You Say You Want A Reformation? With Dr. R. Scott Clark (Session four: Biblicism, Sola Scriptura and Confessionalism)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. So I promised that I would do

Galatians 5 and then I failed you, so let me do that quickly just to finish up the last bit.

So one of my criticisms of revival and revivalism, so I don't accept

Ian Murray's distinction because I don't think it works historically, and I don't think he thinks it works, because even when he goes to talk about the

Second Great Awakening, he ends up focusing on basically, as the doctor said, a certain quality of religious experience, and in that sense, they're really the same, even though there are significant differences theologically and phenomenologically, sociologically even perhaps, but ultimately, they're both about a new quality of religious experience.

And in contrast with that, Edwards wrote a book called Religious Affections, and he set up tests so that you could know whether you were having the right kind of religious experience, whether you're having the right quality of religious experience.

And my contrast, I had a pithy little phrase yesterday, and I don't remember what I said, we only talked like 11 hours yesterday, no, that was a good jump shot,

Mike, no, it wasn't that. I was, we were contrasting the fruit with feelings, maybe,

I mean, affections are more than feelings, but they certainly involve feelings, and my contention is that the

New Testament is much more interested in fruit than in affections, right, and if you look at Galatians 5,

Paul says, starting in verse 16, but I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, for the desires of the flesh are against the

Spirit, and that Spirit there should be capitalized, right, that's the Holy Spirit, and the desires of the Holy Spirit, I'm adding holy there, are against the flesh, that's sinful nature, right, flesh is sinful nature, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things that you want to do, but if you are led by the

Holy Spirit, right, I'm paraphrasing, you are not under the law, now the works of the flesh, right, the sinful nature of the old man with which we continue to struggle are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these,

I warn you, as I warned you before, those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God, people whose lives are characterized by these things are not going to inherit the kingdom of God, you're not a or sorcery, or fits of anger, or rivalry, or dissensions.

But, verse 22, the fruit of the Spirit, not religious affections, groaning in a service, or falling on the floor, or as the doctor records, he's the only one who does this, the story of Sarah, right,

Pierpont, floating across the room, nobody else records that story, so I don't know if it's true, but he, I guess it's a story that people who identify with President Edwards tell among themselves,

I assume it's some oral tradition or something, I don't know, but he seemed to think it was true, right, if Mrs.

Clark starts floating across the room, I'm going to tackle her, and then we're going to go see somebody, see what's going on, stop it, no floating across the room,

I got enough problems. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self -control, against such things, against these things there is no law, and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires, if we live by the

Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit, let us not become conceited, provoking one another to, provoking one another, envying one another, and really, it continues into chapter six, bearing one another's burdens.

There is nothing extraordinary about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, right, that's the

Christian life right there, there's no floating, there's no falling, there's no Shundala, there's none of that, this is just ordinary

Christianity, dying to sin, living to Christ, being conformed to Christ day by day, little by little, loving your neighbor, loving

God, and manifesting in these ways, right? It's not complicated, it's right here in Galatians 5, and it has nothing to do with a particular cause, because you know what, your religious experience is going to do this, right, for those who are listening to this, can't see my hands,

I'm making a wave motion, it's always going to be this way, and so some days you're going to feel, man,

I feel great, I really feel like the Lord is with me, and other days you're going to feel like, man, I feel terrible, and you know what, that could just as well be hormones, we are body and spirit, and there's lots of stuff that affects us, could be you ate a food you shouldn't have eaten, that's not the

Holy Spirit, that could be too many carbs, could be you're dehydrated, I had a guy fall over at church one day, he was just dehydrated, we thought he was dying, it turns out he was dehydrated, it takes about 45 minutes for water to get all the way through your system, so you're hydrated, by the way,

I know this from personal experience, drink enough water, or your kidneys will say, drink water, all right, well, we got to move on to the next topic, and that is a biblicalism, biblicalism, sola scriptura, and confessionalism, so we sort of started on this, obviously these topics are all integrated, they're all related, and I already began to sketch for you how the movement that is called biblicalism came about, now let me make a definition,

I hope it will clarify things, when I say biblicalism, I'm not talking about being biblical, I've had people come back to me and say, well, we want to be biblical, this is like the distinction between pietism and piety, all in favor of piety, of godliness, of sanctification, of devotion, and having devotions, and reading, and praying, and praying at table with family, reading scripture at table with family, reading scripture privately,

I'm in favor of all that, I'm opposed to pietism as a movement and as an ethos and as a spirituality, so in the same way,

I'm in all in favor of being biblical, being faithful to what scripture actually says, now here's where confessions are going to come in, because the church, right, the church has, from the very beginning of its history, confessed, and even in scripture itself, confessed a certain understanding of the faith, right, the church itself has confessed a certain understanding of the faith, so you say, well, yeah, we want to be biblical, what does scripture mean?

That's a great question, and from the very beginning, right, scripture has confessed certain truths that help us to understand the rest of scripture, for example, like last night

I quoted Deuteronomy 6 .4, right, hear O Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one, right, we're not polytheists, we're not pagans,

God is one, and gradually through the history of Revelation and Redemption, we come to understand that God is one in three persons, right, we can see right away he's one in multiple persons, but it becomes clearer over time that he's one in three persons, right, we know from Genesis, right, the

Spirit was hovering over the face of the deep, and we know from John 1 that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the

Word was God, and nothing came into being that except that which came into being through the Word. Well, in the beginning was the

Word means the Son is present, and the Son is actively creating, so it's not the case that the

Father created, and the Son redeemed, and the Spirit sanctifies. Well, that's true in broad terms, but it's not true absolutely, because the

Son is the, if you were the agent through whom or through which creation was accomplished, and so he's the

Creator, and he's the Redeemer, and it's from him that the Holy Spirit is poured out upon us, so he's also in that sense the sanctifier.

So those broad categories are true enough, but they need to be modified.

So what does Scripture mean? Well, from the very beginning we have confessed an understanding of the faith, right, so it's not enough to just quote

Scripture. Why is it not enough just to quote Scripture? Because of this.

This is a rule from church history. All heretics quote Scripture. I don't know who first said that.

I haven't been able to track it down, but it is absolutely true. All heretics, and it was so from the very beginning.

The Gnostics quoted Scripture, and they tried to attach themselves to Christianity and to revolutionize Christianity.

The Marcionites quoted Scripture and tried to revolutionize, hijack Christianity, and through the history of the

Church, various groups have tried to hijack Christianity. The Judaizers tried to hijack Christianity, and so we've always, even in Scripture, confessed certain fundamental truths, even within Scripture, to oppose various movements and to preserve the truth of the

Christian faith. For example, one of the very first confessions is in 1 Timothy 3, 16, and if this was laid out properly, you would see that this has all the marks of a confessional formula that was probably recited by Christians who had access to 1

Timothy, and may have been recited by other Christians in other places, right? Not every first century church had every epistle, right?

They were copied out, it was difficult, it was expensive, and they didn't all get successfully transmitted everywhere.

Everybody didn't have them all at the same time. It took a while for us to get them all together in a collection, in a book, in a codex.

But if you would lay this out properly, you'll see there's a series of verses, or series of verbs.

He was manifested, this is 1 Timothy 3, 16, he was manifested in the flesh, there's a verb, that's about the incarnation.

He was vindicated by the Spirit, that's about the resurrection. So we know if he was incarnate, and he was raised, well, if he was raised, he must have been dead, right?

So it assumes that we know about the cross. He was seen by angels, so that's another verb.

So we have witnesses of his resurrection, proclaimed among the nations, the apostles went and are announcing the gospel, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

Does that remind you of any sort of pattern or formula with which you might be familiar?

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten

Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried, was raised on the third day.

Like the Apostles' Creed. The Apostles' Creed didn't drop out of the sky, and the apostles didn't write it, but the early church, after the close of the canon, about 92, 93, 94

AD, the Apostle John finishing the apocalypse, the revelation, that's the end of the canon, and the early

Christians recognized that was pretty much, there was some discussion, but the church recognized that the stuff that we're writing now is not canonical

Scripture, and that they quoted the New Testament as canonical Scripture. They received it as canonical

Scripture. By the way, the church didn't create the canon, the canon created the church. There's no meeting, there's no evidence of any meeting at which the church created the canon.

There's another conference that we could have some day. The canon is self -creating because God is canon,

God revealed the Word, God gave the Word, God preserved the Word, God inspired the Word, and the church received the various books as having apostolic authority.

They received the Old Testament canon as already finished and completed. They didn't have the intertestamental books, the

Apocrypha, that's not in the Hebrew canon, and then the 27 New Testament books were received by the early church, so that by the middle of the second century, and even before that really, it's pretty settled what are the books received by the church as canon.

Received, I said received, I didn't say created. It's important that you know that because there's no place where we met, there's no evidence that we actually met at Laodicea in the 360s and decided on a canon, a eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

We're going to, this one's in, this one's out. There's actually no evidence for that. The church didn't create the canon, therefore the church can't change the canon.

If the church created the canon, then the church is canon. Well, the church isn't canon. Canon is canon.

The church works for Scripture. Scripture doesn't work for the church. That's why we say sola scriptura, and so we're going to start to sort out what the difference is between biblicism and sola scriptura.

So, biblicism is the attempt to read

Scripture as if no one's ever read it before. I'm going to read Scripture by myself in isolation.

I'm going to read Scripture in isolation. I, and so the picture

I always use is I in my closet with my Bible in the sovereign, autonomous

Bible interpreter, and the biblicist always becomes the canon.

This is the great problem with biblicism practically. A, it's wrong, but B, practically the problem is the biblicist always becomes the canon.

No, the biblicist and the interpreter is not the canon. The Scripture is the canon, and canon, you say, well, what does canon mean?

First of all, there's only one end, right? The other, we have two ends. That's boom, boom, canon. This is one end.

Canon just means a rule. That's all it means, a measuring stick, a rule. The canon is the rule.

The Scripture is the rule. So, the canons of Dort, although it's funny, they met in an armory, so there could potentially have been two ends, but the canons only have one end.

I've seen, I say that because I've seen it, sort of self -published editions of the canons of Dort with two ends. Oh, it always makes me laugh, because they don't know when they did it, they didn't know that we were meeting in an armory, because in an armory you might have canons.

All right, so the canons of Dort are simply the rulings of the synod of Dort. The canon of Scripture is the final authority, the final rule for Christian faith and Christian life.

Where does biblicism come from? Well, in a sense, it's always been around in some way or other, but why is it so pervasive today?

Well, it's so pervasive today because we live in a narcissistic age. You look at the work of Philip Reif and Christopher Lash.

They've done really marvelous work describing the rise of narcissism.

What's narcissism? Narcissus is the story of the man who saw his reflection in the water and he fell in love with himself.

He wanted more of it. He reached in to grab himself and he drowned. Narcissism is self -absorption.

If narcissism doesn't describe the age in which we live, then there is no word that describes the age in which we live.

We live in the most narcissistic age ever, right? I remember a few years ago, the President of the

United States had a selfie, right, had a selfie stick, right? The selfie is the sacrament of narcissism.

Well, actually, honestly, this is a little gruesome. The real sacrament of narcissism is abortion.

I am not going to be inconvenienced by this tiny little human being that's growing inside me. That's too much trouble.

I have whatever, whatever challenges and careers, and if you've had one, God forgives you.

It's not the unforgivable sin, but it is the sacrament. But the selfie is everybody, right?

Not everybody can have an abortion, but everybody can have a selfie, and 10 times a day, right? Oh, I got to gram this, right?

I'm having mac and cheese. I got to gram that. I have to post that on Instagram. You know what?

I think in five years, doctors are going to be diagnosing selfie arm, right? He's got selfie shoulder, right?

So we live in this narcissistic age, and Christians are participating in this narcissism so that everything is about me.

The church is about me. The scriptures are about me. The message has to be about me, and again, as I said last night, there's a reason why preachers give you three steps to this, seven steps to that, 12 steps to that, because that's what people actually are demanding, and the preachers know that, and they are responding to the market demand.

They're responding to a culture of narcissism, and as a consequence, in the modern period, right, we have systematically rejected the objective reality of the historic

Christian faith, the historic understanding of scripture, and the scripture as the as the objective norm.

So objective means that which is apart from me. If a tree falls and a forest doesn't make a sound, yes, if I'm not there to hear it.

You're being there doesn't have to, right? Stuff happens. You're not the, you don't make reality.

There's no such thing as my truth or your truth, right? And I, so this is what

I tell the students. We have a clock tower on campus, and I don't know, two stories high, and I say, please don't do this, and if you're thinking of doing this, please come see me or somebody, right?

I don't want anybody to hurt themselves. It's a thought experiment, but were you to climb to the top of the clock tower and launch yourself off and say,

I identify as a bird, right? Well, you can identify as a bird all the way to the ground.

You know what's going to happen? Boom. Why? Because gravity is objectively true.

You can have your truth and identify as a bird right up until the ground says, I identify as ground, and gravity says, and by the way,

I identify as gravity, and you're going to self -identify as dead because there's objective reality, objective truth.

There's no such thing as my truth, my gravity, right? So we live in an insane time.

It's mass psychosis, right? Mass psychosis. I self -identify as a squirrel, right, or as a whatever.

No, you're insane. You need psychiatric treatment. There's objective reality, right?

I think we should take everybody out of the city. You know what? You don't find any of this in farm towns.

You know why? Because they work with animals, and they know where food comes from, and they know how the world actually works, and I learned to drive in a pasture, and I know the difference between heifers and cows and steers and bulls, and I know where babies come from, right?

And it's because there's two sexes. There are three genders grammatically, but there are two sexes biologically, physically, and the doctor didn't arbitrarily assign you one or the other.

Nobody assigns you a gender. The doctor's like a quarterback. He's just waiting for the snap from the center.

He's just receiving whatever's coming out. I was there. I know. I was right there. I saw, and then they hand you this slick little football, and you're supposed to hang on to it.

Oh, help me, Jesus. I'm going to drop this child. Please wipe her off.

It's so, they're so slippery. I still have nightmares about that, right?

My kids came out female. Nobody assigned them, right? They weren't born, because there's objective reality, right?

Do you see how crazy we've become? It's like 100 years from now, somebody's going to look back and say, who put

LSD in the water everywhere? Well, this all gets filtered into evangelical theology, piety, and practice, and one symptom of this turn to the subjective is biblicism.

Well, so I've sketched for you some of the places from which this comes. One of the places from which this comes is a movement called

Socinianism. I know there are famous Unitarian churches in Boston.

My first religious training was Unitarianism. I was in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Omaha, down by the tennis courts, not too far from downtown.

Olds, and their claim to fame was this giant organ, and the pipes went up the wall, and then they went along the ceiling.

It was pretty magnificent, and where I learned in the youth group to get in touch with the oneness of the universe, right?

So the Socinians are the forebearers of the Unitarians, right? They weren't, well, they were

Unitarian. They didn't think of themselves quite as Unitarians. The Socinians were rationalists, and they said, what my mind can't catch can't be true.

What my mind can't understand absolutely, comprehensively, can't be true. Therefore, the Trinity is not true, the substitutionary atonement is not true, and the deity of Jesus is not true.

And you know what they said? We are just following the Bible. John Owen wrote a book on the vindication of the gospel against John Biddle, who was an

English Socinian, and it's a battle over how to interpret the Bible, and who gets to interpret the

Bible, and what constitutes Christianity. And Faustus Socinus set up a system wherein the individual, autonomous individual, gets to determine what the

Bible means. The autonomous individual gets to determine what the Bible means.

And the Biblicist professes to be following Scripture and submitting to Scripture, but he's really following self.

He's really submitting to self, and it's his mind that gets to say, it begins with the self.

It begins with self. I'm the measure, ultimately, of all things. I'm the measure of what Scripture does say.

I'm the measure of what can say. And it's always done without confessions, without creeds, without reading the

Scriptures with the Church. And by the way, this became a mark in American Christianity, both of the liberals, who were opposed to creeds and confessions, because they didn't want to be constrained by them, and the fundamentalists, who were suspicious of them.

The liberals didn't want to be constrained by them, and the fundamentalists, who to some degree didn't want to be constrained, but really, they were suspicious of any claim to ecclesiastical authority whatsoever.

And the Reformation said, we're not placing the Church over the Scriptures. The Church works for Holy Scripture, but the

Church reads the Scripture, and the Scriptures are sufficiently clear that we've been able to come to a consensus as to what the

Scriptures say about the essentials for the Christian life. And this process began in the

Church very early on. Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics, confessed what he called the rule of faith.

And if you read Irenaeus against Heresies in 170 AD, so this is very early on, you find the substance of the

Apostles' Creed, what becomes the Apostles' Creed already in Irenaeus against Heresies, 170 AD. Two or three times, he gives what he calls the rule of faith, and it's basically the

Apostles' Creed. It's quite remarkable, because it's an elaboration, essentially, of 1 Peter 3, 15, or 1

Peter 3, 16. It's systematizing in a historical way, right?

Starts with God, goes to the Incarnation, Salvation, Resurrection, Ascension, implicitly

Pentecost, the formation of the Church, Sacraments, and the return of Jesus. Those are the core essentials of the

Christian Church, the 12 Articles of the Holy Catholic. Now, Roman, Roman Catholic, by the way, is an oxymoron.

It's a contradiction of terms. Catholic means universal. It can't be Roman and universal simultaneously. Pick one.

And I tell my churches, the Roman Communion, I don't say Roman Catholic, if I can remember not to say it.

I say Roman Communion, or Romanist, or if I'm being particularly cranky, the

Papists, right? It's a 16th century

Italian sect. How do I know that? Because in the 2nd century, there's only two sacraments.

There's no Pope. You can't show me any evidence for a Pope in the 2nd century. Nobody knows anything about a Pope. Nobody knows anything about a

Petrine papacy in the 2nd century. Nobody's calling on the

BVM, the Blessed Virgin, as an intercessor. Nobody's appealing to saints. Now, it's not going to be too long before stuff like that begins to pop up.

But in the 2nd century, it's not happening. Now, I'm not saying there's not weirdness in the 2nd century. There's some serious weirdness.

I don't recommend you read The Shepherd of Hermas, but if you don't believe me, read The Shepherd of Hermas, and then you'll say, wow, that's really weird.

And people took that really, they thought that was really great. It's like Tim LaHaye. So this is

Tim LaHaye stuff. That's how I explain it to my students. It's just bizarro fantasy.

It's worse than Tim LaHaye because at least Tim's Trinitarian, and The Shepherd's not even Trinitarian.

He has a vision of a lady, and he's got a thing for, it's weird. He's got sexual undertones.

It's very weird. It's the worst. We have to read it next week, and I hate that. So I'm sort of dreading it.

But then we get to do Diognetus. So if you get a copy of the Apostolic Fathers someday, you could take a look at it.

Pastor can show you it. There's a wonderful treatise in there. It's a modern collection of 2nd century texts, and one of them is called the

Epistle to Diognetus. Man, that, if you're going to add to the canon, that'd be on my list, except there's one weird passage in there.

But otherwise, it's really, really good. Obviously, you can't add to canon. The canon is the canon. By definition, you can't add to it.

All right. So very early on, the church, in opposition to heresy and challenges to who gets to interpret scripture, confesses a rule of faith.

Tertullian repeats that rule of faith. And then by the middle of the 4th century, we have pretty much a mature version of the

Apostles Creed. I can't get into all the details, and there are some questions about descending into hell. I understand that. All I can say is that originally, it just meant buried or buried, depending on where you're from.

Do you say buried or buried here? Buried. All right. I think we said buried back home, but I can't tell anymore.

I've learned to say roof and not roof, and root not root. Creek not crick, although there's still a difference in my mind between naked and naked.

Naked is taking a bath. Naked is something else. All right. So we come to confess the faith, and that's our rule.

And anybody who agrees with that rule is being faithful to scripture. Anybody who denies that rule is being unfaithful to scripture.

The Biblicists then sought to overturn the rule. And they were going to read the

Bible as if no one's ever read it. They're going to read the Bible without paying attention to the world around us.

They're going to read the Bible in isolation from the world around us. By the way, and I can illustrate to you the problems of this right away.

Who here believes, and don't raise your hand because it might indicate psychiatric issues.

Who here believes that the sun revolves around the earth? Don't raise your hand.

I said don't raise your hand. Who here believes the sun revolves around the earth? That's called geocentrism.

From, I don't know, Ptolemy until the 1540s, 1530s, 1540s, everybody was a geocentrist, and all

Christians were geocentrists. We just assumed that this is what we learned about the world. And the

Bible says the sun rises. Well, the sun rises, the earth must be the fixed point, and therefore the sun must be going around the earth.

And Copernicus and others, and eventually Galileo, Kepler did calculations, and then eventually observations, and they developed an optica tuba, an optical tube, a telescope.

They were able to make observations and do calculations and figure out that, well, it turns out that the earth goes around the sun.

Guess what? None of you learned that the earth goes around the sun from scripture. But you all know it's true, you all believe it's true, and that's because you paid attention to natural revelation, and you learned something, and you realized, guess what?

The Bible wasn't intended to be an astronomy textbook. It was intended to teach you creation, fall, redemption, incarnation, redemption, and the

Christian life. It does teach you redemptive history, true history, but it's not teaching you science.

And so we learned from natural revelation, and from natural revelation, we realized, you know what?

We're reading the Bible rather badly by reading geocentrism into scripture.

That was a huge lesson. It was really hard for people to learn. It took my people about a century to accept it.

Some of my people were very skeptical. Herman Witzius has a passage in one of his books where he makes fun of people because there were some crackpots saying,

I looked through the optical tube, and I saw a man dancing on the moon, and Herman Witzius said, that's crazy.

He was right, but he also said, and so the earth, we know that the sun goes around the earth.

Well, he was wrong. He was wrong about that, and we all know it's wrong, and none of us learned that from the

Bible. We learned it from scientists, right? So I'm not saying we let scientists run the

Bible for us, but I am saying that we set up a relationship between scripture and natural revelation that's safer and saner than it has been sometimes, right?

The Biblicists don't have anything to do with general revelation. They're going to read the Bible in isolation from general revelation. The Biblicists are suspicious of confessions, right?

And they tend also to be suspicious of systematic theology, right?

We're just going to follow. So when I was a theological student, we were going to do only biblical theology.

Systematics was for people who were too interested in logic.

We wanted to know the way scripture talked about this, and scripture talked about that. We're going to do a biblical theology of this, and a biblical theology.

I'm a big fan of biblical theology. Gerhardus Vos will change your life if you let him, if you let

Gerhardus Vos into your heart. It will change your life, change the way you read scripture.

It's amazing. It's transformative. It's hard stuff. You start with the kingdom of God. Teaching of Jesus on the kingdom of God is a great entry point.

Pastors, have you been reading Hebrew epistle of the DFAK a little bit, right? I don't agree with everything he does, but it's an interesting and useful.

Pauline eschatology, and then his survey, biblical theology. With Vos, you've got to read a paragraph or two or three and then think about it for a few days, right?

You can't be in a hurry. All right, anyway, so I'm a big fan of biblical theology, but when I was a student, we were suspicious a little bit, my group of systematics, because we thought, well, these guys are doing things to scripture.

We just want to follow the Bible. I was a biblicist, so I'm not indicting other people. I'm indicting old me, and it confuses, biblicism confuses sola scriptura with biblicism.

Sola scriptura isn't biblicism. Well, what is sola scriptura, or what isn't it? Well, first of all, it's not biblicism. Sola scriptura simply recognizes the canonical authority of Holy Scripture.

It's the final court of appeal for the Christian faith and the Christian life. Nobody can make me believe anything that isn't taught or clearly taught or implied in Holy Scripture.

Nobody can impose a practice or a doctrine on me that is not clearly taught or clearly implied in Holy Scripture.

That's what sola scriptura means. It doesn't mean that I'm only using the

Bible. It doesn't mean, as one writer says, that all knowledge is biblical. No, all knowledge is not biblical, right?

Geocentrism wasn't biblical. It wasn't true, and by the way,

I'm not at all interested in setting up science as a canon over the canon, right?

If you read the history of science, when people talk about settled science, I laugh and laugh and laugh.

When you talk about settled science, geocentrism was settled science for a thousand years.

Guess what? We decided that was wrong. Then Newton was settled science, and that was wrong. Then quantum was settled science.

Well, that was not wrong, but it's being modified. Now we're into string theory, and I don't know where we're going next. There's no such thing in the definition of science.

There's no such thing as settled science. Read Michael Polanyi. People who talk about settled science have never read Michael Polanyi. This is hard work, but if you're serious about this, read

Michael Polanyi because he wrote a wonderful book in which—I can't think of it—Personal Knowledge, Personal Knowing, something like that, in which he says, listen, let me tell you, when you do the history of science in the old days, they said, well, here's this experiment.

We learned this. This is a rung on a ladder, and then there's this one and this one, and you build this ladder, and there's all these rungs that are fixed, and he goes through and he deconstructs all these rungs.

He says, well, I know the guy who did this experiment. Let me tell you what they don't tell you in school. Somebody, he had to select data, and he had to omit other data in order for the experiment to come out.

He doesn't say it's not necessarily wrong. It's just not infallible.

Michael Polanyi, P -O -L -A -N -Y -I, absolutely brilliant. Thomas Kuhn, also very helpful, basically ripping off Polanyi.

Polanyi's a genius. It's hard work, and it's not for everybody, but if you're interested, this—Polanyi is amazing.

So there's no such thing as settled science. I'm not talking about that at all, but we do learn from general revelation, right?

The Bible doesn't tell you what a tree is. You have to know what a tree is, right?

You can't find out what a tree is from the Bible. You learn from your eyes and from experience. Oh, a tree is a hard wooden thing, and if you're playing football, you don't want to run into it because it's going to hurt you.

That's what, right? And in the fall, it drops things on the ground, and mom makes you go rake that up. That's what a tree is.

Bible doesn't tell you that. You learn that from natural revelation. So natural revelation is real. It's true, and by the way, the

Bible says there is such a thing as natural revelation. Again, Romans 2, Romans 1 and 2. We know homosexuality is contrary to nature,

Paul says, Romans 1 18. He actually appeals to nature because he knows you know what nature is.

Nature is when you jump off the clock tower. That's nature. Nature is when two people of the same sex do what they ought not to be doing with each other.

There is a due penalty in their own flesh. What an interesting, suggestive comment.

I don't know, I don't entirely know what it means, but it's really interesting that he says it.

And by the way, you don't, you think Paul was a prudent? He didn't know what was going on? You don't know the ancient world.

You think it's shocking now? You go to Ephesus in the first century, you'd see stuff in public, giant advertisements that I can't even, if I told you

I'd get in trouble and he would make me leave and go to the airport. I can't tell you because it's so graphic, what they did in Ephesus in the ancient world.

You could come to town and there's a, we'll say, graffiti and a big arrow.

If you're looking for this, go that direction. That's right out in public for everybody to see. So in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, the

Apostle Paul uses two words to describe homosexual behavior and also polycarp does the same thing in his epistle to the

Philippians. He uses two words for the two partners in male homosexuality, the passive partner and the dominant partner.

How does he know that? Because he's not a prude, he knows what, he knows how the world is, he's paid things, he's got, right, he's not isolated and he's not ignorant.

Oh, Paul didn't know any, absolutely, you haven't read 1 Corinthians 6, 9 in Greek and you haven't done a serious study of what they'll use, right.

Sola Scriptura is not biblicism, it's not solipsism, right, I'm the definer of the world, it's not narcissism, it's not all about me, and it's not ignorant of general revelation, right.

What is it? It's the unique final authority of God's sufficiently clear word.

It's the unique final authority of God's sufficiently clear word. It's sufficiently clear for salvation, it's sufficiently clear for the

Christian life, and therefore we reject everything, as we say in the Belgic Confession, everything that does not agree with this infallible rule.

The only fallible rule for the Christian faith and Christian life is Scripture, so that the Belgian Confession can be changed.

The Belgian Confession didn't drop out of heaven, a guy wrote it while the Spanish Roman Catholics were trying to kill him, and it's a great confession, but it's not infallible, it could be wrong, it's all subject to revision.

This is why, one of the many reasons I'm not a Romanist, because Rome says she's infallible and she can't be revised.

Well, you're not infallible, I know your history. You're like a grand dame, sort of, in a dowdy house, right.

If you're thinking about converting to Rome, you're going to be disappointed. Ask John Henry Newman. John Henry Newman converted from Anglicanism to Rome and he was really disappointed.

He had serious second thoughts. He stayed, he got a cardinal's cap for it, but he had doubts, and she's like a grand dame who comes down the stairs in a big ball gown that's all, it's got that hoop that's wired and just knocks everything off the walls, and she pretends that nothing's happening.

We can see her knocking everything off the walls as she comes down the staircase. Hey sweetie, you're tearing the thing up, and she just keeps going like nothing's, oh it never happened,

I was never there, everything's the same as it always was. Nonsense, you're just making stuff up. That's the way Romanists tell the, that's a very short account of the way

Romanists tell the history of the Church. But you give me 13 weeks,

I can prove it to you. I do it every year. The Scripture is our ultimate rule of faith, and so it's our ultimate rule of worship.

Right? We do what we do in worship because of what Scripture says. We do what God says and nothing other than what he says.

It's also the charter of Christian liberty. You know, brother,

I just don't think you should be drinking demon alcohol. Well, okay,

I appreciate your concern. You might be right. In my case, I probably shouldn't be drinking for a variety of reasons.

But if you're going to turn that into a temperance movement and impose that on every Christian, you better have good reason for that.

Well, you know they drank grape juice at the wedding of Cana. No, grape juice didn't exist until Welch's invented grape juice so that you wouldn't be drinking wine.

The whole point of the narrative of the wedding of Cana is that he made wine and that he brought the best wine out at the end, usually when people had had wine and they didn't really care anymore, right?

You give people the craft beer at the beginning of the party and you give them the blats at the end of the party because they don't know and they can't, they don't care anymore.

If you don't know what blats beer is, you didn't live in the Pacific Northwest. Schlitz. The whole, if you take out the wine, oinos, it's a be not drunk with oinos.

Ephesians 5 18. If it's not wine, if it's grape juice, how'd you get drunk? You get diabetes, but you're not going to get, if it's, you can't get drunk on grape juice.

It's oinos. It's the same word as the wedding of Cana. Come on, let's get serious. You don't like booze, that's fine.

Don't put that rule on me and other people and bind their consciences. The scriptures are my charter for Christian liberty.

You can't impose it. So I don't sing hymns and I told my, the church authorities,

I'm not going to sing hymns. I will sing the word of God. It's the word of God. That's what God's author. That's my personal conviction.

I'm not here to argue with you about this. I'm just saying that's my personal conviction. And I just told him, you can't make me do it.

I'm not going to do it. My conscience is captive to the word of God. Now, Luther didn't say, here

I stand, I could do no other. He should have. It's a great line. He missed it. But he did say, my conscience is captive to the word of God.

Right? I'm free. You can't make me do something that God hasn't authorized me to do in public worship.

I'm free to live my Christian life under my conscience, guided by the word of God.

Right? That's sola scriptura. And the confessions are the, now this is important, the confessions are the ecclesiastical summary or conclusions about what the scriptures teach on the

Christian faith, the essential matters of the Christian faith and the Christian life. And they are our public ecclesiastical constitutional guarantee that in this assembly, or whatever assembly it may be, not this one in particular, but any particular, right?

In my assembly, for example, I'm an associate minister of the Escondido United Reformed Church, and we subscribe the

Belgian Confession, the Canons of Dort, and the Heidelberg Catechism. They can't obligate me to believe or say or confess or hold anything other than what we've agreed to in those documents.

And we hold each other accountable. This is our shared understanding of the word of God. It's not a mini systematic theology.

It's a public ecclesiastical constitutional document, right?

If we still paid attention to the Constitution of the United States, it would be that any law that contradicted the

Constitution would not be a law. That's why the Constitution is there. Any law that contradicts, right, we've sort of given up on the

Constitution, and we're making stuff up, or we have been for a long time. We're hopeful. Justice Scalia and others, maybe, have set us on a path where, at least for a while, we have some justices, or at least somewhat interested in what the

Constitution actually said, rather than what they wish it said or what they think they can make it say. That's how a constitution is supposed to function.

It's supposed to govern what, right, agencies, right, administrative agencies.

That's actually a great battle, right? Administrative agencies can create de facto laws and impose those on you, and they suffer no constitutional test.

Well, the Constitution's supposed to govern all that. That's what a confession does, is it governs.

But it's fallible. It's revisable. It's corrigible. I'm sure somebody said about me when

I was a boy, he's incorrigible, meaning he's incorrectible. Well, the catechism, the confession, and the canons are all corrigible.

I don't think they're wrong, but somebody could show us that they're wrong. What's the value of confessions?

You know what? People who are in solid confessional churches, who've not participated in the evangelical craziness that I know some of you have participated in, they've missed all that stuff.

I know people who don't know any of this stuff that we've talked about, Toronto Blessing, Brownsville Revival, Barking Revival, fallible prophecy.

I have to explain all this stuff to them because they've never heard of it. They just live in a world where we have the

Word of God, and we have the Belgian Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort as subsidiary standards of our agreed ecclesiastical understanding of the

Word of God, and none of that is in there. What's the value?

Well, let me tell you a story about Hank and Elsie Navis. In my federation of churches, we had a minister who preached a sermon, the title of which is,

The Lion Will Not Bite the Innocent. And the point of that sermon was to say, you're initially justified by grace alone in Jesus, but there's a second stage.

And at that second stage, you'll be finally justified and saved through spirit -wrought sanctity by virtue of union with Christ and your cooperation with grace, so that God will approve of you finally because you're sufficiently sanctified, which is effectively a

Roman Catholic doctrine. And he preached that in one of our churches. And two members, a farmer and his wife,

Hank and Elsie Navis, no more theological training other than they were raised in a Dutch Reformed church, and they knew the

Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic, and the Canons. But they hadn't been to seminary. They weren't ministers. He wasn't an elder.

They said, yeah, well, this sermon does not agree with the Word of God, and it doesn't agree with the

Heidelberg Catechism. So they complained, as they should to their elders, that we call it a consistory, a medieval word.

And they said, this doesn't agree with the Heidelberg Catechism. And the consistory said, yeah, well, what do you know? Go pound sand.

They didn't say pound sand, but that's effectively what they said. And so they appealed to classes.

We have a regional gathering of ministers and elders. It's a court of appeals. And they appealed to classes.

They said, consistory is wrong, and they're not agreeing with what we understand the

Catechism to teach or the scriptures to teach as summarized in the Catechism. And the classes, elders and ministers, and the ministers have been to seminary.

They said, what do you know? Go pound sand. And by this time, we were in contact, and they were writing me.

And I was telling them, don't give up. You are right. Stand on the Word of God as summarized in the

Heidelberg Catechism. And so they appealed the synod, and our synods only meet every three years.

And finally, synod meets, and they appealed, and the appeal came to synod. And the strong majority of synod stood up and said to classes and consistory, you people are profoundly wrong, and you owe an apology to Hank and Elsie Navis.

They were right, because they stood on the Word of God, and they had the

Catechism as our agreed understanding. And all you ministers and elders should be ashamed of yourselves.

And it wasn't a minister. It wasn't a theological professor. It wasn't even an elder, a ruling elder.

It wasn't even a deacon. It was two lay people, humble, ordinary people.

Hank's gone. Elsie's still here, who stood on the Word of God, and they saved my federation of churches from a gross distortion of the gospel of Jesus Christ, a

Galatian heresy. They did it. I didn't do it.

Not a minister did it. They did it, and they held us to account. That's the power of catechisms and confessions.

It's the power of the Word of God, but it's the use of catechisms and confessions.

They held us to our own confession. I know I got to quit. Why was

Dr. King so persuasive in 1964? Why was he so persuasive in the letter from the

Birmingham jail? If you haven't read that, it's a great piece of American political rhetoric. Why was that letter so persuasive?

Why was the dream speech that we've apparently abandoned in this country, why was the dream speech so powerful in other speeches like that?

Because he held us as a nation to account for what we actually, if I can say the word confess, in our constituting documents.

We have a declaration, we have a constitution, and we were not living up to what we say we believe as our political, cultural creed.

And he won because he was right. He held us to account for what we say we believe. That's what

Hank and Elsie Davis did. They held the church to account for what we say we believe and what the

Word of God actually said. Without that, where would they have been?

Nowhere. You have your interpretation of the Word, and Pastor Hoekstra has his interpretation of the

Word. Classes and Synod agrees with him. Go pound sand. They saved the

Reformation from my federation. We had not spoken to this error. I'd been complaining about this error. Who listens to idiot history professors?

That was the first time we spoke to this issue. Now, we would continue. They made it so that we would deal with it.

We came back to it again a couple of times, and we got it right. But we only got it right because of Hank and Elsie Davis.

Those are names. I know you won't remember these names after today, but those are names that ought to be remembered.

In my mind, those are heroes.

They believed the Word of God. They stood on it. You know how terrifying it must have been for Hank and Elsie to stand up in front of all those ministers and elders who said,

God, what do you know? They knew what the

Bible says. That's sola scriptura. That's how it really works. But it's not in isolation from the church.

It's in the church. It's with the church, and it's with the confession of the faith. We all confess out of the

Word of God. Does that make sense? Is that clear? It's not biblicism.

It's not narcissism. It's not solipsism. This is confessional

Christianity. And it's biblical. It's historical.

It's vital. This is life -giving stuff. And I've got to stop.

The first thing the Reformation did after we had a Reformation was to start writing confessions.

And you know what we stopped doing at the end of the 17th century?

We stopped writing confessions. I think that's a huge mistake. I think we need a new confession.

I've been arguing for this. I've been arguing that we need a new confession. We need to do in our age what they did in their age.

And the fact that we can't or are unwilling, I think, is a bad symptom. But at least we need to recapture our confessions and confessionalism as a bulwark against the tyranny of human opinion and a charter of Christian liberty.

Because you know what we confess in those confessions? The Scriptures are the sole authority for the Christian faith and the

Christian life. All right. Well, we'll stop there, and we'll take just a short break, and we'll come back and talk about sola fide and its modern detractors.

So stay tuned. You won't want to miss this. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.