If the Bible is coherent, then understanding the Bible means grasping how things fit together. Becoming a Biblical theologian means seeing more and more pieces fit together into a glorious mosaic of the divine will. And doing exegesis means querying the text about how its many propositions cohere in the author’s mind.
If we are going to feed our people, we must ever advance in our grasp of biblical truth. And to advance in our grasp of biblical truth we must be troubled by biblical affirmations.
It must bother us that James and Paul don’t seem to jibe. Only when we are troubled and bothered do we think hard. And if we don’t think hard about how biblical affirmations fit together, we will never penetrate to their common root and discover the beauty of unified divine truth. The end result is that our Bible reading will become insipid, we will turn to fascinating “secondary literature,” our sermons will be the lame work of “second-handers,” and the people will go hungry.
“We never think until we have been confronted with a problem,” said John Dewey. He was right. And that is why we will never think hard about biblical truth until we are troubled by its complexity.
Habitually Disturbed
We must form the habit of being systematically disturbed by things that at first glance don’t make sense. Or to put it a different way, we must relentlessly query the text. One of the greatest honors I received while teaching at Bethel was when the teaching assistants in the Bible department gave me a T-shirt which had the initials of Jonathan Edwards on the front and on the back the words: “Asking questions is the key to understanding.”
But there are several strong forces which oppose our relentless and systematic interrogating of biblical texts. One is that it consumes a great deal of time and energy on one small portion of Scripture. We have been schooled [quite erroneously] that there is a direct correlation between reading a lot and gaining insight. But in fact there is no positive correlation at all been quantity of pages read and quality of insight gained. Just the reverse. Except for a few geniuses, insight diminishes as we try to read more and more. Insight or understanding is the product of intensive, headache-producing meditation on two or three verses and how they fit together. This kind of reflection and rumination is provoked by asking questions of the text. And you cannot do it if you hurry. Therefore, we must resist the deceptive urge to carve notches in our bibliographic gun. Take two hours to ask ten questions of Galatians 2:20 and you will gain one hundred times the insight you would have attained by reading 30 pages of the New Testament or any other book. Slow down. Query. Ponder. Chew.
Another reason it is hard to spend hours probing for the roots of coherence is that it is fundamentally unfashionable today to systematize and seek for harmony and unity. This noble quest has fallen on hard times because so much artificial harmony has been discovered by impatient and nervous Bible defenders. But if God’s mind is truly coherent and not confused, then exegesis must aim to see the coherence of biblical revelation and the profound unity of divine truth. Unless we are to dabble forever on the surface of things (content to turn up “tensions” and “difficulties”) then we must resist the atomistic (and basically anti-intellectual) fashions in the contemporary theological establishment. There is far too much debunking of past failures and far too little construction going on.
A third force that opposes the effort to ask the Bible questions is this: Asking questions is the same as posing problems, and we have been discouraged all our lives from finding problems in God’s Holy Book.
Rightfully Respecting God’s Word
It is impossible to respect the Bible too highly, but it is very possible to respect it wrongly. If we do not ask seriously how differing texts fit together, then we are either superhuman (and glance all truth at a glance) or indifferent (and don’t care about seeing more truth). But I don’t see how anyone who is indifferent or superhuman can have a proper respect for the Bible. Therefore reverence for God’s Word demands that we ask questions and pose problems and that we believe there are answers and solutions which will reward our labor with “treasures new and old” (Matt. 13:52).
We must train our people that it is not irreverent to see difficulties in the biblical text and to think hard about how they can be resolved.
I do not accuse my 6-year-old son, Benjamin, of irreverence when he cannot make sense out of a Bible verse and asks me about it. He is just learning to read. But have our abilities to read been perfected? Can any of us at one reading grasp the logic of a paragraph and see how every part relates to all the others and how they all fit together to make a unified point? How much less the thought of an entire epistle, the New Testament, the Bible! If we care about truth, we must relentlessly query the text and form the habit of being bothered by things we read.
Reading for Reverence
This is just the opposite of irreverence. It is what we do if we crave the mind of Christ. Nothing sends us deeper into the counsels of God than seeing apparent theological discrepancies in the Bible and pondering them day and night until they fit into an emerging system of unified truth. For example, a year ago I struggled for days with how Paul could say on the one hand, “Have no anxiety about anything” (Phil. 4:6), but on the other hand say (with apparent impunity) that his “anxiety for all the churches” was a daily pressure on him (2 Cor. 11:28). How could he say, “Rejoice always” (1 Thess. 5:16), and “Weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15)? How would he say to give thanks “always and for everything” (Eph. 5:20) and then admit, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” (Rom. (9:2)?
More recently I have asked, What does it mean that Jesus said in Matthew 5:39 to turn the other cheek when struck, but said in Matthew 10:23, “When they persecute you in one town, flee. . .”? When do you flee and when do endure hardship and turn the other cheek? I have also been pondering in what sense it is true that God is “slow to anger” (Ex. 34:6) and in what sense “His wrath is quickly kindled” (Ps. 2:11).
There are hundreds and hundreds of such seeming discrepancies in the Holy Scripture, and we dishonor the text not to see them and think them through. God is not a God of confusion. His tongue is not forked. There are profound and wonderful resolutions to all problems. He has called us to an eternity of discovery so that every morning for ages to come we might break forth in new songs of praise.
In 2 Timothy 2:7 Paul gave us a command and a promise. He commanded, “Think over what I say.” And he promised, “God will give you understanding in everything.”
How do the command and promise fit together? The little “for” (gar) gives the answer. “Think . . . because God will reward you with understanding.”
The promise is not made to all. It is made to those who think. And we do not think until we are confronted with a problem. Therefore, brothers, let us query the text.
An essential, highly interesting affirmation by the panel of the belief on biblical inerrancy from the Together for the Gospel Conference 2012, led by Mark Dever, Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. Besides the great panel discussion, there are also a few book recommendations (linked to Amazon, just click on title or photo) and lots of links to search peripheral issues as they relate to the inerrancy debate. This page will be added to the (permanent) apologetics page.
We affirm that the sole (final) authority for the Church is the Bible, verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible and totally sufficient and trustworthy. We deny that the Bible is a mere witness to the divine revelation or that any portion of Scripture is marked by error or by effects of human sinfulness.
We affirm that the authority and the sufficiently of Scripture extends to the entire Bible and that therefore the Bible is our final authority for all doctrine and practice. We deny that any portion of the Bible should be used in an effort to deny the truthfulness or trustworthiness of any other portion. We further deny any effort to identify a canon within the canon or for example to set the words of Jesus against the words of Paul.
We affirm that truth ever remains a central issue for the Church and that the Church must resist the allure of pragmatism and post modern conceptions of truths as substitutes for obedience to the comprehensive truth claims of Scripture. We deny that truth is merely a product of social construction or that the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of the biblical events and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. We further deny that the church can establish its ministry on a foundation of pragmatism, current marketing techniques or contemporary cultural fashions.
Is inerrancy something new? Short answer “NO!”
Minute 4 – Dever addresses the charge that “inerrancy” is a “new thing” or just a “reformation doctrine?”.
John Piper responds:.In 1971 Fuller Theological Seminary took the Word out. I read what was happening in Germany. It blew me away. I did not see it coming. So it may have been there, but the teachers that I loved and had influenced me most didn’t talk that way and didn’t give me indication that it would be going that way. I was never able to make any sense out of the distinctions between infallible and inerrant.
Dr Simon Gathercole - teaches New Testament at Cambridge, in England. One of the clearest figures to express a doctrine of inerrancy was St. Augustine and it came up for him in conversation with the Manichaeanswhere he made it very clear that there were no contradictions in Scripture , that if you do find what looks like a mistake in Scripture, it is either a result of a problem with the translation, a problem in the text, a particular manuscript or scribal error or that you have misunderstood it. So Augustine is an example of someone who was very clear on inerrancy.
Ligon Duncan – there is a consistent witness across Christian history to the Bible’s sole, final authority and its inspiration and inerrancy.
Peter Williams – (undergraduate studies at Cambridge) “I believe it is fully authoritative, inerrant, inspired by God’ I think I’d want to add more words, I want to say: It’s basically clear, it’s sufficient, it’s historical. People can take a word like “inerrant” and leech it (by saying) – “I agree with the notion that Scripture is entirely true, but then they try and weaken it in other ways and I think that’s happening particularly because a lot of people, at least in this country are signing an inerrancy statement for their paycheck (which sometimes happens; they redefine inerrancy). There are many reasons to believe in inerrancy, but I think when you believe in verbal inspiration (i.e.) that God gave words and you believe in God’s trustworthiness, that He has a true character and you want to have a relationship with God, then it is inescapable logically to come to a view of Scriptural inerrancy. If you believe that God has given words, I don’t see how you can break that and say, “Well, He gives words and they are sometimes full of errors”, without actually questioning God’s trustworthiness Himself.
The 3 roots/trajectories on how inerrancy is denied
Al Mohler (11 min mark) Why wouldn’t anyone believe in this? (This question) leads to a principle of interpreting church history, which often surprises people when you first hear it, and that is that “heresy precedes orthodoxy“. That doesn’t mean that the false precedes the true. It does mean that the codification, or confession of the faith is often in the face of, is a response to heresy or that which is sub biblical or sub orthodox. So, in 325 AD you have a statement made by the Council of Nicaea, that wasn’t necessary until Arius denied that the father and the Son are of the same substance. And when it comes to inerrancy, the first thing is that this is God’s word, God is totally true, so all the attributes of Scripture seem to come, and yet Augustine has to respond to the Manichaeansand we have to respond to contemporary denials of the total truthfulness of Scripture. I think there are 3 roots, or 3 trajectories in which that comes:
The first is ideological and this is basically the external critique of biblical inerrancy. It comes from new atheists, of course if you don’t believe in God, you don’t believe there could possibly be a word of God; if you don’t believe in supernatural revelation as a possibility, or even recently, if you don’t believe in words as units of meaning; that are capable of conveying truth, there are various rules of philosophy and literary interpretation that have lost all confidence in words. They have to use words to explain how little confidence they have in them any longer; it’s part of the whole conundrum, but nevertheless, it is an ideological assault and so a good bit of what you will read simply says: “Inerrancy is an impossibility” and it will move on. But, it is not the major issue of our concern, there are two other trajectories.
Another trajectory is apologetic. This is where you have evangelicals who say: This is an embarrassment. To claim inerrancy is to over claim the text, it is an impediment to our intellectual credibility and so you have people who would pose to be within the evangelical movement who will say, as Kenton Sparks in a recent book said, “This is the intellectual doom,” to paraphrase him, because it makes us continually defend the truthfulness of every passage in a text and that is leading modern people to have huge intellectual obstacles to receiving the main message in the text, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So you have various forms of this kind of apologetic argument; it’s the same argument as people who come along and say you can’t talk about the Bible’s teaching on sexuality; that’s presenting too much of an obstacle for contemporary people to come to Christ. Ot, you can’t deny the theory of evolution, it’s metanarrative because that creates too much of an impediment for people to come to Christ. And so, you have websites today and people arguing that inerrancy is just an obstacle, it’s a theological construct that’s doing more damage than good.
The third trajectory, or the third root you can look at this is moral, in which case you have people say that if we’re committed to total truthfulness of Scripture, then we’re committed to text which reveal God as acting in immoral ways; God’s people sanctioning immoral acts, and what you have is people who will say, “Look, we have the capacity as human beings to judge God, and thus we’re gonna go to the conquest of Canaan or we’re gonna go to the way God deals with any individual in either Testament of the canon and say that that’s immoral. If you’re gonna try and impose a human standard of morality, like the late atheist, Christopher Hitchens, if you read the Bible honestly you’re gonna find texts that are gonna cause you all kinds of difficulty and by the way, one of the things Christopher Hitchens did very well for us was to say, “He can understand theists who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and he can understand atheists who don’t believe it’s possible, what he didn’t understand were people who tried to pose in the middle.
Dr Simon Gathercole - The central plank for me in the doctrine of inerrancy, and that is that it was Jesus’ view of Scripture and I think the 2 other points that were mentioned are really significant. The sort of dogmatic logic of what Scripture says, God says and therefore because of the character of God, Scripture is without error. Also, it’s the continuous testimony of the Church. I would recommend everyone read John Woodbridge’s book Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal even though the debate is now different, but there’s a lot to learn there. But, if you just look at the way Jesus treats Scripture, what He says about Scripture, “Your word is truth”, “Scripture cannot be broken”, the way He refers to Adam, the way He refers to Elijah and Elisha, all the figures of the Old Testament, the way He responds to Satan: “It’s written, and every word is proceeding from the mouth of God.” That has to be the real cornerstone for our doctrine of inerrancy and it means that it’s an imperative of discipleship for us, that it’s a matter of following Jesus. (Also recommends “Christ and the Bible” by John Wenham)
Peter Williams - If heresy precedes orthodoxy then I think that apologetics precedes heresy, as in most heresy begins as apologetics movement. And, I say that as someone who is involved in apologetics and likes it. Liberal theology is an attempt to rescue Christianity from deep embarrassment and that’s how a lot of these things begin and those of us that are involved in apologetics need to be quite careful about that, because it can lead to error. The way people get seduced sometime into abandoning Scriptural authority is when they become persuaded that, that thing which adheres most to their dreams and their aspirations and start to believe “that more people will come to Christ if I just water this down somewhat”. Sometime people become persuaded in theological education that they are being more faithful to the text if they read it in a way that is contrary to another text. When people are being brought up in a Chirstian context, to value the authority of the Bible, it appeals and they become persuaded that the most honest reading of the text is to read it so it contradicts to another one.
Al Mohler – Liberal theology is a succession of rescue attempts for the reputation of Christianity and to just give an example of what Peter is talking about: You have Rudolph Bultmann, who in one of his books says people who use electric lights don’t believe in a supernatural universe. So, in other words, if you’re gonna reach modern people we’re gonna have to bring christianity into intellectual credibility with the modern world. A lot of the things you see being claimed right now are as old as the heretics that the church fathers faced and certainly in terms of protestant liberalism and what the church has faced in over 100 years.
Ligon Duncan – Another example in modern liberalism is Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was offended by the doctrine of the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ and the uniqueness of Christ. And he looked out at Germany and he said: German intellectuals are rejecting Christianity in droves, they’re impacted by the enlightenment and the message of Christianity must change if we are going to be able to capture this generation for christianity. It wasn’t as if he was sitting around inventing to destroy christianity, but in fact he did that with apologetic missionary motives in reaching his culture and so liberalism’s fundamental premise is that the message must change if christianity is going to survive and effectively engage the culture.
Peter Williams -It’s going right back to Marcion in the second century. Marcion is deeply embarrassed by the Old Testament, by the Jewishness of Jesus. He, as an apologist thinks that he can commend christianity far better by ditching those things. So, that’s why becoming an apologist, led straight to the heresy.
John Piper (minute 20 mark) Mark Dever asks why JP concluded that inerrancy was true: There are layers to that like- My momma told me it was true. That’s one layer. “..remember those from whom you’ve learned the faith” (2 Timothy 3:14), that’s an argument in the Bible. Second layer would be: God made me see it. That’s the deepest layer and I do believe I couldn’t believe the Bible is untrue, if I tried because I am just taken by Him, for it. I believe that’s the deepest reason. You can’t persuade anybody with that and so, up above those layers are the layers of experience, of encounter with the text and I think that at one level the Bible, as C.S.Lewis said: “You believe in it as you believe in the sun, not only because you see it, but you see everything else by it”. I asked my professor in Germany one time, “Why do you believe the Bible? And he said: Because it makes sense out of the world for me. Year after year, after year you live in the book and you deal with the world and it brings coherence to evil and good and sorrow and loss. And there’s one other level I would mention: Liar, lunatic, Lord argument in the Gospels works for me in Paul: Liar, lunatic or faithful apostle because I think I know Paul better than I know anybody in the Bible. Luke wrote most quantitatively, but he’s writing narrative. But with Paul, if you read these 13 letters hundreds of times, you know this man. Either he’s stupid, I mean insane, or liar, or a very wise, deep, credible, thoughtful person. So, when I put Paul against any liberal scholar in any German university that I ever met, they don’t even come close. So, I have never, frankly, been tested very much by the devil or whoever to say, “This wise, liberal, offering his arguments…” I read Paul and I say, “I don’t think so”. This man is extraordinary, he’s smart, he’s rational. He’s been in the 3rd, 7th heaven and he is careful about what he is saying. So, that whole argument “Liar, lunatic, Lord – works for me with Jesus and it works powerfully for me for Paul and moreover once you’ve got Paul speaking, self authenticating, irresistible, world view shaping truth, then as you move out from Jesus and Paul, the others just start to shine with confirming evidences. Just a few ayers, there are others. Dever prompts John to give one more. JP: Why are you married after 43 years? How do you endure losses? really, where does your strength come from? You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Free from pornography and free from divorce, free from depressions that just undo you. How do you find your way into marriage over and over and out of depression and away form the internet? How does that happen? It happens by the power of this incredible book. Dever: For people who haven’t had time to accumulate all those layers, anything you would tell them to read? Piper: Back when the inerrancy council was red hot “Scripture and truth” edited by Grudem and
Al Mohler – The problem is how few of our confessional statements are clear on this in the first place. So one of our evangelical liabilities is that too much has been assumed under an article of Scripture without specifying language, with inerrancy being one of those necessary attributes of Scripture confirmed. You do find people today, some lamentably who are trying to claim that you can still use the word, while basically eviscerating it, emptying it of meaning. So you have historical denials, in particular, you have someone who says that a text… and “The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy” makes it very clear, our affirmations and denials are actually patterned after the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy, which was itself patterned after previous statements in which there were not only affirmations, but clear denials. So, when you look to that statement, you’ll see that there’s the version of what inerrancy means and that means “This is not true”. So, you have clear denials. One of the affirmations is: Scripture has different forms of literature, but the denial is that you can legitimately dehistoricize an historical text. So, in other words, everything in Scripture reveals, including every historical claim is true. You find some people saying: “Well, you can affirm the truthfulness of the text without the historicity of the text. You can’t do that. You have people who are now using genre criticism, various forms to say: This is a type of literature. My favorite of these lamentable arguments is the one that says: This is the kind of text to which the issue of inerrancy does not apply. In other words: I don’t like it. But, what they mean is: I am not making a truth claim. If I am not making a truth claim… that’s ridiculous, but you find these kinds of nuances going on. You also find very clear, points of friction. So, let’s give an example of points of friction: Do we have to believe in the historicity of the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis? What Pete said about apologetics, that puts us over, against a dominant, intellectual system that establishes what is called credibility in the secular academy. Those evangelicals who feel intellectually accountable to that, are trying to say, “There has to be some other way then, of dealing with Genesis 1 through 11 and that’s where you have now the ultimate friction point, with coming, for instance, the historical Adam and an historical fall and now you’re finding people who are trying to say, “Okay, there is no historical claim in Genesis 1 through 3, but I still believe in an historical Adam because I am just going to pull him out of the air and pop him down and say, “I still believe in an historical Adam (but) I am not going to root it in the historical nature of the text, but I need him because Paul believed in him. And then, you have people who have websites today, someone like Peter Enns, who used to teach at an institution which required inerrancy, but no longer teaches there, who says, “Clearly, Paul did believe in inerrancy, but, Paul was wrong”. And so, now you not only have the denial of inerrancy of the historicity of Genesis 1 through 3, you have Paul now, in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 being said, “Well now, inerrancy for him means ‘he was speaking truthfully, as inspired by God, but limited to the world view that was accessible and available to him at the time’. That is not what Jesus believed about Scripture. That is not what the church must believe about Scripture. I never came close to not believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. I came close to believing that there could be other legitimate ways of describing the total authority and truthfulness of the text and especially in context of fierce denominational controversy, I thought there must be room for finding it somewhere else and some people even mentioned here were correctives. For example J.I. Packer’s Fundamentals of God, was the bomb that landed in the playground. That little experiment just doesn’t happen; you take that out, it simply won’t work. At about the time that you (Mark Dever) and I really became friends, we were looking at how you came from an evangelical background where those issues have been discussed for 20 years before they did explode in the Southern Baptist Convention. My denomination had to learn this lesson a little bit late and at great cost.
Mark Dever- leaving the denominational stuff aside, you (Mohler) as a Christian, you found an intuitive, like John is talking about, an intuitive faith in Scripture.
Al Mohler- Well, it was intuitive, but I also had intellectual guardrails. My earliest, explicit theological formation was when apologetics hit me as a crisis as a teenager and I was led directly into the influence of Francis Schaeffer. And the book that most influenced me as a teenager in high school, holding on to the faith as against a very secular environment was his book based on lectures at Wheaton “He is there and He is not silent”, and I would point to that as the 5 or 10 books that most shaped my thinking, because Schaeffer’s logic in his lectures is really clear: “If there is a God, who doesn’t exist, we’re doomed. If there’s a God who does exist, but doesn’t speak, we’re just as doomed. If there is a God who does exist and He does speak, then salvation is in the speech. And so that was one of the guard rails in my life and being raised in a Gospel church that preached the word of God and just assumed that when you say “It’s the word of God”, it means all this.
Ligon Duncan – I didn’t have faith challenges as a teenager that Al did, but I was reading a lot of that apologetic literature and this was being talked about by evangelicals and the Ligonier statement on Scripture had come out in 1973, the ICBI Chicago Statement came out in 1978. Those are my teenage years. This is a conversation in the conservative corner of evangelicalism, in which I was reared. I had a good pastor that was happy to have me ask him questions about this when I was troubled with something I could ask him, he was on the board at Westminster Theological Seminary. When I went to Edinburgh (Scotland for PhD) I already had a solid education in the doctrine of Scripture at Covenant Seminary. But when I went to Edinburgh , James Barr’s book “Fundamentalism” had just come out and I read it. I have more writings in the margins of the text in this book. I was arguing with him relentlessly in this book.
Mark Dever – This was an attack on J.I. Packer’s book and other kinds of statements of faith and Scripture.
Ligon Duncan - At that point I thought this would be some kind of hot topic. I had read some Barr in seminary, mostly semantics of biblical language and other things like that, in which, hopefully he is going after some bad stuff, but, I decided that when that book came out that I needed to read everything that Barr had ever written because of the potential influence on scholars. I was doing patristics at Edinburgh and so this wasn’t something that was part of my reading for work, it was just something I needed to do on the side and so I did. It was the most soul killing 6 months that I have ever spent. It was very disturbing. And several things helped me: One is a professor who had already thought through all of these issues. I went to another professor, and as we sat down he said, “You need to know, I have walked through all of these issues long ago and I’m happy to walk with you through them now. That was an enormous intellectual and theological resource to me. But then, it was the reality of Christ and the Gospel and the lives of believers that didn’t even know that they were ministering to me because that person could not be the way he or she is if there wasn’t a Holy Spirit indwelling Christ in us. I was also reading Ned Stonehouse’s biography of J Gresham Machen, who went through the same thing when he went to Marburg to study and he came into contact with Hermann and the german liberals of those days, and his correspondence with his mother was very significant in keeping him with just losing his mind.
Al Mohler – One other thing that was very informative to me was listening to people preach and seeing the distinction in the midst of a huge controversy with some people saying, “I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and other people saying, “I believe almost the same thing, I just think the words aren’t necessary, etc., etc.” When one got up and said, “This is the word of God”, read the text and preached the text and the other read the text and said, “Let’s find what’s good in here”. And they didn’t necessarily put it that way, but you could tell that is what they were doing homiletically. Here is an accountability to every word of the text. The text speaks because when the text speaks, God speaks. And on the other hand, people saying, “You know, there’s good stuff here, let’s go find it”.
Peter Williams - I went through a time of significant doubt when I was around 21 , 22. Mark (Dever) was in town at the time, in Cambridge, a great help and the Lord brought me through those, having to work through a lot of that. I certainly looked at liberalism and secular approaches to the Bible, from the inside, within my heart and really, there is nothing there, there’s nothing that has the explanatory power, the comprehensive work that the Gospel, the work in your life and even, also, I think on a historical level there are some amazing things about the Bible. If I can just mention one: Historical level: Go back 400 years to someone like James Ussher (or 350) calculating the dates of Kings of ancient Israel, or Kings of Assyria. That was before archaeology had begun, before the language of the Assyrians had even been deciphered (that’s been in the last 200 years) and he gets the dates of Tiglas Pileser within one year of what now people believe it to be, based on the Bible and he’s not got Hebrew manuscripts any earlier than 11th century AD. and he’s getting reliable information from 1800 years earlier. You can document that. It’s not widely appreciated, but he gets the year 728 and we think it’s 727. It’s pretty remarkable, that sort of level of agreement. It is one of the most amazing stories to me, of historical accurate information being transmitted.
John Piper – ends with prayer that faith would increase in this generation.
Link to Darrell Bock academic books here. Link to Darrell Bock website here. Also, see at bottom of page Darrell L. Bock‘s new book - Release Date: 06/04/2012 “A Theology of Luke and Acts”. God’s Promised Program, Realized for All Nations. Series: Biblical Theology of the New Testament Series
Even though we are like the millions around us, we are also different. Different from the inside. The Bible is profound because in its message and through it’s Spirit, it changes us and makes us into something different, something privileged, what the Bible calls saints. We’re not talking about the Bible in abstract, we’re talking about the Bible in practice. The most profound way to present the story (personally) is by being an audio-visual of what God is about, life lived from the inside out so it shows itself to be engaged with all of life. That’s why we are called it’s ambassadors of the message. That’s the portfolio – showing the new creation by being the new creation and it’s more than an abstraction of theology.
Dr. Darrell Bock, Research Professor of New Testament Studies; Professor of Spiritual Development and Culture, DTS, explains that he believes the Bible because it is the defense of the message I have as an ambassador of Christ that allows to keep the point. It is my ambassadorial dossier. Published on Mar 30, 2012 by dallasseminary
Dr. Darrell Bock is professor of New testament Studies and professor of Spiritual Development and Culture. Darrell has earned national and international recognition as a Humboldt Scholar, an honor program at Tubingen University in Germany for his work in historical Jesus studies , especially in Jesus’ examination before the Jewish leadership at His trial. He also has done extensive commentary work on the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. In 2001 Dr Bock has served as President of the Evangelical Theological Society and he continues to serve as Editor at large for Christianity Today magazine.
Darrell L. Bock – Why I believe the Bible
I am here to talk abut this: It’s the Bible! We are here to study it, we’re here to know it and hopefully reflect in our lives what it teaches. For us, it is a privileged book: inspired, inerrant, the very word of God. I deeply believe that for a host of reasons. But today I want to explore a different question.
How do I preach a book I believe is privileged to a culture that does not believe it is privileged?
It is no secret that in our culture the Bible is no longer a privileged book. People challenge it. Discussion surrounds it. Everywhere, there are efforts to argue that it is anything but inspired. So, I want to explain why the Bible is important, and even why I believe in the Bible and how to present it to a culture that does not appreciate it for the precious revelation that it is. You might think that I’ll launch into an apologetic as to why I think that the Bible is inerrant, 645,223 reasons why I believe the Bible. I believe those things deeply but that’s not where I want to go.
Rather I want to make a case that where the Bible is not a privileged book, it speaks to reality in a way that shows it is privileged. It comes from the heart of God. It is self disclosing, not merely because of the facts in it, but because of the profound divine, human account it gives. My homiletical idea is simply this: In a world where the Bible is not privileged, it is the profundity of the Bible’s message that shows the Bible is the fully inspired word of God.
Profundity revealed with faithfulness discloses the uniqueness of God’s word and it addresses our own reality at the same time, privileging God and His creation, at the same time. Privilege is revealed in profundity, in declared and lived profundity. But, I start with a contrast, a meta narrative, told with humor, which show where much of our world is and what culture thinks about why we are here. Bock shows a video clip from “Everybody loves Raymond”. “Who knows why we’re here?” That’s what the popular show declares.
It’s not very different then when Seneca spoke centuries ago; the stoic roman philosopher who lived in the first century, at the same time as Jesus, said this about life and death. In effect, it all doesn’t mean very much. We’ll just have to see how it all turns out in the end. Listen to the words of Seneca in his letter 26, as he muses about life and death: “I imagine to myself that the testing time is drawing near, that the day that is going to see judgement pronounced on the whole of my past life has actually arrived and I take a look at myself and address myself in these terms: All that I’ve done and said up til now, counts for nothing. My showing today, besides being heavily varnished over is of paltry value and reliability as a guarantee of my spirit. I’m going to leave it to death to settle what progress I’ve made. Without anxiety then, I’m making ready for the day when tricks and disguises will be put away and I shall come to a verdict on myself, determining whether the courageous attitudes I adopt are really felt or just so many words. And whether or not the defiant challenges I’ve hurled at fortune have been mere pretense and pantomime.”
Not much profound here, either. Just make the best of what you can in life and see what it will add up to. Hope for the best. Know death comes to all of us and we do not know when, but in the end, nothing will matter. That conclusion is the result of a life lived disconnected from the Creator and from the creation. It’s not a very profound declaration. It’s an empty manifesto, echoing what Ecclesiastes says to us in much of its message: It’s all empty. The net result is not much in terms of real direction of why we are here whether we trust Raymond or Seneca. But at least, Seneca was contemplating the options. Contrast that effort at reflection to our own culture. What some have called: A super flat culture.
Listen to this analysis of our modern and post modern culture by Australian pastor Mark Sayers: Such a culture is why people often miss what the Bible has to offer. And here’s what he says about the super flat culture we live in: We are offered a culture that is a million miles wide, in terms of opportunities, freedoms and consumer choice, yet, it is spiritually an inch deep. Our spiritual voice is being strangled. Our culture is spiritually super flat because of 3 main reasons I can discern:
Any big discussion about deep and spiritual existential issues of life are off the agenda in the public square.
Western culture is a spiritually flat culture in which our need for mystery, transcendence, revelation and a sense of “the other” is repressed.
Our culture is a culture in which everything in life is viewed through a lens of suspicion
The combination of these factors present us with never before experienced missional challenges. They are also the reason so many Christian young adults are choosing to leave active faith. He goes on to say: In a super flat culture where nothing matters, we escape into obsessions and hobbies, interests that bear little or no consequence. In a commodified culture, we move and shift around meaning, giving way to things that do not deserve mountains of time and attention. The 21st century will be a century marked by conspicuous consumption, and a flagrant misuse of time.With religion off the agenda, our culture finds new avenues of devotion and distraction. Instead of moving us towards relationship and people, the eminent, super flat culture pushes us towards things. Millions of hours in the 21st century will be spent working through DVD/TV series, scanning social network sites, gorging on celebrity gossip, downloading music, flipping through home magazines and playing computer games. Things will take precedence over people. Meaningless activities will overtake our lives.
There’s nothing wrong with interest in hobbies in the right place, but the 21st century culture will gorge on such activities. The real reason for human existence that have sat front and center of the human consciousness have been in the super flat, eminent world shoved aside. They have been too heavy to be carried on the road. Instead we buzz along the surface of life, never venturing below the surface. That’s why he calls it the super flat culture in a book that is coming out, called “The Road Trip”.
The best way to get to the Bible’s depth is to allow it to tell its story, clearly and powerfully
In the face of such missional challenges, the best way to get to the Bible’s depth is to allow it to tell its story, clearly and powerfully. We can show what it looks like by how we live. So, we live in a world that’s not sure why it’s here. The Bible has a profound and completely different message to tell and it says that you and I are ambassadors of that key message. The Scriptures reveal needs all people have. And so, the book of privilege gives us a place of privilege and in the process tells the story of why we are here.
That is the major reason I believe the Bible. It has a profound story to tell that the world does not know. It has a profound story to tell that tells us human beings why we have a story to tell and it’s a story that people may be slow to hear and even conditioned not to hear. But you are here (at DTS) to learn how to tell it, noting the extent to which God has gone to return us to Himself. It’s a profound story that says God supplies what we lack and so the bridge to Him can be rebuilt, because He rebuilds it by his grace. It’s a positive message, not a negative one and it’s not about a mere momentary transaction, nor is it about avoiding something, it’s about reconnecting to the living God. Sometimes, when I hear the Gospel presented in the church, I think of the old actor Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy Cagney used to say: “You dirty rat. You shouldn’t be doing that. You’re the one that killed my brother”. Sometimes I listen to the Gospel message and I hear this tone that comes across. It’s a negative tone, it’s not a very positive tone. It’s an accusatory tone as if we have to convince people that they are sinners. Most people are quite aware of it, they just don’t want to face up to it.
In the midst of doing that, the message comes across negative and I ask myself: Where’s the Gospel in that? Other times we present the Gospel in such a way a kind of like Neo in the matrix, where we’re dodging bullets. And the Gospel IS about avoiding a negative, a very hot place. In the midst of presenting the Gospel as if it’s avoiding something, we completely lack to present something: That the Gospel is about gaining everything. It’s about reconnecting with the living God for life.
That was a huge introduction. There is one simple text that I want to return to and it’s in 2 Corinthians 5. This one verse leads into the profundity that I am talking about. It’s a simple verse. It says: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His plea through us. we plead for you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God”. I want to make 3 points out of this text:
Our position: Ambassadors. We are representatives of God in all that we say and do. We have been given a very privileged calling. I want to share an experience back when I was dealing with the DaVinci code. I got invited to a Bible study at the United Nations. It was an interesting experience. I had been there before, through the many metal detection checks, but this time I was an invited person so I got direct access into the middle of one of the key rooms at the UN. I was interacting with some of the ambassadors, who came from all kinds of countries. I had direct access, an access I normally don’t have. When I think about this text, I think about access that I permanently have to the living God, to represent Him in a task that is much greater than anything the United Nations ever takes up. We have a uniquely privileged position in being called to ministry. We also have a representational role. We don’t have to go through any metal detectors because God is the one who called us and we have a rare privilege to represent Him in a world that needs a profound message, that is the Scripture.
The tone. Look at the text: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ”. It’s as though God were making His plea through us: “we plead with you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God”. Much of the sound that comes out of the church today, I am sad to say, is crass. It’s harsh. Now, there is a role in challenging the culture. There’s a role that’s necessary in that. But, if it isn’t balanced with the love of God and the compassion of Christ and the sacrifice and service that God extends even to those who reject Him. If we do not love our enemies, as Christ said, and enter into a plea with the world, then the road she is traveling down is horribly self destructive. You do not honor the tone of this text. This text is a summary text that kind of summarizes the entire message of everything we’ve been given in the portfolio that God has handed to us. It says we are keepers and passers on of His profound message of Salvation. So our tone is one of an invitation and of a pleading. My hope is that wherever you minister, once you are done here (at DTS), and one day that eschatological moment will happen, my hope and prayer is that your tone will be an invitation into the love of God and the grace of God, and the care of God, and the compassion of God and the severe mercy of God.
Reconciliation – Reconciliation assumes a break in a relationship. What’s really exciting about the message that the Scripture has for us, is that God has given the provision to fix that break. The exhortation is: Be reconciled to God. We don’t have to reconcile ourselves to Him, we simply enter into the reconciliation that He has provided. That is the beauty of a passive verb. God’s the one who does it and that reconciliation brings life and enablement. In fact, the profound message of the Scripture is that we can get back to life by getting back to God. It means knowing Him. In His final prayer, almost like a last will and testament, when Jesus is praying before He goes to the cross in john 17:3, He gives thanks for the fact that this is eternal life: to know the Father and know the Son. Or in another summary text in Romans 1:16 we’re told that Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God unto salvation. It’s not just salvation, it’s the power of God unto salvation and if you read Romans, you will see that in that passage power is expressed by taking someone who is dead in trespasses and sins, an absolute corpse, justifying them , raising them up, giving them a position in which the Spirit of God is in them, so that by chapter 8 they’re walking in the will of God and there’s no need for law, because they’re following what God asks them to do. They’re reconnected to the Father. They’ve come back to life. If we read texts in Luke, what we see is that John, the Baptist prepared the world for this message and the coming of Christ by being given a calling to turn Israel back to her God. What’s interesting, when you read that text, in context- take a look at Luke 1:16-17, you will see that in turning themselves back to God, in the next verse the point is made that fathers are turned back to children and the disobedient are turned to obedience. We tend to think of repentance as something that happens privately between us and God. But the Scripture is reflecting that repentance is something that happens between us and God so that it impacts all the relationships that we have. So much so, that when we come to Luke 3 and John the Baptists is asked: What should we do ?as people enter into the Baptism that he represents. Every answer has to do, not with the person, how they are relating to God, but how the person is relating to their neighbor. What we see is an ethical core, a profundity to the Scripture that says: By relating properly to God, you not only fix that, you fix everything around you, in terms of your relationships. So we issue a plea: Know God, so you can have life. Know God so you can truly love others. It is simple, it is profound. The profound book tells a privileged story, of a privileged people who know why they are here. We tell the story by declaration and we tell it by representation.
Even though we are like the millions around us, we are also different. Different from the inside. The Bible is profound because in its message and through it’s Spirit, it changes us and makes us into something different, something privileged, what the Bible calls saints. We’re not talking about the Bible in abstract, we’re talking about the Bible in practice. The most profound way to present the story (personally) is by being an audio-visual of what God is about, life lived from the inside out so it shows itself to be engaged with all of life. That’s why we are called it’s ambassadors of the message. That’s the portfolio – showing the new creation by being the new creation and it’s more than an abstraction of theology.
In the Nicene creed, God is powerfully confessed. He is confessed to a certain degree, in the abstract. I love the Nicene creed. We recite it at our church. But, left to itself, abstract theology and teaching can have a hole. You see, there’s not a word in the Nicene creed about how we live. Theology without ethics and spiritual formation is not a theology that really reveals the profundity of Scripture in the new life because life as it was designed to be lived, WAS designed to be lived and to show itself. It has to move past the cover of a super flat culture that might exist if we just play with the iPad. So tell the story, live the story , show by what you say how profound Scripture is. Reveal it in word and in deed, reveal its reality and show that it is inspired by God by showing how God changes lives. In a world where the Bible is not privileged, the best way to make the case for the Scripture is to call attention to its profound attention to life’s core realities, to live its truth. Privilege is revealed in declared and lived profundity. That is the ultimate assignment and it is a final exam we will all take. We represent our King in the world, we are to take up the call and you shave the privileged role to take this privileged message to point people to the privilege of knowing Him. That message will be found nowhere else. You won’t find it from modern culture and you won’t find it from Seneca. So, believe it, preach it, live it. The message of Scripture is far different from Seneca and it can be summarized in the last verse of the hymn we sang at the beginning of this message:
No power of hell, no scheme of man
Can ever pluck me from His hand
Til He returns or calls me home
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.
A Theology of Luke and Acts
God’s Promised Program, Realized for All Nations
Series: Biblical Theology of the New Testament Series
Synopsis:A Theology of Luke and Acts—the second volume in Zondervan’s Biblical Theology of the New Testament Series—offers an in-depth analysis of these two books. Examining Lukan themes, language, and the books’ context within the Bible, Darrell L. Bock offers an indispensable resource to biblical scholars. SEE SECOND VIDEO ON THIS PAGE for more. Order here.
Darrell L. Bock on the Gospel and Holy Spirit in Luke and Acts
…and here’s Darrell Bock talking about his new book “A Theology of Luke and Acts”. Leading New Testament scholar Darrell L. Bock, author of “A Theology of Luke and Acts” chats with Mark L. Strauss in this clip (5 of 5) about key topics related to his highly anticipated new work. “A Theology of Luke and Acts” explores the theology of Luke’s gospel and the book of Acts. In his biblical writings, Luke records the story of God working through Jesus to usher in a new era of promise and Spirit-enablement so that the people of God can be God’s people even in the midst of a hostile world. It is a message that still fits the church today. Bock both covers major Lukan themes and sets forth the distinctive contribution of the Luke-Acts collection to the New Testament and the canon of Scripture, providing readers with an in-depth and holistic grasp of Lukan theology in the larger context of the Bible. Find out more: http://www.zondervan.com/Cultures/en-US/Product/ProductDetail.htm?ProdID=com…. Published on Apr 27, 2012 by zondervan
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Jesus said, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” Matthew 16:26. Isus a zis: “Si ce ar folosi unui om sa cistige toata lumea daca si-ar pierde sufletul?”
If the Bible is coherent, then understanding the Bible means grasping how things fit together. Becoming a Biblical theologian means seeing more and more pieces fit together into a glorious mosaic of the divine will. And doing exegesis means querying the text about how its many propositions cohere in the author’s mind.
John Piper responds:.In 1971 Fuller Theological Seminary took the Word out. I read what was happening in Germany. It blew me away. I did not see it coming. So it may have been there, but the teachers that I loved and had influenced me most didn’t talk that way and didn’t give me indication that it would be going that way. I was never able to make any sense out of the distinctions between infallible and inerrant. 
Al Mohler (11 min mark) Why wouldn’t anyone believe in this? (This question) leads to a principle of interpreting church history, which often surprises people when you first hear it, and that is that “heresy precedes orthodoxy“. That doesn’t mean that the false precedes the true. It does mean that the codification, or confession of the faith is often in the face of, is a response to heresy or that which is sub biblical or sub orthodox. So, in 325 AD you have a statement made by the Council of Nicaea, that wasn’t necessary until Arius denied that the father and the Son are of the same substance. And when it comes to inerrancy, the first thing is that this is God’s word, God is totally true, so all the attributes of Scripture seem to come, and yet Augustine has to respond to the 
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