Sola Scriptura

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

7th 2nd Timothy 3 16 through 17 All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching for reproof for correction and for training and righteousness that the man of God may be competent equipped for every good work Pretty much says it all right so tonight. I’m going to give you a history of of Sola Scriptura, and I’m going to tell you things maybe you didn’t know and maybe some things you did know, but to fit it together over the past 2,000 years, how we’ve gotten to where we are now, and why it’s even more important today than maybe even was back then to keep this flame alive. So the five Solas are Sola Gracia, Sola Fide, Sola Christos, Sola dea Gloria, and Sola Scriptura. The Solas were not systematically articulated together until the 20th century. They never were totally put together in one book or one manuscript until the 20th century. But Sola Gratia and and sola fide were used in conjunction by the reformers for themselves. For example, in 1554, Melanchthon wrote, sola gratia justificamus at sola fide justificamur. Only by grace

do we justify and only by faith are we justified. All of the solas show up in various writings by the Protestant reformers, but they are not catalogued together by any.

In 1916, a Lutheran scholar, Theodore Engler, published an article titled, The Three Principles of the Reformation, Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, and Sola Fide, Only Scripture, Only grace only faith. In 1934, theologian Emil Bruner, a Protestant theologian, substituted solo de glorium for sola scriptura. Substituted. Why would he do that? Hmm. In 1958, historian Jeffrey Elton summarized the work of John Calvin, wrote that Calvin had joined together the great watchwords. Elton listed sola fide with sola gratia as one term, followed by sola scriptura and sola deo gloria. Later in commenting on Karl Barth’s theological system, Bruner added sola Christus to the litany of solas while leaving out sola scriptura. Interesting in that how they left out as they progressed through the 20th century. The first time the additional two solas are mentioned is is in Catholic theologian John Baptiste in 1965.

The Church and the World is the first book where all five solas were put together by a Catholic theologian. Why did he do that? To attack what? Sola. Sola scriptura. Because with that, you tear apart the Catholic system. So, Sola Scriptura, by scripture alone, Sola Scriptura, or scripture alone, literally, by scripture alone, asserts that scripture must be governed over church traditions and interpretations which are themselves held to be the subject to scripture. And all church traditions, creeds, and teachings must be in unity with the teaching of scripture as divinely inspired word of God. Sola Scriptura asserts that the Bible can and is to be interpreted through itself with one area of scripture being useful for the interpreting of others.

That scripture can interpret itself as a means by which to show the unity of scripture as a whole, as all doctrines are formed via scriptural understandings.

All doctrines must be found to align with scripture and as such are then subject to Scripture before the believer can begin to apply them. This particular Sola is sometimes called the formal principle of the Reformation. Since it is the source and norm of the material cause or principle, the gospel of Jesus Christ that has received Sola Fide through faith alone, Sola Gratia by God’s favor, grace alone, the adjective sola and the noun scriptura are in the ablative case rather than the nominative case to indicate that the Bible does not stand alone apart from God, but rather that is the instrument of God by which he reveals himself for salvation through faith in Christ, solas Christus or solo Christo. Now that’s like, amen we believe that. At the end of this I’m going to read our statement on what we believe about Scripture after we go through all of this. Now contrasting with Sola Scriptura we’re going to see throughout the ages through the last 2,000 years how different denominations and

different sects have looked at this and perverted it. We ascribed to what I just read, now I’m going to read and tell you throughout history how it’s faded away from that and then been brought back in some cases. Contrast with Sola Scriptura. Prima Scriptura is sometimes contrasted to Sola Scriptura, which literally translates by scripture alone. The former doctrine is understood by many Protestants, particularly evangelicals, is is that the scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith and practice, but that the scriptures meaning can be mediated through many kinds of secondary authority, such as ordinary teaching offices of the church, antiquity, the councils of the Christian church, reason and experience.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. As soon as you start to introduce those things, you’re starting to erode slightly What does the Bible say? Right? So that’s a, your radar should go off when you hear those kind of things. However, Sola Scriptura rejects any original infallible authority other than the Bible. Amen. And this view, all secondary authority is derived from the authority of the scriptures and is therefore subject to reform when compared to the teaching of the Bible. Church councils, preachers, Bible commentators, private revelation, or even a message, a message allegedly from an angel or an apostle, are not an original authority alongside the Bible in the Sola Scriptura approach.

It’s really important to remember, no apostle, no this, they passed it down, we’ve always done it this way, all that stuff goes out the window. What does the Bible say? And why are you doing this? If you can’t get that answer here, like Strock says, if we don’t answer you correctly or show you how we’ve arrived at what we’re doing, turn around and walk out the door. Catholicism, the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, the second Vatican Council, 1965, is clear on the total equality of scripture with sacred tradition when it says that both sacred tradition and sacred scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence, because together they form the one sacred deposit of the Word of God committed to the Church.”

So in one sense, scripture has no primacy over tradition, but an ancient tradition holds that the Word of God, though equally authoritative in whichever form it comes, comes primarily in the form of sacred scripture, and thus we should seek for sacred doctrine primarily in the scriptures. Notice the fudge factor, primarily. All those words. One of the key things that I always look for when churches give a statement of faith, the Bible is our rule for faith and practice. That means what we do in the church, we kind of look to the Bible, but when we go outside the church, we don’t have to worry about what the Bible says about how the world was created or any of that stuff.

We don’t apply it there, just for faith and practice. That is a substandard approach to the scripture. Then the Catholics use this. As Thomas Aquinas said, sacred doctrine properly uses the authority of the canonical scriptures as an incontrovertible proof, and that the authority of the doctors of the church as one that may properly be used, yet merely as probable, for our faith Faith rests upon the revelation made to the apostles and the prophets who wrote the canonical books and not on the revelations, if any such there are made to other doctors. Pretty good. He realized there was a problem. This is in the 1500s. He’s, he’s saying to him, Hey, be careful here.

But then the council at Trent comes along and what was the council of Trent? That was Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, answered to the Reformation. Took them a hundred years to get it together, approximately a hundred years, but at the Council of Trent in 1563, the Roman Catholic Church embraced formally the two-source theory of special revelation that she still holds today. Both holy writ and holy tradition are considered infallible sources of divine revelation. The teaching office of the Church, the Magisterium, is charged with interpreting these two infallible sources for the faithful. Sometimes, like when the Pope speaks from the chair of Peter or ex-cathedra, the Church interprets these two infallible sources infallibly and adds to the infallible tradition.

Now, anybody that reads the history of the Catholic Church is going to go, whoa, is that a real snake pit? Because they go along for a hundred years doing this, then a pope decides to do that, then they change their mind over here. They got two popes, they got three popes, they got popes in France, they got popes in Italy. It’s craziness. And yet they still stand that the great teachers, the magisterium, are able to interpret these things and bring the truth to the people. Straight from the pit. Eastern Orthodoxy. Eastern Orthodoxy, this is the split from the Catholic Church in 1,000 AD. Eastern Orthodoxy also teaches Prima Scriptura.

An analogy is made where the entirety of church life is compared to a jeweled necklace, of which the most precious gem is the large diamond in the center, representing the scripture.

The other gems, representing the other parts of the holy tradition, while none of the other jewels are equal to the diamond, they are nonetheless contribute to its beauty. The diamond looks best as a part of the whole necklace. Example. When viewed with the context of church tradition, Sola Scriptura, which analogous to ripping the diamond out of the necklace because one prefers it, it prefers to view it on its own only detracts from the Diamond’s beauty and value. Very poetic, nicely stated, totally wrong. Anglicanism, the Church of England, which is basically the Catholic Church because Henry VIII could not get a divorce, right? He couldn’t get a divorce so he declares the Church of England. That’s a bad way to start a Church. Article 6, of the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for salvation, Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or

necessary to salvation. 39 articles of religion 1571. That’s a pretty good statement right there that it says the gospel is contained in the scriptures and we can’t mess with that. Now I’m going to read a paragraph from a modern day Anglican that wrote just in September of this year. On the other side of the divide, now he’s speaking as an Anglican, on the other side of the divide stabbed the radical reformers. These took sola scriptura to the extremes. Not only does the Bible stand as the norm by which all other norms must be normed, but it stands as a definitive precedent and model for all institutions, secular and religious. In other words, for many of the radical reformers, nothing could be permitted or established in church or state unless a biblical model or precedent could be found. Many the Puritans followed this extreme form of sola scriptura. That’s supposed to be a knock on us. I say to to that, I agree in some ways that we cannot force all the world to perform like Christians, but we need to form our base in what the Bible says. Okay? And

he’s saying that the radical people want to create a theocracy, in other words Jesus reigns, which won’t happen, we believe, until the millennium. But even then, when Jesus reigns on the earth for a thousand years, if our belief is correct. At the end, those in mortal bodies will still rebel against him after all of that time, which is like mind boggling. Okay. So Wesleyan Methodism is another version of how to interpret scripture. Another version of the prima scriptura approach may be in the Wesleyan quadrilateral for the Methodist, which maintains that scripture is to be the primary authority for the church, nonetheless, it is best interpreted through the lens of reason, personal experience, and church tradition.

Although the Bible remains the crucial and normative authority for Christians, according to the United Methodist Church, which adheres to this notion.” So then in quotes, this is their statement, Scripture is considered the primary source and the standard for Christian doctrine. is experienced and the witness of development and growth of the faith through the past centuries and in many nations and cultures. Experience is the individual’s understanding and appropriating of the faith in light of his or her own life. Through reason, the individual Christian brings to bear on the Christian faith, discerning and cogent thought.

These four elements taken together bring the individual Christian to a mature and fulfilling understanding of the Christian faith and requires response of worship and service. Talk about taking away right and wrong, right? Well, there are all those things in the middle and everybody can kind of believe what they want and we just can go along. Not a good idea. Look at what Methodism has brought to its individuals. Homosexual pastors, all kinds of crazy stuff. Okay? Presbyterian approach. This is Michael J. Horton, or Michael Horton, who’s a spokesman for the Presbyterian side, a scholar, and written many books. Many critics of the Reformation have attempted to portray it as an invitation to individualism.

As people discover for themselves from the Bible what they will and will not believe, never mind the church. Away with the creeds and the church’s teaching office. We have the Bible and that’s enough. But this was not the reformers doctrine of sola scriptura, only scripture. Luther said of individualistic approaches to the Bible, that would mean that each man would go to hell in his own way. What do you think about that? I mean, he’s saying that I can’t give a Bible to somebody and they can’t read it and they can’t come to the Lord without the teaching magisterium or the teaching office. That’s not the proper way, but I know I came to the Lord by hearing the gospel from another guy. He gave me a Bible. He forced me to read 1 John. I read it. It brought me to my knees when I got to 1 John 2.4. The power of the scripture is the thing that brought me to my knees. Now was I a perfectly informed Christian?

No. I was full of heresy. That was a rank heretic that got saved, you know, And then, as I learned, I started revolving around that. But it really is an interesting thing that he wants to kind of separate and now elevate the teaching office. On one side, the Reformers faced the Roman Church, which believed its teaching authority to be final and absolute. The Roman Catholics said that tradition can be a form of infallible revelation even in the contemporary Church. One needs an infallible Bible and an infallible interpreter of that sacred book. On the other side were the Anabaptist radicals. Uh-oh, those Anabaptists.

They read in the Bible, you have to believe and be baptized. Those are bad people. Who believe that they, not only did they not need the teaching office of the church, they really didn’t seem to need the Bible either, since the Holy Spirit spoke to them, or at least to their leaders directly. Okay, he’s taken a shot at some of the crazies in the Anabaptist movement and all our movements and all the things have crazy people in them, but the issue of the Anabaptists, how they got their name, is they negated infant baptism because they read in the Bible, believe and be baptized. All right? Now were there crazy people in that?

Yes. Were there crazy people in all these things? Yes. So, you know, there are problems in that. Uh, let me see here. Instead of one Pope, anabaptism produces numerous infallible messengers who heard the voice of God. This is the same problem that happens to any denomination that thinks they’re getting a word from God. Pentecostals in the radical form can stand up. And today the Lord told me, Oh, how did he tell you? Did he call you on the phone or, you know, how did that happen? And so directly the run Pope so infallible message against both positions the Reformation insisted that the Bible was a sole final authority in determining doctrine in life. In interpreting it the whole church must be included including the laity they must be guided by the teachers of the church those teachers though not infallible should have considerable interpretive authority. The The creeds were binding and the newly reformed Protestant communions quickly drafted confessions of faith that received the assent of the whole church, not merely teachers.

Now in that section of that paragraph, we agree. That’s what we did here. We got together. We had meetings with the men for over a year about deacons, elders, how our church should be governed, what the Bible says about it, all of that.

hours were spent with different people that wanted to meet with us and talk about that. I don’t think it’s wrong that you have a local church that goes through this process all the time. Now the Presbyterians say that’s wrong because we have no outside governing authority. It’s hard to find that outside governing authority in the Bible. They find it in church tradition and church history, okay? Keith Matheson, who is a scholar of the Presbyterian Movement, works in R.C. Sproul’s ministry, says this, Among evangelicals there is a common misunderstanding of solo scriptura that views the Bible not only as the sole final authority but as the sole authority altogether. In other words, the church, the ecumenical creeds, and the confessions of faith are largely dismissed even as secondary authorities. It is the no creed but Christ or no creed but the Bible attitude that is so prevalent in the evangelical church today. Of course those who assert such slogans fail to realize that a statement as no such creed but Christ is

itself a creed, a statement that one believes. Amen. Is that a problem? And And they go after you because of that. Now, does that mean that we can’t look at those creeds? We actually teach the Westminster Confession in our school. But, boop, boop, boop, there are problems when you get to certain paragraphs in there and you go, yeah, we’re buying into all of this, we buy into all of that, but over here, we got a problem here. You know, we don’t want to go there. But on the whole, is it good 80, 90 percent? Yeah. Is the Belgian Baptist Confession a good one? Yeah. But that’s why our statement of faith goes on for as long as it does.

It tries to address those things and still keep it in what we believe. And as you look at the footnotes, they’re all biblical sources. But when you start to look at church history and then read our statement, we’re trying to take care of those places where we feel those different creeds and confessions go off a little bit. Now, were all of them necessary to get us where we are? Yeah, like Jonathan said this morning, when the church first started, I mean, they were talking about, is Christ all human? Is he all God? All of those basic things. So they’re arguing over all that stuff. They come up with a statement to get you into the church.

If you believe this, then you can get in. And they’re trying to do it. But what is their main authority always in that? It’s not church councils, it’s not the creed. The creed is trying to sum up what the word of God saying to give it a shortened form to say this is what we believe. So it’s not the creed we believe in, it’s the original source document that we’re trying to get back to. Just as in our school we try to go back to the original source material. Don’t talk about the Constitution and stuff if you haven’t read the Federalist Papers. So anyway that’s the way we’re going. George Grant I think really put it up. We’ve been listening to a series of biographies that was done at a history conference that they had over in Moscow.

And his subject was Martin Booser, who he says is the party animal of the Reformation. He’s a really interesting guy to listen to his biography and everything. He had contact with all these people, and he was a really happy guy that came in to try to solve problems and get people together to talk about it, love God and everything. So Booser, looking for the biblical pattern for the church order and particularly church government, looking first and for the most to the early church, the restoration of the original form of the church. Apostolic warrant is our order. The restoration of the tradition is what he was trying to get back to.

But the papus gave new meaning to that. They said they were doing, you know, this and then the tradition of the church dictating what is true is what you should follow. This is where the reformers said, no, no, no, we want to go back to what the original church did. But to know what the original church did, you go back to the church fathers of what they were doing right away after the Bible was written. But what’s the original source for the church fathers? And I’m not going to have time tonight to go through. I’ve got 3,500 words here and I only have time for 2500. But the, the, I’ve got a list of church fathers that all they said right from the get-go was what does scripture say on the issue? Okay. Now we’re going to get into maybe getting in and poking in some of our kitchens here. The Southern Baptists.

Southern Baptists in recent years have been accused of practicing bibliography, the paper Pope. This is our Pope. Oh my goodness, what a bad charge that is. The purging of the ranks that removed any professors who believed that the historical or archaeological findings might legitimately raise questions about a passage during the late 1990s. Hundreds of Southern Baptist seminarians and denominational officials were systematically removed from office for either claiming that cultural and archaeological findings could give a a better understanding of the context of the scriptures. That is classic Wikipedia misunderstanding of went on in the Southern Baptist Convention and in the Southern Seminary.

They’re saying that these professors had all these discoveries. We need to study those and put them in complex with what the Bible is saying. No, they weren’t. They were looking for things to disprove what the Bible is saying, those professors. They were arguing against inerrancy. Inerrancy is the big question. Luckily, and fortunately, providentially, not luckily, Al Mohler was put in charge of Southern Seminary in the mid-90s. He came in and cleaned house. He got rid of those people that didn’t realize, or didn’t believe that the Bible was inerrant and the sole source. he cleaned house and brought Southern Seminary back to its place where it should be.

They also took a shot at Mueller in this same article. Al Mueller recently stated that any belief system, any world view, whether it is Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or dialectic materialism for that matter, Marxism, that keeps a person captive and keeps them from coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes, is a demonstration of satanic power, whereas Jonathan would have said this morning, demonic power. Good old Al. He talks a lot sometimes and he gets, he’s really a smart guy and can put a lot of words to stuff, but every once in a while he hits the nail right on the head and bangs it home. He is in a long line of the 20th century that’s happened in America.

After the liberal Germans in the late 18th century in Europe started making those seminaries go south, they moved across the water to America. And the battle came to a head in the 1970s with Harold Linzel’s book, Battle for the Bible. He wrote the book after attending Fuller and having battles over inerrancy that happened in the 50s and all of that. And it really rumbled through America. And in his book, Battle for the Bible, he goes through the Missouri synod seminary and how they had gone south and put the Bible was errant, and then they turned it around. Unlike most stories out there, they turned their seminary around and went back to that they believed in inerrancy. One of the few times, it really happened in a good way. The other story in the book is about North Park Theological Seminary, which which is the seminary for the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, which is one of the places that Gail and I first went after we got saved.

And we got right in the middle of this discussion because the seminary turned more conservative, but the church we were at had people that had graduated that were in the wavy part. And here I was saved at that point a year and a half, and I got right in the middle of arguing with those people. And it was fascinating to see that fight and how it divided that church in a good way. And those guys eventually, after a 10-year period, did not win out. And that church veered back to the right course and actually put in church discipline and things which the Evangelical Covenant Church doesn’t do mainly across America. During this time in the 70s, 80s is the time when Talbot, Dallas, and Grace Seminary, Grace is the Brethren Seminary, Dallas is the Presbyterian Seminary in Dallas, Texas, and then Talbot is Biola Seminary, which was started by very conservative people, had really started to veer off the thing.

They changed their statement for professors to sign and put out inerrancy statements. During that time, there were certain professors that said, that’s enough, we’re not signing it, we’re out of here. At that time at Grace Community Church, they had an extension of Talbot Seminary that Irv Bousnitz was teaching. He was a professor from Talbot that came out to teach in the San Fernando Valley. He was like 60 miles away from Biola. These professors came out to Grace Community Church because it’s a big campus and had the buildings to do it and said, you have to create a seminary. We have no place to go. We’ve resigned from Talbot and we have no place to go.

And John MacArthur said, no way. I’m not ready to start a seminary. I got a church here. What are you talking about? And they said, we got these buildings. They’re not being used during the week. Yada, yada, yada. Then all of a sudden people started coming from Dallas and Dallas had gone south. They didn’t deny inerrancy, but what they did was they let counseling come in in an unbiblical way. The Minnerith-Meyer Clinic and stuff started really overriding biblical principles, and those professors started resigning, and they started coming. The same thing in counseling happened at Grace Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana, and those people started coming out.

So there was like 10 people from each of these locations that came and said, please start a seminary. And so MacArthur went, well, I guess God’s doing this. I don’t know what to do. So they started it. They didn’t have the money to do it or anything. And out of the blue, a man shows up and said, I have a million dollars that I want to give you each year. Can you use it? And they used it. And that’s how the master seminary got started. And it’s interesting that over that issue, those good men that had been there for a long time, I mean, one of the guys that came over was Robert L. Thomas, who was John MacArthur’s first year grade teacher.

Okay, this goes way back, these guys. And so that’s how those seminaries got started over this issue, scripture alone, right? Is it an errand or isn’t it? Then we have the Pentecostal view. While most Pentecostals and Charismatics believe the Bible to be the ultimate authority, it would not say that any new revelation can ever contradict the Bible. They do believe that God continues to speak to people today on extra-biblical topics, as well as to interpret and apply the text of the Bible. One of my favorite stories is when I was going to a great seminary west in the early In Long Beach, California, they tried to start a division of that.

We had two Filipino guys that were in class, and we were given an out-of-class assignment to write a paper on charismatic principles. They went to one of the biggest charismatic congregations in Long Beach, and during the time when people are talking in tongues altogether and everything, they stood up and ordered McDonald’s in Tagalog, which is the Filipino language. And the lady who was deemed to be the one that was the filter to see if they were giving heresy or not stood up and went, thus saith the Lord and spouted some verse out of Isaiah, as these guys were ordering McDonald’s, right, you know, one a hamburger, one french fries, in Tagalog. That was their paper, you know, to demonstrate how Wrong, that kind of thing he does.

So now we have the Quakers. The Quakers concept of the inner light or the charismatic views of the Holy Spirit as an attractive force in the life of the believer may be examples of the prima scriptura approach. So the Quakers, the general idea is you’re moved within yourself and you follow your own inner being. It’s tough to find a hardcore gospel statement. You can find it when you go back to George Fox and the early Quakers that came to America during its founding, but over the years the Quakers have really drifted away from that kind of thing. So they’re more into how I feel and what the friends of the society in the meeting hall mean to you.

Seventh-day Adventists. Besides the Holy Scriptures, the Seventh-day Adventist Church holds that LNG White’s writings to be a continuing and authoritative source of truth which provide for the Church. Yes, we are meeting in a Seventh-day Adventist Church. Yes, we’ve talked to Doug, who’s the pastor here, about this very subject. He doesn’t like it that LNG White is part of their history and thinks that they have some things wrong in their eschatology, but he also has some other errant things that we’ve talked with him about that he believes. So the main point is that if you don’t keep going back to the Bible and keep guiding it, you can get off really quickly if you desert and have, oh, we can let this in or we can let that in. If you’re not constantly running it through the grid of scripture, you’re subject to big mistakes.

Others, now these people I don’t consider Christians, but it is interesting how they view the Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, except the Bible is the word of God as far as it’s translated correctly. And it’s regard parts of the Apocrypha, some writings of the Protestant reformers and non-Christian religious leaders and non-religious writings of some philosophers, and notably, the Constitution of the United States of America to be inspired, though not canonical. That’s an interesting mix. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the interpretation of the scripture and codification of doctrines is considered the responsibility of the governing body of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course.

So there you go. That’s what the world believes. Now, one of the things that is attacked when you have churches like ours that are reformed and still reforming, OK? We don’t believe that the Reformation’s over. We believe that we still need to keep reforming and keep making what we’re doing closer to what God wants us to do. So why do we do that? because we keep retreating back to the scriptures. And one of the criticisms of us is that we don’t look to the church fathers, we don’t look to church tradition, we throw that all out the window. I would argue, no, we don’t. We look at all that stuff, but we still grade it against what the Bible says.

You’ll notice Jonathan used liturgy. I try to use it as much as I can. Sean will use it. We set our service to worship God in the morning certain way for very particular purposes. All the things we do, we’re trying to make a statement. We’re here to worship God, not to put on a show, not to have a slick presentation, but to worship God, all of us together, you know, at one point. So when you look back at the Church Fathers, who they say we need to go to them for the truth and read their writings so that because now we’re closer to the Bible and they were taught by the Apostle John and things like that so they must be right. Those very people, Irenaeus 202, okay, we have learned from none others the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the gospel has come down to us which they did at one time proclaim in public and at a a later period by the will of God handed down to us in the scriptures to be the ground and pillar of our faith.

That’s against Heresies 3.11. Tertilian of Carthage, 235’s when he died, and defending the truth of the Trinity against the heretic paraxis.

It will be our duty, however, to adduce with proofs out of the scriptures as plainly as we do when we prove that he has made his word a son to himself. All the scriptures attest the clear existence of and distinction in the persons of the Trinity and indeed furnish us with our rule of faith.” This is 235, okay? These guys are pounding this home and it goes on and on here. I don’t want to read all of these because this is where a lot of words come in and I want to close out with what we have said. But Hippolytus is another church father 235, the last sentence in a long paragraph that I have of his, whatever things then the Holy Scriptures declare at these let us look and whatsoever things they teach these let us learn. It’s a summation of his paragraph. Eusebius of Caesarea 339 he died, same thing he ends up the bottom paragraph or the bottom sentence, but that those who use the arts of unbelievers for their heretical opinions and adulterate the simple faith of the divine scriptures by the craft of the godless are far from the faith. What

need is there to say but to follow the scriptures? Athanasius of Alexandria 373, same thing. Cyril of Jerusalem 386, John of Christendom 407, and then Augustine. Long quotes from Augustine and it’s fascinating the quotes that both sides use in Augustine. Augustine’s an interesting character. We’ve spent a lot of time in omnibus going through him this year with the city of God and we went through the confessions last year or a couple of years ago. Most of the time Augustine gets it right and lands in the Bible. But Augustine has some peculiar ways of interpreting the Bible, where he allegorizes at certain points, starts to bring in numerology and other crazy things, and he brings in reliquies, miracles and stuff that go on. So you have to sort through it.

But the bottom line that Augustine does, as you notice, when he goes through these incredibly complicated arguments, that can go on for two or three pages about a certain thing. He reduces it back to what does the Bible say. So he’s definitely trying to get back to the source material. So I look upon him as a good thing to see and look upon. But those are the general people that the Presbyterians and other Reformed types come to us and say, you guys are just wackos. You know, you’re starting a church on every street corner, and you’re not really going back to church tradition and trying to stay within the thing.

We are going to that, but we’re trying to sort through it. And we want everybody in the church to be those people. We’re not the only ones teaching here. We want you people to learn. We want you to be good students of the word, and the spirit will bear witness to you about what we’re trying to teach you as you go through these things. And there’s a great togetherness that happens. And a great part of the worship is that we are all learning and singing to God together. I think you can appreciate that as small as we are, how well we sing. And some of that, we’re being taught how to sing. Now, is that in the Bible?

I don’t see really a lot of that, except they had musicians come and play the things. But we’re learning how to sing in unison together the great hymns of the faith. And we’ve been criticized because we want to sing a lot of the songs. Well, if we’re singing the songs, it’s pretty hard to get a mistake, right? If we’re singing what the Bible says, it’s pretty bad. You can’t screw up there. So it’s fascinating, I think, to see how the Spirit is uniting us in those things. So I want to close with the 287 words that we use to talk about this doctrine. OK? So this is what we say in our statement of what we believe. Scripture, the written word of, I mean, scripture, the word of God written.

We believe that the Bible consists of 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. It is the infallible word of God, verbally inspired by God, and without error in the original manuscripts, the original manuscripts. This is a translation. It is not the Bible. It is not the thing that we say is inerrant. Okay. This is a new King James. Most of you have ESVs. Some of you got NASVs. Some of you have ASVs or whatever King James. We’re talking about the original manuscript and yes, it gets technical. How we get to that. I’ll talk to that in a minute with this book. Okay. We believe that God’s intentions revealed in the Bible are supreme, sufficient, and the final authority in testing all claims about what is true and what is right.

In matters not addressed by the Bible, determining what is true and right requires wise assessment by criteria consistent with the teachings of Scripture. Always through the Bible grid. Everything. We believe God’s intentions are revealed through the intentions of the human authors, even when the author’s intention was to express divine meaning of which they were not fully aware. As for example, in the case of some Old Testament prophecies, thus the meaning of biblical text is an objective, fixed historical reality rooted in the historical, unchangeable intentions of its divine and human authors. However, while meaning does not change the application that that meaning may change in various situations, nonetheless, it is not legitimate to infer a meaning from a biblical text that is not demonstrably carried by the words which God inspired.

Therefore, the process of discovering the intention of God in the Bible, which in its fullest meaning is a humble and careful effort to find in the language and the context of of Scripture, what the human authors intend to communicate. Limited abilities, traditional biases, personal sin, and cultural assumptions often obscure biblical texts. Therefore, the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit is essential for a right understanding of the Bible. And prayer for his assistance belongs to a proper effort to understand and apply God’s word. I think that that’s really been worked by a lot of people. We copied this from Piper’s Church, and we altered certain phrases in it.

They gave us permission to copy it, and we contacted them with some of the things that we changed. They liked the changes, didn’t disagree with it. But this is, we’re standing 2,000 years after all this has started, looking at all of these statements of faiths and creeds and everything, trying to boil it down to where we are today. Now, I’ve talked a lot about the Bible. Some of you may not be really understanding how we got the Bible. You think you’ve got, you go to the Bible bookstore and you buy your Bible. And this is the Bible. I think that this is the best work to start you off in if you want to understand about your Bible.

It’s called A General Introduction to the Bible. It’s by Norman Geisler and William E. Nix. It was written back, I think, in the 60s, but it is really good. Talks about textual criticism, talks about the original sources, on and on and on. Every chapter gives you the background to how we got to this. Now, Geisler realized in the 1960s in America that something needed to be happening, Because what happened in the churches is that after this book became popular and seminaries realized they had to teach inerrancy, then it started to get a little quirky. They started shaving what inerrancy really was. So they got together and in 19, let me get the right date here, some of you may recognize this book that we’re with us at Grace Bible Church when we taught through the syllabus at the master’s seminary.

In appendix three of this document on bibliology, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy with Exposition, 1978 is when they all finally agreed to this. And the people that were there were Carl F. Henry, Harold Linzell, John Warwick Montgomery, Richard Nicole, J.I. Packer, Rod Mocker, Francis Schaeffer, R.C. Sproul, John Wyndham, all the Bayleywicks all came together to write this document on inerrancy. And it’s like a, eh, like a 15 page document, articles boiling down what inerrancy means. Now, after they wrote that, churches went home and adopted it. Yeah, we believe in inerrancy. But then they realized, how do we interpret the Bible?

How do you go about your hermeneutic, when you look at this, how do you interpret it? It says this, but other people say, well, that word really doesn’t mean that there. It means this because of this. Now we’re into hermeneutics. So another six years went by, and in 1982, They came out with the Chicago statement on biblical hermeneutics.

And this was another knockdown drag out fight. And this one becomes more important actually than the inerrancy one, because you can say, Oh, I believe it’s inerrant, but you don’t understand how to interpret it. Let me explain. I have this secret decoder ring on how to explain this and you have your decoder ring, but I have the right decoder ring, right? So this is another document that was produced, and it’s another 15 pages, but it’s a little more complex and starts to get very pointed. And we stand on the grammatical historical approach. And the interesting thing is, when I get together with friends of mine that are Presbyterians and stuff, when you do that, they go, go, yeah, we believe that, but we don’t believe it quite like you believe it.

And so you have to then start scratching your head, well, what do you mean by it? And so that’s a whole discussion that you need to really think about, and that’s how we come up with how we interpret the Bible, okay? And what it means, boiling it down to a simple thing, what it says is what it means. That’s real basic. But the thing is, God chose those words and in some places there’s figurative speech, in other places there isn’t. A lot of places, scripture teaches scripture, all that kind of stuff. Now do good men disagree on this? Yes. Do good men disagree over the gospel? You get a mistake in the gospel, you don’t get to go to heaven.

You can have a mistake in your eschatology and still go to heaven. But we want to stand for what we think it is. And that’s a tricky business because together for the gospel is a gathering that we go to as a church. We invite the men to go and every two years we go. We’re sitting there with 10,000 people singing all these songs, songs and I can guarantee you that I could probably get in a knockdown drag out fight with, I don’t know, 80% of the people there over some doctrine thing. I mean, I can get in a knockdown drag out fight with people here in the congregation that we worship together, right? Right, Dave?

But that’s not to say we can’t know we’re in God’s family. And that’s the joy in the thing that we want to do. That’s why we pray for other churches that are preaching the gospel. We want them to preach the gospel. Now, do I think that somebody, once they learn the gospel, should stay in a church that maybe has an errant view of inerrancy or sola scriptura? No. I think that as they mature, that they will realize, Oh, I can’t stay in that. I got to move away from that. And so that’s a process. And hopefully if we’ve got things that are wrong, that we will change. And we welcome those criticisms and those discussions.

You know, those are the things that sharpen us and want to do that. So to close, the major thing is that the Bible is the formal principle on which the Reformation was started. Remember, Good old Martin was told to translate the Bible into German for the German people. Yes, sir. He goes up into his study and he starts translating. And he goes along and oh my goodness, it’s by faith alone. This is incredible. I’m going to write to Pope. He’ll change his mind right here in the scripture. So he writes off the letter, sends it off, and wham. The wreck is on. And so then he nails up his theses, and then the real wreck is on.

But going ahead, he thought, this is incredible. It’s right here. This answers all my questions and the story of his life is really incredible And he’s a flawed guy just like all of them are we’re all sinners saved by grace, but He’s the guy that put his foot down and said this is it here I stand right when he got at the diet of worms and What was that over what the scripture said now? But the church councils said they put his back against the wall and he said he would stand on the scripture and so will we So let’s close now and a word of prayer and then we can go home. Father, we thank you that you have, through your general revelation, shown that there is somebody bigger than us, and then you gave us special revelation to give us great insights into who you are.

We thank you for that. We ask that you would specially bless us to be good students and to prepare our hearts to change those places where we’re in error and to constantly grow and to grow into your son’s image. And the great thing about that, no matter how flawed we are, you promise in 1 John 3.2 that you will conform us to your son’s image. So we are all in process, those of us who believe. We thank you for that, and of course, we thank you most of all for your son, Jesus Christ, in whom we pray, amen.