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- [00:00]
Narrator
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase spiritual formation? Is it prayer and fasting? Spiritual encounters? Carefully designed programs meant to accelerate growth? Today, many popular approaches to spiritual formation simply drift away from Scripture. In a heart aflame for God, Matthew C. Bingham draws from the Puritan tradition to show how believers can cultivate spiritual disciplines rooted in grace alone. This book explores prayer, meditation and self examination within a reformed framework that keeps Christ at the center of the Christian life. Support our work with a gift of any amount and we'll send you a copy. Visit solarmedia.org offers to get yours today.
- [00:48]
Bob
When we talk about perspicuity, we tend to mean not that every verse is equally understandable within the scriptures. We mean something more like this. Everything that God needs you to know for salvation is very clear in the Scriptures. The narrative of fall into sin, God's faithfulness to Israel, the fulfillment of the promise, the dying and rising of Jesus, the mission of the church. These things are very clear in the Scriptures and if you just sit down and read them, it should make sense to you. What it doesn't mean is something like this. Everybody's going to understand everything equally in the same way. The Scriptures are clear, but that doesn't mean the interpreter is going to get it right. The Scriptures are clear because they're God's word. But we have a lot of baggage that we bring to the text that, that muddies the waters sometimes. And so what we have to constantly be doing is going back to the Scriptures and having the Scriptures correct us with the clarity of what they teach. So I think that's perhaps a good starting point that at least it's clear on what's necessary for salvation.
- [02:05]
Narrator
Applying the riches of the Reformation to the modern church. This is White Horse Sin, a weekly roundtable discussion about theology and culture.
- [02:23]
Justin
If you listen closely to American Christianity, you can still hear the echoes of a crisis that began more than a century ago that has fragmented and fractured the church of this day. How did this happen? And how did forces such as Enlightenment, Rationalism, Bacon's common sense realism, the pressures of Darwinism and The Rise of 19th Century Critical Scholarship reshape the way Americans read the Bible today? On White Horse End, we're going to revisit the turning point, the theological and cultural upheaval that created fundamentalism and permanently altered the landscape of American Protestantism. And to do that, we need to look at the post Civil war Protestant empire. And this is an era of unshakable confidence. So let's, let's paint a picture of that.
- [03:08]
Walter
Yeah, this reminds me of the. Just the period that's just after the Civil War, through the early 1900s, kind of a loose sort of Gilded Age, as people often refer to it. This is this fascinating times when the pews were full, the buildings were grand. Like, confidence was high and almost borderline bulletproof of you, too, as you just kind of alluded to, Justin. And so the smoke from this Civil War was just kind of just clearing. And then Protestantism, it just wasn't faith. It was more of the cultural oxygen of America. Protestantism was sort of like the foundation of what it meant to be a leader at this time. If you were somebody who was of influence, you're Protestant. And so the King James Bible was taught in schools. The blue laws were in effect with businesses closing on Sundays. And so just to be American was to be Christian in many ways. And so. And that's. That's the hallmark of this period in time.
- [04:06]
Mike
Yeah, they're on both sides, the north and the South. There was this strong sense of America as a civilizing influence, and in particular, Caucasian people as the civilizers of the world. Here, for example, is a Southerner who was one of the leaders of the secession. He said, this restless energy which knowledge and civilization imparts will not be satisfied with limits, but spreads abroad its eager enterprise and dominion. The Caucasian race is not only to be the masters, but the spiritual pastors of the world. And then, almost in exactly the same words, Josiah Strong, one of the leaders, in fact, he was the secretary of the Evangelical alliance, saying that this great Anglo Saxon race is going to sweep down on Mexico and then go civilize the rest of the world. And then there will be finally the final solution to this dark problem. So you have a little social Darwinism in the mix here, both in the south and in the North. But this ideal, this picture of America as the redeemer, not only the redeemer nation, but as the civilizer of the world. And that's what the missionaries are supposed to be doing on the front lines. They're supposed to be going out there making sure that Christianization goes hand in hand with civilization around the world.
- [05:41]
Walter
It really goes hand in hand with this sort of post millennial reality that's going on as well, you know, as. As we Christianize, as Americans Christianize the world through evangelism and also taking the culture with it. I don't think they assume that they're taking American cultural norms with it, but they were. As they're doing that, they are fulfilling this post millennial reality where they're going to bring about the coming of the Messiah.
- [06:06]
Mike
They did actually believe that they were taking. They said explicitly that they were taking American values. And that's what's so.
- [06:14]
Walter
Wow. I should be very charitable.
- [06:15]
Mike
It takes your breath away. It takes your breath away. There was no difference at this point between political liberals and political conservatives within the evangelical movement. All of Protestantism called itself evangelical. There was like an evangelical empire, a Protestant empire. You referred to Walter, kind of America's country club, Ivy League world. But the religion was an inch deep. The Sunday school movement tried to water down everything that it's no more catechism being taught. Particular churches with their own catechism. We're gonna get rid of all that stuff and we're going to create a new curriculum for. That's what the American Sunday School union did. And the whole Sunday school movement really killed a lot of catechism programs in a lot of churches.
- [07:13]
Justin
So optimism is the key theme happening here. We're on the winning side of history. America's going to get better and better every day, every way. God's on our side.
- [07:26]
Mike
Clearly it's after this terrible war. Yeah.
- [07:30]
Walter
Which really explains some of the difficulty of, you know, Catholics and Jewish immigrants coming through Ellis island at the time, because it was. They were going to this Protestant empire and they didn't fit the mold.
- [07:40]
Bob
Right along with this. Then there's. There's a mix in of something called common sense realism. This is kind of a dominant philosophy at the time. Am I correct about this? Can you guys talk a little bit about what common sense realism actually is and how it applies to all this?
- [07:56]
Mike
As Justin was saying, it's sort of this. This idea that truth is not hard to figure out. It's right there in front of us. It's especially tied to the experimental scientific method. And of course, that's true of a lot of experimental studies. But not everything is data. Not everything is observation. But there was this idea that if everything is just even literature and history, if these disciplines and theology were taught like one of the sciences, the hard sciences, then we would have this in enlightenment and advancement and so forth. So, for example, this common sense realism dominated Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth. Uniquely American universities were influenced by this common sense realism, which is often, I think, maligned and not treated fairly, but also was suspiciously unnuanced about how well and clearly we could understand everything, not just empirical evidence.
- [09:16]
Justin
Yeah, it wasn't a big fan of theories. It was like, okay, and even phrase. I mean, Thomas Reid is famous for the kind of Scottish common Sense realism, but it's a common sense realism which is we don't want to go kind of just abstractly thinking about random hypotheses and imagining, but it's not being as simplistic as well. Some did tend in this, but you can only know something only if you verify it by evidence. Like an AJ er, like a logical positivism type of philosophy. It wasn't as kind of wooden headed as that, but it was definitely tending in the. But it was also assuming a certain universe. It was assuming that God made things orderly. God made human brains that could absorb and think about ideas and organs that could see reality and that we would share language. So it had a lot of assumptions that made the common sense realism actually work. When you have some of those going away, it changes things.
- [10:17]
Walter
Yeah, I would affirm that there are helpful things about it. And Mike, you mentioned this in passing, that it was not treated fairly, that Baconian common sense realism or common sense realism wasn't treated completely fairly. In what ways would you say that it was treated unfairly as it's been critiqued over time?
- [10:35]
Mike
Yeah, I think that it has been represented often in secondhand summaries rather than looking directly at Thomas Reed and his work and the work of some of his followers in recent decades. Nick Wolterstorff at Yale has done a lot to rehabilitate the reputation of Thomas Reid and the seriousness really of his philosophy, which also has influenced Alvin Plantinga and others. So there's this kind of oversimplified version of what it is out there. And the thing is, there really was a kind of understandable backlash of people, of Americans in particular, who had a kind of view of Europeans, continental Europeans as too smart for their britches and you know, that things are a lot simpler than that and not just, not just, you know, farmers out there getting their work done. Hey, it's, it's simple enough, you know, I don't need any newfangled theory, but also professors who were saying, look, let's get on with the progress and we're not going to have progress if we're just sitting around endlessly debating speculations.
- [12:04]
Justin
It was, it was the belief that ordinary people can perceive the world accurately. I mean, that everyday beliefs about reality are generally trustworthy unless you have a strong reason to doubt them. That's why Planning and Wolterstorff are so helpful, because they use this applied to apologetics. You can trust your senses, basically the belief that the external world exists independently of our own minds. So they are challenging Kant and some other Moves that were made and that ordinary human perception, you usually gives reliable knowledge about what yourself, other people in the world out there.
- [12:42]
Bob
So what's happening in the evangelical churches then or in the American churches then is this common sense realism, The. The everyday person can understand reality. And if you have a God who designs things in. In an orderly fashion, then when he gives us a book and speaks, everybody ought to be able to understand what's in the book. Right. It's just straightforward, clear, because that's the way God operates. And so we get this idea of the clarity or the perspicuity. We'll talk about more in a few minutes here. But that becomes the dominant way of reading the Bible in America. That this is just the common sense way to understand what the text says. Is that fair?
- [13:19]
Mike
Yeah, the Bible, no creed but the Bible. Whereas we would say precisely because the Bible is so clear, we can have a creed that summarizes it.
- [13:30]
Bob
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [13:34]
Mike
But, yeah, there was this idea that the Bible's so clear, everything in it is clear. God said it. I believe it. That settles it. That kind of frontier revivalism was becoming more and more apparent as liberalism came across the Atlantic, and also homegrown liberalism, especially in Boston and the New Haven theology that really was Pelagian. You had people who really did come to believe that Jesus was a historical person. He was a great man, he did a lot of good deeds, but he was not God in the flesh. We don't believe in vicarious atonement. That's all in the past. We don't believe in necessarily that he rose from the dead, although some said no, that's the one thing we have to still believe in. There's a weakening, a general weakening of the supernatural worldview. That's what's so important here. What at bottom is unraveling in the late 19th century is a supernatural, providential worldview. God is pushed out, the cross is pushed out. Resurrection, these things aren't necessary because we're good enough. We don't need it. God already created everything and set it up so it runs reasonably well. And then two world wars kind of threw that one into confusion.
- [15:12]
Walter
Yeah, so I think you're getting on something that's very helpful, Mike. You know, you start talking about how the confidence in God's word was waning. And there are some specific causes that we can point to in regards to this. I mean, one of those is Darwin's Origin of species. In 1859, it crossed the Atlantic and it really started a theological earthquake here in the States. And really what it began to do was it began to say, well, if things evolved, well, how do we understand something like the book of Genesis in the creation account? There's really no space for it. So before, you know, as scientific developments happen, like Newton and Bacon and so forth, it was utilized to affirm what the Bible was saying. But now there seems to be this shakeup to where it's saying, you know what? Science is no longer an aid for faith in the Scriptures as we read them, but it's. It's now one or the other. And that began to start this problem that, that we had that almost emerged and, you know, in full with the fundamentalist movement.
- [16:17]
Mike
Yeah, I think that describes the fundamentalist movement. But what's interesting is before that, it doesn't describe fundamentalism. The book called the Fundamentals from which we get Fundamentalism. Actually, the essay in there on Creation was written by the Scottish Presbyterian James Orr and defended theistic evolution. So, you know, James McCosh, the president of Princeton, which was staunchly old school Presbyterian University at the time, and B.B. warfield and others, you know, went right along with it. Darwin didn't really cause a stir in American Protestantism until you get to the 1920s and the scopes trial and teaching evolution in the classroom and, you know, debate over that forever changed the view of who the fundamentalists were. And I know we'll talk in the next episode about millennialism, but that played a role too.
- [17:22]
Walter
So is it appropriate to say that when that discussion was popularized and it began to eke out of the academies, it became what we now know as like a more fundamentalist position?
- [17:31]
Mike
Yeah, I think what really the people who came to be called fundamentalists cared about was not what was taught at Harvard, but what was taught at the country schoolhouse. It touched their lives.
- [17:49]
Walter
Yeah, there are some real parallels to the contemporary moment, but we won't go into those.
- [17:53]
Bob
Yeah, yeah.
- [17:54]
Justin
Well, there were some other factors because we need to come back to science and how this influences and epistemology knowledge. But in addition, you said, Walter, there were a few different factors. And you talked about Origin of Species. There's also higher criticism. The scholars from Germany and the way they were started demythologizing. Just stop looking for miracles. Stop treating this like history. It's just any other historical book, but it's not a testimony of miracles. And so what's happening with the higher criticism at the time, similar to when Origin of Species is coming out and coming across the Atlantic?
- [18:34]
Bob
Yeah.
- [18:34]
Walter
Scholars begin basically treating the Bible like any other ancient text. So you know, analyzing it for errors. There was analyzing it from multiple authors. So there was some suspicion, you know, looking for political agendas. And I mean, so there's, there's various ways of critiquing the Bible that previously were not a part of biblical scholarship,
- [18:54]
Justin
which was apparently just, you know, isn't it? I mean, there's a thing called plenary perspicuity, which means all of it is extra clear. That's the common sense application of, well, this is clear and obvious. And suddenly Darwin showing up. Maybe it's not as clear and obvious. There's this hypothesis, and I thought it was pretty clear that Jesus fed 5,000. No, that's not really a miracle. That was something. I mean, so you start having these questions about how one reads the Bible. I mean, I'm not trying to go too far into persecution yet. We'll come back to that. But that's part of the story that you see bubbling up, that the fabric now has some, some threads that are being pulled.
- [19:32]
Bob
The concern is legitimate concern pastorally. Right. Because if you start getting. It starts seeping into your churches that actually we think Genesis through Deuteronomy has four different authors and they all lived at different periods. So how would they know? And why are we crediting this to Moses? And why does the New Testament call it Moses? Well, they just didn't understand. And suddenly, like, everybody is uncertain that they can trust the text in front of them. And so pastorally, this becomes a very concerning issue because I'm tasked as a pastor to preach the truth, to preach from the word of God. But how do I even know this is the word of God, this thing? You know, us here in the old Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, we're a good 100 years behind all of you guys in these conversations. So this thing comes up in the 1970s for US 60s and 70s. But it does become a big concern. How do I know I can actually rely on the text in front of me? Not only is it clear, but is it reliable at all? And so this is, this is no small crisis that the fundamentalists, as we'll, we'll come to talk about, the fundamentalists are reacting to something that is concerning souls. I mean, it's a big deal.
- [20:42]
Mike
Right? And that's a great point because, you know, they, they are, for the most part, they, they are standing for doctrines, what the liberals are standing for. And a lot of the people we're talking about weren't even liberals yet. They were pretty close to what we call mainstream evangelicals today.
- [21:01]
Bob
Interesting.
- [21:02]
Mike
Yeah, they were kind of soft on vicarious atonement. And it was basically, you ask me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart. It was pietist. It wasn't necessarily anti orthodoxy, but it also was, let's just break down barriers and not have a lot of doctrinal niceties. We got to get out there and Christianize everything. So let's not carry a lot of baggage. And here's an example. November 1897 was the 250th anniversary of the Westminster Standards. There was an event held on that day at old First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and then at Madison Square Garden Concert Hall. You can't imagine that happening today. And Warfield played a large role in that conference. During the same week, the Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, which was the bastion of evangelical liberals, held a celebration of its 50th year and quote, to remind themselves and the nation of that church's place at the forefront of progressive Christianity. And here you get Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Beecher, a who's who of evangelical leaders. And at the time, evolution now is a social view. It jibes with their experience. Things are getting better and better. One of the pastors there, George Gordon, you get Gordon. Conwell Seminary, Gordon Seminary. He explicitly rejected the old theology, saying, for all thinking men who are in any measure open to the new light and spirit of our time, Calvinism, as an adequate interpretation of the ways of God with men, or even as a working philosophy of life, is forever gone in this country. And then William Newton Clark at Union Seminary, no visible return of Christ to the earth is to be expected, but rather the long and steady advance of his spiritual kingdom. If our Lord will but complete the spiritual coming that he has begun, there will be no need of a visible bodily advent to make perfect his glory upon the earth. And then you have all these people. Walter Rauschenbusch, speaking of the complete Christianization of society, Washington Gladden's Applied Christianity, to which J. Gresham Machen replied, there's so much applied Christianity around, there's no Christianity to apply. And the dean of the University of Chicago's Divinity School, Shaler Matthews, says that we have a new conception of Christianity which makes service superior to theological orthodoxy. You can go down the list. It's just service unites, doctrine divides. We've heard this in kind of evangelical circles. Deeds, not creeds and fundamentalism very quickly, not only defended certain doctrines, but included with it kind of its own cultural separatism, its taboos and its premillennialism. Sam.
- [25:27]
Narrator
It's common to put our theology in one box and our daily Christian life in another. But the reformers saw it differently. They taught that sound doctrine and spiritual growth don't just overlap, they need each other. In the Reformation in spiritual formation, Dr. Michael Horton shows how the reformers understood and approached this relationship, revealing how God provides the means of spiritual growth for both individuals and the community of believers. Download your free digital copy today@solarmedia.org offers.
- [26:09]
Walter
I'm glad you mentioned Walter Rauschenbusch in that description. And because that was one sort of crack in the foundation amongst many that you mentioned, I was going to sort of, you know, promote a little bit because not promote, but like mention. So I mean, if you have this, you know, think about this, this Gilded age, there's all this wealth that's growing, there's this growing enthusiasm, you know, this, this post millennialism that's, that's emerging. But then you also have simultaneously some crushing poverty that's going on as well, you know, for, for others. And you're having, you know, the industrial revolution and 12 hour work days, kids working, doing hard labor. The slums are just thriving and growing with people. Then you have a Walter Rauschenbush who comes along and says, you know what, this is actually not about the soul saving revivalism. There has to be, you know, this kingdom of God at work in our cities because our people, our parishioners are in these horrible situations. And it's more about the ethic than the doctrine. As you guys said, deeds and not creeds.
- [27:11]
Mike
Here's the thing that has fascinated me before the fundamentalist modernist split, the evangelical movement, which was heavily influenced by Charles Finney, that evangelical revivalist movement, even the people associated with the so called social gospel, we ought not think of them like sort of political progressives today. For example, one of the leaders of the social gospel was Russell Conwell. Again, Gordon Conwell, the other half of Gordon Conwell. These are all old leaders of the evangelical movement and Russell Conwell as a social gospel, or quoting what Would Jesus Do? Charles Sheldon's book, what Would Jesus Do? He gave the most listened to sermon at the end of the 19th century and it was called Acres of Diamonds. And in it he said, you know, there are acres of diamonds in America if people will only look, it is a sin for you to help a poor person out of the ditch. He's in there for a reason and he's got to figure out how to get himself out. He says, I have never met, I have never met an honest Christian who wasn't rich. And he goes on and on what? And he's one of the leaders of the social gospel. And also all these leaders of the social gospel are warmongers because that's part of Christianization. Why we have to serve these poor savages over a broad. You know, that's the paternalism that they have in going to war.
- [28:56]
Walter
Wow.
- [28:57]
Mike
While people like Jay Grash and Machin were saying this war is being fought over money, this isn't being fought over principle.
- [29:04]
Justin
Well, we need to shift, this is amazing, but we need to shift to how this influences, these are the influences of enlightenment rationalism, common sense realism, pressures of Darwinian thought emerging, The Rise of 19th Century Critical Scholarship from Germany. And this is reshaping how people are reading the Bible. And that was another great example that Mike just gave us. So, and we hinted to it, Bob brought up and said, okay, this is. Well, if it's common sense realism, then everything's equally just like clear and obvious. Just kind of do what's there. It can become either deeds, not creeds, or very moralistic, or it's just obvious and clear and then there's some cracks in the foundation. Maybe it's not obvious. There's these other theories that haven't been tested. Darwin wasn't a problem because of the content of it. It was the method of doing the science of Darwinism, which was it wasn't just observable science, it was a theory, a hypothesis that it just didn't fit. But this is all bringing to bear how do we read the Bible? Is it clear, is it not clear the word that we talk about as the perspicuity of Scripture? So let's shift to that. What is the perspicuity of Scripture? What does it mean and what does it not mean? And what is clear in Scripture? What's not clear in Scripture? So what's perspicuity?
- [30:21]
Bob
I think when we talk about perspicuity, we tend to mean not that every verse is equally understandable within the scriptures. We mean something more like this. Everything that God needs you to know for salvation is very clear in the Scriptures. The narrative of fall into sin, God's faithfulness to Israel, the fulfillment of the promise, the dying and rising of Jesus, the mission of the church. These things are very clear in the scriptures. And if you just sit down and read them, it should make sense to you. What it doesn't mean is something like this. Everybody's going to understand everything equally in the same way the scriptures are clear. But that doesn't mean the interpreter is going to get it right. The Scriptures are clear because they're God's word, but we have a lot of baggage that we bring to the text that muddies the waters sometimes. And so what we have to constantly be doing is going back to the Scriptures and having the Scriptures correct us with the clarity of what they teach. So I think that's perhaps a good starting point, that at least it's clear on what's necessary for salvation.
- [31:27]
Mike
Yeah, that's exactly how the Westminster Confession Chapter one puts it. Not that all things are equally plain, but. Or equally clear, but that someone without education by the diligent use of ordinary means can understand the Gospel therefrom.
- [31:45]
Justin
Yeah, he's going from memory on this too. I just closed his eyes. He just closed his eyes and started singing that love song to himself.
- [31:55]
Mike
I paraphrase a little bit. And I think that's what's different from fundamentalism. Right, because you don't really need to explain. Do you really need teachers? God said it, I believe it. That settles it then. Why do I even need a pastor?
- [32:13]
Walter
Yeah, and it's 1 7.
- [32:15]
Justin
Mike was quoting 1 7. But this is what it says. All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all, yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation. That's that qualification Bob talked about and so clearly propounded and opened in some place in Scripture or other that not only the learned, but the unlearned in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. The Anglican tradition, Article 6 says holy scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation. And so again you have in that the Anglican tradition. This is from the homily and reading Scripture, the first book of homilies, the Scripture for the instruction and salvation of mankind. Richard Hooker. The main principles of Christian faith are in Scripture plainly delivered. Article 20 of 39 articles. The Church may not teach anything contrary to God's written word. So you have the Westminster Confession giving a definition. And you gave the same definition, Bob, that Westminster 17 and classical Anglicanism assumes perspicuity, especially for salvation. And so you have the Protestant traditions are all moving this direction. It was your guy, the Lutheran guy, Preuss, who said, hey, we're also not doing plenary perspicuity. It's not everything. It is what is necessary for salvation is clear to all.
- [33:41]
Walter
To be specific, it's things like eschatological positions that the Bible is not quite crystal clear on.
- [33:48]
Justin
It was pretty clear.
- [33:50]
Walter
Well, I mean, the kingdom's kidding, kidding. I was like, I must have missed something.
- [33:56]
Justin
You know, I was just watching you avoid baptism.
- [34:01]
Bob
Well, I wanted to bring up the Lord's Supper.
- [34:04]
Walter
Well, yeah, you know, those are things we can talk about. We have talked about those. But I mean even, even how to read apocalyptic literature and the conclusions that we come from as it pertains to eschatology. But the, the as, as we keep kind of coming back to the challenge that emerg. But we begin to say, especially me as a Baptist who holds the waves, the priesthood of believer banner high. I mean it wasn't just things that were unto salvation. It was everything that we thought was crystal clear. And that becomes a problem which is what pushes away the need for those who are trained in theology. It pushes away the need for those who are ordained in a way which then fueled especially in the second Great Awakening, these frontier revivals where you had a lot of lay people, which, I mean praise be to God for their enthusiasm and excitement, but they would just get a Bible, open it up and they start, you know, proclaiming lots of things as if they were on that top tier.
- [35:01]
Bob
I think what becomes interesting is there's sort of two, two sides to this coin because on the one hand it's important to say like the Bible is very clear on what's necessary for salvation. This includes law and gospel. I think this is a proper thing to say that, that it is pretty clear on some differences between right and wrong and what God aspects of his people. By and large the doctrine of creation is very clear that God created the heavens and the earth, that Christ is coming again to judge the living and the dead. This is very clear. Now you go to Revelation and you start reading it. It's. It's a tough book. Anyone who says I just sit down and read Revelation and it makes total sense to me is, is lying. It's not true. But at the same time we've got to be very careful that we, we don't start playing this game where we say something like Erasmus does to Luther, that you know, the Bible's a closed book until somebody comes along and you have sort of the authoritative interpreter to open it up for you. Because everything in the Bible is obscure. I tend to think that that ends up being a cop out from actually having to be confronted by what the Scriptures have to say. And so we do have to be careful in this conversation. There is, there is a good deal of important nuance here.
- [36:12]
Mike
The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic.
- [36:14]
Bob
That's right. That's right. St. Paul did not write obscure letters for the church to receive and say we have no idea what he's talking about. I hope somebody comes along and explains it to us soon like he was. He knew what he was saying, they knew what he was saying. We have to learn it. But there are some things that are just hard for us to understand and we've got to work towards those things.
- [36:32]
Mike
Yeah, I think that's such an important point because, you know, we're not saying everything necessary for salvation is clear in the Bible that we've sort of decreed this somehow. This is not an external idea we're imposing on the text. Rather it's the text itself that shows us that this message is its central point. So Jesus said the Pharisees read the Bible thinking that there are scholars in it, but they don't really know it because they testify concerning me, but they won't come to me to have eternal life. If you read the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia of end times, Nostradamus kinds of predictions, or it has a handbook for everything in your family,
- [37:34]
Bob
everything
- [37:35]
Mike
in your business and so forth, if you read it like that, then you're not going to to get the clear message of Scripture. You're talking over it. And so we have to, I think, underscore here that we're not imposing a rule on Scripture, but rather following the warp and woof of its main teaching.
- [37:57]
Justin
Let me give some examples of perspicuity is affirmed by Scripture. Think about Deuteronomy 6. Teach this to your children. And it's like, this is something that's so clear that you can teach to your kids. And they're going to get it. Like the Deuteronomy 6, 6, 7, that the people of Israel were expected to be able to understand the words of Scripture well enough to teach them diligently to their children. It's not so abstract. God's not so transcendent and so confusing in what's being done. And then Jesus, I mean, the fact that Jesus was, he was using aphorisms, he was making it easy to understand. He was pretty clear. He's like, I have come for this purpose. I'm laying down my life. This is the purpose of why I have come. And then Jesus would say this regularly. Have you not read this all over Matthew, Right. Have you not read in the Scriptures? You are wrong because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Like clearly God's pretty clear in Scriptures. And then you brought it up, Bob, the epistles. I mean, Paul is writing Letters to congregations, assuming that they'll be able to understand what he's saying. And some of them are Gentile converts. And he keeps. He does. He makes some allusions to the Old Testament and thinks that they might actually start reading it and getting it. And so, again, that's the important part. This is not imposed from without. This is from the way Scripture says what it says about itself, but also what it's assuming in the very production of these letters and texts that are being read that are in the canons.
- [39:33]
Walter
I think a helpful case study of this is the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. You know, he says, how can I. How can I understand unless someone guides me? And so then you have, you know, Philip, who doesn't go and create some fancy sort of new meaning of the text. He just gives him context That's. That's already there about what's going on. And so it wasn't. It wasn't that, you know, there was this novel reading. It was a very, you know, it was an appropriate reading that took into consideration the redemptive reality of the text itself.
- [40:07]
Bob
Yeah, I think the Ethiopia, that's such an important text in this conversation because oftentimes it will be used by like perhaps Rome to say, see, the eunuch couldn't figure it out on his own. He needed the authoritative interpreter to come along. And I think I want to respond by saying no, he needed someone to tell him about Christ.
- [40:28]
Walter
Exactly.
- [40:29]
Bob
Christ was the key to understanding the text. Philip wasn't the key to understanding the text. Christ was. And so he needed someone who knew the Gospel. Sure. But that doesn't mean that suddenly we have established this authority that only has the inner light that they need to shine for the rest of us. What it means is Christ needs to be proclaimed.
- [40:49]
Justin
And that's the point of from 2 Peter where he says, paul's letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own. Can you imagine how offensive that would be if you didn't know that was Scripture? The ignorant and unstable ones, anyway, love that I'm reading it and feeling the intensity of that, that they twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. 2 Peter 3:16. And so you have this Scripture interprets Scripture principle for perspicuity. And this is from the very beginning. Among the Fathers, you have Augustine, who says, after gaining familiarity with the language of the divine Scriptures, one should proceed to explore and analyze the obscure passages by taking examples from the more obvious parts to illuminate obscure expressions and by using the evidence of indisputable passages to remove the uncertainty of ambiguous ones. Or Peter Martyr Vermele. If anything is stated obscurely in one place in the Scriptures, it ought to be clarified from those places in which the same teaching is more plainly expressed. And so that's that great example is like, oh, you want to understand this? Well, here's a context for it. In the context that's how to read
- [42:02]
Mike
a book, by the way.
- [42:03]
Bob
Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [42:05]
Walter
Well, and so Justin's question a while back when we were turning from history to biblical interpretation was how does this sort of common sense realism impact our reading of the Bible? Well, it makes us read the Bible not as we read another book because we go in there hunting for data points that we can plainly see. We put them in our little engine. We are a little machine. We churn it out and then out pops some sort of teaching and then there you have it. But it's divorced from the canonical understanding of what Christ is doing and all of redemption. And so that's really the difficulty that we see, I think hermeneutically when we begin to see the common sense realism's impact on how we interpret the Bible as we rip Christ out and just focus on it as a self help textbook.
- [42:54]
Justin
And again, going back to Preuss, this is where Preuss says the tradition is not plenary perspicuity, but soteriological or evangelical perspicuity, which is the clarity is on God is for you in Christ. That's the clarity. I mean you can say it with more words and more specificity, but it's the covenant of redemption. The members of the treaty had a plan to redeem God's people. And this is the plan. And you hear a promise in Genesis 3:15, you can trace a promise all the way throughout all of Scripture. Promise is not hard to see of what God's going to do. He's going to rescue, going to redeem. God's going to do something that you can't do. And that's clear in all the teaching of Scripture.
- [43:36]
Mike
And let's, you know, thank the fundamentalists for coming along and defending their own doctrines that aren't part of the canon of the historic church. You know, they added a few, let's say, but at least they didn't subtract.
- [43:57]
Bob
Amen. Yep, yep.
- [43:58]
Mike
And you know, the Protestant liberals, well, and Roman Catholic liberals really are anti supernatural fundamentalism, I think has a difficulty affirming the natural. Liberals have trouble affirming the supernatural. And so I think we have to be on guard against both of those tendencies.
- [44:23]
Justin
There's one more piece we have to address, which is the role of the Holy Spirit. It's in Westminster Confession 1:10. The Holy Spirit who inspires the text is the same Holy Spirit who illuminates the text to the readers. This is the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined. And all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, private spirits are to be examined, and whose sentence we are to rest can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. So this link between the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word and the vitality of the Church is so central to the Reformers and just the Protestant tradition. That's why the Church was called the creation of the Word. So this is not only that the Scriptures are trustworthy, true, without error, because of inspiration, but the same Holy Spirit who inspires is the same Holy Spirit who illuminates in our reception of reading of the text, guiding us through. That's why we think it's possible, because Scriptures are clear. The same Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and inspired the text is the same Holy Spirit who resides in you, illuminating the Word of God.
- [45:38]
Mike
Here's where we differ from our Roman Catholic friends. We need the Holy Spirit to illumine us because we're dull. We don't need the Holy Spirit to illumine us because the Scriptures are opaque.
- [45:51]
Bob
Correct? Right. Right.
- [45:53]
Justin
So the crisis that produced fundamentalism was not simply a battle between belief and unbelief, or between science and faith. It was also a crisis about how we know truth and how we read Scripture. For generations, American Protestants assumed the Bible's meaning was largely obvious to any sincere reader. But as these new intellectual and cultural pressures emerged, that confidence was shaken and Christians responded in a variety of ways. Recovering a faithful understanding of Scripture means holding together both conviction and humility, confidence that God speaks in His Word, and recognition that we need the Church, the Spirit and one another as we seek to understand it rightly. And at the center of Scripture, what is most important and very clear is its steady heartbeat. God forbid you in Jesus Christ.
- [46:57]
Narrator
Thanks for listening to this production of Sola Media. If you enjoyed this episode, would you share it with someone you think would benefit from it? Your support helps us spread the riches of the Reformation and apply historic Christian theology to every area of life.