Gordan Runyan:
All right, y'all. We are here for episode three, season one of the Ragtown Reformed Forum. Today's episode is on sola scriptura. Did I make that sound gravitational enough?
John Train:
Very good.
Gordan Runyan:
My name is Gordan Runyan. I'm the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari, New Mexico. To my far left is my friend and fellow minister, Mr. David Morris. How are you, sir?
David Morris:
I am good, sir. Thank you.
Gordan Runyan:
And to my immediate left, fellow pastor Tom Miller. Tom, you all right today?
Tom Miller:
I'm melting, but still here.
Gordan Runyan:
Yes, indeed. They should just call us Arizona. And to my left is Mr. John Train, our deacon at Immanuel. How are you, sir?
John Train:
Howdy, doing fine.
Gordan Runyan:
Good deal. We're here to talk about sola scriptura. It's one of the five battle cries of the Protestant Reformation. If you're out there, give yourself extra points if you can recall the other four solas. But we're not going to go into those today. We're just talking about sola scriptura. Now, strictly speaking, my Latin is pretty rusty, but I think it means scripture only or only scripture, scripture alone, and one of the battle cries of the Reformation. So I'd like to open up the table here and ask you believing men to—Explain to me, give me a definition. What are we talking about when we say sola scriptura? I know, Pastor Tom, you've got a quote there for us.
Tom Miller:
Yes, by one of my heroes in the faith, Dr. Robert Godfrey. As Protestants, we maintain that the Scriptures alone is our authority. Roman Catholics maintain that Scripture by itself is insufficient as the authority of the people of God, and that tradition and the teaching authority of the church must be added to Scripture. We stand in the first clause. We believe that the inspired Word of God, known as the Bible, is our only book of faith and practice and our only authority.
Gordan Runyan:
Right. So when we talk about an authority in faith and practice, I generally like to stress that what I think that means or entails, it includes at least, is the idea that as churchmen, church people, we personally don't have any authority to bind anyone's conscience beyond what the Scripture has said.
David Morris:
Yes, sir.
Gordan Runyan:
We can call people to repent and believe what is written, but, you know, there really are areas where churches make a lot of hay, get a lot of mileage out of coming up with their own rules and binding men's consciences. I think Jesus pictured it as coming up with heavy loads and putting them on men's shoulders and then not lifting a finger to help them with it. And so for me, when we talk about authority in faith and practice, it's who gets to tell you what you really must do, and it's no man; it's only the Scripture.
David Morris:
Right. Yep. Yeah. Second Timothy, I believe it is, tells us that the Scripture was breathed by God. I believe it was Second Timothy.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, 3:16.
David Morris:
Yeah, and it says it was breathed by God, and its purpose was for teaching, for reproof, and for encouraging. So whenever you take that, you know, I mean, as we did our first podcast was God alone. So we know that God alone is the triune Godhead, and yet now we've got Scriptures that's breathed by God. And I like to say that the living Word of God, His Spirit is in the Bible. So our Scriptures are now alive to us as Christians. And so when you have a scripture like Second Timothy 3:16, you can bank on it, you can stand on it, and you know that those scriptures are breathed by God, and no man has altered them. They're strict, they're straight, and they're pure.
Gordan Runyan:
Can we read that? That's going to be one of our scripture references for the day.
David Morris:
Yep.
Gordan Runyan:
So I'll have Deacon John look up Second Timothy 3: 16, 17. All right.
John Train:
All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be equipped, having been thoroughly equipped for every good work.
David Morris:
That's that thoroughly equipped. That's a beautiful statement.
John Train:
It really is.
David Morris:
See, God never called you to do anything that He didn't prepare you for. But now, you can't obtain that by osmosis. You have got to study to show yourself approved. And so now we know what that Scripture tells us. So when God calls us to do something, we're equipped. And we've always got Him. He's there with us. He's never alone. We are never alone from Him.
Gordan Runyan:
Just giving us the Bible, that at least makes it possible for us to be fully equipped. It's not going to do it magically as it sits on the table closed. But we have that avenue. We have that free access into that which will equip us. I think that's important.
John Train:
Right. And the Scripture itself, apart from anything else, is sufficient to fully equip us, right? Right. Nothing else is required, and that's really the uniqueness of the Protestant position.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, that's kind of a thing in our day. I might be skipping ahead, but it sure does seem like you have churches that are willing to admit the Scripture's authority, but on the other hand, they're not willing to admit the sufficiency, like you need something else. The Bible's good, but we need something else. Have you seen that before, Tom?
John Train:
Yeah. We confess along with the Catholics that the Bible's inspired and inerrant and infallible.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah.
Tom Miller:
There's another side to that coin that I'd like to mention, because of my past background. I am the one and only bona fide Presbyterian at the table.
Gordan Runyan:
Amen.
Tom Miller:
I have my bona fides.
Gordan Runyan:
You're saying my infant baptism doesn't count.
Tom Miller:
Anyway.
John Train:
You've seen the error of your ways.
Tom Miller:
I've been more carefully taught. Anyway, the other side that is abused, it's not in the Bible, so since it doesn't condemn it, that there's an implied permission. Right. And that has raised error, and there's been some errors perpetuated because of that. Well, it's not there, so that's the other pitfall.
John Train:
Right. So, like, where in Scripture would you go to condemn that practice of, Well, the Bible doesn't condemn it, so therefore I'm free to do it?
Tom Miller:
Yeah, that's a lot like, I'm going to throw a rock. Sorry, anybody out there that— hopefully I don't hit you. It's like topical preaching. I have a precept. I will now search for a scripture to support my precept. And it's really the same thing when I say, Well, I can baptize babies. It doesn't tell me not to.
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
Yeah, I go to places, you know, where we're instructed to not exceed what is written, right? Don't turn to the right or to the left.
David Morris:
Right. And Deuteronomy 28 has got a whole long, you know, whole long list. I think it's got 13 blessings, I think that's right, and then I can't tell you how many—Dozens.—curses it's got. Well, those curses covers just about everything you can imagine. And then... If you want to get a little bit more technical, just bounce over to Romans chapter one, I believe, toward the end, bottom of the chapter, you'll find out that there's a whole long list right there that tells you what's an abomination to God.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
John Train:
You know, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Right. So our position is the Bible is sufficient, and we get that from viewing all of what Scripture says about itself. And really, a Christian should want to have the same view of the Word of God that Jesus had, right?
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah. And what can we discern about that? What was Jesus's view of the Scripture?
John Train:
Exactly.
Gordan Runyan:
I have an answer in my mind, but I'll just throw that out there. What was Jesus's view?
David Morris:
Right. He didn't agree with it.
John Train:
Some people view him doing that in the Sermon on the Mount, right? You've heard it said, but I say to you. Yeah, yeah. So he's throwing out the Word of God. Is that what he's doing?
David Morris:
No,
Gordan Runyan:
no,
Tom Miller:
no. That's, for those of you who know scan, the C is for clarity. And what Jesus did on the Sermon on the Mount was introduce clarity. Right.
Gordan Runyan:
I believe that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, evidences really the highest possible view of inspiration when he talks about not a jot or tittle will pass from these things until the earth is gone, you know, and I don't know how you get higher than that. Scripture cannot be broken, he says a few times. And then I think of the Apostle Paul who—Frames the whole argument in Galatians based on one letter, the difference between seed and seeds. This whole argument falls apart unless that's really the way that's supposed to work.
John Train:
It's been preserved, right?
Gordan Runyan:
Absolutely, yeah, faithfully preserved.
John Train:
Jesus said, Have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying,
Gordan Runyan:
right,
John Train:
and he quotes Scripture.
Gordan Runyan:
Well, that's another one, right, where we're talking about who did Jesus think the Scripture was aimed at, right? It wasn't. It is kind of fashionable for us to talk about, you have to interpret this passage the way that it would have been interpreted by the first person who read it. But Jesus really does make that point that what was written was written for you. Paul makes that same point in First Corinthians, that whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction,
John Train:
right? Jesus was talking to men who were not born for hundreds of years from when the Scripture he quotes was written.
Gordan Runyan:
Exactly,
John Train:
and says it was written to them.
Tom Miller:
That comes to this S sufficiency. Yeah. If the Scriptures are not the only revelation, then where is the sufficiency?
David Morris:
Right, right.
Gordan Runyan:
That was my understanding too, that when we say sola scriptura and it's our only authority, that's a little bit different than if we were saying nuda scriptura, that naked Scripture is the authority, because Scripture itself sets out other lesser authorities within the church. And I don't think we're denying that by saying sola scriptura. We're just saying you don't get to come up with an authority that the Scripture hasn't come up with, and you don't get to promote your pet authority over the Scripture.
John Train:
The doctrine is that Scripture is the only infallible authority, right? Right. Don't deny other authorities. What would be some other authorities, John, in the church?
David Morris:
Well, it's a Scripture that says— By your traditions, you've made the Scriptures null and void. And so that's what, when you're trying to insert your own authority or set up an authority, you're starting a man-made tradition that takes away from the Scripture, which now is a crash.
John Train:
This was critiquing their man-made authority by the Scripture.
David Morris:
That's right.
John Train:
Found them wanting. By establishing their tradition, they had thrown out the Bible, essentially.
David Morris:
Yeah. One of the things that I also like, you know, Jesus said on multiple occasions, I only do and say what my Father has— I have seen my Father do, you know. So he has said that on two or three times. So to me, that makes the connection of the triune Godhead complete. I mean, not only was he sent here to Earth to teach us and to show us, set an example and everything, but he brought God with him. And he made several statements how that the only thing he's doing is what he saw his Father do and say, you know. So I like that, that he made that connection, and it was in Scripture. See, that he did it. But I think that's an awesome connection.
John Train:
On the road to Emmaus, what does Jesus say to the two disciples about their reception of what the Word of God had spoken to them, right?
David Morris:
Oh,
John Train:
foolish men.
David Morris:
Yeah, foolish men, right?
John Train:
Yeah. He judged them based on their rejection of what the Word had said, that they should have gotten this already. He was frustrated that they hadn't received what God had already written.
Tom Miller:
Yes, and very closely tied. To ye, O ye of little faith. Because our faith, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, says Romans 10:17. Scripture bears the absolute, immutable authority. But God has also set up pastor-teachers that need to have authority in the Word. Their knowledge of the Word is authoritative.
John Train:
Right. And so the doctrine is any lesser authorities judged by the ultimate authority. That's right. There's one rule that everything is measured by. Right. So, you know, I'm holding in my hand the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. This is an authority, and many people adhere to this authority, but this is only authoritative insofar as it agrees with the Scripture wherever it speaks. Right.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right.
John Train:
So it would be wrong for me to place this above the Scripture and judge the Scripture by this.
Tom Miller:
Exactly.
John Train:
Right.
Tom Miller:
If you look in a good rendering— getting old, can't talk right— a proper rendering of the first pages in a King James Bible, you'll find that even the Westminster Council that did the translating of the King James from the original language meant that they were not the final authority. God Himself is the final authority, that this was their best effort.
David Morris:
Right. Yep.
John Train:
And this confession itself lays that out clearly, right? They're not claiming divine inspiration for what they've written here.
David Morris:
No.
John Train:
Right. And so... They're teaching in their confession, which ought to be believed in practice, that the Scripture is their rule, and they are judged by the Scripture.
Tom Miller:
Well, a faith is either subjective or objective. Christianity is an objective faith. Christ is the object of our faith. But every object of faith has a standard, and ours is the revealed Word of God.
David Morris:
Exactly.
Tom Miller:
Not as in the Talmud, a collection of human writings.
Gordan Runyan:
If I could just expand or drill— hitchhike, that's a good word—hitchhike on what Pastor Thomas brought up, this idea that we have come to believe that the Scripture is that final authority. Let me just ask, why do you believe that? What is your reason for believing that the Bible is inspired, is God-breathed? Is there something on your mind for,
John Train:
you know,
Gordan Runyan:
what gets you there?
John Train:
That confession has a great section,
Gordan Runyan:
right,
John Train:
on how the beauty of Scripture and the harmony of its parts,
Gordan Runyan:
right,
John Train:
you know, the beauty of its doctrine, all this stuff. But then it ends, what's the ultimate reason? Right. It's the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit, right? Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me. So why does any man receive the Word of God? It's because God has opened his eyes to receive it.
Gordan Runyan:
I'd say that's the final—in the final analysis, as Dr. Sproul would say,
John Train:
right—
Gordan Runyan:
that's the ultimate answer.
Tom Miller:
Why do
John Train:
we receive the Word? Because God has enabled us to receive it and to rejoice in it.
Tom Miller:
Yes, and because it is His Spirit that enables our human spirits to receive it and understand it.
John Train:
Right. He's written His law on our hearts, you know, the heart of every believer.
David Morris:
See, Jesus said—No, no one can come to me except the Father draw him. So the Father has got to get your attention before you can go say hi to Jesus,
Gordan Runyan:
right?
David Morris:
And that is a major, to me, that is one great miracle.
Gordan Runyan:
You know, I just watched the Odyssey movie, and there's the siren scene, right, where they're
John Train:
sailing past the island with the sirens, and they all put wax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song, right? But it's kind of like when we're born again, regenerated, God takes that wax out, right, so we can finally hear. And it's a good message, not destructive like the siren song, but, you know, so we're born with that wax in our ears, essentially. Yes. And we don't want it removed. We like it. We like it, right.
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
We're dull of hearing, right? We've blocked God out of our knowledge, and then God sends His Spirit and takes that wax out, and suddenly we have a whole new understanding.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, that to me is my number one experiential side to my faith. When I read the Scriptures, and suddenly it becomes alive to me on the page, and I say something profound like, Gee, I didn't see that before.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. When did this get in here? Yeah.
David Morris:
Somebody rewrite my book?
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. Well, let me run this by you, run it up the flagpole. When I was preaching through Deuteronomy, I had a lot of occasion to, you know, just dig deep into the Torah and read. One of the things that I enjoyed doing was taking commentary that was written by unbelieving Jews, or, yeah, just unbelieving Jews, what they think about these words. And of course, they're in the main very wrong, because Christ is the center and the object of everything. But there were some places that I found fascinating, and one of the things that they pointed out was they believe that the Jews who were alive in the generation of Moses, if you had gone to them like a reporter from here, time travels back and is going to ask this Jew, What makes you think that those tablets were written by God? Why would you believe that? They're just going to look at you like you're stupid and point to Mount Sinai. You know, it's probably still smoking and burned, and they're going to tell you the story: We saw. We saw the cloud of God. We heard the voices and the trumpets and the thunder and—We saw the rocks on fire. We know he was up there. It was a crazy thing. And you want to ask me what makes me think the words on the tablets are inspired by God? Who else was up there to do that, you know? And I just, for me, this is a little presuppositional of me, but if you ask me what makes me think that the Bible really is that standard, my first answer is because Jesus was raised from the dead.
David Morris:
Yeah.
Gordan Runyan:
And his resurrection from the dead, to my mind, validates everything else that's in the Scripture. And a little bit like that Jew would just look at you and say, You're crazy. Do you see that empty tomb? And I'm like, You're crazy. Do you see that empty tomb? This is real. And so for me, that's part of the reason I believe it's inspired.
David Morris:
Right.
Tom Miller:
Right.
Gordan Runyan:
Authority.
David Morris:
Yeah. Well, and that's a good reason.
Tom Miller:
Well, every milk stool has three legs.
David Morris:
That's right.
Tom Miller:
And how could a confessing Christian not believe in the sufficiency and the clarity of Scripture when our Savior Himself, when tempted or tried or when often returned to the Scriptures Himself in His constant use of the phrase, It is written. That's right. And in that phrase, He was not making a suggestion. He was stating an ironclad fact.
David Morris:
Yeah, that's right.
John Train:
Right.
Tom Miller:
Right.
John Train:
He quoted Genesis, for example, as history, right? The creation. So
Tom Miller:
if I claim Him as my Savior and my only Savior. Then can I then say, Oh, well, he was good except in this one point? No. That's the point I'm standing on. It is written.
John Train:
Exactly. We're just following him, having his same mindset about the Word of God, right? Right. That ought to be the goal of every believer, right? I want to believe, I want to handle the Scriptures like Jesus handled it.
David Morris:
There you go.
Gordan Runyan:
So we get our view of inspiration and authority from Jesus himself.
John Train:
Yeah. Some, they're bold enough to say that Jesus got his view of Scripture wrong, and that he was a first-century Jew, and he viewed the Word of God as infallible and inerrant, and of course he was wrong on that because now we know, name science history thing, that the Bible supposedly got wrong.
Tom Miller:
Well, the proof in that picture, my dear brother, is that they are also not—they are not— their faith is not founded on him.
John Train:
No. Right.
Tom Miller:
He is not their foundation. It's not their Savior.
John Train:
And here's Jesus claiming to be the truth, and yet he's getting things wrong in his teaching.
Tom Miller:
Right.
John Train:
I think that might be sinful for a teacher to do that.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah.
John Train:
A professor gets up and claims to teach the God-honest truth, and he's lying, essentially. He's in sin. Therefore he can't be your Savior.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
John Train:
Right.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
John Train:
I use the right word, though. They're very bold to do that.
Gordan Runyan:
Right. Well, see, and I jump
David Morris:
over to, I think it's Romans again, where it says he turned everybody over to a debased mind. Yeah. So that's the only way they can get to that point, if you ask me, is
John Train:
foolishness.
David Morris:
They've got to have a mind that's not only—it's debased. It's not on Christ. It's on—Selfish gain or selfish promotion or something like that. It's not got anything to do with Christ.
Tom Miller:
The Reformers believed that the Scriptures themselves made the man Christ, that they made him wise, and that they had equipped him, and that they had furnished him for every good work.
David Morris:
Yeah,
Tom Miller:
because
John Train:
he
Tom Miller:
was truly man and truly God,
David Morris:
right?
John Train:
Christ studied the Scriptures.
Tom Miller:
He leaned on the Scriptures. He quoted the Scriptures because his faith was also locked to the Scriptures, even though he's the author. But
John Train:
he applied himself to the Word as a young man.
Tom Miller:
He also obeyed the Word.
David Morris:
Yeah,
John Train:
absolutely.
Tom Miller:
Himself. He kept it perfectly, which we can't do.
David Morris:
No. And see, Jesus came to earth and walked as a man. He became our perfect example. Now, we can never be that perfect example. That's not in us. But everything Jesus did, he quoted the Scripture. He read the Scripture. He knew the Scripture by heart. But not only did he do all that, I can remember several different scriptures where he said he went up on the mountain alone. And now what was he doing up there? He was talking to his Father. And see, that's another thing that we've got to include in our walk, is, see, our Scriptures, everything from the Scriptures was God-given. And so we have doubts or anything like that, we go back to the...
Tom Miller:
Let me also lead you in this. In the temptation, when the devil himself came to the man Jesus and tried to tempt him, rather than being flustered or whatever about answering a, what would today be, you know, Well, let me—no. He went deeper into the Word. Rather than running from the Word,
David Morris:
he
Tom Miller:
went in deeper into the Word.
John Train:
And what was Satan doing in that wilderness temptation, right? He threw Scripture back at Jesus, right?
Tom Miller:
Yeah. But Jesus went deeper, and didn't he? Right. When he said, The angels will support you, rather than saying something cute, he said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. He went into the Scripture itself deeper with an even more clearer clarification. Right.
John Train:
He threw Scripture back at the devil using an interpretation that accounted for all of what Scripture said, right? It's like Satan was proof-texting, you know. The Bible says this here;
Gordan Runyan:
apart from everything else God has instructed. Yeah,
David Morris:
right.
Tom Miller:
Well, that's what I call a Bible dipper does, you know. They open it up, close their eyes, put their finger on there, and, Oh, okay, that's what I'll do.
John Train:
So Satan was abusing Scripture. Both of their interpretations weren't equally valid.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. That is right. Well, that—I almost can't. Keep from jumping here. How many times have you heard people say, Well, my pastor is a good guy because he just preaches from the Bible. Well, Satan preaches from the Bible, and that's not enough, you know. And
John Train:
he knows it better than we do, most likely.
Gordan Runyan:
Most likely.
John Train:
Doesn't believe it.
Gordan Runyan:
Right, right.
John Train:
But he's been around longer than we have.
David Morris:
Well, it was the Scriptures say that even the demons know and tremble that there is a God. Well, Satan may know it, may believe it, but his mentality, his selfish, egotistical self won't let him. I mean, he's greater than God is what he's thinking, and he wants to ruin everything God's got.
John Train:
I mean, just think of all of the heretical groups out here that adhere to the Scriptures, you know, and all of their unique interpretations. You know, just that fact that those exist, and there's so many of them, means that the Bible, or the devil, has a great knowledge of the Scriptures, and he's able to twist it to produce all the error he delights in.
Tom Miller:
Yeah. Another pitfall here that I sang my brother Gordan going towards, and that is the ones who, I don't need any other education or interpretation. I'm going to get special revelation just reading the Word. I don't need to go to Bible school. I don't need to go to seminary. I don't need to go to a seminar on Koine Greek or any of these things.
John Train:
Hermeneutics, whatever.
Tom Miller:
Those are all— Not Christ-like interpretations,
John Train:
right? And there's a denial of sola scriptura. You know, you mentioned nuda scriptura or solo scriptura, right? Me and my Bible under a tree. I'm separated from all the teachers that exist and all the teachers that have existed in church history.
Tom Miller:
That's right.
John Train:
You know, so,
Tom Miller:
and that's how you take a pretext and make it—
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
That's right.
David Morris:
Take a text and make it a pretext.
Tom Miller:
That's right.
Gordan Runyan:
Yep.
David Morris:
Right. You certainly take the Scripture from the Bible and learn from it, but you can't, without Christ making it more knowledgeable to you, understanding to you, you can't apply it hardly. You have a hard time applying it. And so what Tom's saying is, I mean, I agree. If you, like John's always bringing up books, you know, that he's read that's interesting and got great points to it and stuff. And so, to me, the Bible is solo, and that's the greatest thing you got. But there is no problem with trying to learn all you can learn from every godly Christian man teacher that you can.
John Train:
You're a great example of that, brother. You know, in your study, you make a lot of use of various commentaries. Yeah. And you glean the best nuggets from all of them. And, you know, you're very aware that God has not spoken to you only, you know?
David Morris:
Right, right.
John Train:
He's spoken to Christians all down through the church history, you know, and they have great understanding that we can learn from.
David Morris:
Right, right. Yeah,
John Train:
that's so important.
David Morris:
And some of them commentaries has got some—Really good jewels in them if you go find them.
John Train:
My favorite is when two commentaries might disagree, and so it gets you digging.
David Morris:
Yeah.
John Train:
You know, well, this—I love this teacher here. I love this guy too. They're both saying different things. Yeah, you know.
David Morris:
But then you can come to the grand scheme of things and you find out that they did agree on this little point, that they were trying to go down this path, but at the end of the path they were back in the same road.
John Train:
That's right.
David Morris:
They had the same belief again. I mean, it was the same belief; they just took a different path to get there. Yeah. And that's, to me, that's Christ. It's God. How else can you do it, you know?
Tom Miller:
Well, that's also why we're not to neglect our assembling of ourselves together. We are to be under the umbrella of teaching and discipline of the local church. Christ invented the local church. Paul put it in operation, principally. And we need that because I can sit here and read a book on, oh, I don't know, aerodynamics, but I won't be able to design an airplane.
David Morris:
That's right.
Tom Miller:
Because I haven't been tutored.
John Train:
Right. You know, on your own, separated from other believers, you know, you could come up with some pretty wild interpretations, but it's that fellowship that is a corrective to us, right? Keeps us level, and it stops us from going outside those guardrails.
Tom Miller:
Yes, and that's the main reason. That Timothy, the young preacher, is told by Paul, his mentor, Preach the word. That's to be our anchor.
David Morris:
Right.
Gordan Runyan:
I'm going to throw out another scripture for you. This is Deuteronomy chapter 6. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Now watch this. These words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign, and so forth. Write them on the doorposts of your house. Another insight that I think the original readers of the Shema and this text, my understanding is the ancients didn't believe that the Shema was separated from this instruction to make the Scripture the centerpiece of your conversation and your thought life and everything else. You love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. What's that going to look like? Everywhere you go, you're thinking about what the commandment is, and you're thinking about how to pass that on to your kids and sharing it with your friends or whatever that might look like. So for me, there's a huge disconnect then when I hear about people claiming to love the Lord Jesus, but you can't get them in a Bible study.
David Morris:
Right. No. You can't get them in church.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
David Morris:
I mean, but, well, see, we're talking about Scripture, and we're talking about how it's Scripture alone. And you made a perfect point that caused my eyeballs to pop plumb out of my head last Sunday. I believe it was last Sunday. And you can stand on that book, you can fan yourself with that book, you can read that book till you're blue in the face, and unless you actually apply the Scripture— I mean, the Scripture, I'm telling you, it's great to read the Scripture, and if that's all you do, read it, but it ain't going to help you a whole lot until you start applying it. Right. And that application of the Scripture is what causes the changes.
Tom Miller:
I think there has to be a capturing of the heart. Yeah. First.
David Morris:
Right. You've got to have that.
Tom Miller:
Scripture and a true believer captures the heart. And the ones that were to practice those things delineated in Deuteronomy were certainly not spoken to the mixed multitude.
David Morris:
Right. Right. That's right.
Tom Miller:
And Scripture will not capture the heart of an unregenerate spirit.
David Morris:
Amen. That's right.
John Train:
There are atheist pastors out there, you know, preaching every Sunday.
Tom Miller:
Exactly.
John Train:
That's right. They know the Scriptures back and front.
Tom Miller:
The difference for us is that Scripture has captured our heart. And if you're going to walk in the Word, talk in the Word, everything you do is Word-centered, then it has captured—Your heart, rather than filthy lucre or immorality, those things capture hearts. But the Scripture truly captures a heart.
David Morris:
Right. And on that statement right there, if your heart has been captured, the application of the Scripture then is not as hard to do.
Gordan Runyan:
You start longing for it, right? You know, you see the commandment, and your first question is, How do I do this? And how do I get this done? Is this for me? What do I do with this? And I think that's all healthy.
Tom Miller:
Yes.
John Train:
So Sola Scriptura is not just talking about churchy stuff, right? Right. It's talking about everything a Christian man or woman could possibly do in life.
Gordan Runyan:
Absolutely.
John Train:
Every profession, every function, God's Word is the standard for all of that.
Gordan Runyan:
Amen. Life and faith. Right.
David Morris:
You guys can correct me, you Bible scholars, but it appears to me that God don't have problems with questions, because if I remember right, I believe there was a few of the Old Testament prophets that would ask questions when God called them. How am I going to do that? You know, I remember a young lady that says, Oh Lord, how can this be? Well, whatever you say, it's good with me. Well, see, God don't have a problem with questions. He's got a problem with the heart that you ask it with.
John Train:
Right.
David Morris:
And so when you're asking of a pure heart, His questions, you will get your answer some way or another, I think.
Tom Miller:
One more thing I want to add to your Deuteronomy. is that we talk about the canon of Scripture.
Gordan Runyan:
Yes, sir. Which
Tom Miller:
comes from a Greek word spelled with a K instead of a C,
David Morris:
right?
Tom Miller:
Because we have to be different. We're Norman Brits. But that phrase means a norm or a set of norms. So when we let the canon of Scripture guide our hearts and our thoughts, then that becomes our norms.
John Train:
That's right.
Tom Miller:
And how can a Christian be witnessed in the world as a Christian if he or she is not following the norms, the canon of Scripture?
John Train:
Right. So the whole canon, right?
Tom Miller:
Right.
John Train:
You don't get to be selective, right? It's the entirety of Scripture is our rule.
Gordan Runyan:
That is the rule.
Tom Miller:
Yeah,
Gordan Runyan:
that is the rule.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, you know, I was a professional military for over half of my life. So I always go back to my three general orders, and neither one of them allowed any exclusions. I was to guard everything within the limits of my post, and I was to do that until I was relieved, not until I got tired. And I was to follow my special orders, not and say, Well, I don't really think the colonel meant that, and draw a line through it. It's the same for the Christian. The canon of Scripture is the norm. It is the rule and the norm.
David Morris:
Yep. Amen.
John Train:
As an aside, what about the Protestant doctrine of the right and duty of private judgment, right? So, as a military man, you're judged based on your— how well you keep your orders, right? Right. The laws of armed conflict, the rules of engagement, you know, you're judged based on how you conform to that, you know. So the Christian man or woman is judged based on how we receive and obey God's Word, right?
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
Gordan Runyan:
But specifically the right and duty of private judgment, that really is atomizing what we've been talking about. The sola scriptura, that means it's the rule for everybody and everything. But when it comes to me personally, it's still sola scriptura. It's my ultimate rule, and I have to—even if I'm wrong— I have to go with what I think it's saying.
David Morris:
And,
Gordan Runyan:
you know, you can let me go, you can try to draw me back, but at the end of the day, a man's conscience belongs to the man, and there's no way you're going to change that.
John Train:
I'll read at the beginning of the chapter in the book we're loosely following here, What is Reformed theology? What did Luther say at the Diet of Worms? Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I will not recant. My conscience is held captive by the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe.
Tom Miller:
Yes. And on top of that, we are commanded that even if an angel comes and tells us to deviate from the Scriptures, we're to say no. My first general order is—
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. Right. Yep.
John Train:
You know, Justice Smith, he said yes, right? He received that revelation. Muhammad in the cave, visited by the angel Gabriel, received another gospel. He received it.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah,
Tom Miller:
that's right. That's right.
John Train:
They departed from the standard. They violated sola scriptura, right? And wreaked havoc on millions in doing so.
Gordan Runyan:
So the—are we ready to move into objections?
John Train:
Sure. So, Protestant, well, Scripture never teaches Scripture alone, right? It says that you're fully equipped for every good work, but it doesn't have the word alone in there, Protestant. So that means that there could be other authorities for you equally as valid as the Bible.
Tom Miller:
Are we going to skip over how the canon was established?
David Morris:
Oh, I think that might be one of the objections.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah. Right.
Tom Miller:
That's the next one on my list, is the disagreement over the apocrypha.
John Train:
Sure. How did we arrive at the 66 books that we have now? Right. Why do we say that's the final standard, closed? Right. We're not looking for other books. How did we arrive at that position as a church? Yeah, that's important. Roman Catholics would say, well, you need an infallible church to decide the content of the Word of God infallibly.
Gordan Runyan:
Right. And it took them 17 centuries to come up with—
John Train:
1546, I believe, is when they finally published their list. Yep. Okay. Of infallible books.
Gordan Runyan:
I thought the Council of Trent was
David Morris:
in the 17th century.
John Train:
No, it was in the 16th.
David Morris:
Okay. All right. Yeah.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
John Train:
So Council of Trent, finally the Roman Catholic Church was forced by the Protestants to make a final declaration: these are the books of Scripture based on our authority as a church.
Gordan Runyan:
So historically, we believe that we hold to the very same Old Testament books that the Jews did, and the Jews were specifically given the task by God of safeguarding the oracles of God. And so the Scriptures were theirs, and we hold to the same. Old Testament that they did, right? And then somebody else wanted to tackle the Apocrypha. My understanding is that the Jews kept the apocryphal books separate from the Scripture. They never considered them to be Scripture in the first place.
Tom Miller:
No, they're not in the Torah or the Tanakh.
John Train:
No. They were never laid up in the temple, right? Right. As the divine oracles.
Gordan Runyan:
No. I think they recognized that some of what's written in the Apocrypha might be helpful, just like we think that about the books in front of John right now.
John Train:
Right. They're on the same level.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, exactly. They're just religious books. The
John Train:
book from R. C. Sproul is on the same level as the Apocrypha.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. Yeah.
John Train:
Now, the Roman Catholics, they elevate them to a deuterocanonical status.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
John Train:
They're not as inspired as Romans, but they're in Scripture according to them.
Gordan Runyan:
Now, when the New Testament comes along, it's a little bit of a different story because—and it upset me when I was a first believer and reading about how we got our New Testament, because it's messy. And it might be handy if there was an authoritative council that would just, you know, say, This is it and this is not it. And that really didn't happen. It was as the scattered churches began to recognize the fingerprint of the Holy Spirit in certain books and not in others. And when they started communicating to each other about those things, by golly, we've all centered on the same books. And really there were only disputes about two of them, right?
John Train:
Hebrews is one.
Gordan Runyan:
Revelation. And really, the only book that a lot of people were in favor of including that didn't make it was the Shepherd of Hermas. But I don't think that was a serious thing. It was just the closest that any other book got.
Tom Miller:
Yeah,
John Train:
I think that was a minority position.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, that's probably. Yeah,
Tom Miller:
and the Church of England loves the book of Tobit.
Gordan Runyan:
Oh, yeah. That's apocryphal.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, it's an apocryphal book.
David Morris:
Yeah, Shepherd of Hermas would have been a New Testament-era additional book that was considered by a few. Yeah, it's a weird book.
Gordan Runyan:
But I guess my point then is that if you don't like the messy way that the Holy Spirit gets stuff done sometimes, the fact that he does manage to draw straight lines with a lot of crooked sticks, then you're not going to be happy with the way we got our New Testament, because it is messy. Sometimes
John Train:
it
Gordan Runyan:
depends on who's the king over here and who's the king over here. It
John Train:
really was an organic process over hundreds of years to arrive at the final 66 books.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
John Train:
Some of, like Justin Martyr, the apologist, he was operating on an incomplete canon. He didn't have all the books, you know, and he was defending the Christian faith. Now, had he received all of the books, I'm sure he would have received them gladly, right?
David Morris:
Oh, yeah.
John Train:
So that's our position, is that the church didn't make an authoritative declaration of what the Scripture was. They received the Scriptures. They recognized them as the Word of God.
Tom Miller:
Well, it was at the fourth session of the Council of Trent.
David Morris:
I see.
Gordan Runyan:
Does it have a year on that?
Tom Miller:
No. And
John Train:
I reports at 1546.
Gordan Runyan:
1546. Well, that
Tom Miller:
the Reformers refused the dual source theory.
John Train:
Right.
Gordan Runyan:
And what is that? The dual source theory.
John Train:
Scripture and sacred tradition are equal authorities.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
John Train:
And the church is the one who has authority over those.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
John Train:
They wouldn't say that. That's not what it is.
Tom Miller:
Yeah. The dual principle says, if the Pope says it's canon, it's canon.
John Train:
Right. So the church gets to tell you what's authoritative and interpret it authoritatively.
Gordan Runyan:
You wouldn't even know what Scripture was if our church wasn't here to tell you.
John Train:
Right. And so the Protestant position is the church existed as the Scriptures were being written, right, and revealed and received. As soon as the church in Ephesus received Paul's letter, that was inspired Scripture.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah.
John Train:
It's our position.
Tom Miller:
Yeah.
Gordan Runyan:
Even while it was just being carried there.
Tom Miller:
Right.
John Train:
Paul had written it through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He was carried along by the Spirit to write exactly what God wanted. As soon as that was done, as he was writing it even, you know, verse one, boom, that's inspired Scripture.
Tom Miller:
Like any other extra-biblical book, if it doesn't jive with the Scriptures, it automatically must be questioned.
David Morris:
Oh, right.
Tom Miller:
Regardless of tradition, I don't care. We know there's no Gospel of Thomas, and we know it because it has too much error in it when you read it.
David Morris:
Absolutely.
Gordan Runyan:
Right. And that's part of the criteria, right? Believers used is, well, does this jive with the rest of what the Word says that we have? You know, this book seems like it's contradicting all of the rest of Scripture, so it's a little questionable.
David Morris:
Well, like what you said a while ago about they recognized it as being the true Word of God. Well, immediately come to my mind is, how did they recognize it?
Gordan Runyan:
The Spirit of God.
David Morris:
They had a spirit in them that connected, and as long as you got that connecting spirit, you can recognize a lot of things that's God's.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
Tom Miller:
You taught Deuteronomy. You like to quote Deuteronomy. What's the test of a real prophet?
Gordan Runyan:
Whether he's right or wrong.
John Train:
Does his message conform with... Easy.
Tom Miller:
True. Did it happen?
David Morris:
That's right.
Gordan Runyan:
Did his word come to pass? Uh-huh. Is he what he's saying? Because I've just been—I'm studying Jeremiah this month,
Tom Miller:
and he just talked about the burden of the Lord, the burden of the Lord, which were fake messages claiming to be the Word of God, but they called them the burden of the Lord because they were placing burdens on the faithful.
David Morris:
Yes,
John Train:
sir. You know, what was the king commanded to do in Deuteronomy?
Gordan Runyan:
Not to veer to the left or to the right.
John Train:
To have his own personal copy of the Scriptures that he would read regularly. Couldn't deviate from it.
Gordan Runyan:
Right.
John Train:
That was his standard.
David Morris:
Yes,
Gordan Runyan:
that's important. I think that verse especially, that passage, to my mind it turns the whole Scripture into a limited powers document, which means that you're just not allowed to make stuff up. If you think there are holes or gaps, you're just not allowed to fill those with your own thoughts and—Even if you're sincerely trying to meet with a problem and meet it head on, you just can't go beyond what the Scripture says. To the right or to the left, to the conservative side or to the liberal side, you just can't. You're not allowed to do it.
John Train:
Power-hungry people hate that, you know.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, right. Oh, absolutely.
John Train:
People who want to build their own kingdoms, they hate that.
Tom Miller:
Well, what did David say? Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee.
Gordan Runyan:
Yep, there you go. Yep. Oh, there was another objection.
John Train:
You know, Paul talks about, you know, receiving tradition in his letters, you know, so there's an unwritten tradition that the Roman Catholic Church has preserved, and you Protestants have thrown that in the trash. I'm being devil's advocate.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, right.
John Train:
Yes. Well, what traditions was Paul talking about?
Tom Miller:
When Paul was speaking, there was not a complete canon. It was in the process of being written. That's right. And even his letters, some churches got them six, eight to ten months late. There was already two more chapters sent since then. So that's what he was talking about: follow the tradition, keep it intact.
John Train:
Right. He's not talking about this ephemeral, unwritten apostolic tradition that the church gets to tell you what it is.
Tom Miller:
No.
John Train:
It's not written, by the way.
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
You can't see it for yourself.
Tom Miller:
You know, part of his thing is, I wrote you chapter nine last month. I know you didn't like it, but you retain it.
David Morris:
Right. You keep it, yeah. Right.
John Train:
God was in the process of revealing Himself to these people who were alive in the first century, right? Right. And Paul's saying, pay attention to this as it's being codified, as it's being written down.
Tom Miller:
I think you can also say, though, that in some of the things like our forms of worship and stuff, Paul, when he talked about tradition, was also saying, it's okay to have a choir.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah,
John Train:
right. We have certain ways of doing things in our church. Yeah, right. And you visit another church, you might be surprised at how they do things.
Tom Miller:
And then when you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 11, when he talks about the Lord's Supper, that's pretty strictly traditional.
John Train:
The way they would practice it.
Tom Miller:
Right.
John Train:
And
Tom Miller:
who was a good candidate to— you know, we spend more time worrying about the mode of baptism than the candidate for baptism.
David Morris:
Yeah, that's true.
Tom Miller:
But in the Lord's Supper, I've seen it: little tiny children who can't even read yet are being given the elements of the Lord's table. I think Paul would say, wait a minute.
John Train:
Gotcha. And so that would be a tradition of, you know, fencing the table, right? Yeah. So we have different ways of doing things, right?
Gordan Runyan:
Well, I do want to stress again, when Paul says, maintain the traditions as you were taught, that's not an anti-Sola Scriptura idea. No. We've already said it's not that we don't believe in traditions. We just believe that our traditions have to conform to the Word. Word,
Tom Miller:
that's right.
Gordan Runyan:
And there's a— There's a difference than saying what I just said and saying, I think the Scripture or the tradition he's talking about is this whole canon of unwritten law that the Catholic Church has come up with. There's a huge space between those two things. He could be talking about traditions that he had delivered orally to them, and we're fine with that. Yeah, that doesn't bother us. And it's just now, it reminds me of how, for a long time, Protestants have really struggled to make sure that we're not talking about Peter in Matthew 16, where Jesus says, On this rock I will build my church, and we act like everything's going to stand or fall on that. But for myself, I don't have an issue with just acknowledging that Peter was the recognized leader of the early church. That's a long way from saying he's the first pope. You know, all the things that are added on to that. Yeah, the magisterium.
Tom Miller:
Well, let's just say that Peter had an unfortunate name. It is clear from the context of the Scripture. Don't lift the Scripture out of context and therefore build a pretext. It is obvious in the context he was talking about Peter's confession.
John Train:
Yeah,
Tom Miller:
that thou
John Train:
art the Christ. Even if we grant Peter was the leader, you know, that's what Gordan's saying. Even if we grant that,
Tom Miller:
well, you know,
John Train:
it doesn't grant the entire Roman Catholic...
Tom Miller:
Groups of men always have one guy that floats to the top that is the spokesman, whether the rest like everything he says or not.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right.
Tom Miller:
You know, it's one way we... We pick commissioned officer. Then we hide them in a mushroom closet.
David Morris:
Right. But
Tom Miller:
no, the context doesn't say that. Right. Don't lift it out of context.
Gordan Runyan:
Well, I would agree with your interpretation. I think that's right. I'm just saying that even granting, even granting that he was in fact the recognized leader, that's a lot different than saying he was the first pope.
Tom Miller:
Oh,
Gordan Runyan:
yeah.
John Train:
They really do build their whole system on that verse.
Tom Miller:
Well, the first pope, let's really be honest, the first pope, Pontiff, was Caesar. Right. Pontiff, pope was the name given to the Caesars.
John Train:
Right. So objection number three, we've already talked about this a little bit, but okay, Protestant, where in the Bible is the list of the inspired books? The Bible doesn't establish the canon itself. There's no index or table of contents. You might be able to flip to the front of yours, but that wasn't inspired. God didn't reveal it with that. So how do we get the canon? Well, it's recognizing and receiving, right?
Tom Miller:
Yeah,
John Train:
guided by the Holy Spirit.
Gordan Runyan:
Messy process.
John Train:
I like what
Tom Miller:
the Old Testament was clearly steered by the Tanakh, in particular the first five books.
John Train:
Yeah, I think there's an interesting text where I think Jesus himself tells us what the Jewish canon was, right? You all know from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. That's how the Jews organized their scriptures, right? Genesis to Second Chronicles was their last book.
Tom Miller:
The Torah is not necessarily chronological either.
John Train:
So they had all the same books we did, but they organized them differently. So their last book wasn't Malachi; it was Second Chronicles. Interesting. And I think that's coming through in that statement from Jesus.
Gordan Runyan:
Well, I think James White has a great answer to that question, where the charge is, you don't know what the canon is unless we tell you what the canon is. And his answer is, well, do you think maybe God knows what the canon is? Do you think God knows which books he inspired? Do you not have any confidence that he can communicate that to his people?
John Train:
The canon is an artifact of revelation, right? It's 66 books. That's all God has revealed. That's right. Yeah. How about we just touched on this, but okay, Protestant, so you deny that church is infallible, but God created the church and gave it binding authority. And infallibility. Matthew. Matthew 16.
Tom Miller:
Oh yeah, the keys.
John Train:
Yep, it all stems from there, right? Right. We've been given this infallible teaching authority to tell us what the right...
Tom Miller:
Where are the keys?
John Train:
Right. Right.
Gordan Runyan:
Did the keys just go to
Tom Miller:
Peter? Don't tell me they're in the Vatican. Because neither is the chalice, nor the Ark of the Covenant, or Washington's boat.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, that's right. No, well, that would be, again, a thing of taking what the Scripture says, take the inch that the Scripture gives you and turn it into a mile.
John Train:
It's the camel's nose in the tent. Yeah, yeah. They build a whole system of apostolic succession. Right. Again, the unwritten apostolic tradition, and it's the burden is on them to demonstrate from Scripture that these things exist.
David Morris:
I think that's right.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, there's also a very— if you read some of the writings of the Reformers, and especially Luther, in his book about the bondage of the will, I get an overriding theme from him that there were things that the church had, the Roman Church had before it was the church, that they really didn't want to jettison. And so they had to become part of this overriding tradition.
David Morris:
Right, right. Yeah, I see that pretty clearly.
John Train:
Yep. What about some of the cults? All right, Mormonism explicitly denies a closed canon. They have a living prophet, right? Modern-day revelation. They're always receiving new inspired words from God.
Tom Miller:
Yes, but so is the Assembly of God Church here in town.
John Train:
Right, so that might be a problem.
Tom Miller:
So which one of them is getting all the information?
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
So they don't have a final standard by which you can test everything else.
Tom Miller:
No. Which also makes then a godly walk rather difficult, isn't it?
Gordan Runyan:
Sure.
David Morris:
Right,
Tom Miller:
because I really don't know where to put my foot the next... I want to tell you something. I want my point man to know where the landmines are, spiritually
Gordan Runyan:
and physically.
John Train:
Right. You couldn't, as a Mormon, you couldn't just stick with, like, the living prophet from 50 years ago. You know, you like that guy, you're going to stick with his. You can't do that. Right. Because what he said 50 years ago might have been totally upended, and now they're teaching the opposite thing now.
Tom Miller:
Oh, well, they also have a fiddled-with King James Bible that they also call the Authorized Version, which is authorized by their council.
Gordan Runyan:
I was looking at LDS. org years ago, and one of the frequently asked questions that they answered was, Has the Book of Mormon been changed? And clearly it has. And their own answer at LDS. org is that it has been changed over 400 times, and that most of these things are small or whatever, inconsequential. And my point as a presuppositionalist is, if your scripture is constantly being changed... It's either being changed in the direction of corruption, or it's being changed in the direction of perfection, and either one of those means that you have no idea what it's supposed to say right now. If it's being corrupted, well, how long has that gone on? How do I trust what's here? But if it's changing toward perfection, how in the world will you know when it's gotten there? Right, you know?
John Train:
Yeah.
Gordan Runyan:
If it's just going to keep on—
John Train:
there's no foundation.
David Morris:
It sounds like a pick-and-choose kind of thing, you know, because you set it up and you start walking, and something smells better over here, so you say, Well, wait, wait, that smells better. Let's work that in. And so in that kind of a situation, you're always confused. You don't even know how to butter your bread anymore because you're confused which side to put it on.
Tom Miller:
I relate that as every time I get on I-40, all the road signs have changed. I don't know if I'm headed towards New York or Los Angeles.
John Train:
That's right. New Revelation's just dropped and everything's changed.
Tom Miller:
Right. Yeah.
John Train:
Everything you believed your entire life is now in the trash. Yeah.
Tom Miller:
Tomorrow it says New Amsterdam this direction, and come back two weeks later and it says New York again.
John Train:
The Jehovah's Witness system is pretty similar to the Roman Catholic system, honestly, when you get down to it. They've got their governing body, which is the faithful and discreet slave that Jehovah has given to the church to interpret His word for them. So the word cannot be interpreted correctly apart from the governing body and what they say. Right. Same thing, Roman Catholicism. You got the magisterium.
Tom Miller:
Yeah,
David Morris:
you cannot interpret Scripture correctly apart from their organization.
Gordan Runyan:
And one of the local leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't think their structure allows him to say he's got a great deal of authority, but he is one of the recognized leaders. And I had a conversation about that with him, and I asked him, Do you believe that it's impossible for the Watchtower to teach bad doctrine or make a mistake? He says, No, I know it's happened before. They have, you know, the whole second coming that they missed and stuff like that. He was admitting that, yeah, of course they've messed it up. So my question as a precept guy was, So how do you know? You get your monthly mailing or your quarterly magazine from the Watchtower. How do you know? If you know they can make mistakes, how do you spot the mistake? And he gave me a very Protestant answer. He says, Well, I have to compare it to the Scripture. I just said, I don't think that's a Jehovah's Witness answer.
Tom Miller:
That's nothing unusual. I have a Seventh-day Adventist friend that says the same thing about the writings of Ellen White. Well, how do you know when it was inspired and wasn't in it? Because if it doesn't bounce with the Bible, she didn't know what she was saying.
Gordan Runyan:
There you go.
John Train:
That's a Protestant idea. The governing body of the Jehovah's Witnesses has admitted it has made mistakes. Yeah. So from their own words, they've admitted they're fallible, and yet they claim that their teaching is necessary for the believers to receive spiritual food.
David Morris:
Yeah. Which one?
Tom Miller:
But Harold Camping didn't make a mistake. He just understood it wrong.
John Train:
And what you're getting at here, brother, is the necessity for private judgment, right? The Roman Catholic— There's many divisions within that organization. How do they know which one to follow? Should I be a sedevacantist and affirm that the seat of Peter is empty, or why not?
Tom Miller:
Isn't there an obvious reason why they're told to read the daily missal but not necessarily read the Scriptures?
David Morris:
Oh, absolutely.
Tom Miller:
Even though the front of their Bible will offer them, I forget how many indulgences it is for reading the Bible through in a year. Well, do I save Grandma from purgatory or not?
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
You know, we've got the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox. They both claim to be infallible churches, right? Well, it's up to the individual to choose which one of those is correct.
David Morris:
I don't remember the scripture address right now, but the scripture says that all scripture is not for use of personal interpretation by
Gordan Runyan:
prophecies of any personal interpretation. Right.
David Morris:
So it appears to me that a lot of this that we're talking about is people has made personal interpretations of something that God never intended to—have made a whole denomination. Yeah, they made a whole different, and God never intended that.
Tom Miller:
You know, I hate to say this, I guess I'm going to be throwing some rocks, but a lot of denominationalism, to me, is the result of, I don't like this church. I'm going to go and, with that corner over there, and build a church of my own.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right.
John Train:
So that's another Catholic objection, right? Sola Scriptura produces interpretational anarchy. You got 40, 000 denominations. How do you know which one's right, Protestant? Right.
Gordan Runyan:
And even though that number is a piece of fiction. Yes, because what they did to inflate it so much is they counted every independent local church as its own denomination. Of course, you're going to have multiple tens of thousands.
John Train:
So what is our response to that, though? So we claim that the Bible is sufficient for the Christian life, and yet here we are with so many disagreements.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, I would just say the fact that I believe the Bible is sufficient doesn't— it's not the same as saying I believe everyone who reads the Bible is infallible or gets it right or anything like that.
Tom Miller:
Well, and people have spiritual cataracts.
David Morris:
Right.
Gordan Runyan:
So you have a bunch of sinners, and you don't have a choice, but you have a bunch of sinners reading the Bible and coming up with a little bit different view on this and that. I think it's right to point out that, generally speaking, you and I, as members of this church, we can have close fellowship with Christians here who are not in our church.
David Morris:
Yep. Right.
Gordan Runyan:
Absolutely. And we've decided we need to worship separately because we have different views of this and that. But I count them as my brothers, and I think Christ loves them as much as he loves me, and on those main points of Christian doctrine, we're completely aligned. So I really think the whole disunity thing is overblown on purpose.
David Morris:
Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said our Christian brothers, the ones that are spiritually fed by God, they are our brothers, and it doesn't matter what church they come from. We are able to rub elbows with them because we have a like mind.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, we can do mission with them.
David Morris:
Right.
John Train:
We do.
David Morris:
And again, like you said, we just separate at the point of—not a point of Scripture that's different, but it's just a, maybe you'd call it a traditional difference. I don't have a clue. Yeah, that's a big deal. But it is a difference. You know, that's what separates us.
John Train:
So the caricature is, you know, sola scriptura means that you can just believe whatever you want. Why is that wrong?
Gordan Runyan:
Well, you didn't get that from a believer in sola scriptura. Yeah,
Tom Miller:
no, nor does the Scripture say that. That's right.
John Train:
Talked about the right and duty of private judgment. You know, you will be judged by God based on how you handle His
Gordan Runyan:
Word. Absolutely.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, we don't like the duty part, do we?
John Train:
Right. It's a duty. We
Tom Miller:
like the privilege, but we don't want the duty,
John Train:
especially teachers. You know, we're obligated to handle God's Word correctly, you know,
Gordan Runyan:
soberly. That's a very sobering warning attached to that. But I like what Tom said, that what we have in the Bible is an objective standard to our Christian faith, and the fact that we're all coming to it as individuals, that doesn't change the objectivity of what's written.
David Morris:
That's right.
Tom Miller:
No, you know, it's like in my own case, I'm pastoring an independent church because denominationalism has also created additional authority. In some cases, it's just implied, but it's still there. And my congregation would say today, no, we're not joining the association because our mission money goes to support the missionaries we want to support.
John Train:
You know, that unity. You know, you can fly to Zambia and worship with brothers and sisters there, and you have tremendous unity. You believe the same things, right? You're rejoicing in the same gospel, and they're all the way across the world. That's one of the testimonies that this is a divine book, the divine book, of that beautiful body it's created throughout the whole world.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, I believe that the scriptural model is this. I am not the only Christian, but I'm only Christian.
David Morris:
Right.
Tom Miller:
I haven't brought anything else in.
David Morris:
There you go. I'm a preacher, brother. That is good. Yes, sir. And the thing, what I was talking about is even as brothers in Christ, you know, because I traveled around to different churches, you know, doing singing, this, that, and the other. Well, I knew when I walked into certain churches that it was going to be a grand time because of the spirit, because of the people. The feeling that you got was great, and you knew it was going to be a grand time. And I've walked into other churches that I didn't know whether we needed to start pulling teeth or, you know, I didn't know what we had to do.
Tom Miller:
Put on the parka.
David Morris:
Something. I, you know, I've been into some churches that you were kind of wondering, well, should we, what should we do now? Right. You know, but we'd go up and normally we have a good time because we trusted God put us there for a purpose, and we carried out His will and His glory. So anyway, that's what we have to do is we can rub elbows with our Christian friends, but then we also know that our spirit is entwined in Christ.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. Yep.
John Train:
So the doctrine is not saying that all of the Bible is equally understandable, right? There are difficult passages.
Gordan Runyan:
Absolutely. Important for us to remember that.
Tom Miller:
We sometimes make passages difficult ourselves.
John Train:
That's
Tom Miller:
right. Which is why I'm not a King James only preacher,
John Train:
because we—
Tom Miller:
Arcane English is still arcane.
John Train:
It adds another level of difficulty unnecessarily, especially in the modern era,
Tom Miller:
for sure. And just because I can read Shakespeare doesn't mean even I, you know, there are some words that I go, What? I need to go look it up.
David Morris:
Talking about the difficulty, my brother and I was just talking about how people get a lot of stuff wrong, like in the feeding of the five thousand at the end where they were going to make him a king. And he said, I tell you truly, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you can have no part of me. Well, that blew everybody's mind. They did not have a clue what he was talking about, didn't understand nothing, and they all fled. They all left. And so sometimes we read the scripture like that, and it blows our mind off of course because we had a total different idea. Now, if we're truly Christians like we're supposed to be, we go back to that phrase and we start eating on it till we got it figured out. And that's what we have to do whenever, in that case of scriptures that are hard to...
John Train:
You read a passage, you're like, What does this mean? It requires humility, teachability, right? Maybe the openness to get some input. You know, Hey brother, what do you think of this text?
David Morris:
A lot of times it's a slap up beside the head to say, Slow down, pay attention, now back up and try again.
Gordan Runyan:
That's right. Yep.
John Train:
So we deny that any of our interpretations are infallible. We are fallible, sinful men.
David Morris:
That's
John Train:
right. Right, grappling with the Word of God.
David Morris:
Right. We're trying to understand it just like everybody else. Right.
John Train:
And we can know some things certainly.
David Morris:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
John Train:
We do have certainty. How about some resources? Are we getting about to that time?
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah, let's talk about resources. Anybody got a particular book that you love on this topic? One that's—it's not written directly on the topic of sola scriptura, but I found James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, to be extremely helpful in talking about issues of canon and how we got the Bible and stuff like that. It is showing why the King James Only position is untenable, but it's more than that. It's really helpful.
John Train:
Along with that, I'll recommend his lectures on YouTube about New Testament reliability. Go to YouTube, search James White, New Testament reliability, and it's a lot of the content of that book. but
Tom Miller:
I recommend Sola Scriptura: A Protestant Presentation of the Bible, or Position of the Bible, and it's the normal group of Reformers, Bob Godfrey and so on. But, and it's on Kindle, and it's extremely easy to read.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah,
Tom Miller:
the language is not highly technical. Right.
Gordan Runyan:
Also, if you catch this guy named Wes Huff on YouTube, he does a lot on the reliability.
John Train:
Greg Bahnsen, his book Against All Opposition, he gets to talking a lot about ultimate standards and why, for Christians, the Word of God has to be it.
Tom Miller:
Yeah, and of course, if you want to go as back as far as I go, B. B. Warfield's book on the inspiration.
David Morris:
Yeah, there you go. That's a classic.
Gordan Runyan:
All right, brothers, anything else? Wow, we've been rambling like Baptist preachers in here. All right, well, we're gonna say goodbye to y'all, and remember to catch us on Reformed or RagtownReformedForum. com.
John Train:
Just RagtownReformed. com.
Gordan Runyan:
RagtownReformed. com.
John Train:
Send us a question.
Gordan Runyan:
Yeah,
John Train:
there's a contact form there.
Gordan Runyan:
That'll be good. Anything else? What was I supposed to say?
John Train:
You can subscribe on any podcast app. Just search Ragtown Reformed, it'll pop up.
Gordan Runyan:
There you go. So get yourself hooked up. Shoot us a message. We'd love to hear from you guys.
John Train:
Yeah.
Gordan Runyan:
Amen. All right. God bless y'all. Till next time. Do we have our—we should tease them with what our next topic is.
John Train:
Brother Tom, what's our next topic?
Gordan Runyan:
Do you have that?
Tom Miller:
I don't have my syllabus.
John Train:
Is it sola fide?
David Morris:
Sola fide, yeah.
John Train:
All right.
Gordan Runyan:
Sola fide.
John Train:
Faith alone.
Gordan Runyan:
All right. I'll have to spend the next couple weeks learning what that is.
John Train:
Yeah, we don't believe that right now.
Gordan Runyan:
All right. God bless y'all out there.