SAET Blog

Doctrine of Scripture Posts

  • October 31, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    The Final Word

    I’ve not yet read Christian Smith’s book, to which Gerald referred in an earlier post. But in this short article, Peter Leithart highlights the crucial issue in dealing with the question of sola Scriptura: who gets the last word? Historic Protestantism, as opposed to some degenerate contemporary evangelical forms, has always recognised that Scripture is not the only authority; of course, of course, of course, human teachers, and more so the creeds and confessions of the church, have a relative authority. (For a good introduction, see Keith Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura.) ”The issue is not about ‘sole’ authority but ‘final’ authority.”

    As Leithart explains, and then applies with a nice polemical flourish, ultimately the issue devolves to one of theology proper:

    Suppose God wants to correct a corruption in His church. Is He able to speak to it? Can God’s voice break through to rebuke and correct and train in righteousness? Can our traditions muzzle the Lord of the church? Can He by His Spirit speak independently of, and against, the tradition?

    Why not? It’s happened. It’s a contested, raucous process. It always is. But it happens. Golly, it happened in the Roman Catholic church in the past century as theologians cut through thickets of misleading quasi-Thomism to get back to Thomas, to the church fathers, to Scripture itself. Speaking as an outsider, and a Protestant to boot, ressourcesement looks a lot like God speaking against a powerful tradition to purify His church. Can anyone doubt that the Catholic Church has gotten better at talking Bible over the last century? Which might make the Roman Catholic Church one of today’s most compelling proofs of Protestant convictions concerning sola Scriptura.

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | Ecclesiology | General | Matthew Mason

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  • September 2, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    God’s Personal Word

    John Frame is a theological giant, one far too little known outside his own conservative Reformed circles. Having benefited greatly from his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God and Doctrine of God, I started reading Doctrine of the Word of God today. I think it won’t disappoint.

    In his preface, Jim Packer commends the book in glowing terms, noting what a pastoral work it is, particularly in its central thesis. Frame himself claims that it’s his best ever work (xxviii), and Packer agrees (xxiv), describing it as “magisterial” and “almost indispensable”.

    From what I’ve seen so far, the great thing about the thesis is twofold. First, Frame’s methodology. He doesn’t spend forever on historical surveys, nor is he reacting against other points of view. Rather, he works from the Scriptures, seeking to expound the Bible’s testimony about God’s word. The second great strength is that Frame starts in exactly the right place, what he calls a “personal-word” model of Scripture and revelation. He explains this in chapter one:

    The main contention of this volume is that God’s speech to man is real speech. It is very much like one person speaking to another. God speaks so that we can understand him and respond appropriately…My thesis is that God’s word in all its qualities and aspects, is personal communication from him to us. (3)

    At the start of the next paragraph, he asks us to imagine God standing at the foot of our bed, talking to us as one person to another. Frame observes that this personal encounter is precisely how God interacts with people throughout Scripture: he comes to Adam and speaks directly and personally with him. He does the same with Noah, with Abraham, and so on. It’s clear that Frame sees these historical examples as closely continuous with how God speaks to us today through Scripture.

    And then, at the end of the main argument of the book (there are numerous appendices – far too many, in my opinion):

    The doctrine of the word of God in this book is unintelligible apart from the role that God plays every moment, to vouch for his word and to accompany it to its destination. He is not a God who has gone away and left us a book. [In a footnote, Frame is critical of what he calls Reformed deism, that treats the Bible simply as a text to be studied.] He is the God who brings his book to us each day, each minute. And that fact makes that book all the more precious to us. It is his personal words to us, not only delivered by him, but spoken to our hearts whenever we hear or read them. (334)

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | General | John Frame | Matthew Mason

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  • August 3, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    The Shortest Word

    Magrassi again, this time summarizing the patristic teaching on the relationship between God’s Word – the second person of the Trinity in eternity and incarnate – and God’s word in Scripture.

    In recapitulating the divine plan Christ also recapitulates and sums up the Word that creates its course and sheds light on its meaning. The “many words” become forever “the one Word.” In the past God’s Word was fragmented into many human words. It rang out in many ways, all of them partial, through the hearts and mouths of many sacred writers (Heb 1:1-2). To be sure, God in his mystery speaks but one eternal Word in his permanent act of begetting the Logos: “God has spoken only once.” But as heard by humans, it is manifold… But the time comes for the Word to return to its original unity, when the Word of God pitches his tent among us…

    At that moment, all the previous words scattered in the Bible through centuries of waiting are gathered into him. They are illuminated, they reveal their ultimate meaning, and they find their center of unity in him. Indeed they always contained the one Word who was expressing himself and secretly directing all things in view of his final appearance. This one word, which now rings out on the lips of Christ, is (as Origen would say) “the Word that concludes and abbreviates.” It condenses all of the Scripture into a “summary that brings salvation.” It is the “shortest Word” in which all the light is concentrated, in which we can clearly perceive “the very marrow of Scripture.” But while human language in striving for brevity often becomes obscure, here it is the opposite: the divine Word, when abbreviated, becomes supremely clear.

    In condensing all things into Christ, Scripture is not impoverished. Instead its soul is revealed, its innermost recesses are opened and it is transfigured…

    But the “shortest Word” adds to its luminous density an astonishing concreteness. The message cannot be separated from the person, and that Person is the incarnate Word. At first, the Word was only “audible,” but now it is also “visible and tangible.” No longer is it “written and silent” but “incarnate and living.” (Praying the Bible, 48-50)

    Categories: Christology | Doctrine of Scripture | General | Matthew Mason

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  • August 1, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    The Bible and Creation

    A robust commitment to reading Scripture will probably only come from an equally robust doctrine of Scripture. Magrassi not only offers an account of patristic lectio divina, he expounds the doctrine of Scripture that underlies such reverence for the text, and he does so in delightfully rich and suggestive ways. It’s a short book, but its account of Scripture is profound. Drawing particularly on John Scotus Eriugena, he here illuminates the connection between God’s revelation in creation and in Scripture. In a sense, this could be seen as a meditation on Psalm 19.

    Creation is God’s first book. Augustine, too, was fascinated by this idea. Using one of his clever word plays, he said that the universe was written by God as a book, and Scripture was made by God as a universe.

    Both Scripture and creation, says John Scotus, are reflections of the eternal light. Without sin, creation would have been enough. [MM: no, it wouldn't; it was still necessary for God to speak his covenant word to Adam (Gen 1:28ff; Gen 2:16f)] The world would have been a book, large and clear, and every creature would have been a manifestation of God.

    But after sin, it bears a curse which makes it opaque to the divine light. What is more, our mind bears a curse which makes it unclean and unable to understand the language of things, to see in them a reflection of eternal beauty. And so God created a new universe, spreading before us this new firmament which sings his glory: Sacred Scripture. Upon entering it, we can hear his Word again, see his light, enter into communication with him. At the same time we find the key to unlock the book of creation. In the light of the Word, the material universe also becomes transparent again. (Praying the Bible, 36-37)

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | General | Matthew Mason

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  • July 26, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    Seeking the One we love

    My sense is that many in my generation of evangelicals have “grown out of” what we perceive as the legalism and pietism of previous generations’ stress on personal daily reading of Scripture and prayer. I think this is bad news, not least because, at their best (which was much of the time), previous generations were motivated not by duty but by love. They loved Scripture. And they loved Scripture because they loved Christ.

    In a passage of great beauty, Mariano Magrassi captures the same attitude in the fathers and the medievals. They were greedy for God’s word because as they read, they encountered Christ through the sacred page.

    Hunger for the Word is a need of love. The drought that creates this thirst is the fire of love; it is the “soul obsessed with Scripture” which Jerome admired in Origen. Lack of reading is an unbearable fast which saps the life of the spirit. Love inevitably brings with it an irresistible need to know. Everything pertaining to the beloved takes on special interest and becomes the object of intense searching. Augustine’s love of Truth, which prompted his search and made it so fruitful, is of this kind. it is not intellectualism. It is the discovery of the mystery of a Person deeply loved, in whom every truth comes together like the lines on his face. He is the Truth, and every text of Scripture speaks of him. (Praying the Bible, 65)

    This therefore shapes the way we read.

    All of this has consequences for lectio divina. It is not so much a matter of reading a book as of seeking Someone: “With all its ardor, the Church seeks in Scripture the One who she loves.” Exegesis is not technique it is mysticism. The meaning of Scripture is not an impersonal truth, but the fascinating figure of Christ. “The meaning of Christ, mysterious and hidden.” The whole science of exegesis is the ability to recognize Christ. And when great saints such as Origen, Gregory, or Bernard pore over the text, their exegesis becomes an ardent search, a joyful and almost dreamlike discovery, a poem of love. (Praying the Bible, 52-53)

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | General | Spirituality

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  • July 11, 2011 by Matthew Mason

    Growing with the Word

    Mariano Magrassi’s exquisite little book, Praying the Bible, draws on the deep wells of the patristic and medieval writings on Scripture to show how the first twelve centuries of the Church were nourished on God’s Word. In a sense, here is a Roman Catholic Archbishop giving a “thick” description of the traditional evangelical quiet time and the theology of the Word that undergirds it. It seems to me, though, that among younger evangelicals, the quiet time has fallen into neglect. If I’m right, this is a disaster. Without daily, prayerful, feeding on God’s Word, we will produce, at best, anemic Christians: pale, boring, listless, and of little use for the kingdom. Perhaps neglect of the Word is not such a danger for the kind of person who visits the SAET blog. Nevertheless, those of us interested in theology run a different risk – that of thinking that sharper exegetical technique, more secondary literature, cultivation of the languages, familiarity with the great texts of history, is what we need. But really, this is no better. Technique, tools, and texts alone are the way of death.

    So, in my next few posts, I plan on quoting some of the choicer parts of Magrassi’s book, in the hope that it will stimulate a hunger for the Word.

    Perhaps the most important emphasis of the book is that reading the Bible is first and foremost a spiritual discipline. To be sure, there are tools and habits that can be learned, and that are important for responsible reading. Nevertheless, far more important than a checklist of exegetical techniques is the indwelling Spirit, love for Christ, trust in his Word, and growth in godliness. For Scripture is God speaking, and he reserves his best insights for those who love him best.

    There is a radical disproportion between human beings and the mystery of the Word that was written for them. “Who has enough spiritual understanding to explain these mysteries?” wondered Origen…

    There is always something left to discover; we can always draw new water from this bottomless well. At every reading, it is as if there were a new world to discover. It is as if God “had already begun anew, as it were, to open to us that very great abyss of mysteries.” These are the words of the Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx. His confrere Gilbert of Hoyland echoes him: “New things can always be discovered in Christ. Into the new, one may penetrate.

    Once again it is Gregory [the Great] who finds the most apt terms for describing this faith insight. He saw that Scripture grows with the mind of the reader:

    The divine words grow with the one who reads them…Where the mind of the reader is directed, there, too, the sacred text ascends; for…it grows with us, it rises with us.

    These words are justly famous and widely repeated in later tradition. What exactly do they mean? Gregory points us in the right direction, saying that when the reader addresses a question to the text, the answer is in proportion to the reader’s maturity. The objective dimensions of the Word do not grow; the already correspond to the mystery of Christ. Its lifegiving power is unlimited, thanks to the presence of the Spirit. It is the reader’s mind that grows. And it grows through the influence of that Word, which creates in the soul of the faithful reader an ever-new capacity to receive it. Clothed with the light of God, the mind reaches out. And to the extent that the receiver’s mind reaches out, so too does the Word. (Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina [trans. Edward Hagman; Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 1998], 39-41)

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | General

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  • October 28, 2010 by Jason Hood

    Ehrman’s Conundrum

    On the one hand, in Misquoting Jesus he wants the “original” text of the New Testament to remain inaccessible and obscure, forcing him to argue that text-critical methodologies cannot really produce any certain conclusions.  On the other hand, in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture he needs to argue that text-critical methodologies are reliable and can show you what was original and what was not; otherwise he would not be able to demonstrate that changes have been made for theological reasons.  Moises Silva comments:

    “There is hardly a page [in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture] where Ehrman does not employ the concept of an original text.  Indeed, without such a concept, and without the confidence that we can identify what the original text is, Ehrman’s book is almost unimaginable, for every one of his examples depends on his ability to identify a particular reading as a scribal corruption.”

    Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity, 223.

    Categories: Doctrine of Scripture | Jason Hood

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