Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Theology’ Category

God’s Hammer: The Bible and Its Critics – Part One

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology, tagged on June 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

This is the first in a series of posts commenting on the book God’s Hammer by Gordon Clark.                                            

Necessity, authority, sufficiency, clarity.  Historically Protestants have considered these to be hallmark characteristics of Scripture, summing them up under the Reformation slogan sola scriptura.  But beginning in the 19th century, the reformed trumpet began to make an uncertain sound.  In 1893, noted Presbyterian minister and scholar Charles Augustus Briggs was suspended by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. for  teaching that the Bible contains error.  While this was a notable victory, the following decades were not so kind to the Fundamentalist cause, and by the end of the 1920s the PCUSA was firmly in the grip of Modernist ministers preaching a false gospel from a (supposedly) fallible Bible. 

Now the theological debates of a hundred years ago may seem far removed and unimportant to Christians today.  And while it’s tempting to dismiss the Fundamentalist-Modernist conflict over textual criticism, translations and Biblical infallibility as nothing more than a case of pointy headed professors wrangling over words, that would be a big mistake.  The transformation of the PCUSA from a Bible believing church to a tool of the modernists began with an attack on the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of God’s Word.  “Yea hath God said?,” was Satan’s first attack on verbal revelation, and his attacks continue in our day.  Writing in the introduction to God’s Hammer (GH), editor John Robbins comments,

The twentieth century may be a pivotal period in human history, for the doctrines of justification through faith alone and truth through the Bible alone came under such a severe and sustained attack.  That attack, which has been countered by only a few of the professed tens of millions of Christians in America, has come primarily from within the church itself.  It indicated that the wolves are within the sheepfold, and in many cases, are actually posing as shepherds. 

Gordon Clark was one of those few twentieth century theologians who undertook to counter the attacks on Scripture.  And in truth, he did more than simply counter the attacks, with devastating logic he demolished the critical arguments of both modernist and neo-orthodox scholars and demonstrated powerfully from the Scriptures the truth and authority of the Bible.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be blogging through God’s Hammer chapter by chapter to discuss Clark’s arguments in defense of the Bible.  If you haven’t yet, I urge you to buy and read a copy.  If you’re a long time Clarkian, I urge you to reread it, for God’s Hammer is an apologetic gold mine.  

Comments are welcome.

Read Full Post »

The Word of God and God the Word

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology on June 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Christians often refer to the Bible as the Word of God.  And that’s certainly appropriate, for that’s what the Bible claims to be:  God’s inspired verbal revelation.  At the same time the Bible describes Jesus Christ as God the Word,  “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn.1:1).  Is it merely an accident that the term ‘word’ is used of both the Bible and Christ, or is there some connection?  

Writing in his book The Johnanine Logos, Gordon Clark examines the apostle John’s use of the Greek word logos, famously translated ‘Word’ in the first verse of John’s Gospel as a name for Jesus.  Clark then looks at how John uses logos in the rest of his Gospel account and finds after quoting several examples that it always means, “an intelligible proposition [sentence].” So what is the connection between the Logos who is God in verse 1 and the logoi  [plural of logos] that are propositions (sentences) in the remainder of the book?  Clark writes,

The connection is this:  The Logos of verse 1 is the Wisdom of God.  To him his worshippers erected the architectural triumph Hagia Sophia, the church in Constantinople dedicated to the Holy Wisdom of God…Some of this wisdom is expressed in the propositions of the previous list [various verses from John’s Gospel that are said to be logoi].  They are the mind of Christ:  They are the very mind of Christ.  In them we grasp the Holy Wisdom of God.  Accordingly there is no great gap between the propositions alluded to and Christ himself.

The Scriptures are not merely black ink marks on white pages; they are the eternal thoughts of God.  Paul stated, “we have the mind of Christ” (1Cor.2:16).  Christians  have the mind of Christ by understanding and believing the words of Christ recorded in the Scriptures.  And not the words of Christ only, but all the words in all the Scriptures, for, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2Tim.3:16).  To know God the Word, we must be good students of the Word of God.

Read Full Post »

Tool Time

Posted in Theology, tagged on May 12, 2010| 4 Comments »

tool: one who is used or manipulated by another – Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary

Featured as the lastest Trinity Review, Richard Bennett’s article “The Roman Catholic Agenda Embedded in the Manhattan Delcaration” is a much-needed exposé of this dangerous, ecumenical document.  Bennett’s main point is that the Manhattan Declaration, while being promoted as a Christian defense of life, marriage and liberty of conscience, is in fact a hard-core Romanist document designed both to advance the socialist agenda of the Roman Catholic Church-State and to draw Evangelicals into the Roman Church itself.  That this is the case should surprise no one, for Rome has a long history of two-faced political maneuvering.  But what I find most distressing about this sordid affair is how leading figures in the Evangelical community are so easily duped into becoming tools of the Romanist agenda.  

Check out the following video to see Baptist tools Mike Huckabee and Chuck Colson promoting the Manhattan Declaration.  

I found a couple of remarks in this segment especially interesting.  At about the 3:15 mark, Colson describes the language of the Manhattan Declaration as “covenantal.”  So according to him, those Evangelicals who have signed the Manhattan Declaration have entered into a covenant with the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches, both of which deny the Gospel.  This is in direct contradiction to Scripture, which enjoins Christians to separate from those who teach false doctrine.  Then Huckabee toward the end – around seven minutes into the video – makes the comment that Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” was inspired, to which Colson adds that it was inspired by God.  Who knew?  I guess Colson agrees with his Romanist buddies on more that just social action.  By promoting the notion of continuing revelation, he’s joined with Rome as a co-belligerent in the attack on the doctrine of Scripture.

Read Full Post »

Machen on the Inspiration of Scripture

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology on May 10, 2010| 2 Comments »

The Bible alone is the Word of God.  This is the axiom, the starting point, for the whole system of Christian doctrine.  Since all saving knowledge of God is given in Scripture (man has an innate knowledge of God that does not lead to salvation, see Rom.1:18-23 and WCF I.1) it is critical that the church clearly understand and articulate what the Bible has to say about its own origin and authority.  In the early years of the twentieth century the Bible was under attack by liberals, who, by advancing an erroneous doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible, managed to undermine the authority of the Scriptures in the eyes of many.    J. Gresham Machen would have none of this.  Writing in his book Christianity and Liberalism, Machen commented,

The contents of the Bible, then, are unique.  But another fact about the Bible is also important.  The Bible might contain an account of a true revelation from God, and yet the account be full of error.  Before the full authority of the Bible can be established, therefore, it is necessary to add to the Christian doctrine of revelation the Christian doctrine of inspiration.  The latter doctrine means that the Bible not only is an account of important things, but that the account itself is true, the writer having  been so preserved from error, despite a full maintenance of their habits of thought and expression, that the resulting Book is the “infallible rule of faith and practice.”

The Bible alone is the Word of God, and that Word is truth, infallibly communicated by the human authors of Scripture writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Read Full Post »

God’s Truth is All Truth

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology on April 25, 2010| 6 Comments »

“All truth is God’s truth,” or so we often hear.  I myself have said this and felt righteous, wise and holy in doing so.  But closer examination reveals a serious problem with this popular maxim: no definition of the word truth.  What does truth mean in this context? Highlighting this problem in a lecture available on The Trinity Foundation website titled “The Ministry of the Trinity Foundation,” Jack Lannom said,

My mistaken belief that all truth is God’s truth was really no different from the idea that all worship is God’s worship.  John Moffat (sic) addressed this idea in an article in The Christian Conscience. ‘ I can imagine Nadab and Abihu talking about the early worship service in the wilderness.  One says to the other, ‘all fire is God’s fire.  God made all fire, therefore it’s all of him.” Or while Moses was up on the mountain, Mount Sinai, the children of Israel could have said to Aaron, “Aaron, all worship is God’s worship.’ ‘ I love this last phrase that John Moffat (sic) says, ‘these analogies have the same deceptive sound of being logical at first, but they are full of the same ambiguity and deceit as the expression all truth is God’s truth.’

These saying – all fire is God’s fire and all truth is God’s truth – are ambiguous and deceitful because the same word is being used to mean different things.  There are many types of fire.  There are campfires, there are brush fires, there’s even a burning lake of fire, but these fires are different things than what God deemed acceptable to himself under the law.  There are many activities that people call worship, but only that worship defined by God is worship proper.  All other so-called worship is really idolatry. 

And so it is with truth.  There are many things people call truth:  scientific truth, historical truth, truth gleaned from personal experience, truth learned from Oprah.  But none of these things are truth as the Bible defines truth.  Christ prayed, “Sanctify them by your truth.  Your word is truth.” 

The Bible alone is the Word of God, therefore the Bible alone is truth.  Those who say “all truth is God’s truth,” are proclaiming that there is truth outside of the Scriptures that man discovers on his own.  But this is false, for we are just as dependent on God for the knowledge of the truth as we are for salvation.  What we should say is, “God’s truth is all truth.” That is the Christian position.

Read Full Post »

Is the Bible a Reliable Book?

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology on March 31, 2010| 2 Comments »

While rereading Gordon Clark’s God’s Hammer, I was impressed with the forward written by one of the Bible’s great recent champions, Harold Lindsell.  Lindsell writes,

At the heart of the Christological discussion lies the question:  From whence do we get our knowledge about the person and work of Jesus Christ?  The answer is simple enough.  The only Jesus the Church has known or can know is the Jesus of Scripture.  Thus if Scripture tells us what we need to know about the second person of the Trinity, we are still left with another question:  Is the source (i.e. the Bible and its sixty-six books) from which we get out knowledge about Jesus a reliable book?  This opens the door to three possibilities:

1. The Bible is free from all error in the whole and in the part.

2. The Bible is free from error in some of its parts, but it is false in other parts.

3. The Bible is totally unreliable and cannot be depended on for any truth.

Whoever chooses any one of these propositions depends on some basic presupposition from which the inquirer starts.  In our modern world there are basically two ways men write theology, and each involves a presupposition which ends up in quite different ways. 

In all probability a majority of the scholars in the West today would choose option 2. Marxists and many people who adhere to the Unitarian Universalist denomination would more likely choose  option 3.

But whoever writes theology properly starts with the presupposition that the Bible is a divine book.  They do not deny that there were human authors who were involved in the inscripturation of the Word of God.  The writers of Holy Writ were divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit so that they were kept from writing anything that was false.  The divine authorship by the Holy Spirit guaranteed that the final product would be the errorless Word of God even as the historical Jesus was the sinless Son of God who was conceived by the same Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  Since God cannot lie, no part of Scripture is false.  The omnipotent God of Scripture has not stuttered in his speech.

There is no more important doctrine that the doctrine of Scripture.  Get it right, your understanding of other doctrines will tend to be sound.  Get it wrong, and you’re hopelessly lost in a sea of subjectivity.  Those who claim Christ while attacking his Word are like the double minded men of James.  Unstable in all their ways, they will receive nothing from the Lord.

Read Full Post »

Augustine the Tree Hugger

Posted in Theology on December 9, 2009| 5 Comments »

While reading Augustine’s Confessions, I came across a passage where he discussed his beliefs while an adherant of Manichaeism.  The Manichaeans emphasized the the immanence of God, that is, they believed the whole universe, every rock, every tree, every blade of grass was permeated by God.  For someone who holds this position, it’s only logical to see any act of farming or commercial development a great evil and affront to the divine nature. 

While  a  Manichaean, Augustine believed the mere act of plucking a fig resulted in the weeping of both the fruit and its mother tree.  Looking back many years later as a Christian, he described his earlier beliefs as,  “nonsense,” stating,

And I believed (wretch that I was) that more mercy was to be shown to the fruits of the earth, than to men for whose use they were created.

As a Manichaean, Augustine held to a superstitious reverence for the earth and its fruits.  As a Christian, he came to understand that the earth and all its fruits were given to men by God, that the earth was made for man, not man for the earth. 

What is striking about this passage is how much our modern environmentalists resemble the Manichaeans.  The folks meeting in Copenhagen all seem to think that the good of mankind ought to be subordinated to holy mother earth and are prepared to impose this position with draconian laws and regulations.  And like the Manichaeans, their errors can be traced to their ignorance or outright rejection of what God has said about creation and man’s relationship to it.  They should take a cue from Augustine who came to his senses sixteen hundred years ago.

Read Full Post »

Book Review: Can the Presbyterian Church in America be Saved?

Posted in Theology on October 30, 2009| 7 Comments »

CanThePresChurch Can the Presbyterian Church in America be Saved? by Sean Gerety.  The Trinity Foundation, 158 pages.  $9.95. 

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is in trouble.  In many of the denomination’s churches, the central teaching of Christianity – which is that sinners are saved by believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ apart from any good works performed by them – is being supplanted by a clever substitute called the Federal Vision (FV) or New Perspective on Paul (NPP) that defines saving belief in such a way that it includes good works.  Of course attacks on salvation by belief alone are not new within the church; read Paul’s epistle to the Galatians for an account of this very thing in the first century.  The Roman Catholic Church-State, the largest visible church on earth, would later suppress this doctrine, also known as justification by faith alone, for a thousand years.  In the sixteenth century, salvation by belief alone was the central issue at stake in the Protestant Reformation.  Men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin –  correctly distinguishing between justification and sanctification, between a sinner being declared righteous by God and the process of that sinner becoming more like Christ – understood and taught that good works contribute precisely nothing to salvation but are the fruits of salvation already accomplished. That much of the PCA , an heir of the Reformation, could fall away from sound Gospel teaching is a remarkable thing.  How did the PCA get into such a mess?  Is there any hope of it getting out?  These are questions Sean Gerety addresses in his new book Can the Presbyterian Church in America be Saved?            

Gerety’s crisply written book (the main body of the text is a brief 88 pages) falls into three main sections: 1) a discussion of the Report of Ad Interim Study Committee on Federal Vision, New Perspective, and Auburn Avenue Theology adopted by the PCA in 2007, 2) an analysis of how Van Tilian epistemology and apologetics have undermined the ability of many PCA church officers to respond effectively to the Federal Vision challenge, and 3) a refutation of key errors used by Federal Vision (FV) supporters to advance their ideas.  A brief conclusion follows. (more…)

Read Full Post »

John Robbins Remembered

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology, Uncategorized on August 11, 2009| 4 Comments »

In the winter of 2001 a friend gave me a book on justification titled The Everlasting Righteousness by Horatius Bonar.  Being relatively new to reformed theology, I was eager to read about the doctrine on which the church stands or falls.  I started reading at the Foreword, and immediately found myself riveted by the stirring introduction.  Here’s what I read,

  It has been nearly 2,000 years since the apostle Paul wrote his letters explaining the gospel of justification by faith alone to the churches in Asia and Europe, and the light of the Gospel shone brilliantly in the spiritual, intellectual, and moral darkness of ancient Rome.  But Antichrist, already at work in the first century, soon sat in the temple of God, expelling and persecuting the saints and suppressing the Gospel of Christ for a millennium.  His dominion ended when God raised another witness to his truth in the sixteenth century.

It has been nearly 500 years since Martin Luther recovered the Gospel in Europe.  Once again, in the sixteenth century, the light of justification by faith alone dispelled the spiritual, intellectual, and moral darkness of medieval Rome.  The resulting civilization owed its salient features to the Gospel of Jesus Christ – to the first Christians and the Reformers – but for the past century the proclamation of that Gospel – and civilization – has been waning…

Clarity, brevity and power were the hallmarks of this writer, who in three brief pages did more to explode false gospels and proclaim the true one than many authors could do in thiry.  “Who writes like this?”  I asked myself.  And at the end of the  essay on page xi I found my answer:  John W. Robbins. 

I had never heard of John Robbins and knew nothing about his work.  The book’s publisher, The Trinity Foundation, was completely unknown to me.  But I was intrigued and wanted to find out more.  Over the next year I was a regular visitor to the Foundation’s web site, and what began with one small book soon turned into a whole library of Trinity Foundation material.  But the effect on me was far greater than the further stuffing of my alrealy overstuffed book shelves.  It was nothing short of a spiritual and intellectual revolution.

After several years of corresponding by email, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Robbins in January of 2007.  By this time I had read and listened to so much of his work I felt that I already knew him.  But what was he like in person?  When we met he was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and some old work boots.  Not the sort of thing you’d expect from a brilliant scholar, but Dr. Robbins, or John as he insisted,  was not an ordinary sort of man.  The apostle Paul commented that knowledge puffs up, and I have witnessed many men with a fraction of John’s accomplishments bear witness to the truth of this statement.  But John, like the Savior he loved so well, was not a pretentious man.  He was easy to talk to and quick with a laugh.  He showed me into his study where he had to move stacks of books and papers just so I could find a place to sit on the couch.  And while I was concerned about imposing on his schedule, far from being too busy to talk, he graciously gave me three hours of his time.  In fact, I probably could have stayed longer, but I still had a long drive home that night and had to get on the road.

In the providence of God, John entered into glory a year ago this week.  He was for me and elder brother in the Lord, a mentor, and a friend. Selfishly I wish he were still here.  But though the Lord took him this life, his bold proclamation of God’s truth, which is all truth, remains.

Read Full Post »

How do you know?

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology on May 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Several years ago when I first started reading Trinity Foundation materials, I ran across a statement that John Robbins had made about epistemology and the Bible.  While I don’t recall the exact passage I read, I do remember that he argued that the Bible was the axiom, or starting point, for Christian thought.  

Although I was intrigued by the argument, I wasn’t sure I could defend the position if I were asked to.   So with that in mind, I sent John an email, not really expecting to hear back from him.  To my surprise, I received and email response within just an hour or two that answered my question.  I don’t have John’s email anymore, but the following quote from Gordon Clark makes the same point John made to me,

Logically the infallibility of the Bible is not a theorem to be deduced from some proir axiom.  The infallibility of the Bible is the axiom from which the several doctrines are themselves deduced as theorems.  Every religion and every philosophy must be based on some first principle.  And since a first principle is first, it cannot be “proved” or “demonstrated” on the basis of anything prior (What Do Presbyterians Believe?, p.18) .

The simple idea that every religion or philosophy has a indemonstrable starting point, and that for the Christian that starting point is the infallibility of Bible, is the basis for the whole Scripturalist enterprise.  And when I came to understand this and accept it as true, it turned all of my thinking upside down.  Or perhaps more accurately, right side up.

Apart from an important lesson in theology, I learned one other thing from John that day: the importance of not despising an honest inquiry, however simple it may seem.  John was a busy man, and he easily could have ignored my email and found something more important to do.  But he didn’t.  And for that I am eternally thankful.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »