The Bible

This Bible is light and this Bible is life. It shines as a light in a dark place and it shines as truth and gives us a place to stand and a place for our authority to rest because the Bible is God's Word. You and I have the Bible and we can stand upon it, confident in God's Word, knowing that His promises can never fail.

But since the Garden of Eden and throughout history, this truth has been under attack. You're listening to the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind as Stephen Nichols walks us through J. Gresham Machen's classic book, Christianity and Liberalism. Dr. Nichols' message today is so helpful because not only does he help us understand the liberalism of Machen's day and how to respond, he exposes some of the newer attacks on the Bible that you and I encounter every day, living a hundred years later. So here's Dr. Nichols to help us understand what we must believe about the Bible and how to defend it. So what we have been seeing in Machen's beloved Christianity and Liberalism is that fundamentally Christianity is a message and that message is the gospel. Now what he's doing in this book is he's being a great teacher.

He's helping us understand that message in the best possible way. Before we get to the message of the gospel, we have the two foundations that we have to have in place. Because we're talking about the gospel, we can't talk about what Christ did for sin if we don't know who God is and who we are. So foundational to the very gospel message itself is the doctrine of God and the doctrine of man. Well that message not only has those foundations, that message also is contained in a book. So now we're back to the doctrine of the Bible and Machen is going to draw our attention in this chapter to these three key doctrines of Scripture. The doctrine of revelation, the doctrine of inspiration, and the doctrine of inerrancy.

All of these doctrines lead to this fundamental proposition. The Bible is the Word of God and because it is the Word of God, the Bible is true. In fact, it's sort of axiomatic or a redundancy to say the Bible is true after we say that the Bible is the Word of God. Of course, it's going to be true if it's God's Word. So, what we find as the contrary view, the view of liberalism, is to not get so hung up on these doctrines, not get so hung up on the Bible itself. Because after all, what is important within liberalism or what is important to the alternatives of Christianity is experience.

Not being bound in the covers of a book, but the loose experience that one has. Not objective truth, but subjective truth. As we think about these doctrines though, I also want to bring them forward into our day. Now there are some things that Machen talks about that are just as prevalent in our day as they were in 1923.

But there's also some new kids on the block that Machen didn't necessarily have to contend with. So, let's think about this doctrine of the Bible. What we're fundamentally talking about here is a source of knowledge. We're fundamentally talking about a source of truth, a source of authority. So, what do we have in our day?

Well, we've got three things that I want to focus on. One is we've got postmodernism. Postmodernism, probably at its core, means a lot of things, means a lot of things to a lot of people. But at its core, it is a hyper-relativism. A hyper-relativism that sees this quest for truth as unnecessary, as elusive, and as beyond our grasp.

Postmodernism fundamentally has given up on the quest for truth in the capital and singular, and instead opts for truths in the lowercase and in the plural. There's no objective truth. There are no universals or absolutes. There are only truths that function for particular groups and particular times. So, postmodern relativism, we are awash in a sea of this kind of thinking. And in fact, an example of this in our day and age is this expression, my truth, as if this thing can be entirely personalized. We have moved from objective truth, not to subjective truth, but to a radical subjectivity, personalizing the very nature of truth itself. My truth. And that truth that is my truth is what governs my life, which is a way of saying, I am my own God, is essentially when you're saying my truth. I am my own authority.

And remarkable that you always agree with yourself when you are your own authority. That's postmodernism. It's a hyper-relativism. It's a radical personalization of this notion of truth. There is also pluralism in our day. It too ends up with the same conclusion, truths. There are many religious truths because there are many gods and many ways to God, or many names of God.

As the Hindu proverb declares, there are many paths to the same summit. It doesn't matter what the particulars of your belief. If you're a religious person, that's fine for you. What does matter is if you hold to some kind of exclusive view.

That's intolerance in an age of the virtue, the celebration of the virtue of tolerance. But it ends up with the same conclusion as postmodernism that what we're talking about here is truths. It may be very well and true, all this doctrine you're talking about, within the Christian community. But go outside to other religious communities and they have their own views of God, their own views of salvation, their own claims of divine texts, and they are equally valid. That's pluralism. Many names for God, many ways of salvation. So we've got postmodernism, we've got pluralism.

We have good old ambivalence, good old antipathy. We are in a secular age, distracted by so many things. And this wonderful book by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, a dozen or so years ago now written, made the point that secularism ultimately is not the removal of God from culture.

Sometimes it's that. But it is the idea that God is now simply an option. Whereas in a previous age, God was axiomatic. A shared understanding of a belief in God. In a true secular age, God is optional. In some ways, that's almost more challenging to deal with than outright atheism, the denial of God.

But what do you do as someone who's just apathetic about the question of God? You're apathetic about the question of an authority or a truth upon which you live your life. That's a secularism. That's an ambivalence towards the concept of truth. So against this ambivalent secularism, against postmodernism, against pluralism, we have this declaration that the Bible is true.

Not true for me. The Bible is true, period, full stop. And in Machen's day, it was directly opposed to the view of liberalism that saw the Bible as unnecessary because ultimately all of Christian life was grounded upon Christian experience. So this is what we are dealing with when we're talking about the doctrine of the Bible.

There's still that cultural Christianity of liberalism that is afoot, that Machen's arguments apply directly to. But the sum and total of these doctrines also apply directly to some of these new kids on the block that we are dealing with of pluralism, postmodernism, and this apathetic skepticism and secularism that we just seem to be awash in in our current moment. Well, what is the doctrine of revelation?

In the Word is reveal. This shows us that Scripture is not a bottom-up. Scripture is not the views of a religious community and the expressions of a religious community's encounter with the divine being.

That's the view of higher criticism. Revelation is the view that God has revealed Himself. Scripture is not bottom-up.

It's top-down. It is the God-givenness of Scripture. But when we're talking about revelation, we're talking about two kinds of revelation.

We bumped into this last time. There's general revelation, where God does reveal Himself in nature. God is knowable through the cosmos. That's what Paul declares in Romans 1. His divine nature, His eternal power, these are knowable through God's revelation.

That's what Paul declares. That's general revelation. It's through the cosmos, and it's through the conscience, through nature and the moral law. Sometimes we call that general revelation. We also call that natural theology.

It's a theology that is known through nature. But then there is special revelation, and so God reveals Himself in dreams and in visions. God reveals Himself at times in an audible voice. God, as the author of Hebrews says, in many ways, in diverse ways, into many people, God has revealed Himself in the past. But we believe all of that special revelation is now contained within the covers of a book. That special revelation is in the canon of the 66 books of the Bible. And at the center of that revelation is God's revelation in Jesus Christ. What does the prologue of John say but that Jesus has come to make the Father known?

It's very fascinating there. The Greek word that is used there, John 1, is the word exegete. When we are exegete-ing a text, we are leading out the meaning of a text. If you ever heard that word exegesis, it means to lead out of, literally.

And it's as if there's a meaning in a text and you lead it out. Jesus says, I've come to exegete the Father. He's come to reveal who God is and what God is doing in this world. At the center of this special revelation is the special revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.

He is the logos. He is the Word of God, the very Word of God. So, revelation is both general revelation and special revelation.

And this revelation is inspired. So, we know 2 Timothy 3.16. We know 1 Peter 1 and 2 Peter 1. That point beyond the human authors of the text of Scripture to the divine author who used those human authors and all of their personalities. You know this from your own reading of the Bible. John is different from the other epistles. Peter is different from Paul.

James is different altogether. The personality of these authors, the style of these authors. Think of the eloquence of the author of Hebrews. It comes through. It's preserved.

They're not sort of overridden and become some sort of trance-like state. That's the Koran. That's not the Bible. And so, with those human authors are superintended by the divine author, the Holy Spirit, this doctrine of inspiration. It shows us that God is behind Scripture. Or to put it more clearly, God is the author of Scripture. And then it's one small step from inspiration to inerrancy. If the Bible is God's Word, then it is true.

Because God is true. So, to say that the Bible is inspired but is not inerrant is to say that God has given us a false testimony, or that God's revelation contains errors, which is to say that God Himself has falsely testified, or God Himself has erred. So, it is a very small step from the doctrine of inspiration to the doctrine of inerrancy. And two things we like to add to the doctrine of inspiration is we like to say that it is verbal. So, verbal means the very words themselves, not just the thoughts, not as if God implanted sort of a thought in Peter's head and then Peter sort of went with it. Sort of how movies, what movies do to books.

You know, they sort of take the book and then they just sort of go with it in the way they want to go. No, it's the very words are the very words of God. So, we call that verbal inspiration. And then we also say plenary.

Plenary means complete or whole. So, the whole thing is verbally inspired. Sometimes there's this idea that parts of the Bible are inspired, but other parts aren't. So, in matters of history or in matters of the law or matters of Paul's teaching, that those parts are inspired, but other parts aren't. Plenary inspiration drives home the fact that the Bible in its entirety, all of it, is the inspired word of God.

We can't differentiate between matters of faith and matters of history. So, verbal, the very words, plenary inspiration. So, in this chapter, Machen talks about revelation, talks about inspiration, and talks about inerrancy. Of course, he's going to talk about those things because he's at Princeton Seminary, and his mentor was B.B. Warfield.

And it was B.B. Warfield who literally wrote the book on the modern expressions of the doctrine of inerrancy. He did not invent the doctrine of inerrancy.

That's a false claim. You can find this view in the Reformers. You can find this view in the Church Fathers.

It's not a true claim whatsoever to say that the Princetonians and Hodge and Warfield invented inerrancy. But they are the ones who articulated it in a very powerful and succinct and compelling way in the modern age for the modern church. And so, we can speak of Machen's debt to Warfield when he's talking about inspiration and inerrancy. But what Machen goes on to do, and what I want to end our episode with here, is thinking about, well, how do we know the Bible is true? So, the Bible declares itself to be true, but how do we know that the Bible is true? So, what we're going to venture into now is apologetics. If you think about it this way, there's the message of salvation, which is God saves in Jesus Christ. But behind that message is, well, who is God?

And how do we know that there is a God? Well, that's apologetics. That was Machen talking to us about the theistic proofs. That was Machen talking to us, well, how do you account for the concept of justice?

How do you account for the world in which you live? That's apologetics. Behind the statement, God saves, is the statement, God is. And then behind the statement, God saves, is that God speaks, that He speaks to us in His Word, because that is where we find the message of salvation. Well, how do we know that the Bible is actually the truth? There are other texts that claim to be of divine origin. There are other religious texts.

Why should we believe the Bible to be true? Now, this is apologetics. So, let's see what Machen has to say. Machen is going to talk about two different things. The first thing he's going to talk about is what he calls documentary evidence that the Bible is true.

Documentary evidence. Now, he's focusing in on the message of salvation. So, when he's talking about documents, he's primarily talking about the New Testament books. He's primarily talking, obviously, about the Gospels and the Epistles.

So, this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about the Old Testament and the Pentateuch. Machen will do that other places, but we're talking about the Gospel. And so, we're talking about the Gospels and the Epistles. What do we see about the Gospels and the Epistles? First, we see they have an early date.

We see that they have an early date. This view from the 1800s that the Gospels are coming from the 200s and coming from the 300s, that the Epistles are coming later. It's not Paul. It's the Pauline community. Luke is not Luke.

It's the Lucan community. It's untenable because what we've discovered is manuscript witness to those texts in the first century itself and in the early decades of the second century. So, how can you have manuscript witness to texts if the text hasn't been written yet? So, the idea that these are later revelations or later books written by the Christian community is entirely false based on the idea of the early date.

Machen talks about authorship and the claim of authorship. And not only authorship, but the way the biblical authors refer to each other. And the most telling example here is at the end of 2 Peter when Peter says that there are things in Paul that are difficult to understand.

I always take comfort in that. If you get stumped by Paul, it's okay. So did Peter, as there are with the rest of Scriptures. I mean, the ink isn't even dry on Paul's Epistles yet, and Peter's calling them Scripture. There's internal consistency of these books, internal consistency within themselves and in the message across themselves. Think of the synoptics, three eyewitnesses, and yet we can overlay them in a consistent vision, a consistent picture emerges of Christ from these three witnesses. Get three people to witness any event and hear it afterwards, and what do you hear? You think there were three different events.

That's right, four. There were four different events that actually happened. Then, Machen makes this point, the alternative that what is recorded here is not historical fact but is a myth or a deception.

It's altogether impossible. So what are we talking about here? Let's talk about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's in the Gospels. It's in the Epistles. It's either a true fact or, right, it's a myth and it's a deception.

If it's a deception, they would not have gotten away with it. The Gospel writers or the Epistle writers, because it was happening right up against the occurrence of the event itself. The alternative, other than the view that these are factual documents, is not tenable, the alternative that they're myth or deception. In addition to that, what's happening in Scripture is corroborated with external or archaeological evidence, which we have today. So Machen says there's documentary evidence, and then he says, ultimately, there is also the internal evidence of the Bible as a whole, not just the books, not just the Gospels or the Epistles. The Bible as a whole is a unique book that stands absolutely alone among all religious texts. And so we don't just take it on faith that the Bible is God's Word. We actually have arguments that the Bible is God's Word and that it is true.

And here it is. This Bible is light, and this Bible is life. It shines as a light in a dark place, and it shines as truth.

It stands as truth and gives us a place to stand and a place for our authority to rest, because the Bible is God's Word. That's what Machen is doing in this great chapter on the Bible. That was Stephen Nichols, president of Reformation Bible College and a Ligonier Teaching Fellow.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Nichols has been teaching his way through J. Gresham Machen's classic work, Christianity and Liberalism. I'm actually holding Ligonier's new 100th anniversary edition in my hand, and I love the way that Machen ends his chapter on the Bible. Machen says, Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism, on the other hand, is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men. If you'd like a copy of the special edition, simply give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, and we'll get a copy to you. You'll also receive Dr. Nichols' complete series walking through Machen's book and a digital study guide. So I encourage you to give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343. As Machen continues to prove that liberalism is not Christianity at all, next he'll examine their view of Jesus. Is the Christ of Liberalism the Christ of the Bible? That's what we'll answer tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .