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.

Fruit Versus Religious Affections in Galatians 5

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, you know, Edwards wrote a book called Religious Affections, and he set up tests so that you could know how you were having, 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 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 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.

But people whose lives are characterized by these things are not going to inherit the kingdom of God. You�re not a believer if your life is characterized by idolatry 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 Pierpont floating across the room.

Nobody else records that story, so I don�t know if it�s true, but 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. 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 6, bearing one another�s burdens. There is nothing extraordinary about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. That�s the Christian life right there. There�s no floating.

There�s no falling. There�s no Shandala. 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�because you know what? Your religious experience is going to do this. For those who are listening to this and 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. 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 that 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�ve got to move on to the next topic. And that is biblicalism. Biblicalism, Sola Scriptura, and confessionalism.

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. You know, 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 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 has, from the very beginning of its history, confessed, and even in Scripture itself, confessed a certain understanding of the faith.

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, Scripture has confessed certain truths that help us to understand the rest of Scripture.

For example, like last night, I quoted Deuteronomy 6 .4, �Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. 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.

We can see right away He�s one in multiple Persons, but it becomes clearer over time that He�s one in three Persons. We know from Genesis, �The Spirit was hovering over the face of the deep. And we know from John 1, �In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and nothing came into being 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.

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.

Not every first century church had every epistle. 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.

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.

He 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. 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 A .D., with 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 someday. 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 360�s and decided on a canon.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. 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. And so the picture I always use is I in my closet with my Bible and 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 N. The other, we have two N�s, that�s boom, boom, canon. This is one N. 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 N�s.

But the canons only have one N. I say that because I�ve seen sort of self-published editions of the canons of Dort with two N�s. 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. If 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 a 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. I remember a few years ago, the President of the United States had a selfie stick.

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 ten times a day, right? Oh, I�ve got to gram this, right? I�m having mac and cheese, I�ve got to gram that, post that on Instagram.

You know what? I think in five years, a doctor is 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, twelve 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 objective norm.

So objective means that which is apart from me. The tree falls and a forest doesn�t make a sound, yes, if I�m not there to hear it. Your being there doesn�t have to, right, stuff happens, you�re not, you don�t make reality.

There�s no such thing as my truth or your truth, right? And so this is what I tell the students, we have a clock tower on campus, 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, this is 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.

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 doctor. A 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, 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, this is just, do you see how crazy we�ve become? It�s like a hundred 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. 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. If you know, 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 they went along the ceiling, it was pretty magnificent, where I learned in the youth group to get in touch with the oneness of the universe, right?

So the Socinians were the forebearers of the Unitarians, right? They weren�t Unitarians, 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 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 Scripture 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 faith and 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, 16. It�s systematizing in a historical way, 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, not 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 creek, 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 optical tube, a telescope, and 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, by reading geocentrism into scripture, that was a huge lesson that was really hard for people to learn. It took my people about a century to accept it.

Some of my people were very skeptical. Hermann Wittius 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 Hermann Wittius said, that�s crazy.

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

The Biblicists don�t want to 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, and they tend also to be suspicious of systematic theology.

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 Voss will change your life if you let him, if you let Gerhardus Voss 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 teaching of Jesus on the kingdom of God. It�s a great entry point. Pastors, have you been reading Hebrew epistle of the DFAK a little bit?

I don�t agree with everything he does, but it�s an interesting and useful�Pauline eschatology, and then his survey, biblical theology. With Voss, you�ve got to read a paragraph or two or three, and then think about it for a few days.

You can�t be in a hurry. 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�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. 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. 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 law, 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.

And 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 is 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?

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. The 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 entirely know what it means, but it�s really interesting that he says it. And by the way, 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. 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.