Abuses of the Sufficiency of Scripture

Introduction 

I want to be a brief as possible in this, and to do so requires that I be blunt: there are many believing Christians today, Christians who are children and beneficiaries of the Reformation that are utterly ignorant of its principles. Chief among these is the principle of Scripture Alone—often articulated as Sola Scriptura—who are ignorant of what it means in practice.

James White, in his book Scripture Alone, in giving the reader a brief introduction to the history of the Reformation, introduces the principle thusly,

…[The] formal principle of the Reformation was sola scriptura, for it was the assertion of biblical sufficiency over against tradition that allowed for the recovery of certain biblical doctrines: justification by grace through faith alone, the proper form and governance of the church, the individual priesthood of the believer, and much more.[1]

Historically, we must recognize that the principle was grounded in establishing an authority for what Christians ought to believe and how were believers to test whether any doctrine or dogmatic assertion of the church was truly binding on the believer: the Church of Rome or the Scriptures themselves?[2]

Battle Lines

One place where I think that White, like most modern believers, see the lines being drawn today is in the cultural landscape, as the, “advent of postmodernism, the enshrinement of Darwinian orthodoxy in the educational systems of Western society, and the rise of blatant humanism as the religion-by-default of large subcultures”, has posed a challenge to the Scriptures as being philosophically relevant.[3]

However, we act as though these challenges are new, that no one has ever been challenged on the basis of what God has set forth in revelation of his will and intentions for his creatures. Yet this challenge is as old as the first pages of Scripture itself, when that wily serpent asked the woman, “Has God really said…?” (Genesis 3:1).

The challenge of the modern believer, like to those who came before us, is not something that is new and has never before been seen, rather it is old, ancient, primordial, and essentially an attempt at distraction that we must not yield to.

Of False Dilemmas 

Back to the issue of those well-meaning, yet confused believers, who speak of the “formal principle of the Reformation” yet rarely seem to grasp what it means.

I say “well-meaning”, in the truest sense and not in some back-handed manner. I hear them, and hear what they mean: “A Christian should only believe what the Scriptures say.” And I am in hearty  agreement with that. Amen and amen.

As true as that is, what I see is a failure to make distinctions between what the Scriptures say (the words on the page) and what the Scriptures mean (how the words need to be understood). So often the two distinctions are confused, and when that occurs we often descend into confusion because the meaning of the words as objective facts will get substituted for the subjective meaning to me.

The danger of failing to make such necessary distinctions inevitably results, not in a rejection of Scripture, but in an over-reliance on a particular interpretation of Scripture, an interpretation that may be faulty, either in its starting assumptions or in its aggregated premises from which its conclusion is derived. The result of such is often a false dilemma.

Where to Start

So much of the faith, or what we believe, often grows out of tradition. This is not to say that traditions are bad, but how many of Luther’s contemporaries saw the same problems that he did and rather than simply asking a question just put their heads down and trudged along? And I don’t mean to compare…say…young earth creationism to the practice of selling indulgences, but there is a trajectory that both follow, and it is the assumption of tradition: this is what we believe; we’ve believed it for a long time; therefore it must be true.

And indeed, from a doctrinal standpoint, even I would argue that young earth creationism is biblical in the sense that those who promote it actually have somewhere to stand, whereas the Roman doctrine of plenary indulgences is not biblical in that it was created out of whole cloth. Similarly, I would be compelled by the force of Scripture to agree that the Pope, as the bishop of the church in Rome, has authority over that particular congregation, and no authority over any other, and only as much authority as Scripture allows over his own.

These concessions aside, I would argue that young earth creationism—while arguably biblical—is nonetheless a false doctrine that has been imposed upon the modern church in an uncritical fashion.

Unnecessary Trade-offs

My greatest contention in making such a claim is that it falsely assumes that one must trade consistency for certainty. But herein lies the false dilemma that is often presumed by both sides: if you consistently assume some position, then you will lose certainty in another.

There is no denying that there are those who have used the fact that Scripture evidences elements of a shared worldview with their contemporaries to eventually argue against both the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. That is their consistency in one area steered them first into compromise, then into apostasy. But herein lies the error in their reasoning: if “A” is true, then “B” cannot be true. That is, if the biblical authors evidence either familiarity with or reliance upon something commonly assumed, then Scripture cannot be true.

My assertion is that if you’re going to be consistent then you are forced, by both conviction and reason, not to allow two different truths to cancel out one another. Allow me to illustrate by this analogy: 

In my youth, I built a truck. In building this truck, I went and selected a variety of off-the-shelf parts that I collated into a very capable and fun vehicle that I enjoyed for a number of years. Now, their are some, who noticing that I said “off-the-shelf” would say that I didn’t actually build the truck because I was using readily available parts. There are some who would argue that unless every piece was custom made by my own hand, then I didn’t build it. And perhaps some one argue that unless I forced the truck into existence from non-existence by sheer will then I didn’t build it.

At every level of objection, when it comes to the truth of my building that truck, there’s a supposition placed into what I mean by “build”, that becomes more strained and excepted the harder that one pushes against the meaning. Moreover, what if someone were to say that unless I, today, this very minute reproduced that very truck in the exact same way that I built I built it, which was an involved process over a number years that it wasn’t true. How absurd is such a demand?

The “Ah-ha” Moment

My hope is that you see where this is going, and that place is the distinction between that and how, which is what my analogy is driving at. But even within that distinction there are sub-distinctions: how I tell the story about that which I did.

In a more generalized, less than technical setting, I might tell the story with less detail and more focus on how I struggled to maintain a dependable daily-driver while building it. In a more informed setting, I might talk about the history of the engine, the pedigree of the transmission and drive train. In other settings I might talk of the challenge of tuning it. How I narrate the story depends on what I assume about my audience and their level of knowledge. Yet, without a doubt, someone in the crowd might come up to me later and challenge me about aspects or seek more detail.

Indeed, one of the great difficulties of Scripture is that we don’t have the narrator, the writer, the one who under the guidance of the Spirit of God put pen to paper and recorded these stories available to us to point to a text and ask, “What did you mean here?”. And I say “stories”, not to diminish but to point out the fact that humans are creatures of story; we narrate our lives to ourselves and one another. We exist inside a story, participating in its plot, experiencing climaxes and resolutions, which spring into new stories. And just as how we tell our stories is related to our particular historical and cultural context, the biblical authors had their own contexts that they spoke from and into.

If we demand that our stories be understood only within our particular context, is it not proper to assume that the writers of Scripture have the same expectation?

A Slippery Slope?

A chief objection to such an approach might be one that appears, at least on the surface, to diminish either the historicity or the authority of Scripture. Far from it and God forbid. If you or anyone else should think that then you’re simply missing the point and simply aren’t listening. The issue isn’t the Bible as a whole but rather the parts that comprise the whole. Another way to frame this is to say that we are missing the trees for the forest: if the Bible is the forest, then the books are the trees. But a forest isn’t merely trees, it’s the ground that the trees grow out of.

The ground that Scripture grew out of, the ground that revelation was made in had a particular context: particular understandings, tropes, metaphors, literary conventions, stylistic turns, etc. Those elements shifted and moved over time but they also didn’t change that much. As the writer of Ecclesiastes notes, somewhat ironically,

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.-Ecclesiastes 1:9, ESV

While both the dating and authorship of the book is debated[4], the observation made is both stark and relevant in its historical location prior to the Incarnation: the world to them appeared fixed and regular: this was simply the way that the world was. And this is the way that some biblical interpreters behave, which embodies the subsequent sentiment uttered by the writer,

Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. 

-Ecclesiastes 1:10-11, ESV

What I’m saying is that Scripture, when it came into being as Scripture, was the new thing, the paradigm shift, but it did so in its context and it can do the same here. But it can only do that if we’re honest about the text of Scripture and understand what it is teaching, reproving, and correcting (2 Timothy 3:16) in its place in time so that we can bring it forward into ours and do the same.

It’s a Gospel Issue

The enemies of the faith often use our own weapons against us. The weapon that gets used most often is our ignorance: ignorance of the ancient world and its paradigms. 

Those long-established paradigms are what the Gospel of Christ assaulted. And those paradigms are clearly reasserting themselves today if you know what you’re looking at. The problem is that most Christians, largely because of an ignorance of the backgrounds of Scripture, are ill-prepared to fight.

Some might say that I’m trying to deny the work of the Spirit in salvation but I’m not. Rather I’m recognizing that our enemy also has weapons and its no longer the time to bury our heads in the sand or stick our fingers in our ears with our eyes squeezed shut going, “La-la-la-la!” Rather, it is time for us to hear the apostle:

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. 

-1 Corinthians 16:13, ESV

The Sufficiency Strawman

Young earth creationists will often taut the line of scriptural sufficiency in a way that misrepresents what the term actually means or try to force it into places that it was never intended to go, and often do so in ways that are self-refuting, especially when it comes to interpreting Scripture.

“Scripture interprets scripture,” is the cry of the Reformation—and I agree—but in what sense is the interpretation being made? For example, when Paul writes to the Corinthian church, “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair it is her glory?”[5] From where in Scripture is Paul getting this idea and making this interpretation? Does another writer, say Peter, James, John, or even the unknown writer of Hebrews make interpretation and application of it? Please, feel free to give a citation in the comments. One author has written an entire book on the passage that line was taken from, which is about instructions related to head coverings in Christian worship. Needless to say, that by limiting his search to what can be found in scripture, or in commentaries about Scripture[6], he misses the larger point about an underlying understanding of hair in general that is relevant to that ancient context.[7]

A second example, from Phil Johnson, writing at Answers in Genesis, argues that, “God did not give us two books, the Bible and nature. Scripture alone is a sufficient source of knowledge about God; nature is not.”

Yet, assuming Johnson counts himself among the Reformed, who would argue that there is some element about nature that provides testimony to God, as the Scriptures say,

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 

-Romans 1:19-20, ESV

While it is true that creation (nature) doesn’t give us an exhaustive narrative about who God is, it is nonetheless identified by Scripture as a true revelation of what God is, sufficient in itself, to which God can and does hold men accountable. So, let me add to this self-inflicted injury of Johnson,

…Let God be true though every one were a liar,… 

-Romans 3:4, ESV

Self-Inflicted Injuries

I would contend that there are a lot of positions that are held in the modern church that are self-inflicted injuries, which—if examined thoughtfully and consistently in light of history—would be shown as exercises meant to exacerbate human pride rather than remove it. 

I will contend, happily and forthrightly for both scriptural inerrancy and its corollary of scriptural sufficiency, but I will not do it at the expense of common sense biblical interpretation that makes the text say and do things that it was never intended to say or do. Here I find myself in complete agreement with Johnson when he writes,

…[There] is a major fallacy built into the “two books” argument. It wrongly implies that nature and Scripture have equal power, communicate with equal clarity, and so should be given equal weight. In practice that usually means current scientific opinion becomes the judge of how we read Scripture—almost never the other way around.

But that assumes we are correctly interpreting Scripture before we dare to engage in science. I would happily agree that we shouldn’t be trying to fit a scientific theory into Scripture any more than we should be trying to fit some later developed tradition about the Virgin Mary into Scripture. Both actions are inherently eisegetical.

Neither is this to argue about some absurd concept of “nonoverlapping magisteria” where science and religion are to be sandboxed away from one another, neither touching the other. As I have noted elsewhere,

The issue seems that it is bounded by two lines: an unyielding, wooden literalism on one side and a super-soft spiritualization of the text on the other. One makes the text irreconcilable to the point of parody and the other make the text so pliable that it can be formed into any shape needed.

Let the Scriptures be what they are: ancient texts, written in an ancient context, according to ancient rules, often riddled with ancient concepts and concerns. But that doesn’t mean that they can be dismissed or soft-peddled for those same reasons,

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. 

-Romans 15:4, ESV

Notes

1. James R. White. Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible’s Accuracy, Authority, and Authenticity. Bethany House Publishing. 2004. p. 10 (ePub)
2. Ibid, p. 10-12
3. Ibid, p.12
4. Miles Custis and James S. Reitman. “The Book of Ecclesiastes: Critical Issues”. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Lexham Press. 2016
5. 1 Corinthians 11:14-15, ESV
6. Dale Partridge. A Cover for Glory: A Biblical Defense for Headcoverings. Prescott Publishing. 2023. p. 110-21 (Kindle)
7. See also “Sexism and Christianity: Incompatible or Fundamental”