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R. Scott Clark Interview--Confessions
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.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and we like to talk about theology, piety, and practice on this show, but that�s to steal the line from our Scott Clark, who�s our guest today.
Dr. Clark, welcome back to No Compromise Radio.
Hey, Mike, great to be with you, and I love it when people talk about theology, piety, and practice. That is outstanding.
Well, here�s my problem, though. You�ve wrecked me, because every time I think of the word �practice I think of Allen Iverson, and I play that little YouTube where he says we�re talking about practice.
I hear him say that 50 times, so I�m wrecked.
Well, that�s good. I�m glad it�s in your head. I mean, you know, the old Reformed used to always say, you know, there are two parts to theology, most all of them. The first part is doctrine. Sometimes they would call it theory, but, you know, when we say that, it sounds different than they meant it.
But they meant doctrine, and the second part is practice, that�s Christian life. And preaching involves not only exegeting the text and finding the doctrine and the biblical theology, but it also means bringing it to bear in the lives of God�s people appropriately, you know, appropriate to the text of Scripture.
And that�s practice. We live out the Christian life in a place, in the Church, and together, according to the Word of God, and we have to practice the faith. So I love that. You know, I just, you know, it�s Allen Iverson, so he�s such a compelling personality anyway.
And you kind of felt for him, you know, who played the game harder than Allen Iverson? When was the last time you saw a guy dive for a loose ball, a guy that made as much money as Allen Iverson, and yet diving for loose balls and scrapping for every point?
And then, you know, for people to criticize him that he didn�t, you know, practice hard enough when they play 86 games a year, I did kind of feel for him, but yeah, it�s a great.
Bit of audio. Dr. Clark, before we talk about your book, Recovering the Reformed Confession, today on the show, let�s talk a little bit about Nebraska for a second. Who�s going to be the next Nebraska football coach?
Will it be Scott Frost?
I don�t know. I hope so. You know, I always, hey, I have a Scott Frost connection. Really? So, Larry and Carol Frost, his mom and dad, were at Lincoln High when I was a student in Lincoln, Nebraska. I graduated in 1979, and Larry was the football coach at Lincoln High, the Lincoln High Lynx.
So I can�t say I was close friends with Larry, but, you know, I used to see him in the hallway and say, �Hey, coach. So, I mean, I always enjoyed Scott. I wish Bill Walsh hadn�t messed up his throwing motion.
He always reminded me when he, you know, when he would go back to throw, he kind of shot put the football like Carol, who was an Olympian shot putter, I think, in 1968 in Mexico. So, who knows? I mean, he seems like he knows what he�s doing, and he seems exciting and maybe able to recruit and kind of pull things together.
Right now, Nebraska football reminds me of, you know, the Bill Jennings years and the bad years from 19, what, 1941 or �42 to �62, so we can always hope.
It�s kind of like the Mo Ivey years for Nebraska basketball. Scott, you do not know this, but I�m looking at a football here in my study here in Massachusetts, and that football is autographed, and it has many autographs, including Jerry Taggey�s, Rich Glover�s, and Johnny Rogers�s.
Yeah. The listener may not appreciate how wonderful that is. Hey, I used to have, so now we�re really going down the memory hole, and the people are turning up radios everywhere, but I had a pair of Jeff Kinney�s tennis shoes, and just so the listener knows, Jeff Kinney is the running back from Nebraska who carried two, not one, but two Oklahoma Sooners with him across the goal line in the game of the century, Thanksgiving Day, 1971, in Norman, Oklahoma.
So, yeah. So, I hope everybody will forgive us remembering a little glory in Nebraska football.
Well, Dr. Clark, let�s talk a little bit about the book covering the Reformed Confession. I think I might like some of your articles in covenant justification and pastoral ministry as much, but this is one of those books that I think every listener needs to get, because many people in the circles I run in and No Compromise Radio is played in, they don�t really understand much about confessions and catechisms and creeds, and I want them to understand them more because they�re helpful for lots of reasons maybe we�ll talk about today.
But before we get into the book in particular, tell us a little bit about sola scriptura and how confessions and creeds would fit into that, contra-biblicism, sola scriptura, etc. So how can we believe in sola scriptura and still have a high regard for confessions?
Well, you know, that�s a great question. People often misunderstand sola scriptura so that they think that one either believes in sola scriptura or one holds confessions, but one can�t do both. And the truth is that our confessions confess sola scriptura.
We wrote confessions precisely to speak to this very issue. The Belgic Confession, for example, which was written in 1561, has a whole chapter that and then it comes back to it again in chapter 32 to articulate what we mean by sola scriptura.
And so what we mean and what Luther meant and all the great Protestants you know, this is the 2017 500th anniversary of, you know, at least the beginning stage of the Confirmation 1517, 95 Theses and all of that what they meant to say is that it�s not that there are not other authorities in the Christian faith and the Christian life, but there is only one final, ultimate ruling authority.
And that ruling final, ultimate authority, that final court of appeal is not the Church, it�s not human experience, it�s not private revelations, it�s the Word of God. And we believe we Protestants believe that the Scripture is sufficiently clear and the word we often use for that is perspicuity the Scripture is sufficiently clear that we are able to determine from the Scripture what we must believe for the Christian faith and the Christian life.
And that anything anyone wants to impose on us has to be demonstrated ultimately from the Word of God, so that in Reformed churches we are bound ultimately, finally to the Scripture, so that if someone can show us, for example, that what we confess in a given article is contrary to the Word of God, we are duty-bound to change that confession, because ultimately, finally, we are bound to the Word of God.
And so we�re with Luther. You know, Luther stood before God and the Church and the civil authorities, the ecclesiastical authorities, and he said he may not have said, �Here I stand, I can do no other but he certainly said that, �My conscience is captive to the Word of God, and it�s neither safe nor right, and I cannot and I will not go against conscience meaning �as captive to the Word of God.
And so, you know, so that is where we stand, and that�s what he wrote even a month before he spoke up at Worms in April of 1521. So that�s what �Sola Scriptura� means. We read the Scripture together as a church, we listen to the Scripture, we consider the Scripture, we pray over Scripture, we compare Scripture with Scripture, we compare the clearer passages with the more difficult passages.
We admit that not all passages are alike plain in themselves, that�s the language of the Westminster Confession. For example, when Paul talks about baptism for the dead, you and I might have some opinion, but, you know, ecclesiastically we don�t really know, and I don�t frankly think anybody really knows what Paul means by that, and there are some difficult places in Scripture.
But when Jesus says, �Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Or, �For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
Or, �Go make disciples. Right? �All authority has been given to me on heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We know what those passages mean, and we might have quibbles about some things, but we know what the main thrust of those passages is, and those are clear enough and perspicuous enough and sufficient.
Scripture is our charter of liberty. Nobody can bind my conscience to believe or do or say anything that�s contrary to the Word of God.
Talking to R. Scott Clark today as I�m listening to him, one of my goals is accomplished. I wanted to sit during this interview and pretend I was listening to a Heidelcast, and so that�s exactly what�s happening.
Make sure you, listener, read the Heidel blog. I read few blogs these days, but I read the Heidel blog and listen to the Heidelcast. I listen to every show, maybe 1 .5 speed, but I still listen. And the Heidelcast found.
Dr. Clark is a professor at Westminster Escondido, which leads me into the next part of my interview today regarding Sola Scriptura and now what you entitled in chapter 3, the quest for illegitimate religious experience.
And we live in a day and age of experiencing God, books selling by the millions. How do we experience God? So in light of confessions and infallible, trying to understand the infallible Word of God, what happened as you put this chapter under the crisis heading with the rise and the desire for an experience, i .e., mysticism?
How does that contradict Sola Scriptura, and why is it causing us so many problems?
Well, you know, there's nothing entirely new about what I call the quest for illegitimate religious experience, and I want the listener to understand I'm not against a vital, warm, personal, real experience in the Christian faith, you know, and I always pray that people would have a strong sense of the presence of God with them, and that the Spirit would testify within them to the truth of the Word and illumine the Word.
So we're not talking about any of that. All of that is perfectly right and proper and biblical and very much at the heart of our, you know, understanding, the Reformed understanding of the Word of God.
What I'm concerned about is that people often find ways to marginalize the Scriptures and to replace the Word of God with other things. So this is really a defense of Sola Scriptura. So I'm glad you led with that, because we're always tempted, and we were tempted in the Middle Ages.
We were tempted in some ways in the early Church, but particularly in the late Middle Ages, and then again beginning in the late 16th century through the 17th and 18th centuries and 19th centuries in different ways, to move the Scriptures to one side and replace them with private revelations.
For example, in the 1520s, and a little bit before and after, there were a group of radicals who were not actually Protestants, didn't believe in justification by grace alone through faith alone or even salvation, you know, sola gratia, sola fide, but they believed in salvation by law-keeping.
They were known as Anabaptists, and they also did not, many of them did not believe that the Bible is the final authority for the Christian faith and the Christian life. And they mocked the Protestants as ministers of the dead letter because they had revelations from God, and that was their Bible, they said.
A lot of what we know as modern Pentecostalism is really rooted in the Anabaptist movements from the 1520s. They spoke in tongues, they were slain in the Spirit, all of those phenomena with which we're so familiar now in second and third wave Pentecostalism, those things have their roots, at least proximately, in the early first generation Anabaptists.
They came back in American Christianity in a powerful way in the 19th century, but even in some ways in the 18th century, in the first Great Awakening, there was a turn to religious experience that tended to push people away from the Scriptures in some way, away from the objective promises of God, and cause Christians to look within themselves to find certainty.
So here I interact a little bit with Jonathan Edwards and the program that he set up, whereby people began looking at themselves, and rather than talking about fruit, right, we began talking about other things.
And this is because experience, even in the first Great Awakening, became so important that he had to set up tests to find out whether you were having the right kind of religious experience. And so in that way, you're sort of going down the rabbit hole.
Now we're no longer looking at Christ objectively, we're no longer resting on the objective promises, we're no longer thinking of the sacraments as signs and seals of God's promises, but increasingly we're looking at ourselves and making sure that we're having the right kind, the right quality of religious experience.
You know, Mike, I know you've had this experience, I'm sure you have. When I first became a Christian, it was in an evangelical setting, and the first thing that I learned, after I learned that I had to have a Bible with a cover on it, with a dove on it, the second thing I learned was I had to listen for still, small voices.
And that was very paralyzing. I was a young Christian, I didn't know any better, I thought everybody was telling me the truth, why would they lie? And I didn't even know where the verse came from. I just thought, well, this is true, all Christians hear still small voices.
And it was only, you know, after three or four years of agony did I learn that people had taken a verse out of context and misapplied it and set up a system of religious experience that really has no basis in the Word of God.
And I realized that people meant well when they were telling me, well, God told me this and God told me that and God told me the other thing, but really they were just giving a spiritual-sounding name to what may have been otherwise pious desires, or in some cases maybe impious desires.
Scott, when I was saved, I heard still small voices, but they sounded like a 29-year-old man from Nebraska's Grammar and Diction in Language. They sounded just like me! That was so amazing. Dr. Clark, you know, that's like when you read Jesus calling by whoever that lady is, it sounds just like a 45-year-old woman.
Jesus sounds like that.
Well, apparently the Lord says, "...warsh and ruff and ruddy.".
To this day, my kids give me a hard time because the white stuff that comes out of a cow, I say M-E-L-K, milk. That's how I was taught. Milk, yes. Yeah, not milk. And you know what, Dr. Clark? This seems like this quest for this illegitimate religious experience, it is a sad byproduct of lots of pietism today, in my opinion.
Try to describe for our listeners, what's the difference between being pietistic, that is to say, we'd like to be godly, and pietism, which drives towards the inside, and if you're always driving towards the inside, isn't the natural extension or the logical conclusion of pietism to have this internal religious experience?
Well, that's right. There was a movement that arose through the 17th and 18th centuries in the state churches in Europe, and it was driven by a legitimate concern. The concern was, well, now everyone is in the state church, everyone's baptized, and we begin sometimes presuming that everyone is converted, and the reaction to the state church was to begin to form small groups.
They were called conventicles, and the desire was to make sure everyone was really converted, and so they were, in England, you know, there were holy clubs in which the Wesley's participated in, and there were conventicle movements through the 17th century where people were gathering in small groups, and again, nothing against small groups, but the pietists said, you know, orthodoxy is great.
We're not opposed to orthodoxy, but we're more concerned that you have the right kind of spiritual experience, and by the way, we also want you to be concerned about these other things, one of which was kind of a precursor of the social gospel, and so that, you know, we want to have a concern for the world.
And again, nothing wrong with a concern for the world, but they began to set up, again, tests of true Christianity, and when I read pietist scholars, even scholars of pietism who often themselves are pietists, you know, self-identified pietists, they, you know, anybody who loves Jesus and who, you know, loves his brothers and sisters and attends to worship and those basic things, you know, but particularly anybody who's really zealous for the faith, well, that person must have been a pietist, you know, so you kind of had two classes of Christians, you know, those who were spiritual, if you will, and those who were ordinary, so all of that, you know, filtered into American evangelicalism, both the revivalism of the First Great Awakening and the Arminian revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and pietism, and by the middle of the 19th century, it produced a very powerful but toxic mix that really led us away from the fundamental truths of Scripture as understood in the Reformation, away from, you know, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, away from sola scriptura, and away from attending to what the Reformed describe as the due use of ordinary means, the going to hear the Word of God preached and the use of the sacraments as Christ has instituted them, you know, and so piety became one thing and church became another, and again, you know, as a young evangelical, I was just doing kind of what I was told, I didn't know any better, and so I learned that, you know, truly spiritual people were on staff with crusade, you know, and I was, again, this is not a shot at crusade, but that's what I learned, I was given the strong impression that, and I was all but told by people in the Navigator's movement that, well, you know, true spirituality is being in crusade or Navigators or something, and the ordinary Christians go to church, and, you know, I told, why do we go to church?
Well, we don't want to offend, you know, the ordinary Christians, and so you get this idea of two classes of Christians, and of course, I've heard this from my Pentecostal brothers and sisters, you know, well, true Christians, you know, real spiritual Christians, they have the gifts and the blessings and so forth, and ordinary Christians do not, and all of this bifurcation is very damaging to the life of a Christian, very damaging to the life of the church, and it's entirely unnecessary.
The truth is, God has established an ordinary Christian life where we attend to worship, and we attend to the due use of ordinary means, preaching of the Word, the use of the sacraments, and we live our Christian lives before God and man humbly and quietly, fulfilling our vocation during the week, and there aren't two kinds of Christians, and we aren't getting extra-biblical special revelations, and we're not second-class Christians if we aren't rolling on the floor or, you know, speaking in tongues or what have you.
Dr. Clark, I think it's fascinating because maybe a modern-day categorization could be the radical Christians and the unradical Christians, but maybe to push it back in time, because you mention this in the book, a little backdrop to the story.
Years ago, when people would come here to New England and they would visit, they would be a speaker, Truman comes, Carl Truman, and I say, you know, Carl, do you want to go see Whitfield's statue and where he preached and where Edwards was and all that?
And he was like, well, yeah, if you want. He wasn't that excited, and I thought, why is he not excited? There's where David Brainerd was buried, and of course, Edwards said some things that were right and good and proper, but there was this underbelly to some of Edwards' stuff, even maybe it was his interpretation of Song of Solomon, and when you noted his phrase, I am sick of love.
But you have in your book, page 91, Edwards argued that if the Queen of Sheba, who lived before the Incarnation, fainted, how much more appropriate is it for Christians to faint at the direct experience of the risen Christ?
He also appealed, he, Edwards, to the example of the Philippian jailer who fell down before Paul. So maybe we have not just the radical and unradical, those that go to Navigators and those that go to church, but now we have the fainters and the non-fainters, and what do I do.
If I'm not a fainter? Well, exactly. This is what the mere Christian, the ordinary Christian, faces, isn't it? There's this tremendous pressure to have the right kind of religious experience. So now we begin seeking to sort of manufacture this experience and make sure that we're conforming, we're fitting in, we're meeting the test.
And my response to all this is, I don't see any of this inscription, none of those things are prescribed in Scripture. What is prescribed in Scripture are the fruits of the Spirit, peace, joy, love, patience, kindness, gentleness.
Again, these sorts of things, there is no law. Those are the things that we're to seek, you know, by the grace of God and in attendance to the due use of ordinary means. And daily, you know, as we say in the Heidelberg Catechism, 88, 89, and 90, dying to sin, dying to self, and living to Christ, confessing our sins, and accepting forgiveness, and learning to love one another.
That's the vision of Christianity that the Reformation had, not people fainting. I mean, I truly believe, and I know there are people who disagree with me, and there have been some responses to some of what I've written, but to say that, well, if you really understood the 17th century, guys, you'd see that they were right there.
If you were attending a service in John Owen's congregation and you started fainting and rolling on the floor, a couple of the men would take you outside and talk to you, and they'd first make sure that you were okay medically, and then they would tell you to knock it off.
This sort of thing wasn't proper. It didn't belong to public worship, you know? So we've been deeply influenced by all of this stuff, and particularly by third-wave Pentecostalism, or by modern Anabaptism.
You know, you mentioned Platt, or Francis Chan, and being a radical, and all of that. Well, loving your neighbor is radical. Loving God with all your faculties, that's radical. When Jesus said to the rich young ruler, go sell all that you have and give it to the poor, the monks took that as an advice to go do that, literally.
They completely misunderstood what he was doing. He was saying to that fellow, if you think you've kept the law, well, here's the law, keep this. And of course, the young man went away sad because he couldn't keep the law.
And that was Jesus' point. You can't keep the law. That's what I came to do. So a lot of this is just a confusion, frankly, of some basic.
Categories like law and gospel. And I think eventually, Dr. Clark, it drives people to lose their assurance, and they become basically functional Roman Catholics because it was Rome's intention to drive away assurance, to get the people to tow the company line, and the Reformation, of course, and the Bible.
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and we are sons and daughters, and we don't have to earn anything. The ground and condition of our salvation is Christ's perfect works, not ours. And so today's show has gone by fast.
Give us kind of an overview, a four or five-minute overview, or two or three-minute overview of the rest of the book, because this has just only been a teaser today.
Well, you know, the book is kind of in two parts. The first part is the crisis, and that's the quest for illegitimate religious certainty, where people begin to look for certainty where they shouldn't.
What is certain is the Word of God. What is certain is salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. What is certain is really what the Church has confessed from the Word of God, and then they begin, as we were saying, to look for illegitimate religious experience.
The second part of the book is the recovery. What do we do about that? And so what I tried to chart here in this book, now almost 10 years old, was that we need to recover our identity, right? And that's not all that difficult, what it means to recover our identity.
I didn't say it would be easy, but it's not that difficult, inasmuch as we need to start relearning our vocabulary and our categories, and putting them to use again. And you know, everything that people say they want, you know, they want a connection with tradition, they want a reverent worship, all the things that they say that they want, it's in the Reformation.
It's in the Reformed Theology, Piety, and Practice. There's a way of gathering together on the Lord's Day for worship that is ordained by God's Word, that's historic, that goes back to the second century, goes back to the first century, and all we have to do is do it.
And in fact, all we must do is do it twice, just as the Church has always done. Gather on the Lord's Day morning to hear the law and the gospel, and to receive the sacraments, and gather on the Lord's Day evening, and in between to rest, to enjoy one another.
People say they want community, and as they say in Brooklyn, I got your community right here. I mean, it's right in the Church, in the Visible Covenant community. There's your community, those are your brothers and sisters, gathered at the feet of Christ, and then meeting one another's needs, taking up offerings for alms, you know, poor relief in the congregation.
Honestly, we have a plan, and we used to do it, and we lost our way, but we're not so far away that we can't get back to it. Well, Dr. Clark, thanks for being.
On the show today. As I think of the book Recovering the Reformed Confession, Our Theology, Piety, and Practice, it would behoove me to just tell the listeners today, go online and pull up the Belgic Confession, for instance, and just go to chapter 23 or section 23 and 24, Justification and Sanctification, and just read them, and I think you, the listener, would find them biblically accurate, theologically driven, very warm and doxological, and precise.
And so even with the controversy going on now when it comes to sola fide, you read those two things, chapter 23 and 24, and you say to yourself, wow, that is clear, refreshing, biblical, Christ-centered, and warming, experiential, if you will, it drives you to an experience.
And so if you're listening today, do two things. Recovering the Reformed Confession by R. Scott Clark, you'll want to pick that up on Amazon, you won't regret it, and then read—this one's cheaper, this one stood the test of time longer—read Belgic Confession 23 and 24, and I think, Dr. Clark, you'd be happy if they read.
Those two sections. I would be very happy, and it's easy to find. You can go to rscottclark .org, there's a whole section of Reformed Confessions, and the Belgic is there, the Heidelberg is there, the Westminster Standards, lots of great resources.
And I promise the listener, if you go and read the Belgic and the Heidelberg, it will change your life, and you will thank Mike for directing you to read it.
And lastly, for you pagans out there, go to YouTube, type in Alan Iverson Practice, and you will, for two minutes, laugh and laugh and laugh. We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice!
Dr. Clark, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio and a fellow Nebraska Cornhusker. We'll see you next time.