R.C. Sproul: Defending the Doctrine of Inerrancy

this is a singular privilege for me John to be a part of this extraordinary conference that you're putting together defending again to this generation the doctrine of the inerrancy of sacred scripture as you know I'm the former president of I CBI and remember fondly the initiative that we took back several years ago to defend this most important foundational doctrine of the Christian faith I also have to say that I before I appeared in this manner of camera that they had to put some makeup on my face I had a deep cut over my lip that was a result of shaving at the club where they have throw away razors and shaving with that razor blade was like shaving with a chainsaw and I was left bloodied and mutilated I bring this up for this reason for you John MacArthur that every day I shave with that wonderful razor that you gave me as a gift so many years ago and apart from that I would have to wear this kind of makeup all the time but let's move to the subject at hand and that is the question of the inerrancy of scripture and when we're engaged in this battle of defending the inspiration and FAL ability and inerrancy of the Scriptures we're fighting a war that's on two fronts on the one hand we are called to defend the trustworthiness of the Bible before an unbelieving world to a secular society that has no end of arguments against the trustworthiness of Scripture and to defend the Bible in that arena involves one set of problems and propositions that we must deal with but then the other battleground for the Bible is within the church itself and that perhaps shouldn't be the case but since the advent of higher criticism and its influence particularly in the mainline denominations there's been an avalanche of criticism leveled against the trustworthiness of the Bible and so we have to defend the claims of Scripture one way to the world and in another way to the church but what I'm going to do in this session is spend most of my time with the problem of defending the doctrine to the church though I will mention the other war zone as well there have been many ways and methods of defense with respect to the scripture that have been presented over the ages I'll just mention a couple in passing one is simply called the confessional method which says that the creeds and the confessions of the church declare their faith and confidence in the trustworthiness and infallibility of the Bible and we take these confessional statements on faith and at that point there is no rational attempt to give a studied apologetic or defense of that claim that just simply says this is what we confess as Christians to believe a second approach which is very popular and is closely related to the first one is that offered by the presuppositionalist wing of the Reformed community following the thinking of Gordon Clark on the one hand and Cornelius Van Til on the other where this approach to defending Scripture goes something like this that the Bible is its own authority we have an auto pistol a self faith of sacred scripture and that there's no higher proof for the Bible's being the Word of God than that which is found in its own claim to be the Bible as the word of God and we construct the argument in this way the first premise is the Bible is the Word of God the second premise is the Bible claims to be the Word of God and the conclusion is therefore the Bible is the Word of God anyone can see even at a glance that that kind of an argument is circular that doesn't seem to bother those who manifest this particular argument because they say that all reasoning is circular in a certain sense that the premises you begin with and the conclusions you reach at the end are of the same sort if you begin with an empirical first premise you will end it if you're consistent with an empirical conclusion if you start with a rational formal premise at the beginning the conclusion that you reach if you're consistent will be of a rational formal sort and I think that that is an invalid way to defend the scripture circular reasoning invalidates any argument and in attempts to reconstruct circularity as a legitimate form by saying that all arguments are circular in a certain sense we see a second fallacy introduced into discussion the fallacy of equivocation where the meaning of circularity changes in both discussions but aside from that view which is very popular and part of the reason that that it is popular is this that if god were to appear here and open his mouth and speak there wouldn't be any debate that it that what he said was true obviously if it were God speaking and we heard his voice directly from his lips we wouldn't have to construct an argument to defend its infallibility or in Assen Aaron see because we know that God is incapable of falsehood or of the seat and of lying and so when those who defend this method of the auto pissed we're saying if we subject the Word of God to the proofs and conditions of human reasoning we're making reason a higher form of authority than the authority of God himself well there's there's some value in that particular consideration because that's the last thing we want to do is to subject the Word of God to our own critical judgments but on the other hand anyone can claim that their book is the Word of God such as the Book of Mormon or the Quran make such claims in the fact that the claim is made does not prove the truthfulness of that claim and I think that we are called with within the Bible itself to give evidence for the truth claims that we make and so I think there's another method another way to approach the defense of Scripture which I'm going to call the classical method but before I give that let me just say that in the past we have seen in response to the unbeliever the basic approaches that have been taken by the church to proclaim the truthfulness of Scripture outside the church would include such arguments that were presented by John Calvin in the 16th century when in analyzing the Bible he set forth certain evidences that in the Latin he called the in dakea the evidences that were both internal to Scripture the heaven leanness of the matter the majesty of the content the way in which the details were coherent one with another and other evidences of the Bible's unique Authority he said that is Calvin that these Indic 'ya these evidences were so powerful and so compelling that they constituted objective truth the the claims of Scripture for itself and he said they were strong enough to stop the mouths of the obstreperous but at the same time he acknowledged that people in spite of the evidence would not submit to the claims of Scripture and Calvin made a distinction between proof and persuasion you know the old adage that a man convinced against his will holds his original position still that when you're trying to defend the Bible to an unbeliever you're dealing with the problem of human sinfulness where we understand that there is an inherent allergy against the Bible that is filed in fallen humanity that in our fallen state we don't want to have God in our thinking and so we will resist any claim to his divine words authority over our lives that we possibly can and so Calvin said even the believer though he has this objective evidence that he calls the in dickey a-- will not be sufficiently persuaded or totally convinced of the truthfulness of scripture unless that evidence is buttress by what calvin called the internal testimony of the holy spirit a concept by the way that i think is one that is so often misunderstood when Calvin talked about the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit he didn't mean that he was appealing to some kind of mysticism where the Holy Spirit comes and whispers into our ear new information or new evidence that gets the other evidence the objective evidence over the mountain and bringing us to the conclusion that it is the Word of God now what Calvin meant by the internal testimony is what the Holy Spirit does is not give new proof or new information to the information that's already there but rather he causes us to do what Calvin called acquiesce into the in dakea that is to surrender to the object of evidence which evidence we would resist because of our innate ostilow knee towards the things of God and so what the internal testimony does is softens the dispositions of our heart so that we will bow before the objective evidence of Scripture now others have presented lengthy forms of Defense's of the reliability of Scripture I think of the scholar FF Bruce's little book the New Testament documents are they reliable and we think of course of Ramsey's journey through the places where Paul went on his apostolic missionary journeys Ramsey began his investigation as a skeptic and as a cynic and set out to prove the unreliability of Luke's report of Paul's missionary activity that he provides for us in the book of Acts and this sceptical scholar went from city to city from country to country and studied the history of these nations and technical items like Luke might call a ruler in a certain city by a certain title that other scholars were saying as skeptics that the people of Philip I for example we're never using that kind of title and then Ramsey goes to Philippi neon art the steel there where there's information going back to the first century where indeed these titles were used exactly as Luke had had reported and at the end of his cynical journey Ramsey came to the conclusion the Luke was the most accurate and reliable historian of all of all time more accurate than people like her audit us or Xenophon or Thucydides or Josephus or any of the other great historians of the past and so we've seen these efforts to to prove the reliability of Scripture by scientific inquiry by using the normal standards and methods of historiography now I'd like to take just a second and reach down on the floor to pick up my glasses that I dropped because I want to take a moment to read one such account for our audience and I can't do that without the help of my glasses so John you're going to come get my glasses this is John he was with us in Rome recently when we were there thank you very much okay there's a man by then there was a man by the name of William Fox well Albright was an archaeologist and Albright was to archaeology what Einstein was to physics the most credible and respected archaeological scholar in the history of the world and I'm not exaggerating when I give that kind of tribute to Albright that's a tribute that would be given to him by both liberal and conservative without anybody being in a particular theme he was one of the editors of a Bible series that included the Gospel of Matthew and in the preface to that edition he wrote the following lines with the help of another man by the name of CS man and I'd like to depart from my normal method of communication and take a moment please to read this passage from Albright here's what he said for much too long a time the course of New Testament scholarship has been dictated by theological quasi theological and philosophical three sessions in far too many cases commentaries on New Testament books have neglected such basic requirements as up-to-date historical and philosophical analysis of the text itself in many ways this preoccupation with theological and metaphysical interpretation is the unacknowledged child of a gillian ism - this should be added to continue and baleful influency calls it of sly marker and his successors on the whole treatment of historical material the result has often been steadfast refusal to take seriously the findings of archaeological and linguistic research we believe that there is less and less excuse for the resulting confusion in this latter half of the 20th century and he goes on to say closely allied with these presuppositions is the ever-present fog of existentialism casting ghostly shadows over an already confused landscape existentialism is a method of interpreting the New Testament is based upon a whole series of undemonstrative postulates of platonic Neoplatonic left-wing scholastic and relativistic origins so anti historical is this approach that it fascinates speculative minds which prefer cliches to factual data and shifting ideology to empirical research and logical demonstration if you're in the academic world and you hear a statement like that from William Fox will Albright it get your attention and what he's saying is that we have been completely unscientific and anti-scientific in the processes we have fallen what followed with respect to the truth claims of the Bible now so much for the defense to those who are outside the church and to those who are fundamentally unbelievers in cry doing reach them to defend the Bible we need to do the kind of thing that albright spoke of looking at fulfilled prophecy looking at archaeological research looking at linguistic analysis and that sort of thing but as I said earlier my major concern today is to defend the inerrancy of Scripture not to unbelievers but to those who are inside the church and I want to do it in a way that avoids pure fiddy ISM that is just believing subjectively what you want to believe and also avoids circular reasoning and I want to use a method that moves not in a circular fashion but in a linear fashion that begins with the first premise being that the Bible is generally reliable in what it teaches now notice that that first premise makes no claim for infallibility no claim for an errand see no claim for inspiration but simply the first premise is that the scripture is generally reliable as a historical as the historical source now I remember once when I defended inerrancy as a doctrine before of the Faculty of an extremely liberal seminary where the professors were outwardly hostile to anything that even smelled like infallibility or an errand see and I was vited I was invited to come and to give a defense of this doctrine that they completely ridiculed and thought was held only by backwoods fundamentalists who were obscurantists and paid no attention to the academic data and I accepted the challenge and I came and I said I'm going to start with this premise that the Bible is generally reliable as a historical source and the reason I want to start here is this again if we're work speaking to the outside world we're going to have a lot of work to do to demonstrate the general reliability of it I said but I'm speaking now to you who are seminary professors ordained ministers and your teachers in a at least confessedly Christian institution and if you won't accept this first promise that the Bible is generally reliable maybe might have errors and may have errors here and there critical mistakes and and views of morality and other things that you disapprove of but in the main in general it's generally reliable not generally unreliable because if it's not generally reliable than you who are professors here are left with saying oh yes I'm a Christian I'm a follower of Jesus and everything I know about him and think about him comes to me from a generally unreliable source and if that were the statement that you would make to your students or to your constituents you would reveal yourself as being credulous and indeed something of being a fool obviously the professors in that room didn't want to appear to be foolish they one didn't want to have to answer the question why they would attach any significance to this historical person Jesus if the only sources they had of him were unreliable sources so by kind of a coercion Lee acquiesced to my giving this the least basic assumption or assertion about Scripture that it was in the very least basically reliable these professors were liberal they weren't Jesus Seminar people they weren't out of their minds they were just bad theologians but in any case as we looked at this I said on the basis of these general reliable documents we can come to the conclusion at the very least that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet I'm not yet claiming deity I'm not yet claiming miracles or anything else but certainly if this basically reliable book tells us anything about Jesus of history Jesus of Nazareth we know that he was at least a prophet if he wasn't at least a prophet again you would be faced with the same dilemma of maintaining your employment here with any kind of reasonable grounds for your academic positions because again if Jesus wasn't even that much a prophet why would you pay any significant attention to him at all and continue your work here at the seminary so again I was able to get their nod of assent that at least Jesus was a prophet I said okay and we know the difference between true prophets and false prophets so now we want to see if there's any way by means of examining this basically reliable document from antiquity can we learn anything about what this at least a prophet Jesus taught about the scriptures and one of the ironies of the whole academic debate about the trustworthiness of scripture that among those who were called higher critics who are quick to attack the validity of this passage or the authenticity of that passage in sacred scripture there's a strange agreement that if there are any parts of scripture that we don't challenge in terms of their authenticity historically it is those passages that tell us what this Jew of the first century whom we've granted to be at least a prophet taught about the Old Testament Scriptures and if there's a consensus among hire critics those who have no brief for the inspiration of the Bible that agreement is this that if we know anything about the historical Jesus we know that he embraced and taught the prevailing view of the Scriptures that was held among his contemporary Jewish leaders the Pharisees and the like and so there is a facile willingness to grant in the academic debate that yes Jesus did teach this high view of Scripture that was held by his contemporaries but he was wrong he said again they will acknowledge that Jesus taught such a high view of Scripture but that his teaching of that high view of Scripture was wrong but not only wrong but okay that it was wrong and let's try to follow their line of reasoning at this point Carl Bart one of the most important voices of theology in the 20th century and is usually considered the greatest leader of the movement called neo Orthodox theology had as part of his goals to get the church back to biblical preaching and listening to the Bible and paying attention to the Bible and he declared that the Bible is the where b'm day the Word of God but not the Werbach day the words of God Bart said that it is by the Holy Spirit the Word of God and God uses this book to by his Spirit bring us to faith and so on but nevertheless it was written by human beings and one of the most fundamental truths with respect to our humanity is our RA humanum asked to err is human and so that if this Bible was written by human authors which we know that it was it must contain error and if we think it does not contain error then we are left with what Bart called a de setec view of the Bible now that term may be a little bit technical for some of you but we remember the ancient heresy as part of Gnosticism which was called docetism coming from the Greek word dokgo which means to seem or to appear and the DOS itis were those who so influenced by Greek philosophy couldn't imagine deity combining with humanity that that was more of a struggle to the Greek thinker that the ideal would interact with the material than even the doctrine of the Resurrection and so the doctrine of the Incarnation was the main stumbling block there and so the Dossett just fixed the problem by saying that that Jesus didn't really have a material body Jesus only seemed to have a material body he appeared to have a material body but that material body was simply a phantom image and not real and so Bart takes that Christological heresy of docetism and applies it to the Orthodox doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture Bart says if you think that God so inspired human beings though I'll they undertook the task of writing down the scriptures as to render them infallible or an errant you have really destroyed the reality of the human authors of the book and you are left with a kind of docetism with respect to the Bible so the Bible is a human book that under the under the work of the Holy Spirit can be come from time to time in an existential sense one of the things that albright had in his lens when he was making the criticism I read a little while ago that the spirit then overcomes the heirs of the Bible to speak the Word of God to us but the Bible itself is not inerrant and his some other co-workers of the day a mo Brunner along with CH Dodd along with yo ho a c'mere Emmaus all first-rate world-class scholars of the 20th century they all agreed that Jesus taught the contemporary view of the Bible which we would call inspired and fallible and inerrant but that he was wrong and that it was okay that he was wrong now how could it be okay that he was wrong well the answer is this that Jesus touching his human nature was not omniscient now the divine nature has the attribute of omniscience but omniscience is not a normal attribute or quality of human beings there's nobody in this room right now I hope who would dare to claim before us that they were omniscient all-knowing sometimes we seem to make that claim my wife said when she married me she married mr. right but didn't know that my first name was always but it's that in any case we understand that in our normal human Asst there are limits to our knowledge we don't know everything only God is omniscient but in Christian history in the Roman Catholic Church first and then later on with Luther I'm sad to say embrace this doctor called the communicati elidio mata or the communication of attributes which meant that the divine nature communicated its attributes to the human nature if you would ask a Roman Catholic theologian is the human nature the body and blood of Jesus present in the mass and they say of course I'd say okay when they're having the mass at the same time in Boston and in Seattle and in Dallas Texas and in Prague and London and Paris is the blood and body of Jesus in all of those places at the same time they say yes I said but then the body and blood would be ubiquitous or on the present and isn't on the present day on the present a divine nature not a not human nature and they say yes in his human nature Jesus normally would not be able to have his blood and body at all these different places but the divine attribute of on the presence or ubiquity is communicated to the human nature making it possible for the human nature to be at more than one place at the same time now this is one of the debates that the church had to deal with in perhaps its most important Christological council and I'm thinking of the fifth-century council of chalcedon we're in Chalcedon it was declared as the church's faith that Christ was Vera home of aridaias truly man truly God and that the two nature's as mysteriously as they are United are without mixture confusion division or separation some I call it each nature retaining its own attributes that means that in the Incarnation the Incarnate Christ was not one thean throbbing person that was a divinely human person or a humanely divine person whereby the deity is humanized and the human is deified rather the divine nature is fully divine has all of the attributes of divinity the human nature that is united to the divine is purely human and not divine in its humanity and each nature in this union retains its own attributes now the divine can communicate ideas or information to the human nature but it can't communicate the attribute of omniscience so when these Protestant critics of an errand see agree that Jesus taught the view that we are defending they will say but he didn't know what he was defending because he was not omniscient touching his human nature now they're not dividing the natures there's distinguishing them they noticed that when Jesus is walking down the street and on legs and he gets sunburned on his back or he gets hungry for food that hunger that sunburn whatever are not manifestations of the divine nature God doesn't get sunburned God doesn't God doesn't have legs and arms and has to eat three meals a day in order to sustain himself so when Jesus bleeds when Jesus sweats when he sleeps he's manifesting his humaneness and so what these men are saying is that when he teaches about the Bible he's not communicating divine knowledge he's making a human judgment which is in error because there was no possible way that he would know of the documentary hypothesis and the Moses didn't really write the pennant or that there were three isaiah's or that the world was around he was a human being with all the limitations of human knowledge so he was wrong on what he taught with respect to the Bible but it's okay that he was wrong with respect to what he taught about the Bible because he was teaching touching his human nature so far so good I certainly agree with these critics that Jesus touching his human nature was not omniscient where I disagree is when they come to the conclusion but that's okay and the reason is this that what is at stake here is not the omniscience of the humanists of Christ because we're not pleading that in the first place but what is at stake here is the sinlessness of Christ which is absolutely essential to our salvation and to the gospel well how does the sinlessness of Jesus enter in to this discussion simply this way I can go back to my first year as a philosophy professor to university and I would gets questions from my students frequently sometimes very weighty and difficult questions to answer and frankly most of the time I was able to answer their questions to their satisfaction and to mine I can remember vividly however one day a student asking me a question there was a thorny question and I had known how other philosophers had answered that question in the past and how the other philosophers answers had been satisfying to those who were making the inquiry and I felt certain when this student asked me this question that I could give this philosophical answer that I had seen being given in the past by other respectable ASSA furs and I was confident that this student would be satisfied with it and I wouldn't look like a fool by having to say I don't know I remember that and I remember being tempted at that moment to use an argument that I myself was not persuaded by and believed that there was a fatal flaw in it and so that it would have been an unsound argument and I knew at the time I could use that argument that I knew wasn't sound and it would satisfy the student so I was on the line well I had to say was I don't know sometimes you have to choke on those words when you're in a classroom because they get annoyed as students what do you mean you don't know you're supposed to know you're paid to know you were to were paying for you to teach us you ought to know something about them but I believed then and now at anytime my professor has asked a question like that when he doesn't know the answer that it is an obligation not just pedagogically but morally to say I don't know to act as if you know something that you don't know and then speak on that basis is sin now imagine if I would have gone into that classroom and I would have said on the first day before we start our class now in the philosophy I want you to know that I'm not going to teach you anything during the course of this study that I didn't get from God and not only that I'm going to teach you with an authority that is unique in this university because all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me by God and by the way I want you to know before we start our class that I'm not only a carrier or Bearer of truth I'm not simply a teacher of truth but I am the truth what would you think of a professor who said something like that I would think that your next move would go right out of the door and down to the registrar's office and and drop that course in a heartbeat and sign up for somebody else BC that's what Jesus did Jesus claimed to speak on the authority of God he claimed to be the very incarnation of truth and if somebody claims to be the incarnation of truth and teaches falsehood even if he doesn't know that he's teaching false when he is sinned it's one of the reason why James tells us Litton that not many become teachers with four with teaching comes the greater judgment you may find a million ways to try to pardon Jesus for overstating his credentials but at the very least it's a peccadillo a minor scratch or blemish on Jesus morality that he was guilty of teaching falsehood about the nature of Sacred Scripture but jesus suffers from moral haemophilia you scratch Jesus and he bleeds to death because the slightest blemish would disqualify him from being the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world so what I'm saying here and what we have said in the past and defense of the scripture is that the church doesn't want to have a view of the Bible that's higher than the one Jesus hadn't taught and certainly doesn't want to have a view of the Bible that is less or lower than that which was taught by Christ because this view of Scripture is not that the Bible is generally rely on Jesus said that the Bible was the very word of God and he said thy Word is truth and he said not a jot or tittle will be removed until all is fulfilled he didn't believe in verbal inspiration he believed in jot and tiddle inspiration and he taught the church that the Bible was not only generally reliable but more than general reliable so do you see how we've moved we've moved in a linear fashion you may argue say well we only know Jesus from the Bible and we only know his view of the Bible from the Bible and so a circular reasoning no we didn't start with an infallible Bible we started with a general reliable manuscript that gives us general reliable information about the character of Jesus if it's not then we're wasting our time it's attaching any eternal significance to Jesus of Nazareth and so if the church is going to follow Jesus and if Jesus is going to be the lord of the church then we have to embrace his teaching about the nature and the authority of all of Sacred Scripture

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

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Keywords: Biblical Inerrancy (Belief), RC Sproul, Sproul, theology, inerrancy of the bible, biblical inerrancy debate, inspiration of scripture, is scripture the word of god, Is the Bible Inspired by God, Is scripture Inspired by God, is scripture infallible, is the bible infallible, is the bible inerrant or infallible, defense, appologetics, jesus' view of the bible, 2015 shepherds' conference, 2015 shepherdshepherds' conference, reformed theology, doctrine, biblical inerrancy, christianity

Id: 8n_cWZZzzec

Length: 43min 35sec (2615 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2015