Kevin DeYoung (0:05)

Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina. And you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology. We'll be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other. And the hope, Lord willing, is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters. Last week on Doctrine Matters, we talked about natural theology, general revelation and special revelation. We're looking at this broad category of how we know God. And the way that we know God is because God wants to be known. He is a God who speaks to us and reveals truth to us. This leads us thinking about special revelation now to that revelation which has been written down for us in the Scripture. So this week we want to think about the doctrine of Scripture. Here's a phrase worth knowing. It sounds a little technical, but it's easy to understand. It's the phrase concursive operation. This is talking about how God inspired the authors of the Bible to write down an inspired text. Generally speaking, there are three views concerning the nature of inspiration. Some hold to a dynamic view of inspiration. This is often associated with theological liberalism that they believed that the biblical authors were under a divine influence. It was dynamic and it gave them some special religious insights and they were able to communicate this life giving spirituality. But it didn't come down to the particulars. It was a generic illumination. It enlightened them. They were especially spiritual men in their consciousness. So the Bible is a special book. But it does not require this view that the individual words of Scripture be divine, let alone infallible or inerrant. That's one view. At the other end is what is called mechanical dictation. Now, according to this view, the words of Scripture were taken down like a court stenographer, somebody just dictating to them. This is the Muslim idea of inspiration with the the Quran. Or it's similar to a Mormon understanding where Joseph Smith just finds the tablets in the earth. Now, many Christian theologians have talked about the effect of inspiration or the result of inspiration as if it had been dictated. So they do use that analogy sometime that it's so reliable. It's as if it were a dictation. And yet the vast majority of Christian theologians have not used this as a technical means by which God inspires the Scriptures. That is to say, it's not that Paul or Peter or Moses or David are just putting their ear up to heaven and God or an angel is giving down some word or just communicating like a written script, and then they write it down. No, it's not mechanical dictation, and it's not a dynamic view. So what is it? Well, it's this term concursive operation that means that God did not use the biblical authors in a mechanical way, moving their pens like some kind of puppet, or pushing their fingers on a keyboard. He did not whisper in their ears what to write down, but rather, Louis Berkoff says he acted upon them in an organic way, in harmony with the laws of their own inner beings. That is to say, he used their intellect, their skills, their personality. That's what we mean by concursive, that two agents are working. We can say the Bible is human and divine, so long as we understand human means. The Bible uses human language, employs human authors, not that it contains human errors. So he's had to be careful. Sometimes people say, well, it's like the two natures of Christ. The Bible is human and divine. Well, there is an analogy there that works human language, human authors, human words. But the ultimate author is God himself. We see that all Scripture is breathed out by God. 2 Peter 1 is particularly important. Verse 21 tells us men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. They were born, they produced these writings, the spoken and written words. And there in that context, it's talking about the written word came through the instrumentality of men. The words of Scripture are at the same time carried along by the Holy Spirit. So that we can say that what's written down, not simply man's words, but God's words. This leads to inerrancy. There are many texts that we could use to show that the Bible is without error. And sometimes people don't like the term inerrancy. They prefer the term infallibility. But for something to be infallible means that it does not mislead. And to be inerrant means that there are no mistakes. Suppose there may be some way to parse the difference. But I think often in recent years, inerrancy has simply been a word that people use or don't like. And so they use infallibility. What, what we want to affirm, because the Bible affirms, is that there are no mistakes in the Bible in terms of what the Bible means to affirm. And teach. Now, if it quotes from the devil, well, the devil says things, or it quotes from, you know, Ahab or Jezebel. So there are are bad people in the Bible who say things that aren't true. We use, you know, basic reading principles as we read Scripture. We also allow, as we would for any book, that there are approximations that we have to pay attention to the genre, that there may be multiple eyewitness accounts who see things in a little different way. None of these realities undermine the nature of inerrancy that when properly understood and properly interpreted, the Bible does not affirm anything that is false. Romans 3, 4 says, Let God be true, though everyone were a liar. That's inerrancy. Jesus emphasized in John 10:35 that the Scriptures cannot be broken. And there he's arguing with the Jewish leaders and he goes to an obscure psalm and he makes this obscure point that he says in the Scriptures it says that you are gods. It's really a hard passage to interpret. He doesn't mean that the rulers in the Old Testament or the kings of the nations were ontologically divine beings, but rather that they were given that, that title, that honorific. And Jesus is trying to puncture the pretensions of the Jewish leaders by saying, look, you're getting so bent out of shape about the term God or Son of God. And. And yet our own Scriptures have used that word before. So the point for our purposes here is that Jesus goes to one word in one chapter in one book, and an obscure place at that, and then says, the Scriptures cannot be broken. So Jesus himself says the word of God, and not just the word that is passed down to us through some oral tradition or through prophetic utterances or through preaching. But he's talking about the written words of Scripture cannot be broken. They cannot fall, they cannot be annulled, they cannot be destroyed. We must have the same high view of Scripture that Jesus had. After all, it was Jesus who said he did not come to abolish one jot or tittle of the law or the prophets. In Matthew 5, it was Jesus who assumed a straightforward reading of the chronology and the miracles of the Old Testament. Sometimes higher criticism has said, well, the Old Testament, really, it's got parts all backwards. And this thing from the Pentateuch was written during the exile. That's not how Jesus read his Old Testament at all. He read in a very straightforward fashion that these things actually happened, and they happened in the sequence that they were given. And he references the men of Nineveh will Rise up against this nation. So Jesus understands that the story of Jonah is a true story, not just some literary artifact. I mean, he says the men of Nineveh will rise up. That he believed that's a real story, not just a literary illusion. It'd be like if I was preaching and I said, the men of Gondor will rise up against this generation. We'd say, well, I know that story from Lord of the Rings, but I'm not really worried about some fictional people rising up. Jesus is not talking about a fictional story. He believes that Jonah and the big fish and all of it is true. It was Jesus who cited the Scriptures as coming from the Creator himself. When he's again arguing with the Jewish leaders about marriage. And he goes back and he says, what did the Creator say? But God made them male and female, and he references Genesis as coming from the Creator and that you can go back and read from Genesis 2. It's not God himself speaking a voice in that text. It's simply written down Scripture. But for Jesus to read from any scripture in the Old Testament is to quote from the Creator himself that God wrote this down. The Bible can no more fall or falter or err. Then God himself can fail or fall or falter or make a mistake. John Calvin said, if we follow the Scriptures, we will be safe from the danger of erring. Calvin said, we ought to embrace without finding fault whatever is taught in the Scriptures. We owe to the Scriptures the same reverence we owe to God. One more from Calvin. In Scripture, God opens his most hallowed lips as if the apostles were sure and genuine scribes of the Holy Spirit. And we could multiply quotations like this from Calvin and we could go back through the centuries of the early church that until very recently in the history of the Church, every Christian theologian understood that the Scripture is God's word. It comes from God, and God is not a liar. And therefore all of it is completely trustworthy. The doctrine of inerrancy means that the Word of God always stands over us, and we never stand over the Word of God. If we reject inerrancy, we put ourselves in judgment over God's Word. That's why it's such a. A serious mistake. We end up giving to ourselves the right to determine which parts of God's revelation can be trusted. Maybe it seems like a small thing you say. Well, I'm just saying a couple of points of, of geography here or some numbers there, or this particular history or this miracle. Just a few things here and there. I don't think we can really trust in the Bible and it was just a mistake. But I still believe the whole message of salvation and Christ and faith. Well, once you compromise in those small areas, you are putting yourself in authority over the Word of God. Now you get to determine which bits and pieces you've concluded just don't work. They don't work scientifically, they don't work rationally, they don't work archaeologically. And rather than humbly saying yes, there are some things that I'm not quite sure how to reconcile, not quite sure how to answer every question. Yet my posture is one of humility to say that this is God's Word and God is true, he's never a liar and I am going to trust everything in this book that is good for the church and it's good for us spiritually. When we deny the complete trustworthiness of the Bible, we're forced to accept one of two conclusions. Either well, the Scripture is not all from God or God is not always dependable and to make either statement is to affirm what is sub Christian. These conclusions do not focus a proper submission to God. Here's a great quotation here. I'll end with from J.I. packer one cannot doubt the Bible without far reaching loss both of fulness of truth and of fullness of life. If therefore we have at heart spiritual renewal for society, for churches, and for our own lives, we shall make much of the entire trustworthiness that is the inerrancy of Holy Scripture as the inspired and liberating Word of God. Thanks again for joining us on Doctrine Matters. I'm your host Kevin DeYoung. Our hope and prayer is that this has been helpful to you as you look at Scripture and try to understand the best of our theological tradition as Christians. Please consider subscribing to Doctrine Matters. And if this has been encouraging, consider passing it on to others. If you'd like to learn more about this week's doctrine, you can ask your pastor for good resources or check out my year long mini systematic theology book called Daily Doctrine. It's available in print or audio from crossway. Org. The Doctrine Matters podcast is produced by Crossway. To learn more, visit crossway. Org.