Author: Ben Taylor

“Creed” by Steve Turner

We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin
We believe everything is okay
as long as you don’t hurt anyone,
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy is okay.
We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything is getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated
And you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in
horoscopes, UFOs and bent spoons;
Jesus was a good man
just like Buddha, Mohammed, and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher
although we think His good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same–
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of
creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the Nothing
Because when you ask the dead what happens they say nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied,
then it’s compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson.
What’s selected is average.
What’s average is normal.
What’s normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors
and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good.
It’s only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust.
History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds,
and the flowering of individual thought.

“Chance” (a post-script)

If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear

State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites Go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

Total depravity and my bad gardening skills

“We are completely sinful,” says the Calvinist. “In our natural state, even our best intentions are corrupted by the basic selfishness that poisons and perverts our most core impulses. There is nothing good in us.”

The problem with the Calvinist doctrine of the Total Depravity of Man is that there is nothing in a totally sinful soul for God to save. It is not merely unworthy of heaven, but worthless. For when we talk about depravity or sinfulness, we are talking about the corruption and ruin of the soul. If the whole soul is corrupt, then what part of it does God want to save? Does God love to rescue wickedness from punishment, or delight to bring blackness into his heavenly light?

A few months ago I planted some flowers in our mulch patch–a fledgling attempt at gardening. One Friday as we were about to leave town for a few days, I decided that, instead of diluting the Miracle Grow in water and watering the flowers, I would just sprinkle a little of the powder onto their bases and let the rain that was forecast that night dissolve it into the soil. #dumbo #thegreenthumbgeneskippedme

When I came back a few days later, I found to my horror that it hadn’t rained, or rained enough, and instead of fertilizing my plants, the chemicals had scourged my plants with burns that had turned them into dry, brown plant-corpses. I decided to dig them up and replace them with new plants from the store, swallowing the extra cost as a learning-the-hard-way tuition fee.

Two of them seemed to have retained some life. While one looked like it would definitely survive, the other had just one thin little twig of green peaking out on the side under the dead mass. (Presumably I had missed a spot with my fertilizer.) I decided to let it live and see if it could be nursed back to health. I replaced the dead ones but let it and its healthier brother remain. Since then, I have been overjoyed to see that, growing out of the center through the dead scrubbiness, new green has returned to it! I am confident now that this little shrub will live to bloom another day.

My point is that I did not save the plants that were totally dead, but the plants that had life left in them. The plants that showed no green I threw away. Is God, the wise gardener of souls, more a fool than I, a foolish gardener of flowers? Does he not see a shred of hope, a shred of beauty and value in the soul of those whom he saves? Does he not see the glorious figure of the unfallen Adam in the shriveled and reduced form of his offspring? Does he not remember that we are his blood, though we have forgotten it, and that, like Darth Vader, there is still good in us? Does he not deem valuable those for whom he exchanges his own Son?

The heart of Jesus at the moment of his death, a heart broken and bleeding with desperate, fiery love, charging into death for us as a lion and a lamb–is this heart one that takes pity on worthless refuse, or one that bursts with passion for a worthy beloved?

In what sense, then, is it helpful to speak of total depravity? It is one thing to say that we cannot earn our way to heaven by mere good works. It is another thing to say that the human soul has nothing good until God causes it to partake in the new birth. The very fact that it is a human soul means that it has been bestowed by God with a great and sacred value that demands respect in our thinking and our theology.

Some funny one-liners

I threw a boomerang a few years ago. I now live in constant fear.

My teacher accused me of plagiarism. His words, not mine.

A man gets stabbed in New York every 52 seconds. Poor bastard.

I, for one, like Roman numerals.

Working in a mirror factory is something I can totally see myself doing.

There is no “i” in denial.

I broke my finger last week. On the other hand, I’m okay.

You’re not completely useless; you can always serve as a bad example.

You can never lose a homing pigeon – if your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, what you’ve lost is a pigeon.

I didn’t believe my dad was a construction site thief until I got home. All the signs were there.

And The Lord said come forth and receive eternal life. But Frank came fifth and won a toaster.

I have a stepladder, because my real ladder left when I was a kid.

Satan walks into a lawyer’s office

Just heard this (while listening to Peter Kreeft’s analysis of the philosophy of Star Wars, incidentally) and had to share this lawyer joke for posterity (no offense, friends of the legal persuasion!):

Satan walks into a lawyer’s office and the lawyer asks, “What can I do for you?” Satan replies, “It’s what I can do for you,” and slaps a contract down on the desk. “I can make you richer than Bill Gates, and more powerful than the president of the United States. All you have to do is sell to me your soul, and your wife’s soul, and the souls of your children and grandchildren to the 30th generation.”  The lawyer flips through the contract carefully and finally looks up at Satan skeptically. “Okay,” he says, “What’s the catch?”

On neurological descriptions of faith

Some humanists (typically atheists and agnostics, sometimes self-proclaimed Christians) account for faith in merely neurological terms. They describe the neurological phenomena that correlate with religious and ecstatic experiences (the active areas of the brain, the chemicals released and their effects on perception and emotion, the psychological benefits of faith, etc.),  and believe that they have proved that religious belief is merely a natural phenomenon. However, to demonstrate the natural causes of faith does not preclude the existence of supernatural causes. It’s logical nonsense. It’s like a crime scene investigator deciphering precisely which angle the bullet hit the victim, and how it caused death by hemorrhaging, and thereby concluding triumphantly that he had solved the murder. Humanists convince themselves that the neurological causes of religious experience entirely account for it because they hold the inherently non-scientific presupposition that no supernatural causes can exist. It is absurd to enter a dialog whose purpose is to investigate whether supernatural causes exist with the presupposition that all phenomena must be natural. When such presuppositions are suspended, we can finally examine the facts of the phenomenon of religion without bias. We will find a great number of human behaviors that don’t seem to be easily accounted for by explanations of natural human behavior–chief among which were a wise and gentle moral teacher who claimed to be the One True God in the flesh, and a group of men who, after his death, themselves went to execution because they swore that he was, and a sect that has survived for 2000 years teaching that God died, that three are one, that a woman gave birth to a child without a man being involved, and that the path to life is not the survival of the fittest, but of the least fit.

Culpability and authority

It was suggested to me today by a colleague that the Church is hardly a reliable authority upon which to base our faith in the Bible or Christianity, because of the many atrocities committed throughout the history of the Church (Inquisition, Crusades, and the like). It is quite impossible to argue that the Church has been lily white in its history–indeed it has been marred repeatedly by corruption and scandal, from popes to parish priests (Just read up on Pope Alexander VI as a starting point). No sort of defense of the Church can stand that starts with the assumption that its authority depends on its blamelessness. The only defense that comes, and it is the only one needed, is that the Church has never pretended to be blameless; in fact, her mantra, the very essence of her message, has always been the acknowledgement of her (and everyone else’s) blame. The Church claims more blood on her hands than her opponents could ever catch her with.

The remarkable claim of the church is that she is authoritative not on the basis of her own merit but on the basis of Jesus’ anointing. She claims that Jesus promised that she would never fundamentally stray or err in doctrine; in other words, that she would preserve the true faith. It is no more necessary for her to be blameless in order to do this than it is necessary to be bald in order to be a barber, or to be a billionaire in order to be a banker. In fact I am the most suspicious of barbers who are bald, and of bankers who are billionaires, and of priests who are perfect.

The real question in examining the Church’s authority is whether Jesus really gave her this charge and whether she has ever fundamentally shifted in her teaching. We will find that, emerging from first century Palestine like an unflinching stallion, the Church has always defended the same message, God’s grace through the blood of Jesus, prevailing over sin and granting those who believe in his name the right to be called the sons and daughters of God, imbued with all the divine authority befitting such a bloodline.

ex opere operato Christi

On conversions between Catholicism and Protestantism

Having grown up as a Protestant, I have heard countless testimonies of people who were “raised in the Catholic church,” but never had a real, personal faith until they found Jesus at a Protestant church later in life. It is almost a cliche in churches like mine. All the Catholic church seemed to be able to produce were spiritually dead Christmas-and-Easter Pseudo-Christians. This evidence formed the impression in me and most of my churchmates that the Catholic church was itself spiritually dead.

Recently, I have become aware of the existence of active, practicing Catholics. Their existence creates a rather interesting observation: not once in my years as a Southern Baptist did I ever meet a former Catholic who was an active, practicing Catholic at the time of their conversion to Protestantism. It seems that the only way these once-Catholics entered Protestant churches was by a decay or regression in their faith (or in the facade of supposed faith), passing through a period of non-religion or spiritual inactivity. In other words, these former Catholics became Protestant after a progression in which they became less Christian. I have never met a convert from Catholicism who experienced the opposite path–that of increasing devotion to his Catholic form of the Christian faith leading to the discovering of Protestantism as a purer, better way to practice his faith. Someone may come forward to testify against it, but it seems to me that Catholics who become Protestants are Catholics who have become less Christian, never those who have become more Christian and embraced Protestantism as a higher form of Christianity.

I have far less evidence for the case of Protestants who become Catholics, but the limited cases I have heard would lead me to tentatively suggest that the trend goes in quite the opposite direction: Protestants who become Catholics are almost always active, practicing Protestants at the time of their conversion, and they embrace Catholicism as a higher form of Christianity. Protestants do not experience a period of doubt about the whole foundation of Christianity, a loss of love for or faith in Christ and the gospel and the essence of our faith, and then, at the end of this process, discover Catholicism. Perhaps there are cases to the contrary, but I sense that generally it holds true.

To show another angle of what I mean, the folks at Called to Communion have pointed out that former-Catholic Protestants tend to be hostile towards the Catholicism of their upbringing, rejecting Catholicism as a body that has lost its Christian soul, whereas former-Protestant Catholics tend to extend mercy towards the Protestantism of their upbringing, accepting it as a Christian soul that has lost her body. The attitude of the Catholic who used to be Protestant is towards pity and reconciliation, whereas the attitude of the Protestant who used to be Catholic is towards resentment and refutation.

If these observations prove true, then they may suggest which is the truer form of Christianity, for Christianity itself would seem to instruct us that its truest form will attract the truest and most devout of all Christians, and will have the most charity toward the other forms, while its weakest form will attract the most disenchanted Christians, and be the most hostile toward other forms.

The Bible’s sure foundation: A response to John Piper’s ‘A Peculiar Glory’

Dr. John Piper’s new book A Peculiar Glory (available for free PDF download) sets out to provide a basis for a sure knowledgefull_a-peculiar-glory that the Bible is true, one that can be known without scholarship. He says that while he has spent much of his life dealing with the historical and textual/linguistic evidences for establishing the truth and trustworthiness of the Bible, he has realized that these evidences do not provide certainty to the lay person who cannot understand them, nor devote his life to the study of Greek and Hebrew and the history of eastern antiquity, etc. He feels that such certainty should and must be available to the common Christian, and indeed it must.

As the means of getting this certainty about the Bible, Piper points to the evidence of Christ’s glory within it. He quotes heavily from Jonathan Edwards, who explains it this way:

“The mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory…. Unless men may come to a reasonable solid persuasion and conviction of the truth of the gospel, by the internal evidences of it, in the way that has been spoken, viz. by a sight of its glory; ’tis impossible that those who are illiterate, and unacquainted with history, should have any thorough and effectual conviction of it at all. (qtd. p. 138)

It is my aim in this essay to demonstrate that the peculiar glory of the gospel of Christ in the Bible is not in itself a sufficient means of knowing the trueness of the Bible, but to propose another means that can provide assurance without scholarship.

To begin, I address an assertion that Piper seems to make about ascertaining the truth of scripture through the glory of the gospel, namely that it is objective. He says, “It is crucial to emphasize here that this glory of Christ in the gospel is an objective reality. The glory is in Christ and in the gospel. It is not in us. It is not subjective, but objective” (p. 141). I respectfully point out that Piper has confused the glory of Christ in the gospel (which entails no knowledge on our part) with the perception of the glory of Christ in the gospel, which is the means by which we can know the glory of God. It is vital to see that the epistemological instrument Piper is seeking is in fact a mental or spiritual illumination, as evinced by Edwards’, John Calvin’s, and his own descriptions of the nature of this proof-by-glory. According to Piper, “Well-grounded faith is not only reasonable faith (based on real evidence and good grounds), but also spiritual faith, that is, it is enabled by the Holy Spirit and mediated through spiritual perception of divine glory in the truth of the gospel” (emphasis mine). In Edwards’ words above, it is not God’s glory per se but “a sight of [the gospel’s] glory” that convinces the believer. Calvin speaks in a crucial quote from Chapter 11:

“How can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we have recourse to the decree of the church? It is as if someone asked: Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.” (Institutes, I, vvii, 2)6

Thus, according to Calvin, the assurance of the truth of the Bible is a sensation, like taste or sight. Now, the word “objective” means belonging to the object of thought rather than the thinking subject, and “subjective” means belonging to the thinking subject rather than the object of thought. The glory of God may be objective, but the “spiritual perception of divine glory”, the great dawning of this glory in the mind of the believer, the sight of the glory which confirms the truth of the Bible to us, the taste of its sweetness, is what we are talking about. And the apprehension of beauty or glory is an inherently subjective phenomenon. Calling a believer’s comprehension of the peculiar glory of God objective is like calling the beauty of my one-month-old daughter objective, as if anyone who holds my daughter experiences the glory that I experience when I do. The subjectivity of a religious appeal to something like beauty is easier for us to see when it is put forward by Islam instead of Christianity. One of the most prominent lines of reasoning in Islamic apologetics is that the Qur’an can be known to be true because it is a work of literary beauty and moral sublimity that is unparalleled and impossible to imitate. The Qur’an says in one place (among others), “Oh people, if you doubt the heavenly origin of this Book which We have sent down to Our servant, the Prophet, produce one surah like it” (2:23). Can any writing be put forth that will satisfy this challenge in the eyes of Muslims? I suggest that it is impossible, because the claim is subjective. Muslims adore the Qur’an as holy. How could they see something unholy as equally beautiful? Therefore, it is clear as Piper advances his point about the glory of Christ in the gospel as the evidence for the truth of the Bible, that he is talking about a subjective evidence.

In addition to saying that the glory of Christ in the Bible is “objective,” Piper says that it is “self-authenticating.” (In Calvin’s words above: “Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth”.) In fact this is one of the main claims Piper makes in the book, using the term in the book’s introduction webpage on desiringgod.com, and throughout the text. Now, a truth that is “self-evident” or “self-authenticating” is something that is authenticated by no outside authority, but subjectively, that is, having the proper source of its evidence or authentication in the mind itself. For example, the Founding Fathers held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, on the basis that any man contemplating the statement has a subjective perception of its truth, based on reason; in other words, it has no other proof but needs no other, since every man’s reason confirms it to him in his mind. By calling the glory of Christ in the scriptures self-authenticating, Piper is saying that one’s mind is the source of the authentication of the Bible. It is important to notice the possible implications of this. If we say that the truth of the Bible is evident to the natural human mind, we make it out to be something ascertainable by the natural mind, in other words, by reason. Now, this reliance on reason is troubling when it comes to the gospel. The comprehension of the divine beauty of the gospel is anything but “natural” in a fallen state of nature, and the glorious paradoxes of the gospel are not “reasonable,” but a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. Dr. Piper would be the first to admit that reason alone cannot bring one this saving vision of the divine glory. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think that he uses the term “self-authenticating” with unintentional ambiguity, and doesn’t really mean that the way we are certain of the supernatural truth of the Bible is by natural reason. Instead, he means that the Holy Spirit within our minds confirms the truth of the Bible to our minds, and it is in that sense subjective: it is within our minds. However, although it is a subjective truth, it is not a self-authenticating truth, but a truth authenticated by a divine witness. This is in fact where Piper ends up, especially in Chapter 11: he explains the Spirit as the agent of illumination.

Filtering out the misleading implications that the glory of God is itself a means by which men may ascertain its truth, or that it is evident by man’s natural faculties, we see Piper’s strongest claim, that our certainty comes from the Holy Spirit’s supernatural guidance and illumination of the mind. Piper first introduces this idea of the Holy Spirit’s role via Jonathan Edwards: The “internal evidences” that Edwards mentions are authenticated “by the special influence and enlightenings of the Spirit of God” (qtd. p. 142), which Edwards says accounts for why some otherwise rational men do not seem to notice them in their study of the Bible. The idea is really expounded in Chapter 11, where Piper stakes the heart of his argument on a crucial phrase by Calvin: “We can know the Bible is the word of God by ‘the internal testimony of the Spirit’” (p. 182). Perhaps Calvin recognized the danger of ascribing the illumination that affirms the Bible merely to the human mind. Perhaps he heard the thundering hooves of the Enlightenment coming on the heels of the Reformation. In any case, he ascribes it to the Holy Spirit:

The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his word, the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit therefore who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded . . . because until he illumines their minds, they ever waver among many doubts! (qtd. p. 184)

According to Calvin, it is by the Spirit’s illumination that we transcend our own rational powers to know beyond a shadow of a doubt the trueness of scripture.

Therefore illumined by [the Spirit’s] power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. (qtd. p. 187)

Or, as Piper explains, “beneath a spiritually vital judgment…is a Spirit-given illumination of the majesty of God himself. The sight of God’s glory precedes and grounds the formation of rational judgments about its truth.” Piper is saying that the proof of the Bible by the beauty of Christ is in our minds, yet not merely by the human mind, but by the Holy Spirit who sanctifies our minds through his divine and authoritative light.

Although I too believe that the inward witness of the Holy Spirit affirms to us all that we read in the Bible, this fact, no matter how true, does not provide any more epistemological certainty; rather it merely shifts the question over a bit. Imagine that a man comes to you and says, “I found these scrolls, and they were sent from heaven!” and you ask him, “How do you know they were sent from heaven?” Suppose he were to reply, “Because an angel appeared to me and told me.” Now you are a person who believes that angels and heaven exist. However, even given that, what would your response be? Would it be to say, “Well, since you say that an angel told you they are from God, I suppose they must be”? Isn’t it more likely that you will be inclined to ask, “Well, then how do I know that an angel appeared to you?” And that is the question we must ask of ourselves, suspending for the sake of truth our assumption that we know the truth: How do we know that the Holy Spirit has truly illumined us, and not some lesser power or principality?

Within the greater realm of those who claim Christianity there are some who, in answer to this question, leap off the precipice of absolute subjectivity, saying, “We know it because we know it. There is no explanation, you just know.” But their tautology brings the argument swiftly to an end, and as swiftly their faith, for they have no room for a Christ outside the one in their mind. John Piper–thanks be to God–is not willing to be among them, and so, when he is tacitly faced with this question, he deliberately avoids the precipice, clarifying that the Holy Spirit does not speak to us in just any way, but by and through the words of the Bible.

“The internal testimony of the Spirit is not an added revelation to what we see in Scripture. It is not the voice of the Spirit saying to our mind, ‘What you are now looking at in the Bible is the majesty of God; so start seeing it’” (p. 187).

The Spirit is not an added revelation outside Scripture. Nor does it work apart from Scripture.

God does not hang a lantern on the house of Scripture so that we will know it is his house. He does not certify his masterpiece with a distinguishing, Rembrandt-like signature. He does not give a voice from heaven: “This is my book, listen to it.” That is not what the word  “testimony” or “witness” means in the phrase “testimony [or witness] of the Holy Spirit.” Rather, the testimony of the Spirit is the work of the Spirit to give us new life and, with this life, eyes to see what is really there in the self-attesting divine glories of Scripture—the meaning of Scripture. (p. 190)

We do not know the Spirit’s work by some supernatural sign, but by the fact that he illumines our eyes to the true meaning of Scripture. In other words, Piper’s answer to the question “How do we know the Holy Spirit has truly illumined us?” is “Because it shows us the divine glory in the meaning of scripture.” The means of confirming the work of the Spirit is the Bible.

It is at this point we realize that Piper’s argument utterly fails, that it is an infinite loop. He commits the logical fallacy of begging the question. For if we ask him, “How do we know the scriptures are true?” the answer comes, “By the revelation of the Holy Spirit,” and if we ask him, “How do we know that a revelation is from the Holy Spirit?” the answer comes, “By the scriptures.”

Piper’s main purpose in the book is to establish a means of knowing for certain that the Bible is true–a means that is available to every man without historical-critical scholarship. We see now that the Bible is not its own authentication, and, although the Spirit of God confirms to us the glorious and holy truth contained in the Bible, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Book share the need for an anchor of well-grounded proof, a defense for the hope that is in them. On what reasonable grounds can we base our belief that the Bible is true, or for that matter, that the Holy Spirit speaks to us? I believe there is such a solid ground.

To find this firm foundation, we have to trace Piper’s argument back to Chapter 7, as Piper is laying the groundwork for his argument in Chapters 8-11. In Chapter 7 he makes some assumptions that doom the following chapters to failure: he claims that the authority that the Twelve Apostles and Paul had as spokesmen for Jesus was not transferable.

Once the Twelve were established for their foundational ministry, there was no plan or provision to be replaced. Paul referred to the new and growing church as “the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:19–20); and John described the church in Revelation as a city coming down from heaven whose wall had “twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:14). The point of Paul and John is that foundations that Christ puts in place are unshakeable and once for all. They are not replaced in every generation. The apostles were once for all. Alfred Plummer clarifies this point on the basis of the intrinsic purpose of the apostolate as Jesus created it: “The absence from Christ’s teaching of any statement respecting the priesthood of the Twelve, or respecting the transmission of the powers of the Twelve to others, is remarkable. As the primary function of the Twelve was to be witnesses of what Christ had taught and done, especially in rising from the dead, no transmission of so exceptional an office was possible.” (p. 122)

Piper says that because the apostles were “foundations,” they could not be “replaced,” which we understand through the quote by Plummer to mean that the transmission of their office was not possible. The implication is that their role as “authorized spokesmen who would teach with [Christ’s] authority” (p. 118)–the authority by which Piper claims the New Testament came into being–ended with The Apostles. But this reasoning is absolutely false. No one lays the foundation of a building and then stops and says, “Well, these bricks are the foundation, therefore I should not put any bricks on top of them.” Indeed, if they are a foundation, then by definition they must be built upon. And God is no foolish builder who leaves his foundations unfinished, but is building on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. As it says in Ephesians 2:19-21, which Piper quotes from, “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Nor does the transmission of an office imply supplantation, but rather succession. No one at the Continental Congress, upon having elected George Washington as the first president of the United States, said, “Well, since we have recognized him as the greatest man in America, we surely must never elect a man to replace him as president.” It is certainly true that the Twelve Apostles have always been accorded unequalled honor above the saints, but it is all the more fitting that there should be successors to their office. The only argument offered by Piper or Plummer that there could not possibly be successors to their office is essentially that Jesus would surely have said something about it, which is a fallacious argumentum ex silentio, an argument from silence.

And here we begin to see our hope, for if the office of “authorized spokesmen who would teach with [Christ’s] authority” is not ended, but alive and well, then we can base our faith in the Bible on their testimony, a testimony that is not entirely in heaven (as the testimony of the Holy Spirit) nor entirely on earth (as the testimony of human reason), but straddling both, like Jacob’s Ladder, like Christ Himself, fully divine and fully human. Behold, here indeed is such a witness, the “holy temple” of which we are bricks and “in which God lives by his Spirit,” the Church, whose head speaks with divine authority handed down from those first authorized spokesmen by unbroken apostolic succession by the laying on of hands.

How can we know that the Bible is true? We can believe on the testimony of the witness who wrote it, who preserved it, who canonized it, and treasured the gospel of God in her bosom from the earliest days of Christianity until today. The Church is with us as a living and authoritative witness so that we do not have to become scholars to have a grounded basis for our faith. Indeed, Piper admits that even if we were to become masters of historical criticism, “the results of such study would not provide a sure foundation for faith that you could stake your life on” (p. 130). By trusting the authority of the Church, which is led by the Holy Spirit and given a spiritual enlightenment, we do not have to subject our trust to the arguments of mere human critics and rationalist skeptics. Yet the Church is also an earthly institution, standing as a physical and historical tether to the objective truths of Christianity, fiercely insistent and perennially consistent in its dogma, keeping us from the pitfalls to which blind subjectivism would leave us vulnerable. The Holy Catholic Church, the Body of the Spirit of Christ, The Protector of the Bible, is the Bible’s one sure foundation, as Christ is hers. All who love the Bible will be drawn to her.

Must the Church be an organization?

In my last post, I concluded that the authority to interpret Christian doctrine rests on the One True Church; however, I have not defined this One True Church. Before we may venture further, we must establish what we mean by this word “Church” (including its capitalized and lower-case forms).

When we refer to a “church” [uncapitalized], we usually refer to a particular congregation of Christians and/or the building they gather in. When we refer to “The Church” [capitalized] we may mean one of two things:

(1) An organization of these churches sharing common doctrinal beliefs affirmed by a central and terminal authority, such as a council, convention, or pontiff (for example, “The Roman Catholic Church” or “The Southern Baptist Church”), in other words, a denomination

(2) The entire global body of Christians, the Body of Christ

When we give the power over interpretation of doctrine to the True Church, we certainly mean the Church in this second, global sense. The question that emerges, though, is whether we must also mean a particular organizational Church (sense 1).

I think we must. My reasons for thinking so are connected to my reason for arguing for the True Church as the defender of orthodoxy in the first place; or put another way, I think this institutional concept of the church is entailed by the role that I have suggested it has.

If we define the True Church as simply the global body of Christ, the question must be asked, do we mean that all Church denominations are included in this? We would then be in the position of affirming the Fire Baptized Church of God of Holiness of the Americas, the Central Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Branch Davidians, the Indian Shakers, not to mention both the Catholics and the Protestants, as all authoritative for interpreting Christian doctrine and practice. Certainly this is not tenable! It is more likely that we mean that the Church transcends the denominations, not fitting perfectly into any one of them. Some people from any denomination might be part of the True Church, and some people from any denomination may not be part of it. In other words, the Church is a spiritual entity known to God and not fully to man.

However, thus abstracting the True Church away from any earthly form leaves us in danger of being unable to recognize it. It cannot be that we are left without any means of ascertaining the Church, because we must be a part of it! Christ wills for us to participate in his Church. Accepting an agnostic position in which we are not concerned about the authenticity of our own church and denomination leaves us powerless to affirm truth or reject falsehood. We may be part of a false or deficient church, and thus develop falsities and deficiencies in our soul, and those around us. We might imbibe false prophecy and erroneous teaching without even knowing it. This is certainly not a possibility that the Good Shepherd leaves open to his precious flock. There must be some way of knowing for sure whether our church or denomination is part of the True Church.

Is there any way that we can affirm the truth of our church or our denomination without equating it to The Church? There is a way, the way taken by congregationalists and quakers and those who see their churches as democratic gatherings of autonomous believers. It is an appeal to a power outside the church or denomination itself: to Reason. The congregationalist believes in his church because he believes that his pastor or his elders or he himself has enough reason and insight, and that their Reason has the authority to interpret Christian doctrine and practice, using the Bible as a basis.

However, I have argued previously that the authority to interpret Christian truth cannot be trusted to the reason of men, for we are flawed and sinful and incapable of reliably interpreting the divine mysteries. The True Church, for whose preservation Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, could never surrender her members to such a treacherous guide, but would protect them from error by her own authority. Since The Church is herself the true authority (as I said in my last post), she would never abdicate to an impostor.

If we affirm more than one denomination, we fall to contradiction, and if we affirm none of them, we fall to an agnosticism that renders us powerless against error, which itself can only be remedied by giving Reason the scepter of interpretation, which The Church would never do. We must therefore regard a single Church, a denomination, as The Church.

We have now come to the point when we can and must ask, “Which Church (sense 1) is the Church (sense 2)?” or put another way, “Which denomination is the True Church?” I will consider this immense and crucial question later, but the significance of the point we have just come to cannot be overstated, namely, that the question can be framed in those terms at all.

The authority to interpret scripture

In the previous essay I concluded that the Bible is reliable on the basis of the authority of the institutional Church to establish Christian practice and doctrine. But, although Protestants accept from the hand of Tradition both the Bible and its companions, the Creeds, they reject the authority of the Tradition of the Church today (as the battle cry “sola scriptura” proclaims). Such authority must have been removed from the Church sometime (perhaps gradually) between the 4th Century and the 16th Century, at which point the Reformation occurred. I have heard it explained in roughly these words: “God gave the institutional Church authority through the apostolic age and through the age of the councils, so that the Bible would be reliably formed, but since the closure of the Canon, the authority to interpret doctrine no longer resides with the leaders of the Church, but with all believers, since the meaning of the Bible is evident and apparent within its completed pages and stands on its own.” Authority to interpret has been removed from the Church, and given to all who can read the Bible for themselves. It is a good thing to read the Bible for oneself, but to place the power to interpret the Bible into the hands of everyone is to destroy all certainty of truth.

The Zionist First Church of God of Holiness

We become aware of this if we consider the hundreds of different protestant denominations, many of which we can agree are dubiously orthodox. Take, for example, Reverend Michael at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness down the street, who claims to be an apostle, slays people with the spirit, and drives a Rolls Royce because the Holy Spirit told him to tell his congregation to contribute to the work of the Lord. We can’t accept his authority, can we? But on what basis do we reject it? We will answer, “His teaching and lifestyle doesn’t line up with the Bible.” But Apostle Michael quotes heavily from the Bible all the time. So, on what basis do we claim that his teachings don’t line up? “He misinterprets scripture.” And how do we know that he is misinterpreting scripture? Because we know how to correctly interpret the meaning of scripture. On what grounds are we certain of our interpretations?

The first and most common line of reasoning that comes to the Protestant mind is, I believe, based on an incorrect assumption.

Intrinsic meaning?

The Protestant will probably answer that we can be certain of our interpretations because, by careful study of Greek, Hebrew, and biblical history, we can know the original intention of the author to his audience, situated in the historical, linguistic, and textual context, and discovering this intention is to know the meaning of the text. This is based on a key assumption about the nature of meaning shared by most evangelicals and expressed by John Piper:

“The grammatical-historical method…aims to get at something intrinsic to the text, namely its meaning.”

Piper defines the meaning of a text as the author’s intention (as discernible from the historical, linguistic, cultural context, etc.) and claims authority to know it based on the fact that the intention is intrinsic to the words of the text. However, it is decidedly not the case that an author’s intention is intrinsic to his words.

Permit me to get technical for a moment. All meaning is conveyed between interlocutors using a process of coding, transferring, and decoding messages. Words, whether “well formulated in writing” or in spoken utterance, are the signs of meaning, the material used in transfer. In a precise semiology, words are not identical to the author’s intention. The intention or meaning is conveyed by the words in conjunction with the encoding and decoding apparatuses of both interlocutors. My ability to understand someone’s intention is dependent on how well they interpret the message into a form I can understand and how well I interpret the form of their message back into an intention. Therefore, the author’s intention is not simply intrinsic to his words, but passes between him and the reader by the instrument of his words within a communicative act that includes interpretation on both their parts.

Such a denial of the role of interpretation in meaning causes us to (unintentionally) neglect God’s role in interpreting scripture to us, and overemphasize our role. This brings us to the real grounds on which Protestants are sure of their interpretations of scripture.

Faith in Reason

What asserting the intrinsic meaning of the texts of scripture is really doing is placing the full power and responsibility to interpret scripture in the hands of Reason, the faculty of the human mind.

At first, we depend on reason only under the guise of scholarship–“Enough rigorous study and education eventually grant the authority to interpret scripture reliably.” However, the subjection of the scriptures to rational scholarship has, in the past four centuries, produced an enormous amount of scholarship doubting nearly everything that can be believed about the Bible, not to mention thousands of fractures of communion based on contradictions of interpretation. Must we accept the positions of any liberal pastor, any linguist, any historical-critical professor of theology who puts forward a new interpretation of scripture based on scholarly study? If we do, then all we will have left of our Christianity will be an emasculated, ham-strung collection of historical happy thoughts. If we say no, then we must again answer, “On what basis?” It is tempting to pretend that there is a consensus among scholars that we might give authority to, by presenting a list of opinions that excludes scholars we deem to be unorthodox, but as with the Canon we will find ourselves begging the question again.

In the end, the only thing we have left to put forward as the sure authority for the interpretation of scripture is our own reason and intellect. But here we have come to something as indefensible as Reverend Michael’s sermon at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness, for no man who says that the Holy Spirit spoke to him can be proved wrong, and neither can a man who gives ultimate authority to his own reason. But no reasonable person absolutely relies upon his reason. The sane person never absolutely trusts his sanity. As G.K. Chesterton says, “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.” In contrast, it is a mark of the insane man that he fixates on his own reasonings. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational man must admit that he is not exempt from the weaknesses of the mind that cause other men to err with the utmost sincerity, and he will look for something greater than himself in which to anchor his understanding of the divine mysteries.

The Church, the interpreter

What shall we say, then? Here lies the Bible before us, but how can we interpret its meaning into our lives with confidence? Surely God has provided a reliable interpreter. We need an interpreter whose authority is neither merely human (as the scholar’s reason) nor merely divine (as the charismatic’s spirit), but has a foot in both, possessing the same dual nature as our Lord Jesus Himself, who is fully God and fully Man. Where can we find such an interpreter? She stands before us in the One True Church, whose Body is on earth and whose Head is in heaven. It was she that gave us the scriptures by the power vested in her, and it is she who continues to give them to this very day. If she does not interpret for us, there can be no sure interpretation.

The authority to interpret the Bible lies today in the same hands as it did in the 4th century, those of the Church. We need to repent of our trust in our own minds, which does not bring glory to God, and instead gladly submit to the safety of the authority of the Living Body of Christ which preserves truth. We must accept the holy and catholic Church as the agency through which God has promised to guide our interpretations of scripture and proclaim its truth in power throughout the earth.