Revisiting the Biblical tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility – thoughts from D. A. Carson

Heard a sermon today that left me pondering, among other things, the long-felt tension between God’s sovereignty (and the extent of his sovereignty, but we’ll leave that one alone) and man’s responsibility, primarily in the sphere of salvation.  A book on the subject that I’ve turned to over the years is D. A. Carson’s Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility: Biblical perspectives in tension.  For my sake, and perhaps yours, I’ve decided that it’s my responsibility today to record here in this blog several sections from this book.

And lest you, the reader, think that this is one very dry topic and you’ll now turn elsewhere to find something more refreshing, Carson’s handling of the topic is really good, his writing really is interesting, and the topic really is relevant to every moment of your life and mine.

The first quotation comes from the introduction:

Is the Bible the Word of God? Part 6: John Piper on the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and preaching

One of the textbooks, if you will, in our preaching class at Bible college was John Piper’s book The Supremacy of God in Preaching.  I think that was my first exposure to Piper, and then his influence lay dormant for me for another eight years or so, until I “discovered” him and his God-centered, Bible-saturated, Christ-exalting ministry again, though seemingly for the first time.

This passage I’m quoting is from that book, and he is at this point dealing with the Bible as the content and focus of preaching, and the preacher’s reliance on the Bible as the gift from the Holy Spirit.

Oh, how much needs to be said about the use of the Bible in preaching!  Relying on the Holy Spirit at this point means believing heartily that “all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16), believing that “no prophecy [which in the context of 2 Pet. 1:19 means Scripture] ever came by the impulse of man, but that men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet: 1:21), and having a strong confidence that the words of Scripture are “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:13).  Where the Bible is esteemed as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, preaching can flourish.  But where the Bible is treated merely as a record of valuable religious insight, preaching dies.

But it is not automatic that preaching will flourish where the Bible is believed to be inerrant.  Among evangelicals today there are other effective ways for the power and authority of biblical preaching to be undercut.  There are subjectivist epistemologies that belittle propositional revelation [as in the emergent church – J.S.].  There are linguistic theories that cultivate an exegetical atmosphere of ambiguity.  There is a kind of popular, cultural relativism that enables people to dispense flippantly with uncomfortable biblical teaching.

Where these kinds of things take root, the Bible will be silenced in the church, and preaching will become a reflection of current issues and religious opinions.  Surely this is not what Paul meant when he said to Timothy, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word” (2 Tim. 4:1-2).

The Word!  There’s the focus.  All Christian preaching should be the exposition and application of biblical texts.  Our authority as preachers sent by God rises and falls with our manifest allegiance to the text of Scripture.  I say “manifest” because there are so many preachers who say they are doing exposition when they do not ground their assertions explicitly — “manifestly” — in the text.  They don’t show their people clearly that the assertions of their preaching are coming from specific, readable words of Scripture that the people can see for themselves.

One of the biggest problems I have with younger preachers I am called on to critique is that they fail to quote the texts that support the points they are making.  It makes me wonder if they have been taught that you should get the drift of a text and then talk in your own words for thirty minutes.  The effect of that kind of preaching is to leave people groping for the Word of God and wondering whether what you said is really in the Bible.

Instead, in the literate Western culture we need to get people to open their Bibles and put their fingers on the text.  Then we need to quote a piece of our text and explain what it means.  Tell them which half of the verse it is in.  People lose the whole drift of a message when they are groping to find where the pastor’s ideas are coming from.  Then we should quote another piece of the text and explain what it means.  Our explanation will draw in other passages of Scripture.  Quote them!  Don’t say general things like, “As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount.”  Along the way or at the end we should urge it into their consciences with penetrating application.

We are simply pulling rank on people when we tell them, and don’t show them from the text.  This does not honor the Word of God or the work of the Holy Spirit.  I urge you to rely on the Holy Spirit by saturating your preaching with the Word he inspired.

Is the Bible the Word of God? Part 5: John Stott on what to do with Scripture

John Stott was “born in London in 1921, is an evangelical Anglican,” and was a preacher and teacher of Scripture for more than half of the last century at All Souls Church in London and around the world.  He’s written a number of books, one of which is a small booklet titled Your Mind Matters: The Place of the Mind in the Christian Life.  This booklet is the full text in written form of an address that Stott gave at the 1972 Inter-Varsity Fellowship Annual Conference.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

What Paul wrote about unbelieving Jews in his day could be said, I fear, of some believing Christians in ours: “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.”  Many have zeal without knowledge, enthusiasm without enlightenment.  In more modern jargon, they are keen but clueless.

Now I thank God for zeal.  Heaven forbid that knowledge without zeal should replace zeal without knowledge!  God’s purpose is both, zeal directed by knowledge, knowledge fired by zeal.  As I once heard Dr. John Mackay say, when he was President of Princeton Seminary, “Commitment without reflection is fanaticism in action.  But reflection without commitment is the paralysis of all action.”

This reminds me of a similar turn of phrase coined, if I’m not mistaken, by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, another notable London expository preacher of the last century:  “Christianity needs to have both light and heat.”  The light of the knowledge of Scripture, and the heat of passion or zeal for the God who wrote and is the primary subject of Scripture.

This next quote is the one I wanted to draw attention to in this post.  It comes at the end of Your Mind Matters, and it made such an impression on me that I wrote it in the back page of my current Bible.  This paragraph answers the question of what to do with Scripture, assuming that it really is the Word of God.

I myself have a growing burden that God will call out more men for this teaching ministry today; that he will call men with alert minds, biblical convictions and an aptitude for teaching; that he will set them in the great capital cities and university cities of the world; that there, like Paul in Tyrannus’s hall in Ephesus, they will exercise a thoughtful, systematic teaching ministry, expounding the ancient Scriptures and relating them to the modern world; and that such a faithful ministry under the good hand of God will not only lead their own congregation up to Christian maturity but will also through the visitors who come briefly under its influence spread its blessing far and wide.

What should we do with “the ancient Scriptures” (the Bible)?  Thoughtfully and systematically teach through all of it (over a period of time), expounding (explaining) it and relating it to our fellow human beings.  Why is this important?  Because this is how God primarily works in peoples’ lives — through the teaching and preaching of the Bible.  Saying something like that isn’t putting God in a box or trying to limit him in some way.  It is stating the truth of how God works.  Don’t believe me?  Read the book of Acts for a start, and then read the rest of “the ancient Scriptures,” and you’ll see for yourself.

This is the ancient theater in Ephesus, where the events in Acts 19:21-41 happened. Click on the image for a hi-res verson.

Is the Bible the Word of God? Part 4: Wayne Grudem on the sufficiency of Scripture

According to his page at Theopedia, “Wayne Grudem is a New Testament scholar turned theologian, author, and Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary, Arizona.”  One of his best known books, from my perspective anyway, is Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine.  This is a book that is worth owning, reading and studying and is widely respected and used in the Christian community at large.

Chapter 8 is titled “The Four Characteristics of Scripture: (4) Sufficiency.  Is the Bible enough for knowing what God wants us to think or do?”  What follows are several paragraphs from this chapter.

We can define the sufficiency of Scripture as follows: The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly.

This definition emphasizes that it is in Scripture alone that we are to search for God’s words to us.  It also reminds us that God considers what he has told us in the Bible to be enough for us, and that we should rejoice in the great revelation that he has given us and be content with it.

But the truth of the sufficiency of Scripture is of great significance for our Christian lives, for it enables us to focus our search for God’s words to us on the Bible alone and saves us from the endless task of searching through all the writings of Christians throughout history, or through all the teachings of the church, or through all the subjective feelings and impressions that come to our minds from day to day, in order to find what God requires of us.

In a footnote to that sentence he adds,

This is not meant to imply that subjective impressions of God’s will are useless or that they should be ignored.  That would suggest almost a deistic view of God’s (non-)involvement in the lives of his children and a rather mechanical, impersonal view of guidance.  God can and indeed does use subjective impressions of his will to remind and encourage us and often to prompt our thoughts in the right direction in many rapid decisions that we make throughout the day — and it is Scripture itself that tells us about these subjective factors in guidance (see Acts 16:6-7; Rom. 8:9, 14, 16; Gal. 5:16-18, 25).  Yet these verses on the sufficiency of Scripture teach us that such subjective impressions can only remind us of moral commands that are already in Scripture, or bring to mind facts that we (in theory at least) could have known or did know otherwise; they can never add to the commands of Scripture, or replace Scripture in defining what God’s will is, or equal Scripture in authority over our lives.

Because people from all kinds of Christian traditions have made serious mistakes when they felt confident that God was “leading them” to make a particular decision, it is important to remember that, except where an explicit text of Scripture applies directly to a situation, we can never have 100 percent certainty in this life that we know what God’s will is in a situation.  We can only have varying degrees of confidence in different situations.  Though our ability to discern God’s will should increase as we grow in Christian maturity, we will invariably make some mistakes.  In this regard, I have found helpful a sentence from Edmund Clowney: “The degree of certainty we have with regard to God’s will in a situation is directly proportional to the degree of clarity we have as to how the Word of God applies to the situation” (from a personal conversation, November 1992).

Is the Bible the Word of God? Part 3: James Montgomery Boice on the authority and value of Scripture

James Montgomery Boice was the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia from 1968 until his death in 2000.  He was a respected pastor, theologian, author, and speaker.  I heard him speak at a conference in Grand Rapids, MI at Seventh Reformed Church back in the mid 90s, and I have several books on my shelves written by him.  This quote comes from his book Foundations of the Christian Faith, which was our Theology textbook at Bible college.  The book is dedicated “To Him whom to know is life eternal,” which is adapted from John 17:3, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Boice knew that knowing God was of utmost importance, and he worked to help others come to know God as well.

Here are a several paragraphs from Foundations of the Christian Faith, chapter four, “The Authority of the Scriptures.”

The Bible is authoritative because it is not the words of mere humans, though humans were the channels by which it came to us, but it is the direct result of the “breathing-out” of God.  It is his product.  But there is another level on which the question of authority may be raised.  This relates to the way in which we become convinced of the Bible’s authority.  What is there about the Bible or the study of the Bible that should convince us that it is indeed God’s Word?

The human aspect of the authority question takes us a bit further into what we mean when we say that the Bible is the Word of God, for the full meaning of that statement is not only that God has spoken to give us the Bible but also that he continues to speak through it to individuals.  In other words, as individuals study the Bible, God speaks to them in their study and transforms them by the truths they find there.  There is a direct encounter of the individual believer with God.  It was what Luther meant when he declared at the Diet of Worms, “My conscience has been taken captive by the Word of God.”  It is what Calvin meant when he declared that “Scripture indeed is self-authenticated.”

Nothing but direct experience will ever ultimately convince anybody that the Bible’s words are the authentic and authoritative words of God.  As Calvin said, “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 has been divinely commanded.”

The Bible is something more than a body of revealed truths, a collection of books verbally inspired of God.  It is also the living voice of God.  The living God speaks through its pages.  Therefore, it is not to be valued as a sacred object to be placed on a shelf and neglected, but as holy ground, where people’s hearts and minds may come into vital contact with the living, gracious and disturbing God.  For a proper perspective on Scripture and for a valid understanding of revelation there must be a constant interworking of these factors: an infallible and authoritative Word, the activity of the Holy Spirit in interpreting and applying that Word and a receptive human heart.  No true knowledge of God takes place without these elements. [emphasis mine]