Subtle Ways to Abandon the Authority of Scripture

the following message is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthfortheworld.org at the risk of becoming a book peddler I should mention a book that has recently come off the press from eerdmans called the enduring authority of the Christian scriptures it's a big book about twelve hundred and fifty pages and it was put together by 37 people from many countries around the world all with a high view of Scripture and the reason we put it together is because we are persuaded that evangelicalism is drifting toward a softer view of Scripture again we went through this 30 or 40 years ago and Jim Boice and others put together the International Council on biblical inerrancy and various publications came out and so forth so also this new challenge has produced a number of books already but we meant this one to be a standard a rather upmarket and it deals with a lot of different issues it deals with historical questions that is there have been a number of scholars who have tried to argue that a high view of Scripture inerrancy really was late on the historical agenda was invented by the Puritans or it was invented by the Princetonian Zoar it was invented by the common sense realists or it was invented by Warfield but in any case it doesn't come from the Bible itself and and and then there are philosophical essays and there are challenges that come from the way the New Testament quotes the old and there there is a section because this is now increasingly a global world there's a section comparing that the Christian scriptures with the bhagavad-gita and other writings from Hinduism and from Buddhism and from Islam and so on so that we understand the world in which we live so that book is out there I'm not going to repeat its its main findings but more recently I have been pondering the title that I submitted to this conference subtle ways to abandon the authority of Scripture I'm not talking about the abandonment of scripture that takes place for example when a college student brought up in a Christian circle goes off to hear Bart airman or Richard Dawkins for the first time and is simply blown away by skepticism and has no way of figuring things out and that that college student needs information needs alternative reading lists needs sympathetic mentor I'm not talking about that I'm talking about slightly more subtle ways by which we reduce scriptures Authority and by we I mean Christians not least Christian leaders forewarned is forearmed so here we go number one selective silence selective silence the grossest displays of this trick are everywhere evident for example in the health wealth and prosperity gospel movement there's certain texts that are quoted again and again and again but there are very few citations of passages that talk about suffering or if we suffer with him we shall also reign with him or take up your cross and follow Jesus or passages like Hebrews chapter 11 there were others who were tortured refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection some face jeers and flogging and even chains and imprisonment they were put to death by stoning they were sawed in two they were killed by the sword they went about in sheepskins and goatskins destitute persecuted mistreated the world was not worthy of them closer to home many evangelicals have avoided talking about certain disputed topics we know that they will divide our churches so we keep quiet about them whether roles of men and women in ministry homosexual debates it's not that we don't have historic biblically defined positions on them we just don't like to talk about them because they're painful they're awkward they get into the press and they can cause trouble or we see some people talking about these things in such an angry style that we don't want to be associated with them but of course the truth of the matter is when we do that we're secretly hoping the topics will become less Spanish and go away and they won't what happens instead is that Christians and our congregations increasingly pick up the cultures values because we're not offering anything that is counter cultural and this is especially true of our young people many of whom today are convinced that although they themselves are against homosexual marriage there's nothing wrong with it it's just another societal way of ordering things of course systematic expository ministry is the best antidote but even here we can wittingly or unwittingly de-emphasize certain things in our expository ministry for example supposing you begin a series of expositions on Matthew and you come to Matthew 1 and 2 well there's lots to emphasize in Matthew 1 and 2 but I suspect that if we were expounding near Christmas Matthew 1 & 2 we would not particularly emphasize the dreams and angelic visitations that led the Magi away or that led Joseph down into Egypt then led Joseph back and then when he came back and yet another dreamer an angel from the Lord to lead him away from Bethlehem and up to Nazareth and so on so on we we use generic terms like God led them to a safer place whatever but I have friends in Indonesia who work in Muslim contexts and in the Muslim world one of the greatest signs of God's presence and blessing and power is life directing dreams and angels I have a friend there who's been very effective in Muslim evangelism who who simply loves to expound Matthew one and two and especially emphasize the dreams and the visitations of the angel from the Lord and so the question becomes in part have we de-emphasized something because of sensibilities in our culture whereas he is over emphasizing something in another culture because that is his location be just because we are systematically expounding the whole of Scripture does not mean that we may not play games of emphasis and de-emphasis ourselves so number one selectively sows number two heart embarrassment before the text I imagine in a an assembly like this all of us are convinced that the Bible does say quite a lot about hell in fact the Lord Jesus himself does but some of us I suspect have introduced a passage like Luke 16:19 231 in hell he lifted up his eyes being in torment I am an agony in these flames we've introduced such a passage by saying things like I don't really like this doctrine but you know what's what the Bible says so I've got to be faithful and preach it do you say that ever God have mercy on your soul are you going to present yourself as more compassionate than God or we come to election and read Romans nine and we may really deep down in our hearts believe it but skimp on it just a wee bit just because we know what's gonna split our congregation that again is where two Corinthians four the passage read by Alistair in the first session is so helpful we have renounced secret and shameful ways we do not use deception nor do we distort the Word of God on the contrary by setting the forth of truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone's conscience number three subtle moves to legitimize things that the Bible condemns subtle moves to legitimize things that the Bible condemns Zondervan has recently announced a new book edited by Preston sprinkle called two views on homosexuality the Bible and the church one is affirming and the other is non affirming with respect to homosexual marriage now at one time the debate was between evangelicals and non evangelicals or evangelicals and Catholics versus non evangelicals and non conservative Catholics but now that the boast of this book is that this has become an intra evangelical debate that is there are some evangelicals who take the affirming side and some who take the non affirming side and that's demonstrated you see by a book that offers two views in such a way that we're really bringing the debate inside the evangelical camp you can take either view and still be a happy evangelical I've been saying for years that these five views books and three views books and four views books on this topic that topic or the other topic vary between extraordinarily helpful and extraordinarily dangerous they're helpful because some of us really do need to enlarge our understanding of the elements of debate across the history of the church how Christians have disagreed on some pretty important issues on baptism for for example and and we need to understand what those debates look like on on the the nature of the relationship among the covenants and and and so forth but on the other hand it can also be a way of subtly shifting what is now viewed as tolerable and what is not viewed as tolerable recently Pete Briscoe the one of the pastor's at Ben Tree Bible fellowship in Dallas who has led the church into a willingness to have women elders dependent in some respects on william Webb's trajectory hermeneutic you follow the trajectories of Scripture and beyond Scripture to the contemporary world and just as we have abolish slavery so we should abolish any limitations on what women may do wanting us to agree to disagree but the test case for living under the authority of Scripture comes home to us again and again in every generation and some of us I count myself as one of them thinks that some of the think that some of these issues although in some ways they're not foundationally important the way the resurrection of Christ is important or the way substitutionary atonement is important nevertheless they have become important in our day in the same way that indulgences became important 500 years ago indulgences at one level was the wrong issue over which to split the church imagine splitting the entire Western Church over Tetzel and indulgences but it became the test case that dealt with justification would you live under the authority of the word of God or not over the authority of the Pope over questions of grace and faith over eschatology and limbo and purgatory and assurance of faith and and so on it became a test case of of works righteousness it it became a biblical test on this question shall we live under the authority of the word of God or shall we not and I think that there are one or two of those issues that are becoming like that for us today subtle moves to legitimize things that the Bible condemns number four I swiped this title from Mike ovie the art of imperious ignorance isn't that a wonderful title the art of imperious ignorance if you want to read his article it's in the off the record column in the most recent fascicle of Tamela oz which as many of you will know is posted for free on the gospel coalition website the art of imperious ignorance volume 41 pages 5 to 7 his point is this at some point in debates people listen to both sides of something or other and some bright spark concludes well all of this debate demonstrates that the evidence is not very clear and since it's unclear we can't know the mind of God on these disputed matters we are ignorant as to what God is truly saying now clearly that is sometimes a valid argument what does it mean to be baptized for the dead 1st Corinthians 15 wow I remember a long time ago many decades reading three articles written in the Catholic biblical quarterly in 1950-51 that surveyed 42 different interpretations of that expression in the history of the church 42 and since then I've counted another half dozen and if you push me hard I think I can narrow it down to the three most likely but I'm not quite sure I mean I don't want to impose imperious ignorance that is if you think you do know God bless you I don't but that's a little bit different than the cases I have in mind that is based on an expression that occurs only once in all of Holy Scripture that's why the wisest pastors and theologians across the centuries have tended not to put into statements of faith and the like expressions or theological reflections that show up once are only twice in Scripture not because God has to say things several times for them to be true but because he may have to say things several times for us to understand what he's saying because we're stupid and slow so when things come up again and again and again and again and again in Scripture then it behooves us to say what is the pattern that's going on and in some issues that there's room for debate this side or that side and Christians will disagree in other things there's a consistent pattern there is no biblical text not one that approves homosexual Union not one but if you impose imperious ignorant and show how oh those texts all have their difficulties some people want to want to know whether it's autumn the real sin was lack of hospitality or something and and you you debate every single one of them and then impose that ignorant imperiously then it becomes wrong to say that you do know what the truth is it's the imposition of imperious ignorance what my co V does is draw an interesting parallel that I'd forgotten about until I read it again in his essay it's in a historical parallel the council at sirmium in 357 the council at sirmium in 357 imposed what was in fact a pro Aryan Creed that's proto JW for you they announced a prohibition in their decree against using terms like homo you see Oz one of the same substance talking about the deity of Christ and homeboy you see oz of similar substance they wanted both terms banned because we can't know it was the imposition of imperious ignorance and they got quite spiritual about it who shall declare his generation they quoted there is mystery here we cannot possibly fathom these things therefore we cannot know yet hilary of poitiers and athanasius of alexandria viewed sirmium as blasphemy that's a pretty serious charge for first of all the decree had an element of compulsion they were compelling confessional ignorant they were not saying we are ignorant and can't decide they are they were trying to impose confessional ignorance on the church moreover the decree actually stops true propositions about who Christ is such as the proposition regarding the eternal generation of the son from being affirmed worst the claim of dogmatic ignorance because of lack of clarity actually allows people to adopt whatever position they want instead of asking what the scriptures say and doing more rigorous exegesis the claim of imperious ignorance no one can know it's just too vague it's too disputed allows you not to say I don't know historically what it's tended to do is allow people to claim whatever position they Charlie well wanted and it does not take much imagination to recall some of the similar debates today number five determinately not getting right the balance of Scripture oh there are a lot of examples to be given here a year to ago in some of the circles in which I move there was a bit of a debate going on on the doctrine of sanctification that has always been a difficult topic of course and so some of us got together on the telephone in a conference call about a dozen of us because some of us thought it would be a good and useful thing for everybody to hear firsthand what the other party was saying so that so that there would not be shibboleths and and straw men created and so we needed to hear from one another's own lips what we understood is is is sanctification the the result of the proper application of the third use of the law or is sanctification really the result of merely responding well to the gospel of Jesus and so on and so on the debates became warm so we all listened to one another on this phone call went on for almost two hours and then we all ask questions of one another to make sure we understood what the other one was saying and then one of us asked the question now I'm going to make up a case study a problem and I want to know how you would address it so you're in your study at the church and somebody comes in with this problem and then the case study was laid out now the question is how would you answer we went around again you know we discovered blew me out of the water we discovered that they all would have handled it the same way so why were we arguing and when we probed the question from that vantage point we discovered that probably half the debate was over the fact that some came out of strong fundamentalist background had reacted against it and love the freedom of grace intended to emphasize how Christian ethics finds its driving power from the gospel itself and others came from really loose backgrounds without discipline anywhere they had they had been involved in multiple sexual partners and all arrests and they had got converted and what they saw the church needed was some discipline and rules and and and and strong rigorous confessionals discipline in that the local church level and so as a result instead of really coming to grips theologically with a balance of Scripture and putting things together there was some reaction that was going on that reflected the backgrounds of the pastors themselves it's understandable but it took some serious conversation to get to that kind of self acknowledgement to you a 2-tiered you see it's possible in other words to be determining right the balance of Scripture there are many other examples that we could list number six to little reading to little reading so as to remain to culturally constrained to culturally constrained by the broader culture to culturally constrained by our own confessional bubbles that's really part of what was going on in the example regarding angels from Matthew one and to John Stott of course was single all his life so his example is so far as reading is concerned isn't it's not something that all of us can put into practice but his commitment his effort was all the days of his life apart from the reading he was doing to prepare the next talk or the next Bible study or the next sermon he tried to reserve an hour a day a half-day a week a day a month and a week a year for serious reading of course we all know the name of charles haddon spurgeon most of us aren't going to be able to put in the hours that he put in and we hope not to die of gout at the age of 57 too but on the other hand his aim was to read six serious books a week now people have different speeds of reading and and their different demands on time and different stages of life and if you have three or four teenagers in your home that's gonna chew up some hours in a big hurry you put in all the caveats you like but some of us need to do some more serious reading because that will help us on many fronts to get things right if all you read is biblical theology you need to read some systematic theology if all you read a systematic theology you need to read some biblical theology if all you read is theology you need to read some commentaries if all you read is commentaries you need to read some some devotional literature and some serious theology and so on and so on and so on then in any case you need to be reading some books that unpack the the culture a little better and and on and on and on pastors are first and foremost GPS their general practitioners we don't have the right to become specialists and the third picket fence to the right it's it's it's it's it's part of pastoral ministry that our responsibility is to unpack the whole Council of God to the whole people of God and that does require some serious reading time failure to do this will almost always issue in too many wobbles in our reading of Scripture with the result that Scripture itself is not functioning as the authoritative truth that it is in fact number seven the failure to be bound by both a formal principle and the material principle let me explain confessional reformed evangelicalism has always said we are bound by two principles the formal principle and the material principle the formal principle is the Word of God the material principle is the gospel well and confessional II fleshed out do you see if we're bound only by the formal principle then you have to say that you share that formal principle with Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and others the formal principle that is the affirmation of the truthfulness and reliability of the Word of God does not necessarily guarantee you genuine submission to what the Word of God actually teaches unless you think that your friendly neighborhood Jehovah's Witness has got it right when he affirms the truthfulness and reliability of Holy Scripture that's what makes me a little nervous when I hear somebody saying I don't need to read theology I just preached the Bible I don't need theological training I just preach the Bible any self-respecting Mormon could say that because there is a material principle as well the material principle and the formal principle interact with one another it's not that there are two separate principles and neither of the twain shall meet after all you still want to say that it's the formal principle the authority of the word of God which shapes and reshapes and reshapes our understanding of the gospel as we come back to study the Word of God again and again and and enables us to develop a an informed confessional grasp of what Holy Scripture says regarding what the gospel truly is but at the same time when you start doing your exegesis of the next passage of Scripture you carry that confessional understanding in your mind in your brain in your hermeneutics in your exegesis as you start reading the passage that is next on the agenda and it helps to shape what you see in that text so that although the authority line primarily runs from the text to your theology there's a sense in which the material print of all the shaped theology then also helps to delimit how far out you go in your understanding of what that text is so you don't come to a passage like the end of John 14 where Jesus says my father is greater than I and start saying well I'm gonna have to think this one through from first basics all over again does that mean that God is a greater God the Father is a greater God than Jesus is God why don't you think that way well the reason you don't think that way is because your mind has already been shaped by enough of biblical truth to do to know that that there are other texts in the Gospel of John and elsewhere in the New Testament so the Word was with God and the Word was God he was God's own fellow but he was God's own self and and there is the confession of Thomas my Lord and my God and and and Jesus does not respond oh you're going a bit over the top there Thomas back off just a wee bit I'm only a junior God and and because you're you are familiar with many texts therefore you are you are allowing your understanding of Scripture up to this point to reshape how you will understand what's going on in in John 14 so to some extent all of us are doing this all the time it's inevitable it's part of being human it and having a finite brain but being intentional about it is a bit different that is to recognize that we are bound by the Word of God and we are bound by the material principle that is the summation of what the gospel is about of what God is about what human beings are about what the cross is about what the purpose of God's self-disclosure in Scripture is about what Jesus is about and so on so on so we are bound by all of that that that that itself feeds back into our understanding of how Scripture works and functions in our lives failure to be bound by both a formal principle and the material principle almost always issues in exegesis that is woefully lacking it tends to be shallow it tends to be psychological attempts to be merely moralistic it is not profoundly faithful to scripture that also has a bearing even on how we think about some other larger issues how do we address Islam for example well some of us want to address that only politically but if we're going to think about evangelizing our Muslim neighbors we're going to have to recall the fullness of the material principle regarding the gospel we are going to approach them with confidence with joyful self-sacrificing godly righteous self-denying giving evangelism you cannot fruitfully evangelize people you don't love number eight the lust for the merely technical I've been teaching seminary for enough years now that I've heard from many generations of students this complaint when I first came to seminary I loved reading the Bible it was my pleasure and now I'm here and I'm taking Hebrew and Greek you know Luo Luo a slew a lumen what's the next one looat a and and now I have to do my exegesis in my line diagrams and and and and and you know the the joy of it's all it's all gone I mean where is my pleasure in in in reading the Bible and when I was a young man I responded by saying something like well you got to make sure you preserve your devotions where where you read the Bible up for some part of the day in a devotional reverential frame of mind forget your Greek exegesis you just just read the Bible on occasion devotionally and and let God speak to you through its pages I never say that anymore I never say that the reason is because that's interests in troduce in bifurcation so when you're doing your Greek exegesis it's still the Word of God you're still to approach it reverently you're still supposed to be listening and when you're reading devotional you should still should be trying to get it right not just looking for pious thoughts that hit you out of the sky did you see whether we're reading at a more popular level and call it devotional or whether we're doing detail exegesis and look thing looking things up in grammar books and so on it still is the Word of God to have a bifurcation between rigorous thought rigorous scholarly work to whatever level we have been adequately trained and devotional reading is a huge mistake because we are always dealing with the Bible as the Word of God avoid the lust for the merely technical number 9 the lust for the contemporary philosophical agenda the lust for the contemporary philosophical agenda now here I would spend a lot more time on this particular item in a different sort of conference two different sorts of people I do recall an interesting review I read in Christianity today 35 years ago Clarke pinic had just come out with his book Scripture principle and it was reviewed in CT by Raja Nicol you will know the name of Roger Nicole I'm sure it was a very fair review but it ended up by saying at the end of the day every theologian has to balance out the need to address the contemporary world with the need to be rooted in the confessionalism of the past dr. pinic Nicole says has shown that he is interested in the former question but sadly he is lost track of the latter question that is to say it's possible so to be driven by the desire to be contemporary or to address the new culture whatever it is whether on philosophical terms or sociological terms or whatever that that what we begin to lose is a sense of any Christians deep indebtedness to the historic confessionalism of the church it's not for nothing that Jude 3 speaks of the faith it was once for all delivered to the Saints so if you so stress for example the postmodern sensibilities that we all understand things a little bit differently because we're all finite and and and if we we follow the track of what's called a neopragmatism or American pragmatism which which sees Bible readers not as finding the truth but using the Bible we use the Bible in our particular community or we use the Bible this way or that way in our particular church we can sometimes pick up that language and realize how profoundly manipulative it can be the Bible is merely a text to be used as opposed to God self disclosure of course there are some things to be done with the Bible that enable us to use it in edifying ways but those ways are always bound up with fidelity to what the text is actually saying well I would love to say much more about that question but the contemporary definitions of of our cultural climate put forward by people like Charles Taylor in extraordinary treatment of secularism and things like this have sometimes meant that Christians have capsized too quickly on a wholehearted submission to the Word of God addressing that culture rather than being in some ways taken over by it and finally then we'll throw a throw it open to questions anything that reduces our trembling before the Word of God alistair bag quoted at the end of his address isaiah 66 god looks to those who are humble and of a contrite spirit and who tremble at his word and to see these things in comparison with who we are you've been born again not of perishable seed but of imperishable through the living and enduring word of god for all people are like grass and all their glories like the flowers of the field the grass withers and the flowers fall but the word of the lord endures forever I've read some interesting reviews recently of enduring authority of the Christian scriptures and some of them are trying so hard to be amusingly snarky that I want to ask do you ever tremble before the Word of God but it's not just with respect to our stance on Scripture you you and I both know some names of preachers who have arisen out of the reformed camp the young restless and reformed kin who doctrinally have remained pretty robust on the whole until the final breaks came where as their lives are falling apart with arrogance brokenness in other words the issues are not merely intellectual anything that reduces our trembling before the Word of God anything that encourages us to think that growth in our sector is due to our gift anything that fails to see that gospel centeredness is more than a confessional stance it's a how we live stance it's a moral stance it's a transform life stance means that we lose some of our trembling before the word of God the question is how our lives adorn the doctrine of the Word of God anything that reduces our trembling before the Word of God is the last of my items on subtle ways to abandon the authority of Scripture this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for living learn more about truth for life with alistair beg visit us online at truthfortheworld.org

Channel: Alistair Begg

Views: 63,204

Keywords: Alistair Begg, Authority of the Bible, The Bible, God's Word, Inerrancy of the Bible, Inspiration of the Bible, Preaching, Sufficiency of the Bible, Word of God, DA Carson

Id: YdfZV0iNHGw

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2016