Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the Doctrine of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
The subjects for this third talk are so large I would be much happier if I had a day on the two topics (a day each), but what I would like to do in this hour is to divide my time between some reflections on the doctrine of God, in effect, and some reflections on Christ insofar as these reflections bear on our understanding of Scripture.
In other words, modernism tended to get Christian apologetics to begin with reason and think through what evidence there was for a high view of Scripture and from the high view of Scripture, introduce you to a doctrine of God. But I’m not sure that’s wise; I’m not even sure that’s possible under a postmodern regime. I think it’s better to start thinking about God first and then from this frame of reference to show some of the implications for our understanding of Scripture.
If this were an evangelistic talk, my approach, my way in would be a wee bit different. But I’m assuming I’m talking to Christians who believe, in principle, God is at least something like he is portrayed in Scripture. Just start with something as vague as that, and what are the sorts of things that fall out from further reflection? I want to list several:
1. The God of the Bible transcends culture.
That is to say, because he is the Creator, he existed before there was anything of what we call the universe, and all that we know of culture is a subset of that created order. He is above and beyond all culture precisely because he was there before the world began. In other words, one of the entailments for the doctrine of creation is God not only transcends space and time but that he transcends culture. That means God’s native tongue, as it were, is not English or even Greek or Hebrew.
Now you’re pushing on the very edge of things, but because the Bible (despite some of our critics) really does present a fundamentally Trinitarian view of God, with the Father sending the Son into the world, with the Son returning to the glory he had with the Father before the world began, and so much more, the assumption everywhere is the One who did not think equality with God was something to be exploited (to use the language of Paul in Philippians, chapter 2) was loved eternally by his Father before the world began. (John 3, John 5)
The Father loved the Son; the Father determined all would love the Son even as they love the Father. The question inevitably arises.… How does the omniscient Father communicate with the omniscient Son before the universe exists? I don’t know. But there are surely some things I can say what it’s not like. I doubt very much it’s in English. How precisely do you simultaneously preserve the Scriptures’ insistence the Father commissions the Son and sends him and the insistence on the omniscience of both Father and Son?
It’s not as if one woke up one morning and said, “All right. It’s time to go now.” “All right, Dad.” I mean no disrespect. How do we think of these things? Sub specie aeternitatis. Think through these things reverently. There are some hints in John 5, verses 28–30, and elsewhere, where it almost sounds as if there is a kind of eternal commissioning. “As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.”
Have you ever thought about that? If it the text said, “As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life,” it would be easy to understand, but it would mean Jesus was not strictly God. He would be a dependent creature. If it said, “As the Father has life in himself, so the Son has life in himself,” then it would be very easy to understand, but it would be hard to avoid two Gods.
But to have, “As the Father has life in himself …” At the very least, life in himself in the context of this discussion, where it’s talking about his ability to give life and even to rise from the dead and to be absolutely independent of all beings means he is an independent being. He is not a created being. His life is his own and is not derived. That is what gives him the ability to give life to others. That’s what the context demands.
“As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted to the Son to have life in himself.” Now that’s mind-boggling. That’s why theologians across the centuries have often spoken of an eternal grant, so there is some kind of eternal relationship of dependency, of subordination, of functional subordination, between Father and Son from all eternity, such that nevertheless both Father and Son have life in themselves, respectively.
The Father loves the Son, we’re told. (John 3) The Father loves the Son, we’re told. (John 5) The Son loves the Father, we’re told. (John 14) How do they express their love? Well, partly we’re told the Father loves the Son and, therefore, he gives him everything he has or he determines the Son should be honored even as men honor the Father. How does the Son express his love? Well we’re told in John 14 he does this by obeying the Father perfectly. In fact, all men must know he loves the Father by coming to see how perfectly he obeys the Father.
That presupposes commands, commissioning, obedience, conformity (in English), amongst omniscient beings. You see? If you just take the language of Scripture seriously, you begin to reflect on how matchlessly great is this God who is eternal, transcendent (that is, above space and time), self-existent. Nevertheless, with the dynamic of relation between Father and Son (and I could extend it to Spirit) that goes back into eternity past, that goes on to eternity future to a new heaven and a new earth with the exaltation of the Lamb in Revelation 5.
Again and again and again when there’s reference to God on the throne, it’s almost always to the One who sits on the throne and the Lamb. So there is presented a dynamic of relationship in sequence, but if in sequence, our understanding of sequence involves time. But our understanding of time also presupposes a universe. What does sequence mean to a God who is transcendent?
Which brings you into all of the hardest philosophical debates about the relationship between God and time. You reflect on those things for a few minutes and then say, “The Bible insists God spoke to Jeremiah in particular words which he transcribed and put down on a manuscript, that God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush in a language Moses understood.”
In other words, this God is presented in Scripture as a talking God. Not talking simply in his own terminology but in the terminology of the recipient and, in fact, not only is much of this Book described as dictated by God, as in particular speeches or particular 10 words written as it were by his finger, or in concrete dictation given to Jeremiah, such that when the manuscript is destroyed by the opponents, God can clearly give the dictation again. It’s not as if God has forgotten what he said. It’s a pretty futile effort to destroy the words of God in a manuscript.
But not only so, the Bible starts insisting (by the way, one later passage refers to an earlier passage) even the descriptions of these things are the words of God. Once you get to the New Testament, for example, quoting the Old, or later parts of the Old Testament quoting earlier parts of the Old Testament, when the texts say, “God said,” or “the Holy Spirit said,” or “the Holy Spirit said through so-and-so,” it does not say that only of those parts of Scripture where there are, as it were, quotation marks around particularly-dictated passages in Jeremiah.
The whole of the Canon is viewed as God’s words. He is a talking God. What that has done, then, has generated a lot of thought about what an act of matchless, merciful, gracious condescension it was for God to stoop to speak in Hebrew or Greek. It’s an act of condescension.
2. Granted this act of condescension, granted the words of Scripture are, in this sense, the words of God (which is certainly the way Jesus views the Old Testament and certainly the way the New Testament views the Old Testament), and granted it is an act of mercy and condescension for him to speak this way, what does it say about the meaning of the text, how univocal is the text?
That is, does it have only one meaning? Is the meaning really in the text or is it only in the reader? Is the meaning in the authorial intent or is it only in the reader’s understanding of the text? Is God able to speak in such a way that what is put down on paper is, in fact, what he wants to say? Now when God has Jeremiah put down on parchment what he wants said, such that it is God’s word, it is not all God knows about the subject.
God cannot communicate his omniscience to finite beings. God cannot communicate all he knows about anything to anyone who is non-God. The question, therefore, is not whether or not Scripture conveys everything God knows about anything. The question is whether or not God, who has this perfect reservoir of omniscient knowledge, can convey some things truly. That’s the question.
3. In the very nature of the case, this revelation is presented in Scripture as essentially historical.
Christianity claims to be a historical religion. There are huge implications. Let’s start with Christ. Christ is not universal human being. He is a man. He is a Jewish man. He is a first-century Jewish man.
He is a first-century Jewish man with certain genetic and legal descent. That means he speaks certain languages and not other languages. He dresses a certain way and not other ways. The things that happened do not become paradigms of universal human experience, not in the first instance. They are what happened to him.
Now not every religion makes similar historical claims. For example, if you could prove that Gautama the Buddha never, ever existed you would not destroy Buddhism, because the truth or otherwise of Buddhism depends on its own internal philosophical structures. Even if you could prove somehow (I don’t know how) Gautama the Buddha never existed, it would not effect those structures one whit. There is nothing intrinsic to the various strands of Buddhism, Theravada of Buddhism, that demand Gautama existed. Nothing in Buddhism depends on that historical claim.
Come to Hinduism. In Hinduism, there is eternal truth which manifests itself in a variety of gods, millions of them, in fact. If somehow you could prove that Krishna was a fake (I don’t know how you would do it), but supposing you could prove Krishna never lived, you would not destroy Hinduism. There is always Shiva, and millions and millions and millions of others.
Come to Islam. Islam makes more historical claims, but you could ask a devout, knowledgeable Muslim this question without the question being incoherent. The question being, “Can you imagine the revelation you claim came to us through Muhammad could have been given through somebody else?” Now at first, such a question would probably be misunderstood. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We claim Muhammad was the last prophet, and it really did come through Muhammad.”
“Yes, I’m not disputing that. Fine. Fine. Fine. Whatever you say. But could you imagine God might have given that revelation through someone other than Muhammad, had he chosen to do so.” And the devout Muslim will reply, “Yes, of course, because we’re not claiming Muhammad is the revelation. We’re claiming God chose him to give the revelation.” Thus, if somehow you could show the revelation actually was given through someone other than Muhammad, nothing in Islam is thereby jeopardized.
But it is not coherent to ask the question, within the framework of orthodox Christianity, “If you could prove Jesus Christ never lived, would Christianity be destroyed?” For the truth of the matter is Jesus himself is the revelation. It’s not just that he conveys it. He is the revelation. If you can prove Jesus Christ never rose from the dead, you have destroyed Christianity. Paul thinks so, in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, in fact, then we’re duped. We are of all men most to be pitied, for we believe something that is not historically true.
In other words, Christianity is an intrinsically historical religion. It makes historical claims about the locus of revelation. That means, humanly speaking, we have access to those claims only through the channels of history, whether we like it or not. Oh, I know the Spirit of God opens our blind minds. I know the Spirit of God gives us conviction about all kinds of things, but this is not abstracted from history in some merely mystical way.
At the end of the day, the Spirit of God enables us to believe the witness of those who were there, who saw and touched and handled and heard. That’s why the witness theme is so important in the New Testament. The book of Acts is full of “and we are witnesses of these things.” Do you see? It’s why the witness theme recurs in John’s gospel or in the book of Revelation or in Paul’s understanding of his apostleship.
It’s bound up with historical witness, and you cannot divorce the Christian claims from this historical witness. In exactly the same way, the words of Scripture are given in a certain historical matrix. Now I am claiming Christ is universal and transcends history in his claim. I am claiming the Bible is universal in its claim and must be understood and translated and preached everywhere, but, but, but the revelation came to us in historical terms. That means in cultural terms. That simply cannot be avoided.
That means our access to the truth of the Christian religion is access through historical methods: witness, texts, multiplicity of sources, language, exegesis, word studies. You simply cannot avoid those things. To try to have a Christianity divorced from these things is to try to have a Christianity divorced from the very revelation God has given, for the revelation God has given is a historical revelation. I cannot emphasize that strongly enough. That means every thoughtful Christian must be an exegete.
Now how good your exegesis is, with what degree of learning, with what degree of language command, or whatever.… If you’re reading the Bible and trying to understand it, you’re exegeting. You’re performing exegesis. You are reading out the text. Now unless you succumb to the view you have the right to read in any meaning your subculture allows you …
If you really do hold God has spoken with certain intent and it is true what he has said because it is God who has said it and could get it exactly right because he is omniscient, then is it not your responsibility to try with every once of your being to understand those texts (so far as you humanly speaking can) as God meant them to be understood?
That doesn’t mean you’ll understand them perfectly. You’ll never have omniscient knowledge. It doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. It does mean it’s a historical revelation, and you destroy the very essence of Christianity when you cut the ties between religion and historical claim. It’s true with the text as it’s true with Christ.
Christianity cannot long survive the abandonment of the historical claims the texts make. It cannot. It degenerates into pure subjectivism. It’s gone in a generation or two. It cannot long survive. It becomes quirkish, subjective, uncontrolled. Thus the questions to ask, presupposing, just a general frame of reference for God, as found in Scripture are.… Does this God know everything? Has this God chosen to disclose himself? Where has he chosen to disclose himself?
Within that frame of reference, I would want to argue this God has chosen to disclose himself in marvelously condescending ways, not only in the great acts of redemptive history and not only in the words of human beings but, supremely, in the person of his Son, and all three stand or fall together.
Now I would like to say much more about that, but I’m going to let that stand for the time being and come to Jesus, now, the Living Word. Let me begin by contrasting two positions that are both advocated in some Western universities: the view exemplified, for example, by John Hick, which makes incarnation a mere metaphor, and the view of someone like Helmut Koester, at Harvard, who takes the view there are a lot of incarnations in the ancient world and Jesus is just one more of them.
There are a lot of other positions, of course, examples being that of Knitter, theocentric Christology, and that of Panikkar, a cosmic Christ, all of them moving toward some form of pluralism, but I want to argue the issue in each case is more than whether or not there are a few carefully selected texts which could be understood within the frame of reference advocated by one or more of these scholars. The issue, rather, is whether or not the Bible as a whole will allow you to make those judgments. And I don’t think that you can, not in any one of those cases.
Hick admits if the incarnation is real, in biblical terms, and not a metaphor, as the church has always taught, then pluralism cannot be right. But, he argues, at the end of the day, you have to take it as a metaphor and nothing more than a metaphor, precisely because he is convinced pluralism must be the given to begin with. Thus, Scripture is domesticated.
Once again, however, you are back to historical claims, are you not? You are back to what you make of Christ Jesus himself in the historical arena. Was the Word made flesh? Or is that merely a metaphor for some kind of display of the ultimately real in space-time history, which is Hick’s understanding. It is the question of historical claim of revelation. In this connection, then, it is important to see the New Testament writers, by and large, do not think of themselves and their writings as one more stage, just like the Old Testament.
Rather, they think of the Old Testament writers as having written, moved by God, and now the ultimate revelation has come, not in more documents we call the New Testament. The ultimate revelation has come in Jesus. Look, for example, at the opening lines of Hebrews 1. In Hebrews 1 we read the words, “In the past, God spoke …” There is this talking God. “… to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways. But in these last days, he has spoken to us …” The NIV has “… by his son.”
So, “In the past, God spoke through the prophets to our forefathers at many times and in various ways, and in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” So it sounds as if the Son is parallel to the prophets, but in fact, the Greek suggests something different. It’s simply the anarthrous en huios. That is, “In the past, God spoke by the prophets to the fathers in many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken in Son.”
That is, in what we might paraphrase as in the Son revelation. “… he has spoken unto us, and his last word is the Son,” which is a Hebrews way of saying what John says in the prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That is, in the beginning was God’s self-expression, and his self-expression was with God, and his self-expression was God.
And this Word, this self-expression became flesh, and we have seen his glory! Or, as John then says in 1 John, “And we have touched him and heard him and seen him.” The ultimate revelation is not more words! The ultimate revelation is the Word made flesh. So the New Testament documents see themselves, thus, as not merely a progression of more words but as those words which God has given to the first witnesses, the first generation, to bear witness to the Word incarnate.
Any notion of canon must therefore be tied, finally, to the supremacy of Christ as God’s Word incarnate. That’s the reason why it is so hard for an orthodox Christian to open up a category for Joseph Smith to come along and be another prophet centuries later. In these last days, the writer says, God has spoken unto us en huios.
That is the climatic, culminating, eschatological revelation, and the New Testament documents, then, are seen as those which bear witness to him, which explain him, which anchor him, which tie him to history. Do you see? That is what takes place in these last days until the coming, at the very end, when history is wrapped up.
That brings us, inevitably, then, to understanding Jesus and the gospel. So I thought I would spend at least a few minutes talking about Jesus as the Word in terms of the skeptical categories that are introduced to most of us our Gospels courses and the like. This is not much more than a priming of the pump, but I thought we had better take some concrete examples, and this is where I choose to fall.
If you have not read anything in this area, I suggest you start with Craig Blomberg’s book, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, now out in a new edition. But there’s a recent book on Jesus and history by Paul Barnett, just retired as bishop of North Sydney, Australia, a large book that is extremely good, that anchors the whole of the New Testament documents to the revelation of Jesus.
Now let me offer you some reflections. If you have not done any critical studies of the Gospels, some of these categories will go by you. Bear with me. There are others here who are struggling with these things, and it might be worthwhile getting some of them down.
1. The span of time between the events surrounding Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is a matter of decades, not centuries.
Let me repeat that. The span of time between the events surrounding Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is a matter of decades, not centuries. Now if you have done anything in gospel studies, you know there is constant reference to the “tunnel period” or the “period of the oral tradition” when people were passing on oral stories about Jesus that eventually were written down very, very late.
Out of this, we are told came the writings of various traditions that coagulated together to become our Mark, reflecting the Markan community, ostensibly, and others that came together to form our Luke, the Lukan community, and the Johannine community, and so on. Do you see? All of these, it is alleged, reflect different strands of oral tradition that have brought different stories about Jesus, competing stories, and, sometimes, contradictory stories about Jesus down to us in the life of the church.
Some of this was based on form-critical work done by Hermann Gunkel, about a century ago. Hermann Gunkel based some of his work on studies about the Maoris in New Zealand. When James Cook first landed Down Under, eventually there were Caucasians who learned enough Maori language and civilization to write down the oral traditions that were being passed around the Maoris at the time.
Three centuries later, further anthropologists listened to some of these same stories which had still descended three centuries later in campfire oral traditions, down through Maori generations to the twentieth century, and compared those stories with what James Cook’s heirs and successors had written down three centuries earlier.
Out of this, because the stories had changed somewhat, began to be formed theories of how traditions descended orally, when things were just passed down orally from generation to generation to generation to generation, how they would be shaped, and so on. That was the beginning of form criticism in the Old Testament, which then took up particular changes by Wrede and Bultmann and others as it was brought into New Testament studies.
Notice the same sort of language is still being used today about the descent of the oral tradition and so on, so on, so on. You see? But observe:
A. In the Maori case, there are three centuries operating.
Under the most liberal of believable dates for the New Testament Gospels, you’re talking about decades. That’s all. Even the latest dating of Mark is really only three decades after the events. People are still alive.
B. Observe further that the society in which this takes place is literate.
Every Jewish boy in the first century learned to read and write. Not usually the girls, although some of them did, too, but every Jewish boy learned to read and write. The church leaders, from the beginning, were literate leaders. There never was a completely oral period. In fact, you read the opening verses of Luke’s gospel, and it sounds as if were many, many, many reports and sub-reports and little written records that were put down.
“Many have undertaken to write these things, and now I’m putting them into an order for you, O Theophilus,” and so forth. Do you see? There never was an oral period. Moreover, you combine those two things, the prevalence of written traditions with the brevity of time, and the fact that things are being written still within the lifetime of the original people, and the whole view of a dark oral tradition becomes highly unbelievable.
It is now further called into question by the work of Richard Bauckham in this country, or in Scotland, and some others, whose little book edited by him, The Gospels for All Christians, is really quite brilliant. He first read that as a paper at the British SNTS, Society for New Testament Studies, and actually received a standing ovation. That just doesn’t happen. You don’t get standing ovations in British academics circles. It’s not done.
But he managed it, and what this book does, in effect, now that it has expanded to this length, is argue there is not good reason for thinking Mark’s gospel was written for the Markan community, and Luke’s gospel was written for the Lukan community, and so forth. There is not good reason for thinking that. The Gospels were for all Christians; they were for all the churches, right from the very beginning. That was what they were for.
Then the arguments are advanced. Now if that is the case, then there is less and less reason for thinking Matthew reflects a theology of a Matthean community which must be pit over against John, reflecting a theology of the Johannine community. After all, the Roman system of roads meant there was able communication around the churches in the empire: the best communication system in the world, all the way down to the 1800s.
People talked with one another. They traveled. They communicated. We are not to think they were hermetically sealed-off communities that had aberrational stories of Jesus that reflected merely the later theology of the church. In other words, the history that is being done is, in my view, bad history. My deepest criticism of a great deal of contemporary critical work on the Gospels is not that it is bad theology but that it is bad history. But because Christianity is a historical religion, the effects are formidable.
2. It has been shown that the Greco-Roman lives, the bios, were not always creative fiction.
That is to say, it has often been argued the biographies of the ancient Greco-Roman world were made up of bits of fact and fancy legend. You don’t know what was really said on the occasion so you made up a speech and put it on his lips. It was a bit more like our historical novel than it was like a biography in any modern, critical sense.
But Loveday Alexander and others have shown from about the time of Isocrates there was a division in the style of biographies between a more literary and a more scientific form. That is to say, the more literary form took a lot of liberties in how accurate they were. The more so-called scientific form was pretty careful to work hard with sources and find out what was going on and not extrapolate too much beyond the evidence and so forth. In terms of form, she argues, Luke’s gospel is classically written to line up with the second of the two rather than the first.
3. It would be obscene or blasphemous to expect literature like the Gospels to be neutral or dispassionate.
Let me repeat that. It’s very important. It would surely be obscene or blasphemous to expect such literature as the Gospels to be neutral or dispassionate. You see, what is often being said by the critics is, “Well, here, clearly, Matthew’s theology commits him to the view that.… Therefore, you can’t believe what he says is the truth.”
In other words, the more firmly the New Testament gospel writers believe something, because it’s allegedly reflecting Johannine theology or Markan theology, the less you can believe it is historically accurate as a representation of what Jesus taught, for example. Well part of the problem is we expect our contemporary biographers to be reasonably neutral, to be reasonably above the fray.
So we’re inclined to read in those expectations into first-century gospel writers. That’s part of the problem. We’re demanding our particular standards of literary form to belong to the gospel writers’ literary form. But it’s more than that. When David McCullough writes a biography of John Adams, or when Antonia Fraser writes the biography Cromwell: Our Chief of Men, in both cases these writers are writing one human being of another human being. That’s all. The gospel writers are writing one human being of another human being who is also God.
If what they say is true, even if what they say they believe to be true, whether it is true or not, it would be obscene of them, perhaps blasphemous of them to try to maintain a kind of distanced neutrality. If what they are saying is true, it demands their worship. If it is not the truth, it demands their scorn. But it is very difficult to be neutral about someone like Jesus. Let me try to draw a not-very-adequate analogy.
When the first people, the very few, escaped from Auschwitz and Birkenau and managed to make their way west and told their stories, on the one hand most of them were discerning enough to see they had to be understated, careful, and accurate, and on the other hand they were inevitably passionate. But just because they believed passionately all the horrors they had seen and witnessed really were happening and that something needed to be done did not mean what they described was, therefore, to be discounted because of the passion of their belief.
In fact, it lead them, by and large, to be all the more careful about saying only what they had seen precisely to enhance their credibility. If they could bring out photos, they did! Because they knew they had to be believed. In other words, there is no necessary line between passionate commitment to a belief and distortion of truth. There may be a direct line between passionate commitment to the truth one knows and doing everything our power that makes it maximally credible, which may lead to understatement, care.
One of the things many critics have notices is, for example, the restraint with which the passion narratives in all four gospels are described. Or, compare the Gospels with the pseudonymous gospels of the late second century and beyond, where you get all kinds of silly things like Jesus making clay pigeons and throwing them up in the air, and they flap off.
There is none of that. It’s so understated, precisely because these New Testament writers are writing as genuinely confessional Christians. Matthew is not writing as a neutral biographer. He is writing as a deeply committed Christian. To think for one minute that should lessen his credibility, however, it seems to me, is immensely blind. It is methodologically inappropriate.
4. It is historically discreditable to argue the most influential man in history should be believed only when what he is alleged to have said reflects neither his historical context nor the successors who believed in his words.
You see, that is one of the strongest criteria for authenticity contemporary New Testament scholars argue for. Not all hold this, but many do.
They argue if you find something Jesus alleges to have taught in the Gospels and you can find a parallel to that in the Jewish literature, then probably it’s not from Jesus; it’s just part of the Jewish tradition. If you can find something that Jesus is alleged to have taught, which is found not only in this passage but in the later teaching of the church, then probably the church made it up and it’s not really from Jesus, either.
So the only way you can be sure you have something truly from Jesus is if you find a saying of Jesus, a teaching of Jesus, which has no background in the parallel Jewish society/matrix/culture, and no parallel in the later Jewish church. That is considered good history.
It is such bad history it is shockingly appalling! It is stunning one still has to offer critiques of it! It is so bad it is embarrassing! Why should the Jesus who is enmeshed in history reflect nothing of the history of his time? That’s the whole nature of a historical revelation. Why should the most influential man in history have left no mark on his followers, such that anything his followers say cannot possibly be traced to him responsibly? Do you see? I have more to say along those lines, but I think I’ll pass.
My point in taking this small excursus was very simple. You see, questions of inerrancy, inspiration, truthfulness, authority (I’ll come to some of those terms in the last talk) … They turn, finally, not simply on this proof text or that proof text (“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for [this or that or the other]”), and so your whole doctrine of Scripture, then, depends on a certain proof text.
It’s not as simple as that. At the end of the day, whether you are even open to listening to the authoritative voice of Scripture inevitably turns on a much larger matrix of things going on in your mind. One is your epistemology, whether you like it or not, which is why I spent some of the morning doing that. But another is what sort of approaches you take to history in general, to literary criticism, how much you’ve been influenced by some of the fads and the current trends and so on in biblical scholarship.
It’s not that there are no challenges or no difficulties in understanding Scripture. I’m not saying anybody who disbelieves Scripture, as I believe it, is a twit. Far from it. The vast majority of New Testament scholars whom I know in a society like Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas are brilliant people. They have first-class minds! But there is such a blindness in the appeal to this sort of criterion that at the end of the day I still want to argue it’s bad history.
It’s bad history! That’s what generates the bad theology, and that bad history is itself generated, in part, by frames of reference that are largely naturalistic, that make us want to stand in judgment of these texts, whereas the texts themselves demand, again and again and again, if these things are true, they stand in judgment. Do you see? The Christian thinker, the Christian scholar should have as his or her aim, not becoming masters of Scripture but being mastered by Scripture, for that is what Scripture itself demands.
I want to end this hour by taking you through three or four texts quickly. Consider this one, for example, in Deuteronomy 17, the last three verses. It envisages a time when someone will come to the throne. Starting in verse 18. “When this king takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law …”
Whether “this law” means the book of Deuteronomy, which is most likely, or conceivably longer. “… taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. It is to be with him and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendents will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.”
He becomes king. What’s the first thing he’s supposed to do? Appoint a chancellor of the exchequer? A secretary for the war department? A home secretary? No. The first thing he’s supposed to do is take either Deuteronomy, or conceivably the Pentateuch, and copy it out by hand in Hebrew. That does not mean download it from a CD onto your hard drive without it passing through your brain.
It means writing out by hand, sufficiently legibly, that that becomes your copy for the rest of your life. So you will read it, then, daily and thus learn to revere the words of the Lord your God. Then if you do this, you will not consider yourself better than your brothers, and you will not step aside to the left or to the right from all God has said.
Now if only these three verses of Deuteronomy had been meticulously followed by all the kings of Judah and Israel, all of history would have been different. You see, the issue is not, at the end of the day, having polite little devotionals that make you feel good. It’s not having little private readings with helps from some publisher or another to give you a momentary lift or a psychological feeling of closeness with God, as important and as useful as that is. It’s learning to think God’s thoughts after him so you do not step aside to the right or to the left of all he has said.
Or think again about what is said again and again and again in Psalm 119. The words of God, the law of God, the statutes of the Lord are flawless, pure, like gold, tried in the fire. Or what the prophet said. “To this person will I look. He who is a of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word.” Or what is it Joshua is told when he takes over the leadership from Moses? “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth; but you shall meditate in it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.”
Or Psalm 1. The just person (negatively, verse 1) is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly or adopt the lifestyle of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. No, no. Positively, verse 2: “… his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by streams of water, whose leaf does not wither and who brings forth his fruit in season. Whatever he does prospers.”
You see, the idea again and again is not, “A blessing a day keeps the Devil away” or something like that. The idea, again, is learning to think God’s thoughts after him, to reshape your whole mind. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul says. Proverbs says you are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
The point of hiding Scripture in your mind, of thinking about it again and again, turning it over in your mind, thinking about it, re-reading it and re-reading it and re-reading it is not that every time you come away with a great blessing and an emotional high. Just as every time you eat a meal doesn’t mean that meal goes down as so spectacularly tasteful and wonderful it will be seared in your memory forever.
You might have some meals like that, but the constant eating keeps you alive. So the constant reading of the Word of God, this thinking about it, and bowing to him shapes your mind. There might be some spectacularly high times in your emotional life, in your spiritual life, in your walk with God, in your quiet times, moments of immense intensity and awareness of the person and presence of God.
There will be a lot of times will be singularly unmemorable, but the constant habit keeps you alive. You learn to think God’s thoughts after him. Wisdom asks, “How will a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to my Word.” Thus, the questions, you see, that we’re asking today are not, finally, about picky points of esoteric definition regarding inerrancy and the like.
They are deeper questions. They have to do with worldview. They have to do with whether your allegiance is to the God of the Bible and the Christ whom he has sent, whether or not those words are so precious to you that you want to think about them all the days of your life and turn them over in your mind, that you want to not so much master them as be mastered by them so that they shape your personality and your sense of humor and your pocketbook and whom you marry and what you do with your kids and what you do with your time. Do you see?
Give up small ambitions. Think big, under the sheer godhood of God, under the sheer lordship of Christ, under the One whose word is true. Jesus says, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.” So we publish scholarly editions in which we put his words in gray or pink or red, depending on how much authenticity we can give to them, and call it scholarship. The Bible would call it idolatry.
There is a very famous story that circulated in the 60s of several American hippies who were sort of doing the European tour thing and arrived at the Louvre and were going from painting to painting and making really ignorant, condescending remarks about a Rembrandt and Van Gogh and a Gauguin. For everything they saw they only had condescending, ignorant remarks.
Eventually one of the assistant curators who was listening to this patter going on and was becoming more and more enraged eventually came up and said behind them, in his thick French accent, “In this museum, it is not the paintings that are being assessed.” When you stand before the Word of God, it is not the Word of God that is being assessed.
