this and also in the formation of the Hebrew Bible of the of that Canon you can see two opposing principles at work as believers worked out the boundaries of Scripture in fear and trembling in all of their responsibilities on the one side there's a principle of exclusion the principle that says we dare not include a text unless we are sure that it's inspired we fear in case these texts get corrupted that's a fear that you see running through the New Testament whether it's the way that Paul refers to his distinctive handwriting is a way of assuring the Galatians that this is really him to the blood-curdling warnings in the final chapter of the book of Revelation against messing with the text so that principle leads to a tight cannon it leads to leaving things out if you're not sure and then on the other side there's a principle of inclusion we dare not leave out anything that God has said to us we dare not forget anything we will treasure every last scrap that may have some savour of the words to it so we'll include Mark's Gospel even though there's very little in it that's not in the others even though some of the unique material has got troubling discrepancies with other accounts we're going to include brief and in almost inconsequential texts like second and third John not because we see them as foundational to any particular core doctrines but because they are or they appear to be genuine letters from a genuine apostle and so you're going to treasure them the same way that you treasure letters from a lover almost regardless of what they actually say and those two principles played out against one another and eventually met and we have the Canon of Scripture now if you're a Roman Catholic then you've probably come to the wrong meeting but if you were then the story from here is simple if you were a stern Orthodox you'd be a little different but let's leave that aside on the Catholic view the church the Bride of Christ the body of Christ which Paul speaks of the church founded on the rock of Peter Prince of the Apostles governed by those apostles and their successors illuminated even in its darkest hours by the Holy Spirit the church is the heir to the teaching of Christ and it transmits that teaching down to the present by far the most important deposit of that teaching is Scripture but it's not the only one and scripture itself derives its authority from the fact that the church transmits and witnesses to it sent Augusta in the 5th century famously said that he would not believe in Scripture unless the church had given it to him that's a principle which the early Protestant reformers find and there's also for Catholics a deposit of tradition which lies outside Scripture the so called unwritten Pharisees these traditions are how Catholics accept the Apostles Creed for example it's how they know that infants as well as adults may be baptized it's how they know that the Virgin Mary was it was immaculately conceived remained a virgin throughout her life and was at last bodily assumed into heaven and of course it's how Catholics know despite the lack of scriptural warrant for this that Christians ought to celebrate their Sabbath on the first and not the last day of the week I don't mean to emphasize the sabbatarian dispute in this setting in order to be cute it was genuinely in the Reformation period the most common knockdown argument used by Catholics to defend this doctrine of unwritten verities the proof that here was a practice the Sunday Sabbath which was universally recognized by all Christians had been done at least since the early second century and couldn't be rooted in Scripture if you were a Protestant who was committed to a Sunday Sabbath and of course almost all of them were and not quite but almost all were in those first centuries this is a genuinely awkward challenge and of course we shouldn't imagine that adopting the seventh-day Sabbath makes the problem go away traditions and interpretive inheritance cluster around any church and any denomination bear Scripture can sometimes seem like a meager deposit of the faith Protestants almost as much of Catholics have often found in practice that alongside Scripture subordinate to it but alongside it there may be authoritative rulings or prophetic utterances or communal traditions or shared confessions or norms of the faith which don't have the same status as Scripture but in practice are binding on the community the writings and pronounced of people like Martin Luther or John Wesley or Ellen White people who are very unlike one another and none of them is like st. Peter and yet there is a comparison to be made but I'm getting cited throughout the European Middle Ages the Catholic Church's doctrine of Authority in which church and scripture speak with a single voice and must inevitably do so because only the church can definitively interpret Scripture during the Middle Ages this begins to strain credibility a series of dissident theologians came to feel that the plain words of Scripture were so severely in tension with the church's interpretations of them that those interpretations might be false and if those interpretations are false then that entire doctrine of Authority unravels instead of the church witnessing to and guaranteeing scriptures authority scripture becomes an authority by which to judge the church a yardstick to measure it against against which it can be found wanting Martin Luther was not the first person to do this but nobody before him had done it with quite such unapologetic Verve nor with the same degree of theological thoroughness it was a very effective polemical gambit and I'll be coming to that after lunch for now what I want you to notice is the problematic logical basis that it rested on like a modern atheist who uses his god-given Faculty of reasoned argument to argue that there is no God and therefore no such thing as reason Luther risks as his opponents saw it using the church given gift of Scripture to argue that the church was false and therefore the scripture that it affirmed was have no more authority than any other ancient book it's not an insoluble problem but it is a problem as Catholics persistently asked through the formation period and beyond you appeal to the Bible but what makes you so sure that it is in fact the Word of God now if there's one key thing that I want you to notice about the Reformation response to this challenge it's this the Protestants were to a surprising extent unbothered by it they gave relatively little direct attention to this problem and when they do attend to it they don't do it with a sense of anxiety and trepidation but with the sense that this question is almost too obvious to be worth us answering not on the face of it this is odd it's not just that Catholic theologians are posing this question insistently and aggressively this is also the era when serious scholarly study of the biblical text was getting going Erasmus of Rotterdam the greatest scholar of the generation before the Reformation had tried to reopen the question of the New Testament Canon in particular he mounted a cogent argument of the book of Revelation should never have been included in the New Testament he also more or less established I mean which nowadays isn't controversial that the letter to the Hebrews was not in fact written by Paul most medieval theologians had held it to be to be poor line and but establishing that it's in fact anonymous leaves a major question mark over it's not about apostolic authorship and also you've got that problematic passage in Chapter six which can be taken to mean that forgiveness for a sin that you've previously repented of is impossible and in fact Luther famously denies that those two books revelation and Hebrews along with the epistles of James and of Jude he denies that those books are written by apostles and he takes them out of their normal place in the New Testament and puts them at the end in a sort of relegation I mean obviously revelation and Judah they're anyway but he puts those four as a separate block at the end of the New Testament they're not being expelled from Scripture but they're definitely being put on notice now part of this is to do with Luther's very distinctive understanding of what Scripture is and if his understanding of the Word of God in particular which I want to come back to in the next session so let's bracket that for the moment I just want you to notice that the new biblical scholarship in this period is making the question of how we can trust the Bible more difficult and that's something that is only going to get worse during the course of the 16th and 17th centuries a series of minor problems just kind of quibbles start to accumulate the most neuralgic of these is the so called Johanna line comma this is the verse in the First Epistle of John which had traditionally been used as the best biblical proof text for the doctrine of the Trinity here it is in the King James Bible which follows the traditional reading for there are three that bear record in heaven the father the word and the Holy Ghost and these three are one and there are three that bear witness in earth the spirit the water and the blood and these three agree in one but by the time of the King James translation in 1611 this is already looking pretty dubious it's becoming clear that the most authoritative in the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament tended not to include that of Trinitarian slam dunk in verse 7 most modern biblical translations of course leave it out and that's only one of a host of textual problems there are minor variations in the manuscript witness the knotty problem of how Val's are marked in Hebrew and whether those markings are themselves part of the inspired witness of Scripture now on one level at least these problems are are minor and inconsequential in the affront affects a small fraction of the biblical text and that means that if you want to ignore them you can but they can't simply be shrugged off because there's an awfully big difference between inspired and mostly inspired or inspired you know with some problems and indeed that difference is almost intolerable these little worries about the biblical text are like chisel taps on a case of dynamite apparently trivial concerns but they threaten to blow the whole thing open so how do early Protestants deal with them well of course on one level they deal with these historical and textual problems case by case verse by verse fighting every question and that's a process which continues down to the present and that close up hand-to-hand polemical combat is is probably unavoidable it certainly scored some impressive achievements and for some troubled believers it was and remains important and of course it keeps biblical scholars off the streets but there is a limited sense in which those sorts of arguments can actually solve the problem most biblical scholars claimed to have solutions but unfortunately they disagreed amongst themselves about what the solutions were and there's also a queasy sense that they're mounting ex post facto arguments in other words they've decided before they started that they were going to defend a traditional view of biblical authority and they then went out to look for any arguments that they could find in order to make that case which lent a kind of unsettling air of dishonesty to the whole proceedings when they concluded triumphantly that everything's okay that you can trust the Bible entirely readers might be forgiven for thinking well they would say that wouldn't they ordinary laypeople wanting to know how they can trust the Bible could be forgiven amidst this blizzard of scholarship for concluding that certain knowledge of the Word of God is beyond their reach maybe this is not a theoretical problem if you read the Diaries the lattice of Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries never mind since then you see problems like these eating away at people the New England Puritan Michael wiglesworth remembered it wrote in his diary that on one Sunday in 1653 he spent the day being sadly assaulted with doubting whether ever word of the scripture were infallible and this because he'd been reading about variant versions of the text and the problem of Hebrew vowel markings an English woman around the same time recalled that when I'd read the Word of God the devil tempted me with doubts and questions touching some things therein whether it was truth or not that sort of thought was a would one eating away at the crossbeams of your faith one teenager English girl named Mary Gunter wrote of how she was plagued by the thought that the Scriptures are not his words she couldn't shake this off ministers tried to persuade her that her doubts were unfounded and instead she said they made her wonder how could she be sure that this was the truth that she now professed seeing there are as many or more learned men of the one opinion as of the other and they all maintain their opinions by the scriptures you try and argue away with your doubts and it makes them worse but while these arguments generated a huge snowstorm of books to and front we shouldn't be distracted by them for a clue of what's really going on beneath all this sound and fury look to the most intellectually brilliant of the 16th century reformers John Calvin not everybody's favorite theologian today or in his own time but he is hard to beat for raw brain power and also more humane and more spiritual than he sometimes cracked up to be anyway when when Calvin addressed this question of the Bible's Authority in his Institute's the Christian religion he did it in a very particular way he carefully and at some length dismantled the Catholic argument that the Bible derives its authority from the church he then gave a rather brief and cursory treatment of the various historical and textual arguments for the Bible's accuracy but he doesn't dwell on them and is careful not to rest too much instead he concludes that was Mary Gunter we ought to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons judgments or conjectures that is in the secret testimony of the spirit and he goes on to say Scripture is indeed self-authenticating he actually it's one of those rare occasions when he uses a Greek word because he can't find a Latin or French one that will do outer peace das and it is something like it generates trust from within itself we feel not we think we feel the undoubted power of His divine Majesty living and breathing there a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself so on this view from the greatest intellect of the process Reformation the Bible's Authority is a matter of feeling of direct intuitive knowledge not deductive argument so this is ultimately a claim less about Scripture itself than about the Holy Spirit and in the end it's one which is beyond rational argument it was sometimes said that arguing for the authority of Scripture was like trying to argue that there is a Sun in the sky John Owen arguably the greatest of the Puritan theologians said that light requires neither proof nor testimony for its evidence let the Sun arise in the firmament and there's no need of witnesses to prove and confirm unto a seeing man that it's day that which evidence it itself is not light you can develop all the brilliant astronomical theories you like but if you really want to know what the Sun is what you should do is turn your face to it and feel the warmth if you can see it there's no need to argue and if you can't or if you won't then there's no point incidentally you can see how this fits with Calvin's strong doctrine of divine predestination and of God's absolute sovereignty you can feel the authority of Scripture if the Holy Spirit chooses to reveal it to you and you can't if he doesn't either way there's nothing to argue about this one to gambit becomes the the orthodoxy of Reformed Protestantism uh that's a broad Calvinist Presbyterian tradition again and again we see discussions of the Bible's Authority begin with a kind of softening up barrage of rationalistic arguments followed by that decisive thrust appealing directly to the witness of the Spirit the Westminster Confession of 1647 what was going to become the definitive confession of faith Presbyterians worldwide mustered a small platoon of rational arguments for scriptures Authority it cites the testimony of the church the heav'n leanness of the matter the efficacy of the doctrine the majesty of the style the consent of all parts you know the fact that the agreement between the books the Bible the scope of the whole which is to give glory to God the full discovery it makes it the only way of man's salvation many other incomparable excellencies but only then does it add notwithstanding our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts now in practical terms this double approach works pretty well most of the time the arguments allow believers to fight off their own doubts and to rebut the assaults of outsiders to their own satisfaction and meanwhile the appeal to the spirit both fits with their actual devotional experience and also reduces what's at stake in the argument part process because believers could rest secure in the knowledge that even if the outer ramparts of their arguments were breached by the hordes of skepticism the inner Citadel was unassailable and yet logically this approach is not entirely satisfactory effectively they're saying here are a group of arguments which can't persuade you to believe and here is a reason to believe which is inaccessible to argument I don't say that this approach is broken down I mean for myself I still think that kelvins basic approach to this holds pretty well but it has been put under quite a lot of pressure and further the second part of this morning's our second half of this lecture I'd like to look with you at some of those pressures and how they've been dealt with because appealing to the witness of the spirit in this way did not in fact put an end to the argument Catholics were not silenced white theologians Catholic theologians like the French Jesuit of course were there long mounted a brutally effective case against something like this so the Holy Spirit teaches you that the Bible is the Word of God does that in a conviction extend equally to all 66 books of the older New Testament to every chapter to every verse to nothing else beyond that does the Spirit then guide your understanding of those books if he does why do other readers interpret it differently if he doesn't how could it be that he persuades you that they're true but then doesn't that doesn't guide use to their meaning what about those troubling textual variations can this sense of inner inspiration help you to discern which is the correct inspired text how can you be sure as the spirit told you that too of course the purpose of these Catholic arguments wasn't to dismiss the Bible Catholics are keen on the Bible but to prove that the Bible's Authority ultimately rested on the church and therefore that Christians ought to submit themselves to the church not to their own judgment or a sense of inner inspiration but this force forces some Protestants to double down on the first part on the argument beside the great Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius argued that it was possible to attain a moral certainty of scriptures authority purely by rational argument but I want to focus on two Englishmen who dealt with this issue an odd couple pair William Chillingworth and Richard Baxter Chillingworth was a troubled English Protestant who in his search for certainty had in fact briefly converted to Catholicism only to find that the cure was worse than the disease and he returned unhappily to a rather unorthodox Protestantism he is now best known for his claim usually taken out of context that as he said the Bible the Bible only is the religion of Protestants which he made in this book during the course of his argument that the Bible could be recognized as authoritative even without having to appeal to the church as witnesses Catholic said what I want you to notice is not the specific arguments that he makes but the way he frames them he does this by lowering the bar for what counts as certainty and parts of this work better than others he does a fine job of demolishing the Catholic claims that their doctrine of authority can be held as a matter of demonstrable certainty he's much less successful in building up his own side of the case and he does it by trying to distinguish between different kinds of certainty he says mathematical or scientific certainty is simply not available if you're considering a historical question like the authority of the Bible and so when he poses the question of for example whether we can be confident that the text of Scripture we have is correct he says not so certain I grant as of that which we can demonstrate as of something that could be through proving for example but certain enough morally certain as certain as the nature of the thing will bear so certain we may be and God requires no more this moral certainty is is almost a legal category this is certainty beyond reasonable doubt it's the certainty with which a jury hangs a criminal or in the other much cited example of the time the certainty with which you know who your own parents are it's not something you can prove mathematically but you jet you generally tend to be pretty confident Chillingworth rejects Catholics who claim to have an infallible source of authority all he claims for Protestants is that they have a manifest source of authority it's not quite the same and that lets him turn that barrage of rationalistic arguments from a softening up into the main assault and he does that simply by declaring victory when he's finished and he you can only do that by changing the terms of the engagement the most extraordinary passage of this book comes in the preface where he tells the the catholic writer who is arguing against that had you represented to my understanding such reasons as being wade in an even balance with those on the other side would have turned the scale and made your religion more credible than the contrary if his opponent had managed to make catholicism look just a tiny bit more likely then certainly i should with both mine arms and all my heart most readily have embraced it you notice that the juddering grinding gear change in the middle of that sentence to begin with he's talking about these finely balanced reasoned judgments it could be tipped by a hair on the scale but then he says that the conclusion he reaches through that process will be one he'll embraced with both mine arms and all my heart give him 51% confidence that you're right and he will give you 100% commitment now it's plain enough why he ends up in this weird position he wants to give a hundred percent come in because that's what Christians do but he no longer believes that anything much more than 51 percent certainty is to be had he's been playing theological beggar my neighbor ensuring that everybody else's religious arguments are left looking as fragile as his own and he's making the miserable best of what's left his contemporary Richard Baxter different character much wiser more settled more humane theologian far more grounded in the faith in Baxter's great Bob in particular his book of 1650 the Saints everlasting rest he expressed his concern that most of his fellow Protestants accepted the Bible's Authority neither for rational nor for spiritual reasons but by default and by habit indeed he said by a sort of bastardized Protestant version of the Catholic doctrine of implicit faith just because the church told them it was true and so he advanced a whole series of rational arguments of the kind of Chillingworth would have liked to have proved the Bible in fact he cites Chillingworth approvingly the difference is that he's not mostly arguing with Catholics he's arguing with spiritualist radical Protestants who were willing to use an appeal to the direct witness of the spirit to go beyond Scripture altogether and that means that Baxter needs the artillery of rational argument because the other half of the maneuver the appeal to the spirit has already been turned against it he certainly recognizes the need for the spirits witness but he insists that I confess for my part I can't boast of any such testimony or light of the spirit which would have made me believe that the book of canticles that the song songs is canonical and written by Solomon and the Book of Wisdom apocryphal or that's- in Paul's epistle to the lay additions were not canonical as well as John's 2nd and 3rd no this is merciless the appeal to the spirit no matter how powerful is simply unable reliably to come up with usable answers to the question of what belongs in the calendar what doesn't yet the more arguments men like these piled up the more they try to redefine what counts as a successful argument the more it starts to appear that the ground they are building on is shifting sand its endlessly debatable it's not mockers and atheists who are prodding at their structures to see how sound they are its earnest believers people who are seeking fearlessly for the truth who are refusing to be fobbed off with too easy rationalistic answers they don't want these shacks they're searching for god's temple the alternative was the approach sketched out by the self-taught baptist teacher samuel Hal who in 1640 appealed to the spirit against learning authority and then he asked how believers can know whether they have the spirit and he says no argument will serve the Spirit of God is a sufficient witness to itself seeing that the Spirit is truth essentially the same point was made at more length by another English radical William whirlwind in the late 1640s we have a hostile witness telling us that whirlwind said this about the Bible I believe it's not the Word of God and I believe again it is the Word of God the scripture is so plainly indirectly contradictory to itself that makes me believe it's not and yes again all those passages that declare the nature of God is Grace and goodness to man I believe are now as I say that comes from a hostile witness when that accusation is thrown at and this is what he himself has to say in defense against that charge and others like it he says he says I've been most uncharitably slandered to deny the scriptures to be the Word of God because I've opposed insufficient arguments produced to prove them and because I've refused to show the grounds inducing me to believe them and he goes on to say that he has never heard a convincing rational argument that the Scriptures are the Word of God and indeed that most of the arguments he has heard weaken rather than strengthen the case given some of the distinctly dubious arguments that men like Chillingworth and Baxter advanced for example like that the existence of witchcraft proves the truth of the Bible it's hard not to see what he means but he goes on I believe them I believe the Scriptures through an irresistible persuasive power that from within them have pierced my judgment and affection in such sort that with abundance of joy and gladness I believe and in believing have that peace which passeth all a trance or expression and it's this inner power that he compares to Elijah's still soft voice where the arguments so will we knew that the Bible was the Word of God not because he could prove it but because he just knew so on one side you have a rationalism which keeps digging down in the hope of striking a bedrock that it can never find and on the other hand you've got a spiritualism which can end up renouncing any search for objective certainty at all but Baxter and Chillingworth and Howe and wool when all of these people did still accept the Bible as authoritative in different ways admittedly others didn't on the spiritualist side you can quickly find yourself with the inspirational ISM of the Quakers who taught that the Bible without is but a shadow of the Bible within or on the rationalist side you could end up like the Dutch anti Calvinist philosopher dirt corn hat who wrote a treatise on ethics in 1586 without citing the Bible once and that was a Christian project his grounds seems also to be that a friend challenged him to see whether he could do it but the basic idea was that he wanted to prove that the Bible's ethics were correct by showing that you could get to a purely biblical position simply by reason alone that you could get to the same destination by a different route now the point isn't whether or not he succeeded you can make your own minds up about them but the very fact that he shows that he argues that there is a different route to the same destination implies that the Bible is option maybe ideal but not a necessity that traditions carried on in the next generation the next century by the the rationalist Dutch group of radicals called the collegiates one of their best-known works Peter Valens book the light on the candlestick since 82 sedulous Lee avoids citing the Bible at all and his fundamental point is that if you're searching for certainty you're gonna have to find it somewhere else a bit like a Quaker he says the true certainty has to come from the light within and in his ambiguous usage that could either mean reason or direct inspiration either way he says we can judge of no doctrine of no book that is divine but by this light the light within for example if we experience in that the book called the Bible in regard of the divine doctrine therein comprised hath such and harmony with that in which God is known that he must needs have been the author of it there cannot rationally any more powerful demonstration be demanded with them that are thus the scripture may become living and powerful not a dead latter as it must needs be to those men who've got no feeling of this on the face of it he's turning the Bible into a stray leaf blown on the wind meaning as much or as little as our wind chooses it to letter to let it mean for a moment a moment but squint a little and how different is it from what Calvin had said a century earlier Scripture is self-identity we feel the undoubted power of His divine Majesty lives and Brees there a feeling that can be born only at heavenly revelation I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself as I said at the start I'm not a theologian but since we're talking about feeling and intuition I have to say that this feels right to me and that for all the many problems with wool winds and the other spiritualists approach I do share that basic intuition that when all the sound and fury of historical and textual argument has passed it is this still small voice that remains and I mean that in two senses not just that this is what Christians ought to do up to a point at least but also that in practices is what Christians actually do and what we always have so let me finish these remarks this first lecture by briefly addressing those two questions of what we ought to do and what we in fact do the second one first when we're listening in on arguments about the Bible and even more so when we're arguing about it ourselves it seems to me important that we should remember that this is basically an argument about intuition and feeling rather than about some disinterested reason as if we were adding machines that applies to us ourselves just as much as to the people that we're arguing with and how could it be otherwise we are people we're human beings we're not computers we should think with our whole selves I am NOT heaven forbid suggesting that we should listen to our hearts rather than our heads the very idea that head and heart are in some way distinct or opposite from one another that reasoned and emotion are opposites this is a piece of philosophical nonsense dreamt up by 17th century rationalists with a deeply impoverished view of reason and we can't seem to shake it our emotions are profoundly and fundamentally rational Blaise Pascal the the mathematician and profound theologian of the 17th century who fought a valiant rearguard action against all this head hard nonsense famously observed that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing reason in the crabbed narrow sense if you prefer what I'm talking about is the difference between logic and wisdom so of course we read the Bible with our whole selves and bring all of our faculties to it how would we dare to do anything less which means we don't simply deduce a theology of Scripture in the abstract and then learn our doctrines from it we Intuit truths or what seemed to us to be truths through our encounter with Scripture and it's encounter with us and through that process we learn more about how to read scripture this is all a little abstract so let me give you an example from my own world which as I understand has some parallels in the Adventist world too as you may know Anglicanism has spent much of the last few decades in a long agonizing set of debates over women's ministry and in our polity with three principal grades of Minister deacons priests and bishops with dozens of independent provinces around the world with no real jurisdiction over one another this has been an agonizing process and it's still going on the majority of Anglican churches that now have accepted women's ordained ministry but by no means all now naturally enough one of the main registers in which this debates been conducted is exegetical texts traded back and forth but one of the things that we learned during this debate was that those arguments were not quite what they seemed I don't mean that they were fake I don't I'm suggesting that each side was simply scrabbling around for proof texts in order to support predetermined positions what I mean is that both sides learned more about how to read the Bible from the way that they approach this debate it became clear that supporting the ordination of women and I should say that I do I'm proud to have a license from one of the Church of England's first women bishops it became clear that that position fitted with a certain home and utak and that hermeneutic had wide our consequences than just the question of women's ministry likewise the opponents of women's ministry discovered the same thing about their positions it had other consequences the terms were different but the process was similar I draw attention to this business of discovering more about yourself and your Bible as the two are put into conversation with each other for two reasons one that we should be aware that that's what we're doing we shouldn't make mendacious claims that we've simply discovered our doctrines having opened our Bibles with open and unprejudiced minds I mean if we could actually do that and of course we can't then I actually think it would be wrong it would be a rejection of everything that God has taught us over the course of our lives all the the prejudgments the acquired wisdom that we bring to everything that we do so it's inevitable and also I should think it's not something that we should be ashamed of this is what we do of course it is if we Intuit a moral or a theological position about women's ministry or anything else and then use that intuition and that experience to teach us how to read scripture further and do so with fear and trembling then I think there's a fair chance that we may be doing the right thing and that when we fall into error as we certainly will that God may nevertheless honor what we've done and that's my my final point the the way to know scripture for what it is is indeed it seems to me to do what the Reformation witness says and to encounter it with our whole selves if you're faced with the water of life the right response is not to take samples and to send them to the lab for testing its to immerse yourself in it to be swept along by it to gulp it down to sorry Anglican moment to feel the taste of it turning to wine on your tongue and then to strike out into the ocean trusting that what seems so insubstantial will actually bear us up and before you say it yes I am aware that there are formidable problems with taking such a freewheeling approach to Scripture when we come back this afternoon I want to think a little more systematically about how we tackle and deal with those problems but for the moment [Applause] Thank You dr. Riley for those there's thoughts and presentations we have some time for Q&A we have a lot of time for Q&A actually so who wants to ask our historian theologian a good question from what you've heard stimulating thinking about you know how much we come to the Bible with our prejudices wow that was a great point questions observations you may have you'd like to pose before our guest presenter here thank you so much this Emanuel Columbia Union in your opinion do you think the Bible was written to be understood by average person or I was written for the theologians to interpret the Bible to average person it feels like a cop-out to say both but I'm gonna say that that was there was a saying is it is it drunk one of the early church fathers has this line which was much quoted during the Reformation that the Bible is like a river which is shallow enough that the most that a newborn lamb can wade through it without getting in stomach wet but is also deep enough for an elephant to be able to swim it that it is simple enough to be accessible and approachable by by ordinary believers and yet has depths that nobody is going turn to plumb which is a good line but I think there's some there's some real truth in that if you look at the other different texts that make up Scripture these are are mostly written you know for particular circumstances for particular groups spoken to any of the biblical authors and said to them do you imagine that your words are written more for ordinary believers or for great scholars two or three thousand years from now I think they would have led towards the ordinary believers I think they might have been surprised know how difficult what would seem to them plain and straightforward as has often appeared to be in in later generations obviously one of the the greatest problems of biblical interpretation has always been seeing what is right there plainly in front of our faces which is something that as human beings we're very bad at do it I appreciate you bringing us to appreciate uncertainty and you've you've brought us to appreciate that that is where we arrive due to the contradictions and the intricacies of translation and the history of where biblical passages come from you've challenged us to bridge that gap rather than the way the Catholics have done it through the authority or traditions of the church but you've brought us to bridge that gap through faith and experience my question is doesn't that still leave us with the subjective uncertainty and are you calling us then to be comfortable with that level of uncertainty and be simply seekers rather than knowers comfortable with it no I don't think the business of being a sinner in this world is a comfortable one or that we should necessarily simply be be at ease with the fact that we can only see as through a glass darkly we don't think we should be to putting up our feet and relaxing about that I'm enough of a Calvinist to feel that we need to be to be striving towards the light but I also think we need to recognize how fundamentally we can flaws we are I mean not just because we're sinners but because we're human we are limited finite creatures living in a particular time and place with with all the the limitations that that place is on us human beings may be Christians especially may be Protestants in particular do have a tendency to overestimate our own importance and you know one of the consequences are spending a lot of time thinking about God as you can almost make the mistake of starting to imagine that you are looking at the world from God's point of view you know we really you know very very little about him or about anything I think that we are much more in danger of overestimating the amount of of certainty that we can claim and say yes we have this fixed thing that whit's a way of making the world revolve around us when Luther talks about faith it's in terms of not of intellectual assent but of personal dependence the faith baby has not that they can prove that person isn't gonna stumble and fall but the question doesn't arise and it's the feeling of the arms around you thank you this is a powerful and stimulating you know what I'm wondering when you take this self identity concept and you have that in the New Testament with all Scriptures God breathing and that's that's clearly a part of it but what what are the safeguards so you don't bridge into the everyone does what is right in their own by kind of thing but what are the safeguards that that bring us together as a body believers and and help us to collectively define our understanding of Scripture so that it's not just if everyone feels it well this is solvent solvent that together Nevada of course that's probably how we get all of our denominations but well how would you describe my sake guys that's that's a really good question and I hope you'll forgive me for saying that you I mean you've just perfectly articulated the Roman Catholic argument against the Protestant view of this I know I should say that that's that particular question is one that I'm going to be talking more about about this afternoon so I don't want to get too much into that now it's really important but in brief there's I think just an ongoing dialogue between that kind of sense of inner inspiration that's guiding you but which ultimately is in a sense is in communicating and you're left with a sense that well hey you know this is my truth what's yours which you can't get you anywhere in terms of actually building a community or being able to agree on something and having a fixed text which you can be tested against which can serve as a yardstick to measure the convictions that you've received and by which the community can discern what what you've what you've reached I think the practical experience of the Protestant churches has been that that sort of collective discernment can work quite a lot of the time which is is why instead of being billions of churches of a single person we have great international denominational families yeah nevertheless we will repeatedly when put under sufficient pressure it's been the the pattern the witness I think the Gloria Protestants in the end to say no my conscience is captive to the Word of God as Luther would say I will not accept what my community whatever that is tells me if my conscience tells me something else most of the time of course most of us aren't in the position of having to make that kind of decision only in that because we give thanks for that but when it does come to it I think the Protestant witness is is ultimately that we follow our conscience --is ah wherever that may lead us before the next question is it just going guys go to the microphone I have a question while they're going to microphone so we give a lot of credit to our good friends in the medieval church or Roman Church of holding up tradition mm-hm as Authority but an observer of history and this student of it as you are what do you see in Protestantism were that becomes an issue in Protestantism where we say oh so let scripture and in pre soon as you watch the cycle of a denomination or movement when tradition tries to put his head up and say oh guess what we have tradition here and this is what really is the authority and we turn it back and say to Rome oh look what you did but we don't the same that's absolutely right I mean and I think it's it's right that it should be so because you know in the appeal tradition has all kinds of problems to it but one of the great virtues that it does show is humility it's the the willingness to say you know okay I've come up with this this set of ideas and thoughts but I need to measure this against what all the saints of God have have taught and believed and prayed for over all the centuries and it takes a fair leap of arrogance to say well I think they were all wrong and that I'm right and so that that willingness to submit yourself and test yourself against the accumulated wisdom of Christians down the ages I think is a good one and of course Protestant churches do this as well and you know the extent to which within particular denominational families the the witness of their founders or their founding documents being becomes becomes really I think this is true in every long-lived denomination there is a difference though but between that kind of respect for tradition and the particular approach that is taken in the Catholic world which is that the Catholic Church for its own in a perfectly coherent reasons claims in a quite a limited number of cases but still claims to be able to make a definitive statements of truthful doctrine the pronouncements of ecumenical councils ex cathedra pronouncements by the Pope very rabbet these things are are definitive and they are fixed I think in every Protestant tradition there is always there at the bottom a recognition that the tradition as powerful as it is and as much as we respect it may include errors may include fundamental errors which may possibly need to be revisited and revised so it's possible that a practice such as the Sunday Sabbath which has been honored by Christian practice for many many centuries that it's possible in the Protestant world to go back to that and say that was wrong a mistake was made very early on and therefore we can we can revisit that ability to look back on our tradition and where necessary repent of it is something that seems to me differentiates Protestants of any kind from from from the Catholic thank you we got time Thank You senator mica then go to the farmer yeah well you may be asking this the wrong person because I confess to being a bit of a fan Kelvin his his most recent or the best of his most recent biographers starts by saying that Calvin never believed that he'd met anybody who was his intellectual equal and that he was probably right he's a mixture of contradictions there are these moments of kind of luminous spiritual clarity and he can have a warmth and generosity which his reputation would not lead you to expect but if you pick a fight with him he was not gonna back down he is not a gracious opponent and his one of the recurrent features of his career is his inability to walk away from an argument it comes out of that same survey in tremendous intellectual self-confidence that he's got and the fact that the self-confidence is justified doesn't make it any more attractive you know he's he will be challenged on something and his instinct is to dig in his heels and double down on that and of course I mean his reputation is is tied up above all with the doctrine of predestination which when he first articulates it is is a point that he you know he's woven into the fabric of his theology but he doesn't want to make a big deal out of it pastoring and to emphasize the mystery of it and say you know this is this is something that you should be careful touch me on in preaching you know it's so it's there but it's it doesn't happen a flashing lights tied around it he's then challenged on this point and he reacts the way he always does when he's challenged and towards the end of his career and even more after his death it becomes a touchstone and a real lesson to the extent of course that is so often happens in these cases it's his doctrine of predestination is developed and refined and frankly weaponized to a degree that I don't think he there's a real case in which you could say that Calvin was not fully a Calvinist in the sense that that gets developed developed later on so there's that comes to be a an almost cruel edge to the way that that doctrine is used and certainly to the way that it's experienced which i think is a distortion of of how he would we forget that Calvin was writing out of out of situations of Exile and of persecution in which his community were were being hounded and killed and under those circumstances to be able to say to people who are facing painful death and having to try to find the strength within themselves as it seemed to them to stand up for their faith in the threat of burning to say to them no this is not about you and your ability to stand firm in your faith you are chosen you are God's predestined God's sovereignty is what's in charge in this situation not your fading strength and so it's that ability to trust that your salvation is not something that you hold in your own hands but something is was decided on by God before the beginning of the world that has has a tremendous pastoral power to it in in his time that Calvinists in more peaceful circumstances have found difficult to recover and I think we do well to remember that thank you dr. Irie for this awesome lecture I'm a student at wiU future minister so at the risk of having a very very elementary question in the presence of so many theologians and educators and all I want to make sure I don't miss this point as a feature minister so knowing the fact that this debate of the authority of this scripture of the word of God going on for so many for so many years how does this relate to a minister and his work within evangelism so when I go on to be a minister how am I gonna face this situation in houses been knowing this information gonna help me in those situations is it going to be something to where all of a sudden everybody I meet I'm gonna start hey you know you got to have faith in order to because faith through faith you understand the authority of God is it something where you choose your battles or is it more of a personal thing that we should know and hold on to so that we could continue in our faith and knowing that scriptures Authority comes from God whenever somebody stand up and says techni basket really elementary question I get nervous I'm not gonna presume to tell you how your ministry within the context that you're going to be working should should be conducted I'm a lay preacher working in a very different context and I'll be addressing some of those questions a little bit this afternoon all I'll say now is that the doctrine of the Holy Scripture is a part of and subordinate to our doctrine of the Holy Spirit the the highest claim that Christians have ever made about Scripture is that it is inspired by the Holy Spirit and that the spirit speaks to us through Scripture that's one of them the primary place where we encounter the spirit I worry sometimes in some traditions I don't know if this is true in Adventism that the the Bible has almost been treated as the third person of the Trinity in its own right and that we should remember that the power of Scripture is the encounter that we have that perspective it seems to me is really important for us for us it maintained that that's what one scripture is I've found in my own preaching in verse it's trying to to be a channel through which the words of Scripture and the work of the Spirit can speak through you to your community that can be what works different people will have different experiences but though those are the questions for this time thank you again thank you very much [Applause]

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Length: 81min 10sec (4870 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019