Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
In this last session, I want to begin with one or two historical remarks and some private stories, as it were, and then offer some reflections on some of the standard terms that are used in confessional theology as to the nature of Scripture: authority, inspiration, claritas Scripturae, the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture, infallibility.
What do these terms mean? What is being said by them? Are they reasonable? Do they have to be revised? Should they be abandoned? Are they brand new invented by fundamentalists in America? How are we to use these terms, or are we to ignore them?
Let me begin, first of all, by saying there have been a number of historians who have argued a high view of Scripture connected with terms like inerrancy or infallibility or the like is really the product of either Scottish Common Sense Realism in the 1800s connected with Thomas Reid and others or American fundamentalists connected with Princeton in the 1800s (people like Charles Hodge, Archibald Alexander, and eventually Benjamin Warfield at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s and so forth).
These charges have been made again and again and again. They really do not stand up. The best book on the subject is out of print, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you can get it from a decent library. It’s by John D. Woodbridge. It’s called Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal.
I don’t think there are many people in the world who know more about the history of the doctrine of Scripture across the centuries than John Woodbridge. The whole book is about 70 percent footnotes. As he takes you through the different periods of history and quotes the primary resources themselves again and again and again as to what Jerome thought and as to what Augustine thought and so on and some of the correspondence between Jerome and Augustine and on and on and on to show you this is not some aberration from late Western development.
Some people have argued, in fact, the doctrine of Scripture as we have come to cite it in Western thought is itself a function of modernism, modernism and its love for order, and precisionism, and all the rest, but one of the things Woodbridge shows and shows with remarkable clarity is, although the terms differ from age to age and although the epistemological frames differ from age to age, nevertheless, a high view of Scripture has so much been an essential plank of the Christian church that it is rightly called and rightly said to be independent of particular paradigms.
In other words, it is paradigm independent. It is not dependent on a certain way of looking at things. Christians who are Eastern Orthodox, Christians who are Common Sense Realists, Christians who are premodern, Christians who are postmodern.… There are Christians in every one of these frames of reference who have argued for a high view of Scripture.
While some Scottish Common Sense Realists were orthodox and had a high view of Scripture (people like Warfield), nevertheless, there were also skeptics who were no less Scottish Common Sense Realists who argued precisely against the authority of Scripture. There’s no paradigmatic control of the discussion from Common Sense Realism.
Those who try to argue from time to time the kind of high view of Scripture I want to expound here in brief summary is a late Western invention or the stepchild of modernism or, God forbid, the invention of American fundamentalists, they really are talking historical nonsense of the very first water, and the best place to see some of that in brief compass (it’s not a long book, 220 pages or so) is Woodbridge’s little book, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal.
The second thing I want to say, again still circling around the topic rather than addressing it directly, is sometimes we are intimidated by our lecturers, by our professors. They’re older than we are. They know more than we do. They’ve been around the block, and they can sometimes be very gracious and gentle. Other times they can be pretty hard-boiled about who’s right and who’s wrong and who knows and who doesn’t.
There are some professors, some lecturers, some readers who you can talk with and probe hard with on this subject or that and others where, quite frankly, they just get angry and want to dismiss you. Those sorts of things you find out experimentally as you go along. What you will discover, nevertheless, is those who are willing to talk, those who are willing to open up and share, those who are willing to dispute with you on any of these related matters, they often do not have things any better put together than you do. They are merely confused at a higher level.
Let me tell you how I first stumbled onto this strange phenomenon. Now I can speak with fair authority because I’m one of these people who are confused at a higher level. That’s one of the advantages of having more birthdays, I suppose. I first stumbled upon this strange phenomenon when I was doing doctrinal work at Cambridge.
By this time, I had been in the ministry a number of years. I had been in church planting and so forth, so I wasn’t sort of 22 or 23 coming into Cambridge. I was a little older and had been involved in Christian ministry for some time, but it turned out the person who was assigned to me as Doktorvater was Barnabas Lindars who, at that time, lectured in Cambridge. He eventually became Rylands Professor of Exegesis at Manchester University.
Because he belonged to an Anglican order, the Society of Saint Francis, he was single. I used to have meals with the brothers over in the chapter house in Cambridge, and I got to know him very well. I was single at the time, too. Eventually, another chap who was at Cambridge (he’s now Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford), Hugh Williamson, and I eventually edited a Festschrift for him, so our links go back a long way.
I recall on one occasion I had him around for a meal. I knew his background was Anglo-Catholic. It was obvious even in his habit in the order he had joined. He wore the Society of Saint Francis garb with a rope and the whole bit. Yet, at the same time, he was probably the most classically liberal faculty member on the Cambridge faculty at the time.
This intrigued me, so I had him around. By this time, we had gotten to know one another pretty well, and I said to him at some juncture, “Would you mind telling me something of your spiritual heritage? I’m not trying to debate doctrine here or score points. I would just love to know how you got to where you are.” He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Well, in my limited understanding of Anglo-Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, for all that it is, isn’t anywhere near where I am as a confessing evangelical. Nevertheless, it’s usually pretty conservative in its general approach to critical issues and so forth, whereas you have a pretty high Anglican theology, almost Catholic, certainly very heavily sacramentarian, but at the same time you are really very liberal in your approach to texts and questions of historicity and dating and source criticism. How do you put that together? How did you get to where you are? I’m not really asking you to justify it. Just how did you get there?”
He was one of those who was always very open. He never tried to score points (he was full of candor, and we talked back and forth about all kinds of things), nor was he the kind of scholar who bluffed. He never bluffed. If he didn’t know something, he didn’t know it and admitted it. That is a great thing to look for in a supervisor. Never trust a supervisor who has to pretend he knows more than he really does.
In any case, Barnabas had many strengths and one was his candor about these things. He said, “I’ll tell you how I got there. You’re quite right. My father was a bishop. I was brought up in an Anglo-Catholic home. I started learning Latin when I was 5 and started learning Hebrew from my father at the age of 9. It was a typical Anglo-Catholic home.” Well, I was impressed. My father managed to get me going in Latin, but he never managed to get me going in Hebrew, so I almost wished I had been an Anglo-Catholic there for a few minutes!
He said the time came when, at the end of the A-levels, he had to make a choice of what he was going to do, and he thought of going to university but he felt called of God to the ministry and had typical Anglo-Catholic views on just about everything (very conservative, and so on) and joined the order of Saint Francis and devoted his life, first of all, to the poor.
He worked amongst the poorest of the poor in London for a number of years and had no intention of academic pretensions at all. He just went to one of the Anglo-Catholic colleges (I forgot which one now) and did two years. He didn’t even do a theology degree and worked for quite a number of years in those sorts of contexts.
Then the order asked him to go to Cambridge and work in the chapter house there and start working with students, so he arrived and thought it would be a good idea, perhaps, just to become a student with everybody else, so at the age of 33 or 34 he moved to Cambridge and started reading theology.
Between the ages of 35 and 40, or so, he went through a major, major shift. He lost confidence in the authority of Scripture. He lost confidence in the simple statements about the deity of Christ that has to be seen as a later good confessional statement. He went into classic, liberal understanding while still retaining as the anchor for his understanding of spirituality his essential sacramentarianism.
When he finished, because he got a first, he was actually appointed a lecturer in Old Testament, if you please, and was connected with Saint John’s College and continued as head of the Saint Francis chapter. His first book, New Testament Apologetic, came out. It was basically a book that argued the New Testament use of the Old Testament shows the New Testament writers really had no understanding of the Old Testament whatsoever.
What they did was rip things out of context in order to prove Jesus really was who they thought he was, so their theology was not really shaped by the Old Testament; their theology was shaped by their experience of Jesus, and they used the Old Testament merely as a query for proof texts. That’s what the whole book was about. For that, he got a DD from Cambridge.
Time went on, and that’s where his theology continued. He also continued in his service at St Bene’t’s Church which is an Anglo-Catholic church. The nave goes back to Norman times. It’s really quite a wonderful structure. I said, “That’s interesting from a sort of personal point of view. Now would you tell me how you put it together? I can understand how somebody who has a very high Christology might also hold that when the priest says, ‘This is my body,’ somehow by the power of God there is some transmutation somehow so that spiritually or in some other ways Christ is truly present in the elements.
I mean, it’s not my theology, but I can understand that, but I don’t understand how, after you have dismissed the deity of Christ in the first place, you get to a sacramentarian theology with respect to the Mass,” as he called it, “and in the second place, how do you do that?” He tried to talk about different layers of tradition and on and on and on. “What does it really mean in reality? What do you think you’re doing when you’re at St Bene’t’s on Sunday?”
I began to push. At this point, I was just getting into my debate mode, and I was just having fun. I was enjoying this discussion. I wanted to know where he was coming from. It suddenly dawned on me that he was sweating, becoming uncomfortable and red in the face and was stumbling and stuttering, and I realized suddenly I had put him in a corner. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him. I wasn’t trying to score points. I backed right off, but I learned something.
It’s the lesson I’ve learned again and again and again and again. Not all your lecturers have it all put together theologically, and I decided right at that moment (it was one of those serendipitous “Aha” experiences) I would rather have what I had of the gospel of Christ than have what he had as lecturer of Cambridge, and that dawning realization at that moment freed me from many, many, many academic terrors.
Decide what’s important. Fear God. Fear no one else. That presupposes you’ll engage with people. You’ll talk, push, and find out. Be courteous, but you will often discover again and again and again the total package that is on offer is not such an attractive package, after all. That, too, must be said.
My second experience in this regard came many years later. I was teaching by this time at Trinity, and I was pushed very hard to put my name in for a chair at a Scottish university, and I didn’t want to. I was happy where I was. I didn’t want to move the family transatlantically again. I went to an esteemed former professor at Cambridge. You would know his name immediately if I told you, but I won’t mention it. An interesting man. A charming man. An immensely learned man.
By Cambridge standards, far more conservative than most of the Cambridge scholars I knew; nevertheless, with a pretty strong detestation of high view of Scripture and a pretty strong detestation of anything to do with substitutionary atonement, but a lovely, gracious man. He had his devotions out of Greek in the morning and out of Hebrew at night.
If your wife had a baby, he would be the first to pump up to the door on his bicycle and deliver flowers. A great encouragement to students and so on, a wonderful man. I asked him if he would be so kind, if I did put my name in, to write a letter of recommendation for me. I had known him for years. My kids had dandled on his knee, the whole bit.
I thought this was not more than a courtesy, and he wrote back and said, “There are two reasons why I can’t do that. The first is I’ve already agreed to put my name down as a referee for someone else for that particular post, and I’ve long made it a policy I won’t put my name down for two people. The second is I would have to tell them what your views on Scripture are, and that would queer your pitch, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for doing that.”
Well, I didn’t want the post in any case, but there was no way I was going to let that one go. I mean, I just had to push a little harder, so I wrote to him, and I said, “Forgive me for pushing a little harder. I’m not asking you to change your mind. I respect your decision, and I’m entirely happy with it, but I would like to know from your perspective what it is about my doctrine of Scripture that disqualifies me from teaching in a British university.
If what you really mean is I’m not up to snuff and you’re using the doctrine of Scripture to protect my delicate feelings, tell me flat out. I’m not going to be embarrassed. I’d rather know what you think flat out, but if on the other hand you don’t think I’m in the second or third tier and don’t belong in a British university and it really is something about my views that in your view disqualifies me, then tell me that. I’d like to know.”
He wrote back a letter full of flowery encomia about how I wasn’t in the second or third tier, most of which I dismissed as polite bilge water, but then he said, “The problem is if you hold your particular views of Scripture, you can’t really be an open-minded scholar.” So I wrote back again.
I said, “Am I to understand it, then, if a person holds Anglo-Catholic views on Scripture or if a person holds flat-out liberal views on Scripture or if a person is a self-confessed atheist like Michael Goulder, then you can teach theology in a British university, but if you hold the view that is historically dominant across 20 centuries of Christian history, then you’re disqualified for a British university post?”
Well, that got his dander up. Then started a correspondence about this thick. It will probably never see the light of day. I should probably destroy it someday. I’d certainly never publish it while he’s alive. I had never been able to engage him in a discussion of the doctrine of Scripture, although I had tried. This got him going.
It turned out to be very interesting. Some of it was personal, and some of it was jokes. Always encouragement about the family. It was all friendly, but some of it was tackling one delicate question after another: the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, a particular citation passage in the Old Testament in the epistle of the Hebrews, how the Fathers used the word inspiration, and on and on. It was a mishmash of correspondence that would be miserable to read, but it was really quite a lot of fun at the time.
The reason I’m telling you this story is for two reasons. The first has to do with this word inspiration which I have, thus, surreptitiously slipped in through the back door. One of the things that is truly said is in the church fathers down to Augustine, the word inspiration is not used as it is used in classic Protestant theology, and if you’re unaware of the difference, you can get caught out in all kinds of debate, and I was insufficiently aware of it at the time.
I had read the Fathers, but it just never dawned on me quite. Then when he started pointing it out, I had to do a lot more work to sort of figure out where I went from there. For example, you can read some of the letters of Jerome and others who will refer to the writings of other Fathers as inspired or the sermons of John Chrysostom are often said by others to be inspired, so Scripture is inspired; John Chrysostom’s sermons are inspired.
Clearly, that’s a bit different from the way we use inspiration this side of the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, does that mean they did not have a similar view as to the truthfulness and authority or exclusiveness or uniqueness of Scripture? That’s the real question. The question is not a particular term or how it’s used but whether or not their views of Scripture were the same as ours roughly in functional terms.
In other words, did anybody take the writings of John Chrysostom and treat them, then, as if they were equivalent to Scripture in normativeness? That’s the question. The answer, of course, is no. In fact, there is correspondence between Jerome and Augustine about whether or not any error could be permitted in the Gospels.
The fact of the matter is they use inspiration in a broader way because it is not a term that is heavily larded in the New Testament so it is, more or less, defined by repeated contexts; it is a terms around which certain theological constructs are made. They used it in a much looser sense. Just as today we might say a preacher was truly anointed or something like that if we come from certain kinds of traditions. If you’re more Reformed, you say he’s truly anointed. If you are more charismatic, you have your other terms. It’s the same sort of terminology that is being used for somehow being, in John Chrysostom’s terms, inspired.
The fact of the matter is, this side of the Protestant Reformation with its sola scriptura (by Scripture alone), inspiration has come to be a narrower technical term. What we insist based on theopneustos in the Pastoral Epistles (all Scripture is theopneustos, God-breathed, inspired) is that inspiration, according to that passage, properly belongs to the text.
That is, we do not say simply the writers were inspired, although that might well be true, but that the text is God-breathed. That is, the text itself, the product, regardless of how it got there, regardless of how many sources, regardless of which author it was, regardless of whether Luke used an amanuensis to write or anything else, the resultant text itself recognized by the church is God-breathed, inspired.
We have been inclined to use other words for our personal understanding: illumination or unction or anointing. We developed another whole range of words to use for that kind of gifting that comes from the Spirit of God precisely because we’ve tried to connect the word inspiration to Scripture. That is a move that is not itself mandated by Scripture. It’s mandated by one verse in Scripture, but the terminology is not a technical one that always has exactly the same force.
Nevertheless, the result is still that the Fathers, when they refer to Scripture, treat it as uniquely normative, uniquely authoritative, and invariably true, unlike the writings of John Chrysostom, regardless of how inspired. John Chrysostom can be inspired but errant; the Scriptures can’t be. We went through these various rounds of discussion, went back and forth, and we’d come to some level of resolution and get on to the next debate.
The second reason why I tell this story is because of the way it ended up. It finally came down after a year or a year and a half of correspondence.… It went on and on, pages of it at a time sometimes. It finally came down to an interesting reply from him in which clearly by this time he was getting a bit exasperated with me.
Well, I can’t blame him for that. My wife and children can be exasperated with me. I can scarcely blame a professor for being exasperated with me. He finally got to the place where he said, “Look, Don. The long and the short of it is I just don’t believe anybody who holds your views of Scripture can finally be a good scholar.”
I decided to write one more time. I said, “It just so happens two weeks ago I was in Cambridge when C.K. Barrett was giving a lecture on Bishop Lightfoot.” (It was one of his anniversaries.) “Barrett praised Lightfoot to the skies for his scholarship, his grasp of Greek, his command of ancient literature, his ability to write, to think through issues, and on and on. The only thing for which he critiqued him was his view of Scripture.”
I said, “As far as I can tell in my reading of Lightfoot, and I think at one level or another I have read the entire Lightfoot corpus, his view of Scripture does not vary from mine, so I have two questions. First, do you think Lightfoot was not a scholar? Secondly, what new evidence has arisen since Lightfoot to make Lightfoot’s doctrine of Scripture no longer credible?” He wrote back and said he thought he had paled on this discussion and would not pursue it further.
All I’m saying is, if you get involved in these sorts of discussions, you can push a long, long, long way and discover the historic positions are defensible. You have to know a fair bit before you do that. If you don’t know a fair bit, you can get swamped by every junior lecturer who has his PhD, but eventually, engage. Engage.
Just make sure you have good backup around you so you can find out what the resources are. Don’t duck. Don’t flinch. Don’t be afraid of anyone. Don’t go into hiding. Don’t go into cowering mode. Be courteous. Don’t ever be rude, but push. Push. This is not a place where you need to fear. This is not a place where we’re holding on to something that is completely and massively indefensible.
The only place where you need to avoid doing that is if you’re a first-year student or a second-year student and you’re trying to take on somebody who has been in the business for about 25 years. Wait. Grow. Learn. Read. Think. Mature. In due course, find people who are able to engage in these kinds of discussions. Get into a group. Find out what the alternative literature is. Read.
You will discover in due course you will come to a position where, far from being afraid or far from being nervous that your position is not really defensible and you sort of hold on to it for merely traditional evangelical piety reasons (otherwise, you might be sort of bumped out of the evangelical guild), rather, you will become convinced this is the historic truth.
It is what Jesus believed. It’s what the apostles believed. It’s what the Fathers believed. It’s what the Middle Ages people believed. They believed a lot of other things that were a lot of rubbish, but they believed firmly in the authority of Scripture. It’s what the Reformers believed. It’s what the great evangelical leaders of the great evangelical awakening believed. It has been mainstream Christianity through the ages.
You ask leaders of the growing church in Korea whether or not they believe in the authority of Scripture, you ask leaders of the growing church in Africa whether or not they believe in the authority of Scripture, or you ask worldwide, you ask Christians who are being persecuted for their faith in China whether or not they believe in the authority of Scriptures and you don’t get a whole lot of stuff that sounds like John Hick. You really don’t. Understand this is not some position in a corner by odd people shaped by American fundamentalism.
The third introductory thing I’ll say (this is the last one) is many of the current discussions on the authority of Scripture very quickly turn to something I mentioned in connection with Barnabas Lindars, which is one of the reasons why I told his story, too. His first book, New Testament Apologetic, as I said, argues the New Testament writers rip texts out of contexts.
That’s a very, very common perception. Amongst the New Testament writers, probably the two books that are most difficult initially are Matthew and Hebrews in terms of the way they handle Old Testament texts. I don’t have time to pursue this one. I wish I could take three or four hours just to handle with you half a dozen of the most difficult texts, to work through them line by line, line by line, and see what’s presupposed.
I will say initially, when I first started thinking about these things deeply, I thought, “This one’s probably going to be a real problem. I don’t know how I’m going to solve this one. I don’t know if it should be solved, and if I’m wrong on this one, I’ll change my views. Fair enough,” but there was one perception that kept me stable for a little while as I grew a little more and then some exegetical experience that shaped me.
The one perception was that in some parts of the world (Germany, to some extent Scotland) there is a tendency to think at the big-picture level, the sort of systematic-construction level, and then to work down from there to the little bits, so if you get your big picture wrong, it really fouls up your little picture.
If you get your big picture right, even if you don’t have all the answers down there at the little level, you still think the big picture is right so you hang on to that. The tradition of English exegesis, however, for the last two centuries or so (it was not always so) has been, in fact, the other way around.
You start at the little level. You start out at the level of the microscopic, the exegetical, and then you work up to the big. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Germany was developing the Tubingen School, which tried to date all the New Testament documents along one axis and where they were in the confrontation between Jew and Gentile, terribly reductionistic but immensely influential, with these huge tomes and series of volumes shaping the whole New Testament discourse according to this one theory.
This big picture, then, gets worked down through everything else. What we were doing in Britain? In Britain, we had people like James Smith writing a massive monograph on the shipwreck of the apostle Paul where he really works through Acts 27 line by line and line by line to show the winds are coming from the right directions according to the ancient sources and the ship tackles names all right. That has been part of the tradition of English exegesis, and at its best, it keeps your finger on the text. At its best, it is very strong at keeping your finger at a sharp exegetical level.
That has been the strength of English exegesis. The weakness of it, however, is that it very often does not ask the big synthetic question. It does not ask how you put this together. It does not even believe that you can put together a whole biblical theology or your systematic theology is not much more than prolegomena or it’s not much more than historical theology, but you’re not allowed to put together the big picture. The text won’t permit it. It’s all bitty stuff.
Whereas my own tradition, which was more diffuse, had been shaped both by the exegetical standards of doctoral work in Britain but also shaped by a certain love of biblical and systematic theology I had received from North America. I was holding the two in tension all the time. I could see, according to the dictates of the stream of history, according to what Scripture said of itself, the high view of Scripture was really required. I could see anything else was an unstable position. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
On the other hand, I had not worked through all the kinds of texts Barnabas Lindars had worked through at the picky level. Then, because of a cancellation, I was asked to write a commentary on Matthew. If you are ever afflicted with that particular commentary on Matthew, you will discover I devote a vastly disproportionate amount of space to every time Matthew quotes the Old Testament.
The reason for that is simply I was doing my homework. I needed to do that for my own sake. Likewise, in my commentary on John I spent a disproportionate amount of space at it. Eventually, I started teaching doctoral seminars at Trinity where two of the three have to do simply with handling text after text after text of the New Testament use of the Old.
I teach the epistle of the Hebrews in Greek every year or two, so I’ve worked through all of those. Let me tell you. The more I have worked at them, the more I have come to see the logic of how the New Testament writers used the Old Testament. There is a logic to it. There is a coherence to it.
I don’t claim to have all the answers about everything. I do think my Doktorvater’s first book, New Testament Apologetic, was profoundly mistaken. Perhaps sometime I’ll be able to come back and give you three or four hours instead of on Scripture in general simply on the use of the Old Testament in the New, because that issue itself is sweeping in its implications and has to do with how you put your whole Bible together.
The only reason I’ve told you that is certainly not to give any implication I’m a better scholar than Lindars, or something. It’s just not the way it works. In fact, the more I have worked at these questions and begun to do background homework in historical theology, the more I’ve discovered almost everything I’ve discovered was long discovered by somebody else but was lost.
For example, there is a two-volume nineteenth century work by a chap named Taylor that worked out many of the things I worked out by myself because I didn’t know the volumes existed. Then you start working out and discover again and again and again and again these things have been thought about in the history of the church and people have written on them from one paradigm or another again and again and again, and they got lost.
They got lost under some sweeping tide of faddism of one sort or another, and it takes a long time to recover them again, which is another way of saying, once again, what I’m trying to present in four rather crammed hours about the nature of Scripture is not something that has been done in a corner, something that is esoteric, something that is aberrational, something that is on the lunatic fringe of evangelicalism. It is merely mainstream Christianity. That’s all it is.
Within that frame of reference, since I’ve said something now about inspiration, let me come to a number of terms. What do we mean when we say the Bible is authoritative? First, what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean precisionism. That is to say, this makes no pretense whatsoever that the Bible is always precise.
You may have a summary of an address rather than the address. You may have the brief statement in another language of something that was said at greater length in a first language. If Jesus preached much of the time in Aramaic and the gospel writers present him as preaching in Greek, then inevitably there are changes in form, substance, words. Inevitably.
If, before the transfiguration, Matthew says, “About six days later,” and Luke says, “Eight days later,” what’s going on? I don’t know how many commentators say, “You see, this proves inerrancy is wrong.” It doesn’t do anything of the kind. Many languages use eight days to mean about week. French does that. Huit jours means a week. Quinze jours means two weeks.
If Luke says, “Eight days later,” likewise in Greek you can do that. It means a week later. One says, “A week later,” and the other says, “About six days later.” This is not something about which I’m going to have a heart attack. It’s not a question of precisionism. The matter of precisionism can lead you astray if the text is promising you one level of precision and gives you another. Then it’s deceptive.
Secondly, it does not mean truth is the only category of text in the Bible. Let me explain what I mean by that. Speech act theory has helped us to understand how language functions in many ways. Language is not only used to convey truth; it’s sometimes used to convey emotion or it’s used to elicit obedience or it’s used to make an exclamation. It may not be dealing with truth issues at all.
There is an implicit truth issue as to whether or not somebody said something when the text says he did, but when Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” to someone or other, there’s no truth issue in that sort of command. It’s a command utterance. The only truth issue is implicit (did Jesus say it or not?) but in the utterance itself there is no truth issue.
When you use terms like inerrancy or infallibility, what is meant merely is where the truth categories apply they are without error, they are true, they are reliable. We’ll come to that one in just a few minutes. Nor does authority overlook differences in literary genre. Here I think postmodernism has often been somewhat more sensitive (nowadays sometimes a bit too sensitive) than modernism which frequently was much too didactic and narrow and pedantic in its approach to texts.
You’re a preacher, and you’ve been assigned for this Sunday morning Jeremiah 20. “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
Pedantic sermon point number one: Jeremiah wants his mother to be eternally pregnant. Pedantic point number two: Jeremiah wants the poor bloke who told his dad the news that he was born to be like a town the Lord overthrew without pity. Point number three.… This is a lament. What the text is saying is, “I wish I had never been born. It’s not fair. I wish everybody connected with my birth were cursed and wiped off the face of the earth so I never would have lived. Why should I be given a life to live out my days in sorrow and shame? God isn’t fair.”
That’s the kind of thing it’s really saying, but you have to understand something of the nature of personal lament before you see that. Authority does not overlook such matters, nor is the Bible a textbook about everything. The Bible is not a textbook of microbiology. It’s not a textbook of astronomy.
That is different, however, from what some people want to leave out of the Bible. Some people want to say the Bible is authoritative whenever it speaks on matters of faith and practice and use faith and practice in a restrictive sense. It’s reliable in matters of faith and practice but not in areas of science, history, morals, or anything else, just faith and practice in a narrow sense.
But when the Reformers used the category faith and practice, they meant it in a comprehensive sense, all faith and all of practice. I would prefer to say the Bible is authoritative on whatever subject it chooses to speak, always remembering, of course, there are literary genres and interpretive questions and all kinds of other things, but by and large, it does not choose to say very much that has a bearing on microbiology.
Nor is it saying the Bible is the only locus of God’s self-disclosure because God does disclose himself in nature, in providential acts. He discloses himself in the lives of Christians, in the love of Christians. He discloses himself supremely in his Son. Nor is it saying no other religion can ever say anything that’s true. It’s not saying that. What does it mean, then, to confess the Bible as authoritative?
1. It is claiming God has disclosed himself, revealed himself, not only in deeds but in words and the locus of these words is Scripture.
This really takes on the early biblical theology movement of the 1950s with G. Ernest Wright and people like that who wrote very earnestly about the mighty acts of God and that sort of thing.
What they meant by that is God discloses himself in mighty redemptive-historical acts but not in Scripture. Scripture is merely the human witness to those mighty acts. In other words, the locus of revelation is in the deeds but not in the words. That is not what Scripture itself says. Here, if you have never read the material (I know it’s dated, and I know the style and approach are slightly old), I still strongly recommend you read two things.
Read the book by Father John Wenham, Christ and the Bible. Still worth reading. In the book John Woodbridge and I edited called Scripture and Truth, read the essay by Wayne Grudem, who just brings together text after text after text which doesn’t allow you to take that view, it seems to me.
2. God’s words are as reliable as he is.
It’s terms like infallibility and inerrancy and so on that have been used over time to try to defend this. When somebody says, “As soon as you start using a term and you have to put in as many qualifications as you put in for inerrancy or for authority, isn’t that really saying the term is not useful?”
The response is there is no disputed theological term that is not similarly qualified starting with God. When you use the word God, what do you mean when you’re talking to a Mormon? When you use the word God, what do you mean when you’re talking to a Muslim or when you’re talking to a Hindu or when you’re talking to a pantheist or when you’re talking to a Jehovah’s Witness?
Any theological term that is disputed eventually is going to be qualified by a number of surrounding expressions, terms, what you mean by it, what you don’t mean by it, and so forth. The fact that terms have to be qualified as you go up in sophistication and discussion is not a reason for not using terms. It’s merely a recognition that things get disputed. Therefore, clarity in definition is helpful.
Within this frame of reference, therefore, concern for truth (that is, that God speaks the truth without admixing error) … That isn’t saying he doesn’t admix metaphor or he doesn’t admix various degrees of precision or he doesn’t use very colorful metaphors and so on, but that God’s words are faithful and true as he is.
Terms like infallible and inerrant were simply used to get that sort of thing across. Eventually, infallibility was displaced in some circles because some circles were trying to use infallibility in a lesser sense. In other words, because infallibility came to be debased, therefore, people started using inerrancy; but originally, the two words meant exactly the same thing.
3. As God first encountered people with words, so the representation of his words opens up new encounters.
Let me repeat that. It’s very important. As God first encountered people with words, so the representation of his words opens up new encounters. That is, again and again and again, God disclosed himself in word. That happens as early as the fall.
God used to meet with Adam and Eve, we’re told, in the garden in the cool of the day, but after the fall, Adam and Eve hid from him. What did God do? Did he appear before them in a blinding flash? No. He spoke and called, “Adam, where are you?” They are removed from the garden. They are removed from his presence, but he still speaks.
He speaks and calls Abraham. He speaks and gives the 10 words. He speaks and gives the dimensions of the tabernacle. He speaks. Again and again and again, God confronts his people in speech. Thus, there is a profound sense in which preaching and teaching the Word of God ought to be, not first and foremost the conveying of mere information but the representation of the revelation of God.
Preaching at its best, teaching the Word of God at its best is the re-revelation of God, which is why, at its best when it’s not dry as dust, near didactic material, preaching at its best generates profound encounters with the living God. As God disclosed himself in word, so as his Word is presented again, there are new disclosures, new encounters.
I don’t mean there is a whole lot of new material that’s being given. It’s not being given for the first time the way it was given at the beginning, but as it was the means by which God disclosed himself and revealed himself to encounter human beings, so the representation is a re-revelation to new human beings. It’s authoritative in that sense.
4. God’s words are, thus, anchored both in history and culture, on the one hand, and in his people on the other.
They are objectively authoritative because they were objectively given, but they have a subjective authority for us as we bow before them. It seems to me that is rather different from the current Yale School.
I don’t know how widely influential Yale School is in your thinking. I am referring now to the work of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck and others. Hans Frei has gone to his reward. Probably his theology now is better than it was. George Lindbeck has recently retired. Hans Frei made some great contributions. That was not meant to be a cheap shot. He made some great contributions and was a great scholar in many ways.
Both of these men and others in the Yale School have been frightened by the dimensions of classic liberalism which have led to such deep aridity, such unbelief, such skepticism that they’re frightened by it, and they want to turn from it. So where do they go? I won’t go through Frei. That would take us too far afield here. Let me just mention briefly George Lindbeck.
Lindbeck writes and says all kinds of things that all kinds of ordinary Christians would be happy to add to their reasons for thanksgiving to God, many things to which they would want to append their “Amens.” George Lindbeck is constantly saying we need more of the Bible in the churches, we need to teach the Bible, we need to have the Bible in our liturgy, we need to memorize the Bible in our schools and in our churches, we need to hide the Bible in our hearts, we need to rethink in terms of the Bible the repositioning of our imagination in biblical categories and so on.
Again and again, wonderful stuff. We want to say, “Amen. Yes.” Except that when you push George Lindbeck hard enough, what you can’t find him saying (possibly he’s hinting at it in the last two or three essays; he may be shifting) for the last 35 years in book after book after book and essay after essay after essay is anything that has him admitting these wonderful texts have extratextual referentiality. That is to say, they refer outside themselves to things.
In other words, these texts are supposed to shape our imaginations, but we cannot say they say something true about God. We cannot say they say something true about Jesus. We don’t know that. You see, Lindbeck is too postmodern to be able to say that. What he is saying instead is, if we’re Christians, we must allow those texts to shape our minds and all of that, but we cannot say what those texts say is objectively true and refers to something outside themselves that’s true.
Beware of that position, because do you see where it leads? It means, ultimately, you are renewed by thinking about what the Bible is talking about whether or not you can claim what the Bible is talking about is true, but the Bible doesn’t say you are saved by thinking about what the Bible is talking about. The Bible says you are saved by what the Bible is talking about, namely Jesus and his cross work.
In my cheekier moments, I have wondered about writing an essay with the title “The Bibliolatry of George Lindbeck and His Friends.” In fact, I’ve actually started a file on that. Whether I’ll ever do it or not, I don’t know, but it’s tempting because, you see, the most fundamentalist fundamentalist who has the most amazingly magic view of the Bible still holds the Bible is talking about something outside the Bible.
It’s talking about God. It’s talking about the world. It’s talking about the Spirit. It’s talking about sin. It’s talking about people. It’s talking about how Christ died on the cross. It’s talking about how he rose from the dead. It’s talking about stuff outside the Bible, but you can’t get George Lindbeck to say the Bible is talking truthfully about stuff outside the Bible. It’s an exceedingly intellectualist vision.
For the fundamentalist, yes, the Bible is important, but it’s talking about stuff outside the Bible, and it’s the stuff outside the Bible that actually saves you. It’s Christ who saves you not ideas about Christ that save you. If all you have that saves you is the reformation of your mind by re-reading and re-reading and re-reading the Bible, then it’s not Christ that saves you; it’s the ideas that save you.
You’ve only gone as far back as Scripture. You’ve not gone back to what Scripture actually refers to outside itself. You have no extratextual referentiality. That is idolatry. It’s bibliolatry. Do you see? In other words, it is very important in this business to let Scripture’s authority speak on its own terms. Two more expressions about which I’ll say just a little. I wish I had time for more.
One is claritas Scripturae, the clarity of Scripture or the perspicuity of Scripture. Just about nobody defends that anymore because of the inroads of postmodernism. Precisely because people are arguing again and again and again that texts mean different things to different people, people don’t like to talk about the perspicuity of Scripture.
The best treatment of the subject in recent times has been an Edinburgh dissertation by a chap named Tim Ward done under Kevin Vanhoozer when Kevin was there. It’s on the perspicuity of Scripture. I won’t have time to pursue that here, but it is by far the best work done on it in the last 50 or 60 years anyway. I wrote a small essay on the matter in a Festschrift for Gerhard Maier in German, but most of you are not going to stumble across that.
One more category. The sufficiency of Scripture. It is important to remember, first, what this does not mean. When we affirm the sufficiency of Scripture, we are not saying it is sufficient for everything without exception. For example, sufficient for building a nuclear bomb or sufficient for inventing a unified field theory or sufficient for mastering Elizabethan sonnets. You always have to ask when you speak of sufficiency of anything in a finite world, “Sufficient for what?”
Nor does this mean there is no need for the Holy Spirit, nor does it mean there is no need for teachers in the church, nor does it mean there is no need for integration with other truth. I would like to explore all of those points. That is never what the claim about the sufficiency of Scripture has meant.
Second, it is important to remember the historical circumstances that prevailed when the doctrine was formulated (that is, what was being argued against). In the framework of Judeo-Christian heritage, it was sufficient for salvation and all that pertains to it, and this was held in the Reformation times over against Roman Catholicism which argued the truth was actually a deposit given to the church, and you needed the magisterium to explain it.
“No,” the Reformers said. “The Scripture itself is sufficient.” This also meant you did not need a priestly class. You do not need a priestly class of special interpreter. I may be a teacher in the church, but I am not an inside track teacher in the church. It’s not that I have a special enduement of the Spirit that nobody else, in principle, can have.
In Paul’s metaphor, I’m just a part of the body, a bit like the stomach. I take stuff in and disseminate the useful nutrients to the rest of the body, but I don’t have an inside track to God that enables me to be a teacher in the church and no esoteric doctrines that nobody else has. The Scripture itself is sufficient.
It means, further, the Scripture itself is the locus of God’s words revealed, not the Scripture plus a later and subsequent interpretation of Scripture, the great tradition. As important as the great tradition is, as important as it is not to think you are an independent interpreter who doesn’t need to learn from the church; nevertheless, in terms of what is normative, what is normative is found in Canon. What is normative is not found in Saint Augustine or John Calvin or John Wesley or whoever your heroes happen to be.
There are some implications for this. What shapes our understanding of the gospel? What shapes our understanding of spirituality? How do we formulate our doctrine? I worry about approaches to systematic theology that talk fluently about the entire history of tradition and score good points and bad points and then add a few proof texts but are basically disconnected from exegesis and biblical theology and the grand streams of the Bible’s own categories. That’s very worrying. Whenever systematic theology becomes just too independent of actual rigorous exegesis, on the long haul the tradition is controlling Scripture and not the other way around.
Enough of all of this. Let me conclude with one text and a prayer. “To this man will I look: he who is of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word.” Let us pray.
We remember how, in the days of his flesh, the Lord Jesus said, “The Scripture cannot be broken.” There is a profound sense in which we need very little to defend Scripture. Scripture itself goes on the attack. It cuts down our pretensions, examines our motives, brings encouragement where there is fear and despair, and brings rebuke where there is arrogance and hubris. It brings learning where there is ignorance. It brings relief where there is pain.
Above all, it brings the glorious gospel of Christ Jesus which alone frees us from our guilt and shame before you and reconciles us to you. We thank you, Lord God, for the gospel which has freed us from our sins and loosed us from our bonds which already has given us the blessed Holy Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance which holds out before us the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth so that we, too, join Christians in every generation who cry, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
Forbid, Lord God, that we should be so shackled by the peculiar faddisms of our age that we end up with a truncated and domesticated gospel, a gospel without power, without much truth, without balance and purpose, without fidelity. O Lord God, bring us back to the truth by which alone we are saved.
We remember how Jude could dare to speak of the faith once delivered to the saints. Help us to be faithful teachers and preachers of it, conveying it on to a new generation faithfully. Help us, Lord God, to be renewed in our inner being by your most Holy Word which is able to change not only our thinking, but our living, our loving, our priorities, our direction.
O Lord God, we do pray for one another. Especially we do pray for those amongst us who are students and who are wrestling with these matters and wanting to be faithful in a generation where most of these themes are not on anyone’s high agenda. O Lord God, it is so easy to go with the flow.
Give us grace instead to go with the eternal flow, to fear you and to fear no one else, to live with eternity’s values in view, to be submissive to truth, because all truth is your truth, but at the same time to take a deeper glance at the dictates of history than those shaped by our own generation to see afresh how Scripture has been understood across 20 centuries of history.
Help us, especially, to go back to that Word again and again and again and think your thoughts after you and hide your Word in our heart that we may learn not to sin against you and grow in grace and in conformity to Christ Jesus, the Word incarnate, in whose name we pray, amen.
Male: We’re going to have questions. I’ve tried to do a bit of redacting myself and tried to put these questions into themes, basically. I hope that helps. First is a question that is more on this morning’s topics. “Could you explain the relationship between relativism and postmodernism? We often, especially in apologetics, equate them and summarize it with the statement, ‘There is no absolute truth.’
However, you have characterized postmodernism somewhat differently. There may well be an objective, absolute truth, but it is unknowable, pragmatically similar, but philosophically quite different. Is anyone really arguing relativism and no absolute truth? Is this a subset of postmodernism? Does it follow naturally from postmodernism?”
Don Carson: You are correct. That is to say, relativism is a little bit different from postmodernism, as I’ve defined it. Part of the problem, however, is postmodernism is a catchall word that covers many, many things. As I use it, I think it’s most usefully used if it’s restricted to the domain of epistemology. Because it’s restricted to the domain of epistemology, it is not itself relativism, but if you are a consistent postmodernist epistemologically, it leads almost inexorably to some kind of relativism.
How serious that relativism will be depends. There are some people who are relative relativists. That is, they will want to say on some sort of absolute scale, truth is always relative, but in a particular group, you can speak of truth and falsehood. In a particular interpretive community, you can speak of truth and falsehood, but it’s all constrained by the particular community.
Nevertheless, they are relativists on an absolute scale. It’s not truth for everybody; it’s just true for your particular group. That is one of the inevitable conclusions of consistent postmodernism (not everybody is consistent), and that’s the kind of connection I would want to draw.
Male: Thank you. This next question is a little more critical. “In the first sessions, you raised the questions postmodernism asks and answered them. However, the answers you gave were on the basis of pragmatic experience of communication and of philosophy and rationalizing. Should we not start from the Bible as Christians as best to say on these things, as you brought out later?
When the Bible speaks of humanity’s experience or wisdom and philosophy, it says not only that they are unreliable but that they are deceitful or even foolish. I appreciate this is hard apologetically, but surely it has more biblical credibility to do these things this way around by beginning with what you later called the authoritative voice of Scripture for an understanding of epistemology.”
Don: The question could be understood in one of two ways. It could be understood as itself merely a matter of pragmatic choice about which comes first. You see, if you are offering a critique of postmodern epistemology, the basis, finally, for my critique of postmodernism is the fact that I am a Christian. I have thought about these things Christianly.
That I have not given a chapter and verse in the first two sessions for everything I said certainly doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it out of biblical themes. When you are evangelizing cross-culturally (I don’t care what group you are evangelizing), you must simultaneously do two things. You must show the inadequacy of the local view to reconcile men and women to God. That is a biblical mandate.
You must also explain what the truth is, but if you try to articulate what the truth is using exclusively biblical language when that language will, in fact, not be understood by the culture without making the actual links, then you are not being faithful to biblical witness in the first place. You are treating the Bible merely as a magic book. That is, provided you get the magic words out then, hopefully, people will get converted. That’s not what Paul does himself in Acts 17 or elsewhere.
What I would want to argue is the kind of thing I have been doing is profoundly biblically mandated. Both for the morning and the afternoon the approaches are somewhat different, but precisely because you have to expose the emptiness of a particular approach as part of the business of exposing the truthfulness of the gospel as Paul, likewise, exposes the idolatry of the Athenians in order to explain the truthfulness of Jesus Christ. Likewise, that is a biblically mandated thing to do.
Whereas I appreciate enormously the question, there is insistence on the truthfulness of Scripture, I never, ever want the truthfulness of Scripture to degenerate into treating of the Bible as a kind of magic book, and provided you get the magic words out there, people get converted. That simply isn’t true, nor is it what the Bible is saying either. There’s a danger, then, that we think we are being faithful by using evangelical words when nobody is understanding them except other evangelicals. That’s a huge mistake.
Male: Following on from that, in three questions all of the same theme, “Where would you start in dealing with teenagers who are confused by all the multiple truth sayings they pick up today? How do you biblically reasons with a postmodernist who doesn’t believe in objective reasoning? What would be your advice to a run-of-the-mill Christian student who is trying to reach out to his skeptical, not-yet-Christian mates?”
Don: Let’s begin with the teenager. It depends a bit on whether the teenager is being brought up in a Christian home. I still have one teenager, and I just couldn’t say more strongly than I’m about to say that the business of rearing teenagers is partly a question of articulating truth. It’s partly a question of authenticity. There is no worse home to grow up in than a home with high spiritual pretensions and low spiritual performance. There is no better home to grow up in than one with low spiritual pretensions and high spiritual performance.
If you’re brought up in a home where your parents transparently love each other and you, transparently love God, and in consequence of that, live differently from the surrounding world, who take you through family devotions that are appropriate for your age and make a joy of them rather than a burden, who discipline you without bitterness or meanness but at the same time encourage you to try your wings and fly, that’s the best thing you can do for a teenager. It really is.
Not to say no all the time but to sort of lead them through things. When my kids started wanting to go to films that were just over the edge, my wife and I would debate them, and time after time, what we would do is say, “Look. You can go with your mates and see that film after I’ve taken you to see the film. Then we’re going to stop somewhere, have a Coke or have a hamburger or something, and we’re going to talk about it. Then you can go with your mates. Deal?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then you’re not going to see the film.”
For film after film after film, as a result, we went through this sort of philosophical, analytic critique of what sort of things are being shown surreptitiously. Eventually my daughter, at that time about 16 or 17, said, “Dad, you ruin more films!” I was getting too much flack on that, so I backed off again. The next film she went to on her own, and I didn’t go. Eventually, I took my wife, and when we came back she said, “What did you think about the film?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“No. I’d really like to know.”
“No. I’m not going to tell you. You just get angry. I’m not going to tell you.”
That went on for three weeks. I wouldn’t tell her. She kept nagging and nagging. I wouldn’t tell her. Eventually, then, we opened up again and had a long conversation. This sort of thing over the years enables you to have a kind of cultural critique that’s going on with your kids all the time so they become less snookered by everything that goes along. It’s very hard to convince a teenager of this if what they’ve seen is a lot of inconsistency or a lot of hypocrisy or something.
I’m not pretending my kids are angels. I’m not pretending they’re all going to turn out all right or anything like that. All I’m saying is, both from personal experience and from what Scripture itself clearly teaches, the maintenance of a teenager’s way of looking at things must be within the framework of a whole-lived life, ideally of a whole community, and if not their own family, then the family of the local church.
I would also want to say if I were senior pastor of a church today, I would certainly be trying to start Sunday school classes or special training classes or sessions for kids at A-level about to go to university, 6 to 10 weeks, to explain what some of these categories are, to explain what the Bible’s storyline is, to explain what worldviews are.
We’ve done this in our church, and there are a number of these patterns around in various churches now. I think those things are just desperately important so they don’t think in bitty terms. Nothing is guaranteed. Apart from the grace of God, we’ll lose them all anyway, but at the end of the day, those are the kinds of big worldview framing sorts of approaches that need to be taken, it seems to me, in terms of our preaching and teaching curriculum.
Male: I don’t think the question was of a person trying to reason with a postmodernist who doesn’t believe in objective truth. I perceived from the question that you get to a point in your discussion where there’s an impasse, and then, where do you go?
Don: Again, it depends on who they are. I really do try to get them into Bible studies. What I will say to them is, “Look. You might not believe the Bible is true, but the least you can do is find out what it says as best as you can understand it. You owe the whole Western heritage at least that much attention, don’t you?”
If the Bible studies are themselves good and interactive and so on, then sometimes it’s the Word itself that begins to have a compelling effect, and they come back at you with questions and so on. If you try to witness purely abstractly without them getting the input from Scripture.… All of my university mission work or evangelistic stuff is all exegetical and expository in nature. I think that’s extremely important. I could tell you some wonderful stories along that line, but I’d probably better stop.
Male: Two questions on the Spirit here. “Is a poor doctrine of Scripture an indication of an unregenerate heart? For example, does the work of the Spirit in a believer’s life inevitably lead to trusting God’s Word?” On the same theme, “Clearly it is the Holy Spirit who enables people to obey the message a passage of Scripture conveys, but what role does he play in helping us to understand the message in the first place? Is it possible to understand the passage without the help of the Holy Spirit? If not, how does he help us to understand?”
Don: Let me handle the second one first, but it’s a far more difficult one. There’s no way I can explain that in 30 seconds, so let me at least have a couple of minutes here. The passage people quote most commonly in this regard is, of course, from 1 Corinthians 2. Verse 14 says, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
There have been two erroneous ways, I think, of understanding that text. One says, in effect, provided you have the Spirit, you don’t need any grammar, academic thought, discipline, or training. You just have the Spirit, and you will understand Scripture. That’s all you need. In the first place, I don’t think that’s what the Scripture says. I think I could prove that if I had more time.
I don’t think it’s what the Scripture says here at all, but also, even experientially, I think you can show again and again and again there are an awful lot of people who are very convinced they have a huge enduement of the Scripture who create havoc every time they open the Word of God and try to explain it. I mean, it really is a lot of nonsense what they’re saying.
The alternative error, it seems to me, is one which says this is not talking about whether we understand Scripture at all; it’s talking about whether or not it’s applied to our lives. So you could have a flat-out liberal who might understand Scripture magnificently, a superb exegete, and be a naturalist atheist but understands the text because he or she understands the grammar and the syntax and the background and the word order and all the rest, the genre and so on, and as a result, has a wonderful understanding of a particular text, and yet not be regenerate.
What this is talking about is not so much understanding in an intellectual way but understanding in the sense of applying to one’s life so that it becomes part of you and you are transformed by it. There is truth to that, too, but it’s too narrow. It’s too narrow. The first part conforms with that. “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God …” That part is true, but when it goes on to say, “… and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned,” it really doesn’t line up very well with that kind of utterance, does it?
In the context, it is making a fundamental distinction between who is a Christian and who is not. In the context, Paul is saying those with the Spirit understand in broad terms what the gospel is about and accept it. Those without the Spirit cannot. It takes the Spirit to enable us to understand. Thus, in the previous verses, who can understand the things of God apart from the Spirit of God? That’s the frame of reference in which this is being discussed.
Experimentally, I would want to argue when a person really is not transparently a believer, even self-confessedly not a believer, even though he or she may be a remarkably good exegete in some passages on some themes at some times, sooner or later that stance toward God and toward the gospel and toward the truth claims of Scripture becomes so blinding the most important core things very, very often simply become so repulsive to that person that they get those texts wrong.
Those repulsive things often have to do with substitutionary atonement, propitiation, sometimes the peculiar worship of Christ, things like that. You see it again and again and again in the academic circles in which I move all the time. They can, on occasion, do a remarkably good job, an immensely rich job of doing an exegesis of some particular passage and we’re all enriched by it.
But when they get to passages that deal with some of these central things, you start seeing again and again and again, apart from the opening of the mind and heart by the Spirit of God, people might have the tools and formally in theory be able to do it, but it’s just that the truths themselves are so compelling, but to these people obnoxious, awful that they cannot come to terms with them, and they go around them.
Let me indulge in one small explanation or illustration. I met my wife, as she later became, at Cambridge. I was at that point in my second year of doctoral studies, and she came up to Hughes Hall, which at that point was not a full college the way it is now. It was really a graduate college for education students. She came to do a year of postgraduate work and was not a Christian.
The first time I met her was at an evangelistic meeting at which I was speaking at Hughes Hall. She was dragged along by her Christian roommate, who is now a missionary, incidentally. We’ve been supporting her for about three decades. At the time, she was dragged along by this Christian roommate, and let it be said, the woman who came to be my wife, Joy, was impressed neither by the message nor the messenger.
Over the course of that next year, partly because I was spending a great deal of time in evangelism in the university in those days in any case, I eventually gave her, through rather amusing circumstances, a copy of John Stott’s Basic Christianity. She didn’t want it. I asked her if she would read something if I gave it to her, and she said, “Was it written by a Baptist?” I said, “No, it’s written by a decent Church of England clergyman. You can’t get safer than that.”
She said, “Well, I don’t have much time for reading.” I said, “I didn’t ask you if you had a lot of time. I just asked if you would read it eventually. I don’t care what the timetable is.” Eventually, she took it rather begrudgingly, and I didn’t see her for months. Then I bumped into her and I said, “Did you read that little book I gave you?”
She said, “Yes, and I looked up most of the Bible references, too.” My ears pricked up. I said, “What did you think of it?” She said, a direct quote, “I have decided Christianity is okay for good people like you and Carol, but it’s not for me.” I ask you, how does an intelligent postgraduate student at Cambridge University read John Stott and conclude that’s what Christianity is about?
Immediately what flashed to mind was 1 Corinthians 2:14. “The natural man does not understand the things of God. They are foolishness to him because they are spiritually discerned.” Whereupon I said, “Would you like to go for a walk?” She said, “What for?” I said, “So I can expound to you justification by faith.”
She was feisty, and I was feisty. We got along fine. We had a two-hour walk by the Cam where I expounded justification by faith, but my point is, if you can read John Stott as a graduate student at Cambridge and come out with that sort of rubbishy view of Christianity, you have to understand there’s more there than intelligence that’s involved.
Male: Two last questions. “There have been a few questions on the whole issue of textual variance and how to decide which we’re representing out in Scripture? Any comment on that or any books we should look to?”
Don: A lot of people think somehow the multiplicity of textual variations somehow jeopardizes inerrancy. I don’t know of any sophisticated defense of a high view of Scripture that has ever claimed anything to the contrary. There is reason for thinking there is a high view of Scripture. There is no reason in the texts themselves for thinking God would so preserve the text that there would only be one variation coming down, world without end.
In other words, there are reasons for thinking God, as he originally gave the text, was God-breathed (theÛpneustos). The texts do not say, and subsequently I will guarantee everybody who tries to make a copy will be infallibly preserved from making bad copies, and when you try to work out what that would look like, in any case …
There is some scribe busy copying away. “Oh, boy. Can’t read that. Bad writing there. I wonder if it means this. Oh, my hand won’t write that.” Or you have somebody who’s coming along saying, “I don’t like that doctrine. Boy, oh boy, I’m a Gnostic. I’m not going to have this rubbish. I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” You would have to have perpetual miracles going on here.
When you compare the attestation we have of New Testament documents with something else that was written at roughly the same time a century earlier, let’s say Caesar’s Gallic War, we have three medieval manuscripts of Caesar’s Gallic War. We have something like 5,000 Greek manuscripts in fragments and 8,000 early versional manuscripts and fragments of the Greek New Testament. In terms of level and sophistication of materials, it vastly outstrips any other ancient document at all.
If, at the end of the day, there is some place in Scripture where I cannot decide between this variant and that variant or amongst this variant and that variant, what it does is makes me unsure about exactly what the text says at this point. In no case does it jeopardize a doctrine, because doctrine is always dependent on many texts … always.
The church has wisely been careful not to build massive doctrinal structures on just one verse, not because there have to be many verses for something to be true, but there have to be many verses for us to understand what something is trying to say. In other words, when there’s only one passage on a particular theme, like, “What does it mean to be baptized for the dead?” in 1 Corinthians 15:28 the Mormons think they know what it means, but they can appeal to the divine law of covenants and the Book of Mormon and other things to explain it.
We can’t do that, so we don’t have a whole doctrine of baptism for the dead built into the Westminster Confession or something like that. It’s not that the Bible has to say things many times for it to be true; it’s that it has to say it many times for us to understand what is meant. As a result, if there’s a textual variant, it may be I won’t understand whether this text says this or that, but that never, ever justifies any doctrine, precisely because doctrine depends on a whole lot of other texts, and those other texts will be more or less textually secure.
What I suspect is this preserves us, I think, from bibliolatry of another kind. There is a certain class of fundamentalists that is guilty of a certain kind of bibliolatry, and not just fundamentalists, sometimes from Catholic or orthodox traditions. You kiss the Bible.… A friend of a friend (not someone I know personally) was in Pakistan preaching (he was from a more fundamentalist background) and said, “We have to learn to stand on the promises of God,” and he put his Bible on the floor and stood on it to illustrate standing on the promises of God. He caused a riot. He was almost killed, because you don’t do that to the Bible.
There’s a sense in which I don’t mind doing it. This is just a piece of paper and synthetic leather and a lot of scribbled notes. It’s nothing! It’s not magic. I don’t bless it over you. It’s the truth that is conveyed that is important, and just as there have been many examples in Scripture where the serpent that was reared in Numbers 21 later becomes an idol, so I suspect if we had originals right from the apostles’ hands, we would make idols out of them.
I think probably God in his mercy has given us this sort of thing so at the end of the day there is no truth that is not secure according to the textual witness. It’s just that according to some passages we may not be entirely sure what is meant. I don’t think it jeopardizes a single matter creedally. Does that help at all?
Male: Finally, “What are you practically doing each day being a husband, father, and professor to ensure you think God’s thoughts after him? What are some practical tips you’ve found helpful?”
Don: They have varied over the years. I talk about them at some length in my book, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers which works through some of Paul’s prayers but also gives a couple of chapters of practical tips on precisely those sorts of points of things I’ve found helpful.
In fact, two of the books I have written really have come out of some of my own practice. Robert Murray M’Cheyne in Scotland was known all over Scotland as the saintly Mr. M’Cheyne. He died a few days before his thirtieth birthday. He was concerned to have his congregation reading the Bible, and he eventually formulated what came to be called M’Cheyne’s Bible Reading Chart. Are you familiar with it? Yes? No? A few people are.
You can find it in The Memoirs of M’Cheyne, written by Andrew Bonar, one of his friends and colleagues. This Bible reading chart takes you through about four chapters, more or less, every day of the year. If you follow his chart, on January 1 you read Genesis 1, Ezra 1, Matthew 1, and Acts 1. When you read through the whole thing, if you read four chapters a day, then in one year you get through the New Testament twice, Psalms twice, and the rest of the Old Testament once.
If you can’t manage four chapters a day, then read the first two columns, and that way in two years you get through the New Testament twice, Psalms twice, and the rest of the Old Testament once. I eventually wrote two books (devotional/biblical theology books) both called For the Love of God, Volume 1 and Volume 2.
In the first one, it offers a one-page meditation on one of the readings in the first two columns, and the second volume goes through one of the readings in the second two columns, with the idea being this would not be a piece of reflection on a text stripped out of its context but would gradually be trying to build up a whole biblical theology so if you worked through those things for a couple of years you would be absorbing a great deal of how your Bible is put together.
The only thing I warn you against that sort of thing is to make sure you read the Bible and not just the commentary. That’s the danger. Read the two passages of Scripture. The commentary is helpful in letting you understand the passages of Scripture. Fine. Read the Scripture.
Those things just came out of my own devotional life. I mean, as I was working through those passages, I just bashed out a page of reflection every day for a year on both of them on my computer while I was there and looked up the odd thing, but that really came out of my own attempt to try to think biblically.
