Foundations of Systematic Theology LESSONthe Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 is, in its literary form,...

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 05 of 24ST408

Bibliology: The Authority of Scripture

Foundations of Systematic Theology

We are considering the doctrine of the Word of God or revelation in ways in which God communicates with human beings. Since we know God exclusively through His revelation, these lessons consider the foundation of everything else we say in theology. In the last lesson, I defined the Word of God as His powerful, authoritative, self-expression drawing on what I called earlier the three lordship attributes. So defined, God’s Word does three things in the world. As His decree, it makes everything happen; as His address, it speaks to us the authoritative attributes of God; and as His presence, it is God’s dwelling place in the world.

I also considered the media of the Word, events, human words, and persons. Under human words, we looked at the divine voice in which God Himself directly addresses us in human words, the word through prophets and apostles, the written Word and contemporary preaching and teaching. But I promised I would spend more time on the written Word for that has a special importance, for without these written words, we would have no access to the divine voice, the words of the apostles and prophets, or to Jesus.

People sometimes think that the facts about Jesus are important, but the words about Him are much less so. They think it’s important that we confess the great facts of Christ’s incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, but they don’t think it’s very important that we look at the Bible. As they understand it, the Bible may contain errors even as it testifies to Christ. I believe that Scripture itself teaches a very different view. You see, Scripture itself contains a doctrine of Scripture. A sound theology will not only treasure the work of Jesus, it will also treasure the means God has appointed for us to know about Christ; namely the written Word—the Bible.

Remember the discussion in our last lesson about the divine voice, God speaking directly to people? There I argue that the divine voice is absolutely authoritative; that it bore the full authority

John M. Frame, D.D.Experience: Professor of systematic theology

at Reformed Theological Seminary

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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of God’s lordship. Then I discussed the word of the prophets and apostles, and I concluded that their word too was absolutely authoritative. Not one bit less.

What about the written Word? What about the words the prophets and apostles wrote down? Some people might want to argue that a written word is always a step down from the living voice. But the Bible itself doesn’t argue that way, and it stands to reason that what a person writes has as much authority as what he says, in some cases even more since what we write is usually intended for more permanent use than our mere spoken words.

But let’s look at what the Bible says about itself. In the first place, God intends His revelation to be permanent, not momentary. Forget the theologians like Karl Barth who think that revelation is so dynamic that it cannot be preserved beyond the moment of revelation. In Scripture, God gives revelation that is to be preserved, that is to be passed on from generation to generation. Listen to Deuteronomy 6:6-9:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.

Even before this, the early patriarchs like Jacob put up pillars, memorials, as permanent reminders of divine revelation.

In the New Testament, revelation is something to be guarded and preserved. Jude 3 says, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that should honestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” Now the word “faith” here means the content of the Christian message that was delivered to the church by the Lord and His apostles. It is not to be changed, but must be guarded, kept preserved, transmitted to all nations and all generations.

Now let’s look at the forms of revelation. First, the book of Genesis speaks of the generations of Adam, Noah, and so on. Some have thought that these were titles of books, for Genesis 5:1 speaks of the book of the generations of Adam. Perhaps these were



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writings Moses used when putting together the first five books of the Bible. That’s a little uncertain, but clearly there is revelation in the covenant God made with Israel at the time of Moses. I mentioned in lesson one that “Lord,” the word “Lord,” names God as the head of a covenant relationship. The covenant always involves words, particularly promises and commands. In a Near Eastern covenant treaty between a great king and a lesser king, these words were written down, and put in a holy place as the ultimate Law, governing the relationship. These words served as the ultimate Law much as the United States Constitution serves as the law of the United States of America.

Archaeologists have found some of these documents, and they follow a certain literary form that is very similar to parts of the Bible. Meredith Kline and other scholars believe that the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 is, in its literary form, a treaty document—a covenant. He also identifies the same literary elements in the book of Deuteronomy. In these treaties, emphatically in the biblical covenants, the Great King is the author of the document. This treaty is not negotiated as modern treaties are—it’s not negotiated between the two parties. The Great King imposes the terms. It’s unilateral. So in the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, God identifies Himself as “the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2).

He is the author of the document. Indeed in Exodus 24:12, God tells Moses to “come up to Me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone with the Law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.” Here God is not only the author, He is also the publisher. He has written the commands with His own finger on the tablets of stone, as we read in Exodus 31:18.

The document, the written document is a “witness” (Deuteronomy 31:26). Not a witness of man to His experience with God but God’s witness against Israel by which God will hold Israel accountable. It is put in the most holy place in the tabernacle by the ark of the Lord. So the written Word becomes known as the Holy Scriptures (I Timothy 3:15). So the written word carries the authority of God Himself. It has no less authority than the divine voice or the word of a prophet.

From time to time during the Old Testament Period, prophets also wrote down their words, and these were added to the covenant



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document. They wrote their words first so that later readers could test whether their predictions came true, determining whether the prophet was a true prophet (Deuteronomy 18:22). They also wrote so that their words could be preserved for future generations and might then perhaps be more favorably received (Habakkuk 2:2). Through the Old Testament Period, God’s people praised God’s Word. Psalm 19:7 says, “The Law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise simple.” What law is the psalmist talking about? Certainly he’s talking about the written Law of Moses. Look through the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119, and you’ll find in nearly every verse of God’s Law, statutes, testimonies, precepts—hear that eloquent redundancy. Again what the Psalmist has in mind here is not the divine voice, not the oral words of the prophets but the written Law of God.

By the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Jews acknowledge what we call the Old Testament as God’s Word, God’s covenant with Israel. Jesus and the apostles also recognized its authority. They cited it with titles indicating its supreme authority. “It is written,” Jesus said. He called them the Scriptures. Paul calls them the oracles of God; he calls them Holy Scriptures. Others I’ve mentioned on your outline as well.

B. B. Warfield in a famous article shows that even a simple phrase Scripture says is an authoritative citation, and he argues what Scripture says to the New Testament writers is “what God says.” These writers use the phrase, “Scripture says” synonymously to the phrase, “God says.” The Scripture is the words of the Holy Spirit given through human writers as in Acts 1:16. Further, Jesus in the New Testament taught the authority of the Old Testament. Jesus said in Matthew 5:17-19 that He had come to fulfill, not objurgate the Law and the prophets, and anyone who teaches others to disobey one of the least commandments will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. He told the Jews that all the Scriptures testified of Him (John 5:45); that the Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:33-36).

Paul says that the Old Testament Scriptures were given for our instruction that through the endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope (Romans 15:4). Now think of that; don’t just let that run past you. Books written hundreds of years before Paul’s time were written to encourage believers of Paul’s own time. That is, they were intended by their author, and who can that be other than God Himself. They



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were intended by their author to be valid and helpful through all time. In that respect, the Bible is utterly unique.

Two New Testament passages are especially important in describing the nature of biblical authority. These are not the only passages dealing with this subject. Remember, the authority of the written Word is a doctrine that goes back at least to the time of Moses—the earliest part of the Bible. But these two passages in the New Testament sum up the overall biblical teaching about the authority of the written word. The first is II Timothy 3:15-17. Paul writes to Timothy, “And how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings,” other translations use the phrase “Holy Scriptures,” “the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation for faith in Christ Jesus.” All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness; that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. In this letter, Paul is concerned about the false teaching and immorality that will enter the church at His own death.

How will the church be able to distinguish the true from the false? Paul first tells Timothy to imitate Paul’s own life and teaching (verses 10-14). But, of course, in time, a generation will arise as it has no personal memory of Paul. For them and for Timothy too, Paul next emphasizes that they should return to Old Testament Scripture—holy Scriptures which Timothy himself studied as a child. That Scripture is breathed out by God. Now that is the correct translation of a word sometimes translated “inspired.” The word means not that God breathes something into the Bible but that God breathed it out. Or in other words, that God spoke the content of the Old Testament. The written Word is God’s personal speech. It is nothing less than the divine voice. So it is the ultimate criterion to distinguish what teaching is false and what teaching is true.

The second passage is II Peter 1:19-21:

And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.



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The context of this passage is very similar from the last. Again, an aging apostle looks to the time when he will no longer be able to personally advise the church. Again, he anticipates (chapter 2) a terrible time of doctrinal and ethical confusion. Again, in verses 16-18, he tells his readers to remember his own personal experience—an eyewitness testimony.

But he also points to something even more sure; the Old Testament prophets. Prophecies, he says, do not come from someone sitting down and trying to interpret events out of their own wisdom the way our pundits do on TV today. The prophets spoke the words, but their wills did not originate the words. Those words came from God and God gave them to the prophets as the Holy Spirit carried the prophets where He wanted them to go.

So the Old Testament is God’s covenant with Israel—His own words, carrying the supreme authority of His lordship. What about the New Testament? In the nature of the case, you won’t find in the New Testament any passage where someone looks at the completed New Testament and calls it the Word of God. For at the time of the New Testament writers, the New Testament was not a complete book; it was still being written. But consider this: The religion of the New Testament is essentially the same as that of the Old—centered on the Word of God.

People sometimes think that the Old Testament is centered on words, while the New Testament is centered on a wordless kind of spirituality. But there is not the slightest suggestion of this in the Bible itself. Remember how important the words of Jesus are so that Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Remember how the Apostles told people that their own words are the commandments of the Lord. Well that shows that the New Testament is just as word-centered as the Old Testament is. And it also makes it very important for us to be able to find these words of eternal life spoken by Jesus and the Apostles. God provided a written form for the Old Testament revelation; can we expect Him to do any less for the New Testament revelation, for the fulfillment of the Old Testament? Note also that the New Testament revelation, like the Old, is a permanent revelation to be passed on to other nations and generations. This is the tradition, the Word given once for all, in the passages mentioned on your outline on 5C.

The words of the apostles, like those of the prophets, were written down in letters, in gospels, and the apocalyptic book of



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Revelation. As the ancient covenants were to be read out loud to the people, so Paul asks for his letters to be read out to the churches, and he makes his letters the basis for church discipline (II Thessalonians 3:14) and the test of people who claim to be prophets (I Corinthians 14:47). Further, Paul quotes the gospel of Luke as an authoritative word from God (I Timothy 5:18). And Peter speaks of how ignorant and unstable men twist the letters of Paul as they do the other Scriptures (II Peter 3:16). You see, Paul’s letters are Scripture, like the books of Moses.

But which books belong in the Bible? That is the question of canon. On one level, that is a difficult question. Some books like II Peter and Jude waited a long time before they were accepted by all Christians as part of the Bible. Other books like the Shepherd of Hermas were read along with the Scriptures by many Christians for years, but the church eventually said that these were not part of the Bible. But on another level, the question should not be too difficult. We know that it is God’s intention to rule the church by a written document as in the Old Testament. So as in the Old Testament, we should assume that God’s providence made that book easy to find. Remember that the church did not canonize the Bible. The church did not make the Bible authoritative. Rather, the church read these books and discovered that God had already made them authoritative. Basically what happened was that God illumined these writings so that the church could recognize God’s voice in them. As Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27).

Our Old Testament is basically the Bible used by the Jews in the time of Christ, which Jesus Himself declared to be authoritative. The Roman Catholics add some other books to their Old Testaments. There is no reason to assume that those books have Divine authority. As to the New Testament books, there was some uncertainty as I said earlier. Generally the church accepted books that they thought came from apostles, like Matthew and Romans, and books from other writers certified by the apostles. Luke, for example, was thought to be certified by Paul, and Mark by Peter, but that criteria doesn’t always work. For example, we don’t know the authorship of Hebrews. Other criteria was consistency with other Scripture. Hence, I believe the Shepherd of Hermas was rejected. But in the end, Jesus’ sheep heard His voice. It’s a remarkable fact that although the early church argued about many things, the extant of the canon never became a divisive issue.



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In the fourth century, when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Eastern letter, listed the books accepted as Scripture in his church, nobody dissented. Nobody disagreed. My overall conclusion: it is the written Bible, is the Word of God, and it is just as authoritative as God’s divine voice.

Now I would like to take up the question of transmission. That is, how does the written Word of God get from His lips to our hearts? First, as I mentioned, God inspires it. Inspiration is the breathing out—we saw in II Timothy 3:16. God speaks the words of the Bible. That’s what it means for God to breathe out words. God speaks the words of the Bible.

People sometimes ask if this means that God dictated the words to the human writers. The answer is sometimes He did, but usually not. We don’t for example, have any record of God telling Luke to sit down and take dictation. Though there is in Christ to tell John to do just that in Revelation 2:1 and following. Luke went about the work of writing his gospel as any ancient historian would. But the result of his work was the Word of God. God uses Luke to breathe out His own words, so that the text of Luke is both wholly Luke’s and wholly God’s.

Next step in transmission is copying. We use the term “autographa” or autographs to refer to the original or authoritative manuscripts of Bible books. Now there is no promise in Scripture that when people make copies of these books, they will be perfect copies. Try it yourself. Make a copy of, say, Leviticus. Chances are you will make some mistakes. That’s why we say that only the autographs—only the original certified manuscripts—are perfectly authoritative. Now some critics of this position say that it destroys our whole view of biblical authority, because if only the autographs are fully authoritative and we don’t have the autographs, then for all practical purposes we don’t have an infallible, authoritative Bible.

But notice these points in response on your outline under B4. Though we don’t have the actual autographs, we do have access to the original texts through the science of textual criticism, which compares various manuscripts readings to the term in the original. The important thing is to have the text, not to have the manuscript. Be that some textual problems remained unsolved, but these are very minor for the most part, and they never affect doctrine.



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Finally, Scripture is very redundant, repetitious in a good way. If there is a problem, in one case understanding what God is teaching us, we can find a clear statement of the same teaching in another place. Most all of the teachings we regard as doctrines are not found only once in the Bible but many, many times. People sometimes say, “It doesn’t make sense for God to inspire a book, and then require us to determine its original content by textual criticism—that is, by human means.” Again, note my replies on the outline.

When you think of transmission as a process, carrying the word from God’s lips to our hearts, eventually there will have to be a role for human thought. For human reason, even science, God might have made it so that whenever He spoke a word, we would all understand it instantly. Certainly that did not happen. God evidently intended some human teaching and some human thought to go on before His people would be able to appropriate the Word completely. He wanted this to be a communal process so that we would depend on one another. The business of figuring out the original text was a part of that.

So when we reach the step of understanding and applying the Word, we can see that it involves both a divine teacher, the Holy Spirit, and human teachers—your pastor, your library, your friendly seminary professor. Of course, the work of these human teachers will accomplish nothing unless the Holy Spirit is working in them and through them. The works of the Spirit are listed under your outline under C2: Illumination, enabling us to understand the Word; persuasion, demonstrating to us that the Word is true; and writing the Word unto our heart, the existential revelation by which loving and obeying the Word become second nature to us.

Now the inerrancy of Scripture—a fiercely debated topic in contemporary theology. The term simply means “no errors.” That is, inerrancy means truth in the common garden variety sense. What Scripture says is true; never false. Therefore you can rely on it. There are no errors in it. By the way, error is not the same thing as imprecision. We often express ourselves imprecisely as when we use round numbers. But to do that is not to lie; it’s not to mislead someone. Often we must use some round numbers to express ourselves clearly. When I tell you my age down to the minute, down to the second, that is too much precision; that is excess precision; that is precision that interferes with communication. The Bible never claims to be perfectly precise. It only claims to be true. It is true because it’s God’s Word, and God always speaks



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truly. Error comes from two sources. Either from deceit—that is, telling lies—or from ignorance—that is, making mistakes. But God never tells lies (Titus 1:2), and He never makes mistakes (Hebrews 4:13) because He knows everything.

Now many people today—and a lot of them theologians—think there are errors in the Bible. Basically they use the two arguments mentioned in your outline under C. First one is that there are obvious mistakes in the Bible such as Jesus’ statement that the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds. But these are not so obvious. With a lot of them, a solution is just to read the text more carefully. When Jesus speaks of seeds in Mark 4:31, He is not speaking about all of the seeds that a modern botanist would know, but the seeds that were normally sown in the ground by the farmers in His day. To discuss all of the other species would be surely excess precision.

Well some of the “obvious errors,” so-called, don’t have obvious solutions. Though for every problem of this sort there are usually two or three solutions proposed into the literature. But the problem here is the people who find errors in Scripture actually have a misunderstanding of Christian faith.

When God spoke to Abraham and told him he would have lots of descendants and they would own the land of Canaan, Abraham had a lot of problems in believing that word of God. But Paul says in Romans 4, no distrust made him waver concerning the Promise of God. But he grew strong in his faith. As he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised, Abraham believed in God’s word, even though there were problems. Even though it seemed impossible that God could give to Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age. Even when it seemed impossible that God could give the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants. But Abraham believed in God’s word even though there were problems, and Paul presents that as the nature of Christian faith. How can we believe that God would forgive our sins through Christ? Think how many problems there are in believing that! But if we waited until all of the problems were solved, we wouldn’t believe in Christ at all!

The second argument against biblical inerrancy is that it is not the purpose of the Bible to give inerrant teaching on matters other then the basic plan of salvation. That’s the way some people think. But where does the Bible itself make a distinction between matters of salvation and other matters? The Bible is all about



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Christ! It is all about salvation! That includes the history and geography because biblical redemption, as opposed to Buddhist or Hindu or Marxist or secularist redemption, biblical redemption depends very much on events that have happened in particular times and places. So history and salvation go together in the Bible. Further, biblical redemption deals with all of life, including our eating and drinking (I Corinthians 10:31). Nothing is irrelevant to God’s Word. So you cannot draw a line between some things that are important to salvation, in which Scripture is inerrant, and other things in which are not important salvation, in which there may be mistakes in the Bible.

Traditionally, reformed theology has discussed four important attributes of Scripture. One is authority, which we have already talked about. The others are clarity, necessity and sufficiency. So let me first talk a little bit about the clarity of Scripture. Sometimes this is called perspicuity if you want a long technical theology word to say the same thing—the clarity of Scripture. You can see the confessional definition of clarity in your outline.

At the time of the reformation, some Roman Catholics were saying that laypeople—that is laypeople that are not ordained in the church office—laypeople should not be allowed to read the Bible, since only people in the church hierarchy who have been trained in the churches’ schools could properly understand it. The reformers did not say that everything in the Bible is perfectly clear. They did say that the basic message of salvation is sufficiently clear, but anyone can understand it either by reading it himself or by using what they call “ordinary means of grace,” such as talking to your pastor. By the way, the power of the Word, its authority, and its clarity [is] a form of triad that corresponds to the lordship attributes. For in Deuteronomy 30:11-14 and Romans 10:6-8, the clarity of the word is based on the nearness of God to His people and presence of God among His people.

Second, let’s talk about the necessity of Scripture. Necessity simply means that without God’s Word, we have no relationship with Him. Without His commands He is not our Lord. For the Lord is by definition one who gives authoritative commands to His people. And without His word, we have no authoritative promises either, so He cannot be our Savior.

Now the sufficiency of Scripture. Read the formulation of the sufficiency from the text of the Westminster Confession on your outline. Sufficiency means simply that within Scripture, we have



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all the words of God that we need to have. We should not try to add to them, and we dare not subtract from them since we live by every word that comes from God. Scripture itself tells us not to add or subtract. And it tells us clearly not to add human tradition to the Word. That is, don’t put human tradition on the same level of God’s Word as the Pharisees did. Human tradition is not a bad thing, but it is not God’s Word. When we try to put it on the same level as God’s Word, we are saying that God’s Word is not enough—that is, that it is insufficient.

There is also special sense in which the New Testament gospel is sufficient. Just as Jesus’ death and resurrection are sufficient to save us, so the apostles’ message about Jesus is sufficient to give us all of the blessings of Jesus’ salvation (II Peter 1:2-11). So we should not expect God to give us further revelation of the same authority as the Bible. People sometimes say that Scripture is sufficient for theology but not for other areas of life like science, history, plumbing, politics, car repairs. But that misunderstands the sufficiency of Scripture. Remember always that Scripture is sufficient always as the Word of God. It gives us all the words of God we will ever need for anything. So Scripture contains all of the words of God that we need for theology but also for ethics, politics, the arts, plumbing and car repair.

Now certainly for all of these disciplines, we also need knowledge from outside the Bible. That’s even true of theology. Theologians need, for example, to know the rules of Hebrew grammar, but Scripture never gives these to us. Theologians need to know the history of the ancient world, but Scripture only gives us part of this history. So in order to use the Bible, even in order to do theology, we need to know some things outside the Bible. That’s also true in ethics. For example, the Bible doesn’t mention abortion. We have to learn what abortion is from extra-biblical sources. Scripture does say some things about murder and about unborn human life. When we bring the biblical principles together with our extra biblical knowledge of what abortion is, it becomes pretty obvious that “thou shall not murder” implies “thou shall not abort.”

The basic point to be remembered here is that no kind of knowledge from outside the Bible is worthy to be added to Scripture. That includes the traditions of the Roman Church, claims of contemporary prophets, and even the confessions and traditions of the Protestant denomination. Scripture alone is sufficient. For our doctrine, it is sufficient for our practice; it is sufficient for anything we do. We ought to seek the Word of God in Scripture for

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all of the activities that God calls us into. It’s those words of God that show us how to be holy, to show us how to glorify Him. That shows us how to carry on our lives in the image of Jesus Christ.

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