Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics HR503 LESSON · Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics Our Father, we pause to recollect that we think and speak and

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 09 of 20HR503

Authority (cont.) and Introduction to Interpretation

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Our Father, we pause to recollect that we think and speak and write in Your presence. Stimulate our minds and memories. Bring every thought into submission to the obedience of Christ for His name’s sake. Amen.

I was talking yesterday about finishing the subject of the authority of Scripture and talking about Christ’s appointment of the apostles, their fourfold uniqueness, four ways in which their apostolic authority was recognized by Christ, by themselves, by the early church, by the reformers. And then I began at the end with some deductions and conclusions; and I suggested first that submission to the authority of Scripture is the way of freedom. It’s not the way of intellectual bondage but the way of freedom.

My second point is it is the way of integrity. Again there are many people in the church who would say the exact reverse. They would say they cannot understand how an intelligent person in the 1970s can believe the divine inspiration of Scripture or can accept the divine authority of Scripture. “Surely,” they say, “your position is untenable, yet you share obscurantism.”

Now my reply to that is to say “no,” emphatically no; far from being obscurantism, it is a question of integrity. Let me enlarge on that. Integrity is the quality of an integrated personality. It’s the quality of an integrated personality whose beliefs are in harmony with each other and with himself and his whole lifestyle. So, as an integrated person, there is a harmony about him, there is a unity about his convictions and his life as a whole and a total person. He’s a man of integrity. He doesn’t go in for contradictions and compromises within his own personality.

Now then, fundamental to all Christian belief is submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ; and this submission to the lordship of Jesus is one of the strongest unifying and integrating factors in Christian theology and Christian experience. If a Christian is

John R. W. Stott, D. D.Experience: Founder, Langham

Partnership International



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to retain his integrity as a Christian, he must submit himself (his mind, his heart, and his will) to Jesus Christ as Lord. He must bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Otherwise he’s bound to lose his Christian integrity if there’s any part of his life that is not in submission to the lordship of Christ. If his mind isn’t in submission, he’s not intellectually converted. He loses his integrity.

This simple principle gives me the clue I need as to what to do with the problems in Scripture, because we don’t deny for a moment that there are many problems surrounding the acceptance of the Bible as God’s Word. There are textual problems; there are literary problems; there are historical problems; there are scientific problems; there are moral problems. There are many problems, and we don’t deny it, but we deal with these biblical problems in precisely the same way that we deal with problems relating to any other Christian doctrine; and every Christian doctrine has problems, every Christian doctrine has problems.

Take as a good example the love of God. Now every Christian believer—whether he’s Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal, you name it—every conceivable Christian of every conceivable complexion believes that God is love. But the problems surrounding their doctrine are colossal. There’s the problem of evil; there’s the problem of suffering; there is the immensity of the universe; there are the so-called silences of God, etc., etc. There are many baffling problems with which people have wrestled.

So what do you do when somebody brings you a problem? Supposing a mother gives birth to a Mongol child and her faith is in ruins. She says, “You know, why has this happened to me? I believed in the love of God,” etc. What do you do? Do you suspend your belief in the love of God until you solve the problems? Do you say, “I can no longer believe that God is love and retain my integrity until I’ve solved the problems?” No you don’t. No Christian does that. What do we do? We wrestle with the problems. Some light is cast upon them as we do so, and then we cling to our belief in the love of God in spite of the problems. Why? For one reason and one reason only, and that is that Jesus Christ taught it and exhibited it, and it’s because Jesus taught and exhibited the love of God that we believe in the love of God because of Christ.

Now turn from the love of God to the Word of God. There are many problems. When somebody brings you an apparent discrepancy



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or some other biblical problem, what do you say? “I can’t go on believing in the authority of Scripture and retain my Christian integrity until I’ve solved that problem.” Do you say that? You shouldn’t. You should react in the same way. Say, “I will wrestle with the problem. I will give my mind to it. I will read around it. I will think about it. I’ll get advice about it.” And then if the problem remains intractable, you say, “I still believe in the Word of God in spite of the problems for one reason only: that Jesus Christ taught it and exhibited it,” which He did as we saw the other day.

Now is this obscurantism? I’ve often said to my liberal friends that if it is obscurantist for me to believe in the Word of God in defiance of the problems, it is equally obscurantist for you to believe in the love of God in spite of the problems. It is exactly the same. But if not obscurantism, it’s Christian integrity. It is an expression of our loyalty to Jesus Christ as Lord.

So I think we have to say that the real crisis in the church today is whether Jesus Christ is the Lord of the church, so that the church submits to His teaching, or whether the church is the lord of Jesus Christ and may manipulate His teaching and modify His teaching at the church’s discretion. I maintain that the evangelical view of Scripture is the Christian view of Scripture, and it is the Christian view of Scripture because it is Christ’s view of Scripture. It’s not obscurantism; it is sober Christian common sense and humility.

Bishop Handley Moule of Durham at the end of the last century (whom I’ve quoted before), who was appointed principal of Ridley Hall Cambridge, one of the Anglican Evangelical seminaries, in 1880, and was a considerable scholar of Cambridge said this, “When my Lord Christ became a living and unutterably necessary reality to me, I remember that one of my first sensations of profound relief was He absolutely trusted the Bible; and though there are in it things inexplicable and intricate that have puzzled me so much I’m going, not in a blind sense but reverently, to trust the Book because of Him.” Again he said elsewhere, “The Lord stated no theory of their construction [that is, the construction of the biblical books], but looking upon them as they existed He recognized in them the decisive utterance of God even in their minor features of expression.”

There is a good example of a man who recognized that there were problems but believed it was the way of integrity to trust the book because of Christ. That leads me, before I leave this second point, to ask, “What then is the place of reason?”



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The relation of human reason to divine revelation is a very important subject. There are some people who want to exalt their own reason and/or the accumulated corporate reason of the church into a position of supreme and final authority. They’re prepared to use their own reason even to criticize or to alter or to reject what purports to be the revelation of God because their reason cannot accept it. I feel bound to say that this is a wrong and a sinful use of our human reason. The proper place of reason (these are via revelation) is not to stand in judgment upon it but to sit in humility under it, to seek humbly to grasp it and relate it to the contemporary world and to obey it.

I find a useful analogy in my own thinking can be drawn between scientific research and biblical research because both scientific research and biblical research are investigations into divine revelation. Both the scientist and the biblical scholar have their data given to them by God, in the first case in nature and in the second case in Scripture. Now we cannot alter these data. This is, if you like, the tyranny of truth. This is what is given us in revelation. The task of the scientist is not to reject the empirical data of nature but to observe them, to weigh and measure them, to interpret them, and to relate them systematically to the rest of his knowledge. That’s what a scientist is doing. He’s given the data; he can’t reject the data. He’s got to accept the data given in natural revelation and to investigate.

Now similarly, the task of the Bible student or the Bible scholar is to study what is given him in Scripture; to strive to interpret it, to understand it, to systematize it, to relate it to the contemporary world in church and only so will he use his mind with integrity. So I say it’s the way of freedom. Second, it’s the way of integrity.

Now thirdly, and I’m going to range a little widely now because I’m anxious for us to see the importance of biblical authority and how wide are the applications of the principle. Thirdly, it’s the way of church union. I realize we may have different ideas about church union schemes but don’t see why I should omit that for this reason.

Jesus prayed, of course, that the church might be united, but He also prayed that the church might be preserved in the truth, and both prayers come in John 17. Indeed He prayed that they might be one through the revelation that He, Jesus, had given to them from the Father, so that the unity of the church and the truth of the church belonged together; and in the teaching of Jesus,



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Christian truth is foundational to Christian unity. But I thought I’d give you as an illustration what I’m much more familiar with in our own situation.

And church union negotiations began in earnest in Britain in a publication in 1950 of a book called Church Relations in England, a report by representatives of the church of England, that is the Episcopal Church and the Free Church Federal Council. And here is an important quotation, “Assurances with respect to doctrinal standards having been mutually exchanged, each church would declare itself satisfied that the other maintained the apostolic faith and proclaimed the apostolic gospel.” And it is the double use of the word apostolic, that the apostolic faith is the biblical faith and the apostolic gospel is the biblical gospel.

Now in my view what has bedeviled church union schemes, and not least the Anglican method, is the unity scheme that recently founded in Britain is the tendency to make central to such a scheme some ecclesiastical tradition, in this case a particular view of episcopacy which Scripture does not require, because this is to rest church union on tradition instead of on Scripture. So the question of relation between Scripture and tradition is one of the most important issues before the church today; and I believe that a widespread agreement on this question would do more than anything else to promote the visible union or federation (or whatever you think is right) or association of the churches. And the Second Vatican Council seemed at least on paper to have taken a definite step forward and away from the Council of Trent in affirming that Scripture and tradition are not two parallel sources of revelation but two parallel streams of revelation.

Now strictly speaking when you think about it, tradition (that is what is handed down by the church from one generation to another), tradition should be precisely the faith of Scripture. What the church is to hand on from generation to generation is the apostolic faith, the biblical faith, Scripture, which it has itself received. This is what we are to transmit from generation to generation so that ideally speaking Scripture and tradition are identical. Tradition can never stand on its own feet as something separate from Scripture or as possessing an authority equivalent to Scripture, because tradition is the church’s interpretation of Scripture. Therefore, every church or individual has the right and even the duty to test tradition by Scripture. Let Scripture criticize and reform the traditions of the church that every reunion scheme should be understood as a reformation scheme. Reform is at the



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basis of reunion; reform according to Scripture. So that’s the—what is it, the fourth thing? I’ve lost count. No, the third thing.

The fourth is it’s the way of evangelism. How do you define evangelism? At its simplest, evangelism means no more and no less than the spread of the evangel. That is what it is. Evangelism is spreading the evangel. Therefore, evangelism is impossible without a clearly defined evangel. Biblical evangelism requires the biblical evangel, which the church is called by its Lord to proclaim, proclaim without fear, but with conviction and authority, urgency, and relevancy.

But yet nowadays, as we all know, at least in Western Christendom, we’re told that men simply won’t listen to this kind of authoritative proclamation of a given evangel, evangel that we have been given. Some would have us renounce evangelism altogether for political and social action, some would have us replace it with dialogue. I don’t know if I’ve quoted Professor J. G. Davis of Birmingham, an uncompromising advocate of dialogue, who says that true dialogue has got to be entirely open-ended so that if a Christian and a Buddhist are in dialogue with one another, the Buddhist may become a Christian, the Christian may become a Buddhist, or both may end up as atheists. And he said if those are not real possibilities before you enter the dialogue, it isn’t a real dialogue. That’s the most extreme statement I’ve ever read on dialogue.

Now I believe there is a place for dialogue in evangelism, if by dialogue you simply mean a serious conversation in which you’re prepared to listen as well as speak and in which you’re prepared to learn as well as teach. I think there is a place for listening within the context of evangelism in striving to understand the other man’s point of view—striving to enter with sympathy into his beliefs and to his doubts and to his hopes and fears—that ultimately in the context of this dialogue, after I’ve listened and struggled to learn and to understand his position, it is then my duty to bear witness to Jesus Christ as I have been given to understand Him and the salvation that is set forth in Scripture.

So you see you can’t engage in evangelism without believing in biblical authority, and this evangel that has been authoritatively revealed to the church, and fifthly, it’s the way of discipleship. Now I again dare even to say that a fully committed, mature, integrated, developing Christian discipleship is impossible without belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture; and it is impossible without submission to its authority as to the authority of God who speaks



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through His Word. And what liberals are doing and trying to take an authoritative Scripture away from us is effectively to destroy the possibility of Christian discipleship. Now don’t misunderstand me in stating that there is starkly . . . I don’t, of course, deny that there are Christian disciples who don’t accept the full authority of Scripture; I’m not doubting that in some sense they are disciples of Jesus, but I am obliged to say that their discipleship is impoverished and is bound to be impoverished as a result.

Why? Well let me argue it. What is the life of Christian discipleship?

A. It is a life of faith. And faith cannot ripen unless it is nurtured by the promises of God; and the promises of God are found only in one place and that is in the Word of God.

B. It’s a life of obedience; and obedience is not possible unless God’s will and commandments are known and accepted in an authoritative Scripture.

C. It’s a life of worship; and worship is impossible unless the God we worship is revealed in who He is and what kind of a God He is. Despite the attempt to do so in first-century pagan Athens, you cannot worship an unknown god. You must know what manner of god he is and what sort of worship is pleasing to him before you can worship him. So without an authoritative revelation of who this god is in Scripture, I cannot worship. So the life of faith and obedience and worship—and one could go on to fellowship and witness and hope and all the rest—all depend indispensably on the biblical revelation. Christian discipleship is a response to the self-revelation of God.

Now I’ve deliberately gone into that because I think it gives strength to our plea to the whole church that in the crisis of authority in which both church and world are engulfed, we will return to and not abandon a humble submission to Scripture as God’s Word written. We shall do so out of loyalty to the lordship of Christ who endorsed the authority of the Old Testament and authorized His apostles to teach in His name. But in so doing we shall find ourselves. We shall find our freedom, we shall find our integrity, we shall find a way to unite churches and a way to evangelize the world, and we shall find a way to live a truly Christian life of both obedience and worship, etc. for the glory of



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God.

Well I hope that helps to persuade us of the great importance of this controversy in the church and the importance of being quite clear ourselves as preachers about the authority of Scripture. I don’t believe any man has ever made a truly great Christian preacher who hasn’t believed deeply in his mind, heart, and conscience in the unique authority of Scripture.

Well now I turn rather abruptly from authority to interpretation. I once heard Dr. Alan Cole of Sydney, Australia, lecturer in Moore College, an Anglican evangelical seminary there, say that, “Surprising as it may seem, God sometimes blesses a poor exegesis of a bad translation of a doubtful reading of an obscure verse of a minor prophet.” I think he was quite right. I think God does, surprising as it may seem. But that fact gives us no possible excuse for slovenliness in our biblical interpretation; and I believe that great preachers have not only got to be convinced about the authority of Scripture, but they’ve got to be very careful in conscientious exegesis. And indeed if the Bible is God’s Word written, then we should spare no pains and begrudge no effort to discover what He said and still says in Scripture.

Now I want to, if I may, press that upon your conscience that you and I as evangelical believers have a higher view of Scripture than anybody else in the church; and if we have a higher view of Scripture then I want to suggest that our treatment of Scripture must correspond to our view. And if we have the highest view of Scripture, we should take the greatest pains with Scripture. And sometimes we do great discredit to the cause of Christ because of the slovenliness of our interpretation; and we belie what we say we believe about Scripture by the slipshod way in which we interpret it.

So that’s why today and next week I want to talk about the interpretation of Scripture. So I want to give you the three teachers today and the first of the three principles if I’ve got time.

But God has given us three teachers to instruct us and three principals to guide us. Now a firm, foremost teacher, of course, is the Holy Spirit Himself. If the biblical author spoke from God not on their own impulses—this is what 2 Peter 1:21, says, “They spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit”—then clearly the Holy Spirit is the One who can interpret what He caused them to speak. The best interpreter of every book is its



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author. But I know that, to my own cost, when some people try to interpret the books one has tried to write. But the best interpreter of the book is the author. He knows what he intended to say, even if it’s a human author and he didn’t say it very clearly. And in just the same way God’s Book can be interpreted by God’s Spirit alone.

It may be helpful now if we get very clearly distinguished in our minds the two stages by which the Holy Spirit communicates the truth of God. The first and objective stage is called revelation and the second and subjective stage is called illumination.

Revelation (revelatio), or unveiling as we saw the other day, is the disclosure of the truth in Scripture or in Christ and in the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ. This is an objective disclosure, a drawing aside of the veil to reveal the truth recorded in Scripture. The subjective stage illumination is the enlightenment of our minds to comprehend the truth that is disclosed in Scripture.

Now each of the two processes is indispensable. Without revelation we have no truth to perceive and without illumination no faculty with which to perceive it. As an illustration let us imagine that we’ve met this afternoon not for a lecture but for an unveiling ceremony. Let us suppose that some former famous faculty member had died and that there was a plaque going to be unveiled here to the great man, and that when we came into the room, of course, there was a veil, a curtain over the plaque. Let us suppose that coming to the unveiling ceremony we brought with us a blindfolded friend. Well it is obvious in that stage that before he can read what’s on the plaque, two processes are necessary. First, whoever is here to dedicate the thing has got to draw the little cord or draw aside the curtain and unveil the plaque; but still your friend is blindfolded, and he can’t read it until the bandages are removed from his eyes.

Now the Scripture itself speaks of this double process of unveiling the objective and the subjective. There is a veil over our minds as well as a veil over God and His truth. Now revelation is the drawing aside of the curtain. It is the disclosure of truth in Scripture, but now the Spirit draws the veil from our eyes so that we can read and grasp what is written in the Scripture.

Well this work of the Holy Spirit in enlightenment is not an unconditional work. There are certain conditions we have to fulfill and I want to mention these before I pass on.



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A. The Holy Spirit enlightens the regenerates (perhaps that’s too obvious to enlarge on but the experience of rebirth is essential before we’re able to grasp heavenly proof). As Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3, “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, let alone enter it.” He’s blind to it. He can’t see it. This fact the apostle Paul echoed in 1 Corinthians 2. The psychikos anthropos—the man who has got animal life but not spiritual life, the man who is unspiritual or naturally unregenerate—psychikos man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God. They’re folly to Him. He is not able to understand them because they’re spiritually discerned, discerned by the illumination of the Spirit. Now many have borne witness to this in their experience. I like the phrase of William Grimshaw, one of the leading English evangelicals in the eighteenth century, who said to a friend after his conversion, “If God had drawn up His Bible to heaven and sent Him down another, it could not have been newer to Him.” I expect all of us could testify to the same thing. I certainly could. I was brought up to read the Bible by my mother, and I did so dutifully until I was in my later teens, but it was sheer double Dutch to me. I just didn’t begin to understand it. Now I’m not claiming that when I was converted I was immediately able to grasp it all, but simply that after conversion one of the ways I knew God had done something to me is that the Bible began to be a new book to me. God began to speak through it. It began to have a living relevant message. So the Spirit illumines the regenerate.

B. He illumines the humble. Pride is the greatest barrier to understanding. Jesus said that He thanked God the Father that He had hidden these things from the wise and clever and revealed them to babies. And the wise and understanding from whom God hides Himself are the intellectually proud. Babies are humble and sincere seekers. Now if we believe that, and if we want to adopt towards God an attitude of humble expectancy, there is only one way to express it and that is in prayer. And I think one must say that unless one is praying for illumination, one is not likely to receive it. We need to pray before we read the Scripture and as we read the Scripture. I hope we’re all learning to read Scripture prayerfully, if possible on our knees. As George Whitfield wrote in his journal not long after his conversion at Oxford: “I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books and praying over if possible every line



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and word. This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light, and power from above.” So the Holy Spirit enlightens the regenerate. He enlightens the humble.

C. He enlightens the obedient. This is much emphasized in Scripture, but God is concerned about the response that readers give to His Word. And the degree of our responsiveness, of our willingness to hear and obey, will to a large extent determine the degree of understanding we receive. Jesus promised that they would know God’s will who had a will to do it. You shall know of the doctrine, He says, if you are willing to do God’s will. It’s a moral condition of knowledge.

D. The Holy Spirit enlightens what I’m going to call the communicative. It may not be a very happy phrase, but what I mean is that the understanding that God gives us is not intended for our private enjoyment alone. He does not reveal truth to us in order that we should monopolize the truth that we have received but in order that we should communicate it to others. And all truth that is revealed to us is held on trust. In Mark 4:21 and the following verses, Jesus said of the parables, “The measure you give will be the measure you get and still more will be given to you.” So the more we give out and communicate what we’ve received, the more we will receive ourselves. So all that’s pretty obvious.

The Holy Spirit is our first teacher, and we do need to learn to study humbly on our knees, prayerfully, obediently, in order that He may enlighten our minds. Now our second teacher is ourselves. That is, there is a sense in which we ourselves in our very dependence on the Holy Spirit must also teach ourselves. Now what I mean by that is that in the process of divine education, we are not wholly passive. We are expected to use our reason responsibly. In our reading of Scripture, divine illumination is no substitute for human endeavor, nor is humility and seeking light from God alone inconsistent with the most disciplined industry in study.

Now Scripture itself lays great stress on the conscientious Christian’s use of the mind. Not as we’ve already seen today in order to stand in judgment on God’s Word, but in order to humble ourselves under His Word to grapple with it in order to grasp it and relate it to our lives and obey it. And again and again we’re



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told not to be like horses and mules that have no understanding but to use our understanding and our brain. So we’ve got to take seriously this biblical injunction to use our critical powers; and we must not oppose prayer and thought as alternative means of increasing our understanding of Scripture.

Now some thoughtless people do that in the church today. All they do is to sit down and pray and wait for light to come, but they never study the Word of God. This is a false antithesis. We’ve got to combine these two, and Daniel in the Old Testament and Paul in the New are good examples. You know, Daniel 10:12 goes like this, “Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to understand and humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard.” I love that combination of Daniel 10:12. You set your mind to understand, and you humbled yourself before God. Or 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything.” But the fact that the Lord will grant you understanding does not exempt you from thinking over, pondering, considering what I say. As Charles Simeon put it, “For the atonement of divine knowledge, we are directed to combine a dependence on God’s Spirit with our own researches. Let us then not presume to separate what God has thus united.”

Simeon used the illustration of the sundial, the old-fashioned sundial in the garden. He said if you go out and look at a sundial on a cloudy day, you will see just the finger. And you’ll see letters on the sundial, but it will have no message, and it will not tell you the time. But let the light break through the clouds and immediately the finger points. And what has been simply letters becomes a message. You tell the time. So you come to the Scripture on a cloudy day, and it’s all just letters and words and ink on paper. But let the light of the Spirit shine upon the page, and the finger points. But again it’s not just the pointing finger. You’ve got to do your reading. You’ve got to go out to the sundial and read. You’ve got to combine your own researches with the light that the Holy Spirit gives to the printed page.

Now I believe that it’s important in the church to emphasize the combination of thought and prayer because, as I said, there are many who separate them. Sometimes our growth and understanding is inhibited by our own proud and prayerless self-confidence. We trust in our study: I’m going to grapple with this until I understand it. But at other times our trouble is sheer laziness and indiscipline. We’re waiting for the Spirit to illumine us but we don’t bother to study; and we need to be equally diligent



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in both, in prayer and study.

So the first teacher is the Spirit, the second is ourselves, and the third teacher is the church because so far my portrayal of how God teaches His people from His Word has been entirely individualistic, and as far as it’s gone it’s been true. God’s loving purpose to enlighten and to save and to reform and to nourish His people by His Word is to do it as each individual believer hears it and receives it and studies it and so on.

Now the sixteenth-century reformists were quite right to want to translate the Bible into the vernacular and to put it into the hands of plain people for that reason, so that God can speak personally through His Word. And Christians have always been in the forefront pioneering education and literacy, teaching people to read so that they can read the Bible and God can speak to each directly through His Word. And the reformists emphasize that.

You know, William Tyndale’s famous jibe to a clergyman critic: “If God spare my life, ere many years pass, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.” Now this was a right desire, and the reformist insisted of course on the right of private judgment that is the birthright of every child of God to hear his Father’s voice speaking to him direct through Scripture; and they asserted this over against the claim of the church of Rome that she’d been given a unique magisterium. A teaching authority said that she alone could give a proper interpretation of Scripture.

Now nevertheless, having emphasized the importance of this individual approach to God through Scripture, in rejecting every attempt to interpose the church or any other authoritative teaching body between the individual Christian and the God who speaks through His Word, we reject any authority that comes between God and His people. Nevertheless, we must not deny that the church has a place in God’s plan to give His people a right understanding of His Word.

The individual Christian’s humble, prayerful, diligent, obedient study of Scripture is not the only way the Holy Spirit makes clear what He has revealed, and it would hardly be humble to ignore what the Spirit may have shown to others. The Holy Spirit is indeed our teacher but He teaches us indirectly through other people as well as directly to our own minds.



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I find quite a useful parallel here between His work of illumination and His work of revelation because after all when He revealed the truth in Scripture, He didn’t reveal it to one biblical author but to a multiplicity of authors down the ages, teaching one, one thing and another, another until the total many-colored revelation is enshrined in Scripture. And if He gave the original revelation to a multiplicity of prophets and apostles, His work of illumination is given to a multiplicity of men and women also.

Now recognition of this truth will give us more respect than evangelicals customarily have for tradition, that is, for the understanding of biblical truth handed down from the past to the present. Gradually and progressively over the years the Holy Spirit has helped the church to get its mind clear on the great doctrines of the faith.

I don’t know. I expect you’ve taken a course in historical theology. It’s a fascinating subject. I remember being greatly helped by Professor James Orr’s book The Progress of Dogma in which he argues that down the ages is the chronological order in which the great doctrines of the faith were clarified with the logical order; and that each generation built on the foundation of the previous generation beginning with prolegomena, with questions of authority, going on to God, going on to the person of Christ, and the two natures of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and then to salvation or to atonement, the work of Christ in redemption and on to man with Augustine on the depravity of man, and then the atonement, and then justification and salvation and so on.

And here the chronological order is the logical order in which the Holy Spirit has successively enabled the church to think its way through and get itself clear. So the so-called Catholic creeds, Catholic because they were accepted by the whole church—like the Nicene Creed we said in chapel this morning and the Reformation confessions together with biblical commentaries and theological treatises of individual scholars in the past—are not to be despised. We owe much to these. All this is part of the Holy Spirit’s work in illumining the minds of men in past ages; and if we shouldn’t despise the heritage of the past, neither should we despise the teachers of the contemporary church (that is, the pastoral ministry as we’ve seen is a teaching ministry), and pastors and teachers are among the gifts of God to the church. The ascended Christ still dispersed pastors and teachers in the church.


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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Authority (cont.) and Introduction to InterpretationLesson 09 of 20

Have you ever thought (Calvin goes to town on this in his great commentary on the Acts) that the eunuch, the Ethiopian eunuch, was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah the prophet? But instead of either sending an angel to interpret the Scripture to the eunuch or instead of giving him a direct illumination by the Holy Spirit, he lifted Philip, you see, from Samaria, and sent him to the desert in order to join the man of the chariot, sit down alongside him, and teach him out of the Scriptures. Philip said to the eunuch, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” and the eunuch said very significantly, “How can I understand the Scriptures unless somebody teaches me?” and Calvin said, “Exactly.”

And Calvin of course is writing a lot against the enthusiasts who believed in a lot of direct revelations and thought that all they needed was the Holy Spirit, and they didn’t need human teachers. That God deliberately sent a human teacher in order to unfurl the Scripture to the Ethiopian eunuch, and He still does it today. Of course no human teacher is infallible, either of the past or of the present, and Christ forbade us to give any human teacher a slavish following, but in principle we still need to respect these human teachers.

Of course, when I was a seminary student in a fairly liberal college, when we sang Psalm 119 in chapel, we used to exchange meaningful winks with our liberal professors when we sang, “I have more understanding than all my teachers for thy testimonies are my meditation.” But although that is true ultimately—and if we’re loyal to Scripture, we have more understanding than all our liberal teachers—yet God has given us teachers in the church, and we must listen to them.

So I’m going to stop here in a moment. I’m not going to go on. I’m sorry that I keep allowing the time to go, but I’ll leave the three principles to next time and just sum up that we have the Holy Spirit, ourselves, and the church. But my final word is this: In saying that, I’m emphatically not saying that Scripture, reason, and tradition are a threefold cord of authority equally authoritative. I’m not saying that at all. Scripture, of course, is our major authority, and the Holy Spirit interprets the Scripture to us partly direct through our own prayer and study and partly through other people, whether past or present, who can be our human teachers.

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