2 Tim 3

Today's first reading is a favorite one to use as an alleged biblical proof of Sola Scriptura. 2 Tim 3:

10You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, 11persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. 12In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

In verse 14 Paul talks about "what you have learned and from whom you have learned it." The preceding verses remind Timothy of some of the things Paul and Timothy went through. Notice Paul does not appeal to an objective impartial reading of scripture. Before he mentions scripture he mentions reasons to trust him as a man of God. Remember Jesus didn't say, "Here is the truth." He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." Paul is following that. He is not focusing on a plan but a person, himself. He contrasts himself with those "having the form of godliness but denying it's power(vs 5)". Essentially Paul is saying Timothy should listen to him because he is a saint.

Then he talks about scripture. What does scripture means here? Probably the Septuagint. Timothy knew them as an infant. Paul does not hint at any books being added. So neither Paul nor Timothy have the New Testament in view here. Did the Holy Spirit have it in view? You can make that assumption but it is an assumption. It is not clear in the text. Catholics do apply what these verses say to the New Testament as well but that does not flow trivially from this verse. We base it on other statements the church has made about the bible that clearly apply to the New Testament.

Then we get down to the verses protestants actually quote, verses 16 and 17. What do they say? First of all, scripture is God-breathed or inspired by God. This is amazingly important. It is stronger than saying it is inerrant. It means God chose these words to make Himself known. It means we need to read them. We need to memorize them. We need to reflect on them. When Catholics deny Sola Scriptura they do not deny the importance of the bible. Quite the opposite. What Catholics say is it is so important it must be read in the right light so it does not get distorted. It is so good that if we twist it to our own desires we can do great evil.

So it says it is inspired and then it says it is useful. Useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. Does that imply that nothing else is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness? No. This was obviously written before Paul was killed around 66 AD. So there would still be people who had heard Jesus preach. Certainly there were many who had heard Paul preach. Would those words be useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness? Of course. Paul is not denying the usefulness of everything else God has done. So the Sola part of Sola Scriptura just isn't here. There is no hint of it. To say it is is to twist the word of God.

Then we have the phrase "man of God". This could mean an ordained person. It certainly does not mean a novice Christian. It means somebody who has been formed in the faith to some degree. But then such a person needs to be taught, rebuked, corrected and trained in righteousness. By whom? By the scriptures? Hardly. Somebody has to use the scriptures to do that. That is how people get equipped for every good work. Timothy was to use the scriptures to form other men of God? Does that exclude the passing on of tradition? On the contrary, it is assumed that Timothy's way of interpreting scripture would be passed on.

Language and Schism

Reading a couple of discussions at Called to Communion again, here and here, I was struck by the comments about the reformers using terms to mean different things. Now, I am used to Catholic language and protestant language being quite different. Protestants think the doctrine of merit is a terrible heresy and the idea of sowing and reaping is a true spiritual principle. When you get past the language they are almost the same thing. So those diferences exist. But where do they come from? I kind of assumed they grew up over time. Theological cultures separate and they develop new language over time. But you find these language differences right in the reformers. Luther and Calvin were raised and educated as Catholics. Why should they use terms in a different way than Catholics used them?

One reason I can see is not actually wanting the difference to be seen as small as possible. When you are in the same church and making every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit then there is no advantage to adding confusion. But when you have already split. Then you have to justify that split. So you look at faith. Bryan Cross says:

Just a quick point of clarification. The Reformed conception of faith is not intellectual assent, but fiduciary faith. (Fiduciary faith is a novelty, something unknown before the sixteenth century.) From a Catholic point of view, fiduciary faith is a conflation of the theological virtues of faith and hope.

So why does Calvin use the term "faith" in a new way? He has split the church over the slogan "faith alone". With further reflection he might come to think it is not faith alone but rather faith and hope alone. But that would be a huge admission of defeat. That the slogan of the reformers is wrong and they are moving to a more Catholic position even if they are still not completely at the Catholic idea of faith, hope, and love. I can see how it is rhetorically much more attractive to "clarify" what you really mean by faith. People play with words to avoid admitting a mistake.

This is why schisms are so hard to fix. Even when the substance of the schism has been reduced by the spirit working on both parties you have a lot more pride involved. It would be diffcult for Calvin to admit that he claimed huge spiritual authority without adequate justification. So he has a vested interest in making that theolgical difference seem large. If he was arguing from within the church then he would likely have limits on his teaching that he would want to have removed. So the incentive would be to make the differences seem as small as possible. 

The opposite temptation can be seen on the Eucharist. David Anders says:

However, I completely agree that these very same terms – real, substantial, local – are given a different signification in Catholic theology. Knowing that, Calvin can be accused of some dissimulation for using terms that had already acquired a technical precision in the academic theology of his day.

But the point is why would Calvin engage in this dissimulation? On this issue there were many ideas out there. Luther and Zwingli were fighting each other. Calvin seemed to look for middle ground. Even then he saw that if the reformers didn't unite around one faith then nobody should believe they had the truth. So word games are used to try and avoid schism not with Catholics but with other protestants. That seems like a noble goal. The trouble is that covering differences with carefully chosen words is no way to deal with them. Look at the Anglican church if you doubt that.

So both the fact of schism and the threat of schsim tend to cause us to change our language and not deal honestly with our theological opinions. What we need is unity that does not depend on uniform theological opinions. A unity that depends on obedience to something higher than someone else's theological opinion. When that is established then we don't need to play these politcal games.

Predestination and Perspicuity

One final stab some protestants make to solve the problem of so many seemingly good Christians coming to believe so many bad doctrines is the idea that God might not make scripture clear to everyone. He just makes it clear to the elect. This is kind of a separate topic but some Calvinists try and explain the plethora of different teachings this way.

Now most Christians would say bad exegesis comes from a lack of faith. They would say many liberal Christians are not first of all lousy interpreters of scripture but that is something that flows from their unwillingness to accept some of the counter-cultural nature of the gospel. So all the scriptures about sin darkening the intellect and God giving wisdom to the simple do explain how people fail to understand scripture. But the people in view are not Christians. The people we are wondering about seem to be Christians. They profess faith in Jesus. They seem serious about studying the bible and doing what it says. They just disagree on important matters of doctrine.

So you get the spectacle of people saying St Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa are in hell. They are forced to go there because everyone who does not arrive at a Calvinist interpretation of the bible is not elect. Dave Armstrong described this kind of thinking as intellectual suicide. You can't make any sense of Christian history with this view.

The problem does not go away. There are so many branches of protestantism that a Calvinist want to agree with most of the time but sees a few areas where they appear to be in error. How does he explain them? They are either elect or they are not. They can't be elect on 80% if the issues and not on the other 20%. So the model does not fit the data.

The only thing that does fit the data is that the bible is not clear unless it has something to keep it in the proper light and focus. That something is missing from many Christian traditions. It does not prove that something is what Catholicism suggests but it does prove that Sola Scriptura is false. It fails on empirical grounds. What it has produced does not have the character of truth but rather has the character of the gradual loss of truth.

Why Other Christians Get It Wrong

This is continuing on the question of, "How do I know when my church is wrong?" that I started in the last post. You convince yourself that what you believe, based on the bible, is very close to the actual truth about God at least in all important matters. I say "convince yourself" because there are a bunch of hard questions you had to set asside to get here but so be it. But you still have the problem of other Christians. Why do so many arrive at different places than you when they start with the same bible?

I know, as a protestant, I underestimated this problem for a long time. I mostly talked about faith exclusively with reformed Christians. I had very little exposure to the wide range of opinion within Christianity. I have even less exposure to Christians of history. Modern mass media is starting to break this down but certainly when I graduated college 25 years ago I had almost no exposure to non-reformed ways of interpreting scripture.

The easiest answer to why others get it wrong is because they have made basic errors in faith or reason. Either they lack intelligence or they don't pray enough or they don't take the bible seriously or they follow traditions of men and not true Sola Scriptura. Essentially saying the problem is those guys are just not doing Christianity right.

That actually works until you get to know them. Once you interact with Christians who disagree with you then you have to recognize these assumption as not very charitable or you have to move into an even more hateful attitude towards them. Happily, in modern time, most people realize the hateful approach is not where God wants you to go. Unhappily hateful Christians are much more common on the net than they are in real life. Here is one example from a recent post:

I know that Bryan Cross has said that it's unkind to speak about him in the third person, and no doubt the words argumentum ad hominem will escape from his keyboard coming up here.

But for you Reformed folks who are trying to figure him out, what I'm about to say may seem unkind precisely until the moment when one of your children, or one of your church members, or even a Westminster-trained pastor that you may know, becomes enamored with and traipses off to Rome. At that point, then, ask, what is the real unkindness?

At one time this argument was used to justify putting heretics to death. Now it is merely used to justify making personal insults. Jesus said if you call somebody a fool you have already committed murder in your heart.

The trouble is coming to grips with the concept that these people are not fools. They are not evil. They are not biblically ignorant. Yet they have not come to the ideas that I claim are clearly taught in scripture. Somebody is doing something very wrong. It becomes hard to escape that that somebody is me.

There is one more way out of this mess. You can blame it on God. This is the Calvinist idea that they are just not predestined to be saved so that is the problem. I shall write another post about that.

Right When I Am Wrong

How does God correct us when we fall into error? On a personal level we can think of many times when we had our thinking about some aspect of the faith corrected. It might happen through a sermon, through personal devotions, or through a bible study. Often it is the combination of scripture and another Christian. But what about errors in the church? What if some error is shared by your faith community? Could that happen? Now when I was a protestant I really believed the answer was basically No. The people I knew were such impressive Christians. But the fact was that there were other groups of impressive Christians teaching some very different doctrines. So either they were in error or we were in error. Was there a good reason to assume it could not be my church making the mistakes? Beside, I didn't believe my church was infallible so I had to accept it was at least possible there were errors.

Now there are 3 possible answers to this question:

1. My church might be wrong but it does not matter because it is only about minor matters.
2. My church is not wrong and other churches do not agree with it because they are defective in some way.
3. My church is not wrong and other churches do not agree with it because God has not given them the same light He has given us.

The first one is mostly wishful thinking. It is what you tell yourself when you want to ignore the question but it does not stand up to scrutiny. Are all differences about minor matters? What is a minor matter? You could lean on salvation by faith alone and assert that the content of that faith was unimportant. What mattered was your heart. It didn't matter if I believed  in ordination of women or infant baptism as long as I accepted Jesus as my saviour. But what about premarital sex or abortion? Does that not mean liberal Christianity is somehow a valid option? I didn't believe that but what not?

At the end of the day faith had to matter. We needed to reorder our lives around what we believed. Can we really then say we are unsure of the truth of those very principles? I was doing teen ministry. Could I tell a teen that he should embrace chastity and sobriety because that was God's will for his life. That the constant message from the culture that drinking and sex were the best things in life was just a lie. Then could I tell him I was not really sure about those very teachings? That they were minor matters about which Christians disagreed?

So what were the major doctrines? Could we be sure we were right even about those? No. If we were we would be asserting a doctrine of infallibility. We didn't want to go there. But assume we solved this problem. Assume we knew what the major doctrines that defined the faith were and that we were confident we were right about them. I had some pretty strong ideas. I didn't have an objective criteria to get me there but I knew roughly where I should end up. Just assume that place was right and move on.

That leads us to response #2 and #3 which I will address in another post.

Psalm 19

I was listening to the Grace To You radio show last night. John MacArthur was talking about the Sufficiency of Scripture. He picked Psalm 19 as the most clear and concise statement in the bible about this. He focused on verses 7-9:

7 The law of the LORD is perfect,

reviving the soul.

The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy,

making wise the simple.

8 The precepts of the LORD are right,

giving joy to the heart.

The commands of the LORD are radiant,

giving light to the eyes.

9 The fear of the LORD is pure,

enduring forever.

The ordinances of the LORD are sure

and altogether righteous.

The amazing thing here is there is no reference to scripture in these verses. We have the law of the Lord, the precepts of the Lord, the statutes of the Lord, the commands of the Lord, etc. So he starts with the assumption that these phrases are talking only about scripture. He even does this when his stated goal is to prove the sufficiency of scripture.

This is how deeply embedded assumptions about Sola Scriptura are. A bright guy like MacArthur cannot even address them when he tries. He sets himself the task of proving scripture is sufficient and proves only the Word of God is sufficient. He can't even address the possibility that the Word of God might be bigger than just scripture. So much so that he declares a text that does not mention scripture at all to be the clearest, most concise statement of a principle about scripture.

The amazing part is that I know nobody is going to see the hole on his logic. I do because I have been thinking about such questions for a long time now. But 10 years ago I would have found his argument very convincing. I would never have noticed his huge question beg. That is because I shared the same reformed tradition. I had the same embedded assumptions. So I would have listened and has my ideas reinforced just like most of his listeners did. I would have said that my intelligence and John MacArthur's intelligence would allow me to be sure no error was made.