Reformed Theology: Ask R.C.

Do you believe that we're living in the end times that we read about in the book of Revelation? Dr. R.C. Sproul addresses that and other questions next on Renewing Your Mind. Hello and welcome to the program. I'm Lee Webb, and I'm looking here at a picture from those early days at the Ligonier Valley Study Center.

People young and old gathered there in a living room setting, some of them sitting on the floor. And R.C. is making a point in dramatic fashion, probably answering one of the many questions those early Ligonier students asked. That's how this ministry started. And over his 45 years of ministry, R.C. fielded hundreds of questions. We are blessed to have a treasure trove of them in our archives, along with R.C. 's clear and concise answers.

We're pleased to feature some of them today here on Renewing Your Mind. So let's get started with our first question. Jerry on Facebook wants to know, if Dr. Sproul were to nail a modern 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door today, what might be his top two to three issues for the church to address?

That's a great question. Well, I would say that the three issues that I would try to address are, first of all, the gospel, which is in danger of being obscured in the 21st century as it has been many times in the past. And we talk about the motto of the 16th century Reformation, post tenebros, luch, after darkness, light. The gospel had been hidden during the Dark Ages, and now it came back to light.

And that's happening again and again and again. The gospel has to be republished with clarity and boldness in every generation. Closely linked to that is our understanding of Jesus. Throughout church history, there have been four centuries where the church's understanding of the personal work of Christ were critical and were profoundly challenged by heretics and unbelievers. The fourth century, which culminated in the Council of Nicaea, the fifth century that culminated in Chalcedon at 451, the 19th century with the unbridled assault of 19th century liberalism against the classic orthodox understanding of the person and work of Christ, which then carried over into the 20th century.

But it didn't go away at the turn of the 21st century. We still have a crisis, not just out in the world, but in the church about who Jesus is and what He has accomplished. So the gospel, the person of Christ, and with that gospel and the person of Christ is the doctrine of justification. That battle has to be fought in every generation, and we're certainly…it's front and center right now. The other issue that I see as crucial to our day is worship.

I think we've lost a sense of biblical worship that's killing us. Dr. Sproul, we had a question on Facebook asking, how can we defend the doctrine of sola scriptura by using Scripture? Well, so often it's been said that if you argue from the Bible to the infallibility of Scripture or the inerrancy of the Bible or inspiration of Scripture, you're caught in the bonds of vicious circle. And we know that circular reasoning is an informal fallacy which invalidates an argument. Now if you reason from Scripture this way and say the Bible claims to be the Word of God, since it is the Word of God, then the claim that it is the Word of God must be an unassailable truth.

Now that would be traveling in the worst of all possible circles. That would be vicious in its circularity and would be, in my opinion, an invalid argument. But at the same time, we argue for the infallibility and inspiration of Scripture, taking into account that it makes that claim, and that's significant. If it never made the claim to be the Word of God, then we wouldn't have the burden of trying to defend that claim.

But we start with Scripture. And I like to start here and ask the question, can we go to the New Testament, for example, and see it as a basically reliable historical source? If we can demonstrate that it's generally reliable, as reliable as Suetonius or Tacitus or any of the other ancient historians, then we don't have to dive into radical skepticism or cynicism. It's a basically reliable historical document. It doesn't have to be infallible.

It doesn't have to be inspired or anything like that, just a historical document. And if on the basis of that basically reliable historical document, we can get reliable information about Jesus of Nazareth, information that's reliable enough to persuade us and convince us that there is sound reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was at least, at the very least, a prophet of God. And a prophet of God is somebody who teaches the truth of God. And if we can come to the conclusion from that historical information and data that Jesus was a prophet, and He prophesied about Himself that He was more than a prophet, then if we take this prophet's prophecy seriously, then we have to take the conclusion that He draws. But then we go to the next step where we know, if we know anything about Jesus, historically we know what His view of the Scriptures was. Now there are many critical scholars who say, yes, we acknowledge that Jesus accepted and taught the prevailing Jewish view of the canon and of Scripture as being the Word of God. However, in His humanity, He wasn't omniscient, and so He can be excused for adopting uncritically this Jewish view of the Bible.

And we hear that kind of arguing frequently. I've responded to that by saying, well, touching His human nature, we don't believe that Jesus was omniscient. Omniscience is a divine attribute that's not communicable to a human nature. Jesus touching His divine nature was omniscient, but His human nature wasn't.

So in that regard, He could be capable of not having absolute perfect knowledge. However, Jesus claimed that He taught nothing except that which He received from the Father, and that all that He taught had the imprimatur from the Father. And He also said that He was the very incarnation of truth. Now if I walked into my classroom in philosophy or theology and I said to my students, look, I want you to know that I'm not going to teach you anything in this class except what God has revealed to me, and I want you to know that I am the truth, and then I give them an incorrect view of sacred Scripture, then I have sinned. And so what's at stake here in terms of Jesus' testimony to the Scriptures is not His omniscience but His sinlessness. And so Jesus must be correct in all the things that He claims to be true, or He sins. As the Scriptures themselves tell us, with the teaching comes the greater judgment and so on. So do you see how we've moved from a basic premise of general reliability to a knowledge of Jesus' historical view that the Scripture is more than general reliable? And so the reason why the church believes that the Bible is the inspired Word of God is because we're acquiescing to the teaching of our Lord. John in Maitland, Florida wants to know, how does the fact that all people know God based on Romans 1.18, unbelievers suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, affect our defense of Christianity? Well, I can remember being invited to speak giving the case for the existence of God on a college campus to the Atheist Club there. And I went through a defense of theism and so on, but I went back to the Romans passage and I said, now I'm happy to try to discuss with you all the intellectual questions that are involved in trying to prove and demonstrate the existence of God. But I want to put my cards on the table up front and tell you in light of what the Apostle teaches here, I'm persuaded that I'm carrying coals to Newcastle because you already know very well that there is a God, and your problem is not that you don't know that God exists. Your problem is you hate the God that you know exists. So your problem is in the final analysis not an intellectual one, it's a moral one.

So you've got to know that's where I'm coming from. Or they were ready to tar and feather me, you know. What was their reaction? Oh, they were apoplectic. They were apoplectic.

They were absolutely furious about it. But again, what I was referring to was that Paul's teaching in Romans 1 where he makes it clear that God has revealed Himself through the creation to every human being, and that that revelation is not obscure, but that it is in the Greek phoneros, the Latin manifestum, it's manifest, it's clear. And there are some theologians who say, yes, there is a clear revelation of Himself from God that He gives in and through nature or through the created order, but because of the sinfulness of human beings and our fallen nature and the effects of sin upon our minds, that revelation doesn't get through. We block it. We suppress it.

We flee from it. So it never really gets through, but that's not what Paul says, because the judgment that he expresses there is this. Knowing God, they refused to honor Him as God, nor were they grateful. This is the basis for the universal indictment of the whole human race under the wrath of God. The one excuse that is taken away is ignorance. No one on the judgment day can plead ignorance of God because He has revealed Himself, and that revelation gets through.

Again, the problem is that fallen man refuses to acknowledge what he knows to be true. Now how that influences our defense of theism? Well, being referred in my theology, I believe that although the rational defense that I can give, if I can give a perfect argument, a compelling argument, an irrefutable argument for the existence of God, which frankly I believe I can, and not that it started with me, but if I could do that, unless the Holy Spirit accompanies that argument and changes the heart of that person who hears the argument, that person will never submit or acquiesce to the argument.

And so some people say, why even bother? Why don't we just proclaim it and let it go at that? And I said, well, you know, as Calvin said, first of all, to stop the mouths of the obstreperous. When we give a defense, an intellectual defense of the truth claims of Christianity, that puts restraints on the unbeliever and the militant atheists in their arguments. Second of all, it is preparation for evangelism. We are not called to jump into the darkness in a blind leap of faith and hope that Jesus will catch us. The faith that we propose and the gospel that we preach is one that is not learned by the actions of reason alone or by what we call rationalism, but the content of the gospel is reasonable. It is rational, and really the person can't submit by faith with their heart to something that the mind tells them is absurd.

I don't ever ask people to jump into the absurd or jump into the darkness. We ask them to jump out of the darkness and into the light. And so there is a place there for the defense of the faith as prolegomena to the preaching of the gospel. And also, you hear all the time about young people who are raised in the church, made a profession of faith. They go to college, and they have an unbridled assault against their faith by the skeptical professors in the classroom. And one of the tasks of apologetics or the intellectual defense of the faith is to undergird the Christian. I can remember when I was exposed to all of that kind of stuff as a college student, as a seminary student, I couldn't always answer the questions that people raised, but I knew people who could. And so I was grateful to God that we had scholars in the orthodox Christian faith who gave a compelling intellectual defense for the truth claims of the Christian faith. Because if we're in doubt and our faith is mixed with doubt, we're less confident, we're less bold, we're less aggressive in the proclamation of the gospel. So these are just a few of the reasons why we continue to be engaged in this enterprise. Well, we continue our highlights of Q&A sessions with Dr. Sproul now with a question from another Ask R.C.

Live event. Dave asked, how do I respond to a female friend who feels that I'm not a male friend who feels jilted by a Christianity that says she cannot have leadership over men or preach from a pulpit? Well, the question of ordination of women in the church is not as simple as a lot of people think it is. For this reason, ordination means different things in different Christian communions. You know, what I find in the minimalist position at the very least that the Apostle Paul prohibits women from having in the New Testament is authentic, which I understand to be government or juridical authority. Now, if you have a church where ordination automatically confers governing authority in the church, then I would say according to Paul's teaching in Timothy that that is not allowed. But there are other churches where women are involved in ministry and very much involved in the life of the church and even in positions of leadership where they are under the governing authority of like a session made up of men. And so that's why I say it's not simple to answer that question because it depends on the ecclesiastical structure in which it takes place. But whatever you come out with on that, this does not mean that as a woman you're not able to be profoundly involved in the work of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the church in a thousand different ways.

What I see that you're not allowed to do is govern. I remember when Dr. Gerstner was teaching in seminary there, they had a woman professor come teaching systematic theology. And he even took the position as conservative as he was that a woman has the ability and authority to be a seminary professor. And I would agree with that. But I think I'm taking as broad a position and as a liberal position of that as you can take and still be faithful to the authority of Scripture. Cathy in our studio audience has a question for our seed.

Cathy, go ahead. Do you believe that we're living in the end times that we read about in the book of Revelation? Yes and no. Now, lest you think I've fallen into neo-orthodoxy and paradoxical theology, let me explain that. In one sense, everything that takes place after the ascension of Christ is in the end times. The end times started in the New Testament.

We're still in the end times. Now, I presume that what you're asking me is, are we at the end of the end times so that we're coming close to the return of Jesus as it was set forth in the book of Revelation? Now, one of the big questions in understanding the book of Revelation and interpreting the book of Revelation is tied to when it was written. The majority report of the dating of the writing of the book of Revelation is that it took place in the decade of the 90s of the first century. There has been some significant scholarly work in recent years that argues, and I believe persuasively, that the book of Revelation was written before the fall of Jerusalem in the 60s during the time of Nero, when Nero's most famous nickname throughout the empire was the beast.

And so the question is, if we could know for sure when the book of Revelation was written, we would have a better handle on what period of history it was describing. Now, I'm in a minority report here, but in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew's Gospel as well as in Luke and Mark is when Jesus talks about the signs of the times, and He talks about the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem, and He said, this generation will not pass away till all of these things are fulfilled. Now, that phrase has been one of the most hotly debated statements ever to come from Jesus.

I went to a liberal seminary, and I heard…it seems to me, I didn't actually, but it seemed that I heard every day in class that Jesus taught that He was coming back within 40 years, and He failed to keep His promise. And that's one of the reasons why we can't believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. And so in terms of higher critical assaults on the trustworthiness of Scripture and the trustworthiness of Jesus, the point of attack is on Jesus' predictions about the nearness of the coming of the fulfillment of His prophecies there in the Olivet Discourse. Notice also the timeframe references that are throughout the book of Revelation where it talks about those things that are near at hand.

And so the ultimate question is this. Were the things that Jesus is talking about in the Olivet Discourse and in the book of Revelation, were those principally pointing to events that were going to take place in the first century, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and of the exile of the Jews? That's one view. The other view is that all of these things refer to distant future times, and some people will say to both there was a primary and a secondary, so this becomes very complicated in piecing it all together. But in any case, however we understand Revelation and when it was written and what it was referring to or the Olivet Discourse, we're still looking forward to the return of Jesus, and He hasn't come yet. And I take great hope and optimism in this, is that every day that passes, He's that much closer. And when I see what's going on around us today, I have every reason to think we're getting closer and closer and closer. But of course, a lot of that is my hope. And I also realize it could be another two thousand years before He comes.

I'm not into making predictions of dates and days or the hours of that sort of thing. But we should certainly be vigilant today, and we should be looking for the coming of Christ. So, R.C., you hold to what's called a partial preterist view, is that correct? Yes, not a full preterist view. The full preterism teaches that all of the New Testament prophecies regarding the future kingdom and the future coming of Christ were all fulfilled in the first century.

I don't believe that. I still think there's much more to happen. But I also think that, and I'm in a minority at this point, I should tell you that, I think that we've radically underestimated the significance of what took place in 70 A.D. in the destruction of Jerusalem. So, how many chapters of the book of Revelation do you believe have been fulfilled in that first century prophecy? It would be most of them up until the last couple chapters when we look up the new heaven and the new earth and the final consummation of the kingdom of God.

So, there's plenty to look forward to in that book. But understand this too, Lee, that in the whole scope of systematic theology, theology is a very broad science. We deal with the doctrine of God. We deal with salvation and sin and the Holy Spirit and Christology. And then we have the science of eschatology, which is study of the last things. First of all, of all of those different subdivisions of theology, probably the most controversial and the most difficult is eschatology because we're dealing with future events that we're not looking back on, and we don't have the 20-20 vision of hindsight.

Secondly, so much of the information about the future prophecies of the New Testament come to us in highly imaginative and symbolic language, which makes it very easy to misunderstand. Now, when I talk about the different kinds of areas of theology, as a theologian, my confidence and convictions of this doctrine and that doctrine are not always equal. I'm 100 percent convinced of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, okay? I don't have any doubts in my mind in that. I don't have any doubts about the deity of Christ or His substitutionary atonement.

Those things I have total assurance of. But you ask me about questions in eschatology, and I'll say, maybe it's this, maybe it's that. I don't have views that are so solidified and cement that I get vehemently dogmatic about it. Dr. Sproul's transparency there is admirable, isn't it? Some things in Scripture will remain a mystery to us. But on those matters where Scripture is clear, R.C.

was clear. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday. We think the answers that Dr. Sproul gave through the years are a wonderful resource.

In fact, our team went back to the archives and pulled together 65 separate sessions that he was part of. We put them on a single USB resource drive, and for your donation of any amount today, we'd like to send it to you. We've also included a digital library of Crucial Questions booklets and Dr. Sproul's ebook, Now That's a Good Question. We're calling it the Ask R.C. Resource Drive. You can request it with your gift when you call us at 800-435-4343.

You can also do that online as well. Our web address is renewingyourmind.org. Well, it's hard to believe, but this month marks three years since Dr. Sproul went home to be with the Lord. Ligonier president and CEO Chris Larson is here with me in the studio. Chris, I know that quite often you sat down and shared meals and had many discussions with R.C. about the future of this ministry.

Would you tell us about those? We did. We enjoyed some wonderful times together with Dr. Sproul, and Mrs. Sproul, of course, was there many times as well. We miss R.C. He was a dear friend and a pastor and a theologian and one of my chief mentors in life. When he thought about Ligonier Ministries, it was clear he would come back to this time and time again. He had in mind for us to have a growing and global outreach as long as we are faithful. That's why here at Year End that the support that we receive from Renewing Your Mind listeners for all that we're engaged in here at Ligonier Ministries is so important, and we are so thankful for it.

Ligonier stands on the authority of God's Word and the gospel of Jesus Christ. We know that if we lose that, we've lost everything. But because we have that, we have a hope and a message for the world. And that's what the broadcast of Renewing Your Mind is doing day in and day out. And so we're thankful for you listening, but we're also thankful for your support. Thank you, Chris. We are listener supported, and we depend on your financial gifts.

They will allow us to begin 2021 ready to meet the many needs we see around the world. You can go online to give your gift at ligonier.org slash donate. And today is the last opportunity to give a Year End gift. And along with Chris, let me add my thanks. Well, tomorrow we will begin the new year with one more Ask R.C. session, and here's a preview. Hi, Dr. Sproul.

My name is Zachariah Loftus. In 1 Corinthians 13 verses 9 through 10, it says, For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. My question is, in regards to the signed gifts, would you please explain whether or not you believe the signed gifts have ceased? R.C. will answer that question and many others. So I hope you'll join us Friday for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.