Reformation II: Sola Scriptura | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Grantiae, and I'm here again with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author and teacher of the Behold Your God study series from Media Grantiae.

We've been talking about the Reformation because Reformation month has been upon us. And last time in our first episode on this series, we talked about a timeline of the Reformation. We mentioned some key events, not just in spiritual circles, but in the world circles, things like the invention of the toothbrush and other important things.

But those things and we did make comment on those things that we don't want to miss the main actor in the story, God, by only focusing on the secondary causes, the men that he worked through. So we would encourage you to go back and listen to that episode.

If you haven't, you can do that at Mediagrantiae .org or really anywhere that you get your podcasts. But those things alone don't really get us to the heart of the movement. To do that, we really have to consider the core beliefs that these men held to.

And those have been summarized in five statements. We call them sola or solas from the Latin word that means alone or only. So, John, tell us, what are the five sola of the Reformation?

There is sola scriptura. That means that the Christian life is according to Scripture alone. Sola gratia, that it's by grace alone. Sola fide, it's through faith alone. Solus Christus, in Christ alone.

And soli deo gloria, for God's glory alone.

The Five Solas Versus TULIP

Yeah, so we'll talk about those today and we'll talk about them again in the podcasts that follow. But before we go forward, we want to contrast those with what have become nicknamed the five points of Calvinism.

Now, those have been put into a pretty easy to remember acronym, TULIP. So we have T, total depravity, known as total inability and original sin, that all parts of us have been affected and twisted by sin, the original sin.

Then U, unconditional election. L, limited atonement, which is also known as particular atonement. And some call it more carefully, I think, definite atonement, that maybe they would say two dip, that those for whom Christ died, that atonement is definite.

It will have an effect. The I is irresistible grace. And the P is perseverance of the saints. But, John, why is it that we want to draw a distinction? You know, when people think about the Reformation, maybe what comes into their minds is these five points, TULIP.

Why do we want to make sure that we make a distinction between them and the five sola?

Well, we're not making a distinction because we disagree with TULIP and think that the five solas are just great. Or the other way around. It's just that the TULIP is an expression of the Reformation doctrines that was not guided by the Reformers, but guided by the opponents of Reformation doctrine.

And so, in other words, at the Synod of Dort, at a religious gathering of leaders and theologians in 1618 and in 1619, Arminius and the Remonstrants, their objections to certain doctrines in the Reformation.

So they would say, hey, we're with you. We're not Roman Catholic. But we disagree on some pretty big points, five major points we disagree with you on. And so all the Protestant churches, the leaders of those churches, kind of came together, the big thinkers, and said, how do we answer this accusation that we're not being biblical here?

These five accusations. Right. So these five accusations are answered by five theological statements or five points. And so that's nicknamed the five points of Calvinism. But the problem is, I don't think anybody, any historian really thinks that John Calvin or Luther or Zwingli or Knox or the English Reformers, if you stop them and said, wait, wait, wait, wait, I can't comprehend everything you're just saying.

If you could just give me five main things, would they say, well, look, the most important thing, and would they have run through the TULIP? I don't think so. Those are true. And those are a good response to the Arminius objection.

But I think that the five solas have greater breadth. And these really give a more accurate balance summary of what were the core truths that drove these men. I don't think TULIP does that. TULIP gives a very good answer to an Arminian objection.

Yeah, I'm glad that you that you bring that up because you could be forgiven for thinking that John Calvin one day just sat down and said, OK, guys, here are the five points of me-ism. You know, if you want to know what I'm all about, this is it.

But that was not at all what happened historically. And as a as a as a person who has come to hold to a confession of faith, I often say that TULIP, while that's good, it's almost like five bones in a body.

They're important bones, but without the connective tissue that really help you see how these things go into all areas of life. And so if we want to get down to what are the the big, big issues that came to inform the Reformation men and the men who came after pressing these five sola into all areas of worship and life and how we approach God, we have to talk about the five sola.

Why the Solas Matter More Than a Five-Point System

Yeah. And by the way, you know, even in Charles Spurgeon's day, Spurgeon believed in the in the five points, the TULIP. Spurgeon, when he first became a pastor, had men join him in a special series of sermons services and where each of the points was discussed biblically.

Why do we believe these things? And Spurgeon one time said, well, yes, I'm a Calvinist. If if you understand that Calvin is Calvinism is a nickname for the gospel. But he did not approve of the of an approach to ministry that only talked about these five things.

And he in his normal witty way, he said this. He said, I have brother pastors who in their church every morning they have they have a pipe organ and it only has five keys. And these five keys are in a minor key.

And so they they use five notes, the five points, and they play the most minor, somber sounding sermons they can from it. And they think the more somber, the more godly. And and and really, I think that Spurgeon was right there.

You know, if you only have five points or, as you mentioned, only five bones, you don't have a very good body. If you only have five points, you have five truths, but you don't have a very balanced view.

So the solas are even more helpful for understanding why. Why did these guys risk their lives?

Another point, though, is that there is an order that we want to take these in and specifically not so much the middle ones, but specifically the first and the last. I think it's significant that we that we think through it in a certain way.

So why is that?

Scripture Alone and the Glory of God

Yeah. And I don't know that anybody else has said there's an order. It's just as we've been talking about it. We want to present it in an order. We do. And we want the first one, the last one to be clear.

The first is first because it's the it's the soil out of which all of this grows. It's the foundation on which everything else is built. And that is a return to Scripture alone as our guide, our authoritative, complete, inerrant, sufficient guide for all matters of belief and practice.

Now, that is so easy to say. And yet every morning, you know, Matt and I want to wake up and, you know, you believer, you want to wake up and you want that to flow into every area of life. But it is not effortless.

You know, you have to know your Bible. You have to remind yourself of things you've learned a hundred times. And then you've then there's times where there's walls in your life and you think, I don't want to do what God says here.

And you have to repent and believe and obey. So soul of Scripture, each of these must be linked with Scripture or else we're not bound to them. And then the final one, the pinnacle of the building or the fruit that grows on the plant that's growing out of the soil is everything is to be to the glory of God.

If we don't keep that in front of us, we can take those doctrines and we can be very orthodox. But we bend them around us or bend them around our church or bend them around winning the world to Jesus or whatever is important to us.

And suddenly we have truths that have been misshapen. Knowing the destination is always a good thing to keep you on the same track.

Yeah. And because we do know and we never tire of reminding ourselves that all things are from him and through him and ultimately to him. So God's glory must be the goal as we think through these things.

So as we approach each one of these, the five sola and the episodes to come, there's an order. We want to see what the statement means. Simple. We want to see some Scripture proves for such a statement, not as a way to to proof text, but to just say, hey, we're not we're not making these things up.

This is the Scriptures when taken as a whole. This is these things are true. We want to see some errors that each of these truths counteracted back then. And we also want to see how the truths have been reemphasized by others since the Reformation.

The Church Always Reforming According to Scripture

Yeah. And then the final point we want to make with each of these solas is that these are things that need to be constantly revisited every generation in Christianity. So there's another wonderful Latin phrase, Ecclesia, Semper, Reformanda, Sola Scriptura.

Now, that's a big Latin phrase. And, you know, we love Latin phrases, but there's there's a reason. What it means in English is this. The church must always be reforming according to Scripture. So we're not saying the church always needs to be in flux like, hey, we just need to adjust to the present world's changing.

The church needs to reform to the world.

Yeah. And look, that's a very reasonable approach if it weren't for the fact that we have the Scripture and an all wise king. So because we have the Scripture, we want to always be adjusting ourself, but not to the fluctuating culture.

But we fluctuate, we get off track, we get confused, we emphasize things wrongly. And so we do have to constantly come back to the truths that we've inherited from the from the our forefathers. But also we go all the way back to Scripture like they did.

And we want to see how does that truth affect the way we live today? What what errors are corrected in our own day?

What Sola Scriptura Means

Yeah. Well, let's jump right in with number one, Sola Scriptura. What does this mean?

Well, simply put, Scripture alone is the only infallible source of divine revelation. So not Scripture plus and the final authority for matters of faith and practice.

It would have been it's it's significant that, you know, the Roman Catholic Church would have been totally fine with saying Scripture, whatever the Latin word for really important, you know, we need to.

Scripture is really important. A lot of people will say that a lot of religious people say, hey, you know, the Scripture is really important, but it is this word Sola. No, the Scripture alone is our authority, not your opinion, not church councils, not, you know, the way that we might want to adjust it, etc.

And just to show that this is not something that people just started believing 500 years ago. Here's a word from a church leader from the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem. And follow this. This is what he wrote.

Now follow this language.

Yeah, now that I mean, look, that was 1700 years ago. So what does he mean? The Scriptures, we don't make any statement about the Christian life, even just a casual statement, if it can't be backed with the Scriptures.

And Cyril says, even me when I'm up because this was in his catechetical lectures. You're reading my lectures on the catechism. We're laying truths out in simple question answer form. But don't you believe anything I'm writing unless you can see that I have taken this from Scripture.

So back all the way back in the fourth century.

The Sufficiency and Clarity of Scripture

Yeah. And so before then, back to the fountain, so to speak, we have the Scriptures that teach this as well. Second Timothy three, 15 to 17. From childhood, you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness and so on. And we also see in First Peter one, 20 and 21. But know this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will.

But men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Yeah. Now, that may to us sound like a no brainer. Like, well, everybody believes the Bible that goes to church. But think about, you know, 500 years ago, the Roman Church taught that the meaning of Scripture was not clear to believers.

And thus it required the church to infallibly interpret what the Scripture was saying and what it means and how it's to be lived out. Now, the Protestants taught something different. They taught that the Bible was perspicuous.

Now, that's a word we may not use a lot, but that means it's clear. It's fundamentally understandable to every genuine believer. Now, you think about it. The Bible says two things. This is the Word of God that He gave you.

And second, you've been given the Holy Spirit who enables you to understand the Word of God. I mean, we have a Bible before us. We compare Scripture with Scripture. We look at a passage in its bigger context.

We labor over that. We plead with the Lord. And on all essential truths, the Bible is clear.

What a radical concept. I mean, our fathers in the faith, Christians before us, would have been told the opposite of that. Look, this is not for you, the Bible. This is the Word of God. You expect you can just understand this?

We have, you know, we have men who have been trained to do this. You don't need to worry yourself with this. What a radical idea and what a wonderful truth to be rediscovered. Now, let's talk about how the generation after the Reformation continued to press this truth of Sola Scriptura out and to really work it out.

And they did this as they wrote confessions of faith. And so we know historically the Westminster Assembly came together and put together the Westminster Confession of Faith. And then some of their Baptist brothers, a little while later in their own convictions, wrote a very similar confession, taking the points of agreement, which there are many, many, many throughout, and changing to match what they saw, their own Baptistic truths in the scripture.

And so in the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, chapter one on the Holy Scriptures, they begin with the Holy Scriptures. This idea of Sola Scriptura comes first for them. And I'll read it in the modern English translation that's been done recently.

It begins this way. The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience. The light of nature and the works of creation and providence so clearly demonstrate the goodness, wisdom and power of God that people are left without excuse.

However, these demonstrations are not sufficient to give the knowledge of God and His will that is necessary for salvation. Therefore, the Lord was pleased at different times and in various ways to reveal Himself and to declare His will to His church.

To preserve and propagate the truth better and to establish and confront, not confront, to preserve and propagate the truth better and to establish and comfort the church with greater certainty against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan in the world.

The Lord put His revelation completely in writing. Therefore, the Holy Scriptures are absolutely necessary because God's former way of revealing His will to His people have now ceased. So, why might we need to return to this idea of Sola Scriptura in our day?

I think that the necessity to do this is made obvious if we just look at some evidences of what happens in a Christian, a genuine Christian's life when they don't hold on to this, when they don't revisit this.

So, I want to give you a couple of kind of parallel dangers. So, imagine walking down the path. The narrow path is what we just talked about, Sola Scriptura. But if we're not sticking to that carefully, we might find ourselves fall off on one edge or on the other.

So, let me give you a couple of these. The first is this. I'm a Bible alone man. Well, that sounds like Sola Scriptura. But is that really what the Bible teaches? The Bible teaches that God does give teachers.

And so, we have books. None of these are on the level of Scripture. I remember when we were discussing like catechisms and confessions, one of the things that Matt said was that these don't have the same authority of Scripture, which we all agreed on.

But Matt used a term that I'd never heard before. They have a derived authority. And that really clarifies it. Any good book we have in the library and any time, you know, believers come together and carefully labor to explain the Scripture, the only authority they have is derived from the Scripture.

So, as far as that is connected to the Scripture, it has authority. If it ever steps away from Scripture, then we say, I'm sorry, in that area you don't have authority. But Sola Scriptura is misapplied if we say, all I need is the Bible and I don't need a church, I don't need a preacher, and I don't need books.

Well, that's not a right application. In fact, that's not an application that the Bible would support since God Himself has given us teachers. But on the other edge, the other danger is this. We've got the Bible, but also, hey, God's given me a brain.

God's given us common sense and we need to be using it. And so like when it comes to, especially when it comes to like how do I apply the Bible in a church or how do we reach our community? We think, well, you know, we need to be really clever schemers and strategists.

And the Bible, look, honestly, I mean, I have been in the ministry for a little while. I have rarely seen a man strategize how to reach his community starting with the Scripture. It's almost always starting with the community and saying, well, what do they want?

Well, how can we fit this to what they want? And so it's a very dangerous trap that a true believer can fall in if he doesn't apply this.

The Sufficiency of Scripture Versus Bible-Plus Thinking

Yeah. So what you're getting to is not just the inerrancy of the Scripture, but the sufficiency of the Scripture.

Yes, certainly. Let me give you another pair of errors. Like I mentioned in the first one, I don't need a preacher. So I'm just going to stay home and just do my own thing. I got my Bible. I don't need a preacher because the soul of Scripture.

Well, but the Bible doesn't support that because the Bible tells us that God gives us teachers. So on the other side is the person that every time you talk to them about their Christianity, they say, well, my preacher says that's not what we want.

No, no good preacher wants that. We want to have a Christianity that applies soul of Scripture. The Scripture alone is the infallible revelation of God's will, of God, you know, of His Word. And it's also the only authoritative one.

Now, let me give you another one. If you go into small groups and we do this a lot, we have a lot of small groups and we do fall into this at times. You're talking about a passage you're looking at and someone says, well, to me, it just, I feel like it means, and you don't want to be rude to each other, but sometimes you kind of have to stop and say, wait, guys, I know what you mean, but we have to be careful.

The question is not how you feel about this passage, but what does this passage actually mean in context of the whole Scripture? That's a lot harder. It's easy to read a passage and have a feeling, have an emotional response.

It's much more difficult to do the hard work of saying, OK, but what does it actually say and mean in its context? So that's another error that shows up when we're not being careful. And then I think another final one, you know, we could go on for a long time, is what you mentioned.

Doubting the sufficiency of Scripture. OK, I believe the Bible is without error, but is it enough? Like, is it enough for my marriage? Oh, no, I got to have the Bible plus. Is it enough for my kids? No, no, I need a Bible plus.

The church, Bible plus. Life, Bible plus. Money, Bible plus. One evidence that we've really grabbed hold of the truth, that grabbed hold of Luther and Calvin and Knox and Tyndale, is that we set ourselves to search the Scripture adequately so that its sufficiency is demonstrated in the way that we're bringing it to bear on every area of life.

And that is a lifetime job.

And that is so different from saying, look, I believe every word in this book and I don't think there are any errors in it. Because you can say that and then you can say, but look, when it comes to things that, I mean, you wouldn't say it like this, but hey, things that really matter.

You know, how are we supposed to counsel people?

Yeah, real things, real life. Yeah. How do we help people? Well, we've got to go to the world.

We've got to go to these other things. And I don't think any of us would say, you know, you can never find any help. You know, I want to study zoology. Well, the Bible is sufficient for that. Well, no, there are sciences that God's given us, but it certainly won't be in contradiction to.

And when it comes to how we approach the essential things of church and life, the Scripture is sufficient. And that's really the battle in our day, I think. The battle of, are there errors in the Bible inside of evangelicalism?

That was a big battle in, what, the 80s and so on. And it's not like people stopped saying that. I mean, people now will say, well, Paul was wrong. That was in his context, in his cultural context. You know, he said this about sexuality or he said this about the roles of gender and et cetera.

So that error is still present that, well, they're just wrong in there. But probably in our circles, wouldn't you agree that the issue of sufficiency is really the issue?

Yes, and, you know, let's think of a Christianity without this sola. I have a God that I owe everything to. I have a soul that's eternal. I have a wife. I have kids. I have friends. We have religion. How do we know that we are on the path of life?

Because he has given us an inerrant sufficient revelation of everything that we need in an authoritative book. I mean, we just take it for granted. But what a happy thing that each of these solas is ours through God's gracious work.

One of the things that we love about attending conferences is when people drop by our booth and they tell us about how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their church, their family, their small groups.

Eventually, we started asking if they would let us record their stories so that we could share them with you. This is Chris, and we talked to him at the G3 conference about rethinking God biblically. As a pastor looking for good resources and really became challenged by it.

He was able to lead our church through in California and to see how God used that in such unique ways to drive us back to a biblical definition of who is God, who is man, what is the gospel. And when we twist that around, we end up with a false gospel and really an empty hope.

And to see how the workbook really challenged the people to dive into Scripture in a way that maybe they don't normally. And so to see the byproduct of really what the Scripture produced was such a blessing as a pastor, as a shepherd.

I think the biggest thing that the congregation walked away with was understanding that we don't get the gospel right if we don't begin with God. And when they talk to other people, they hear, well, I think God is.

Well, it's not about what we think. It's about what Scripture says and who God is. For more information about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit TheMeansOfGrace .org. So we've introduced the five sola after our first episode in this series gave a timeline of the Reformation, made some commentary on those things about not missing that it's God who's at work here.

And now we've introduced the first of five. But just some parting thoughts for us before we bring this episode to a close. Today, this episode is airing on October 31st, All Hallows' Eve, Halloween, or Reformation Day, as some of us call it.

And, you know, I think it's a very good opportunity for us to be countercultural as Christians. Now, I'm not saying that in a sense of, you know, refuse to let your kids dress up like a princess. That may be your conviction, and I believe that it's sin to bind your conscience where the Scripture hasn't bound it.

So if that's your conviction, great. But here's what I do mean in a positive way. We should be looking to the work of God in His church throughout history, and we should be recognizing and appreciating that and also seeing what does it mean for us in our day?

Yeah, there are so many benefits that we have received through God's gracious work during the Reformation period as a whole. And even with that, you know, that small start, one monk nailing some topics to be discussed among theologians to a castle church door, you know, 502 years ago.

So we don't want to be guilty of bankrupting our Christianity by being so ignorant of the things God did that had brought us here. And, you know, so if we stand on the shoulders of the giants who went before us, so to speak, we want to, you know, stop and look down and say, so how did it happen?

You know, what did you do? What did God do? And so especially the five solas, what was at the heart of why you made the choices you made?

So with that, we want to wish you a happy Reformation Day and remind you that God is not just the God of the past, but He is the God of the future and He's the God of right now. And so we might ask Him, Lord, what would it look like for us to obey you today?

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