Dr. Stephen Nichols
Appearances
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And I saw that, Nathan, and I realized he's talking about the International Council on Biblical Inherency. He's talking about the Chicago Statement and the need for that summit. And then even with humility and that unreserved commitment, hey, this may fail, but we ought to do it. And of course, it did not fail.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Well, you know, I've talked to people who were there. I've talked to people who needed that as they began their ministry. And I kept hearing things along these lines. It puts steel in our spines.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
We recognize at the beginning of our teaching or the beginning of our preaching or the beginning of whatever ministry God had for us, that we cannot waver even a half step from the authority of God's word. If we're going to have any ministry, any church, even any Christian life, that ultimately is going to have significance and impact, it has to be built upon the Word of God. And here's the thing.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
If the Word of God errs, even in part, how can we trust it? And how do we know where it errs and where it doesn't? And remember, going back to the statement, Anything that we impute, R.C. says, if we impute a view that is lesser than full and total trustworthiness and inerrancy, well, then we can't trust it.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
So I do think the Chicago Statement played a role in stealing that generation to come to stand on the authoritative word of God. As you look over 20th century church history, it's a significant moment. And even just for this, Nathan, there were three, 400 people there who signed this statement. Five points, 19 articles. Can you imagine getting 400 evangelicals in a room?
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
today and getting them to agree on anything even half as big as the Chicago Statement, it would probably be an impossibility. So I do believe God used it at a moment in the church's life, and I believe God still uses it as we think about in our moment.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
So one in every four evangelicals needs to hear this. They need to understand the value and importance of inerrancy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And you think of all that's happening, this swirl of culture around us. We need more than ever a moral compass, a true north, and it is the Word of God.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Well, we're back to those two key words of inspiration and inerrancy. And again, when we speak of inspiration, it is verbal, plenary inspiration. Every word and all of the words are the word of God. And because this is God, who is true and who does not err... It is inerrant. It is without error. And therefore, it is entirely trustworthy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
On the heels of the statement, various conferences were held, and at one of those conferences, Dr. Sproul spoke on the topic of what difference an inerrant Bible makes. And in it, he was summarizing some objections to caring even about the doctrine of inerrancy that some people make. And Dr. Sproul says, why should we worry about the doctrine? Let's get on with the ministry of the church.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
I'm not going to get bothered with the doctrine of scripture. Well, to that objection, this is what R.C. says. How naive can you be? And what he's saying there is this is of immense practical importance. It is of importance for the life of the church. It is important for the life of the Christian. But let's end with Scripture as we're talking about Scripture. So we all know 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
You know, I remember when he said that, Nathan, and I thought it was a great statement. I remember seeing something he had said back in the early 70s that said, you know, it's very important to read the Bible, of course. But then he writes next to it, we must study. And I think he underlined study two or three times. We must study the Bible.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
It's a densely packed real estate on the doctrine of Scripture and Scripture. Perhaps the most densely packed real estate. But go to the two verses before it, to verses 14 and 15. And I think this is just helpful for us all to consider. Here, Paul says to Timothy, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed...
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
So for decades, at the beginning of Ligonier and in the final years of Dr. Sproul's life, he was stressing Bible study. And there's one reason why we read this book, why we study it, why we put so much effort to understand it, why we at Ligonier spend so much time producing resources to help people understand God's Word, is because it is the Word of God. It is holy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Paul's going to call it sacred writings. It is the holy, authoritative word of God. And we would do well to read it, to study it, to follow Dr. Sproul's advice, and to submit to it.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Yeah, that's a great question. We're talking about the doctrine of the authority of Scripture. Well, what does that mean? How do we flesh that out? And over the centuries of church history, we've landed on two key words that under the doctrine of authority of Scripture. The first is inspiration, which of course is a biblical term itself.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And what inspiration means is that God is the source of the Bible. It is God-breathed. We speak of God using human instruments, and He certainly did. And you don't have to be a student of Greek or a student of Hebrew to recognize that the biblical books read differently.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
They had different levels of education, they had different experiences, different contexts, writing for different audiences, even using different genres. So we sense some differences as we move from author to author. So God certainly used the personality of the author, but God superintended those human authors so that every word would be the word of God.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Two key words here when we speak of inspiration. verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration. So verbal means the words. It's not thoughts. It's not as if God sort of implanted in Matthew's head thoughts and then Matthew wrote the actual words. No, the very words. And then plenary is just a word that means full, complete. So all of the words are inspired.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
The next keyword is inerrancy, which means without error. And so this only follows from inspiration. If the Bible is sourced in God, then it is true. So yes, when we talk about the authority of Scripture, we're talking about inspiration and inerrancy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Yeah, absolutely. It's almost in every age of the church God's Word is going to be challenged, of course from without, but sadly even from within. So we go back to the turn of the 20th century, and modernism is in the culture, liberalism is in the church.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And this has greatly affected the seminaries, and of course, the American seminaries, and seminaries in Great Britain, for that matter, and universities. And so as the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit. And as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And so we were seeing folks in all the denominations, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, moving away from the authority of Scripture and seeing Scripture as more of the human construct, more of the human expression of the divine encounter, rather than the very Word of God. And so people like J. Gresham Machen and the Princetonians B.B.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Warfield took a very strong stand for inspiration and inerrancy in their day back in the early 20th century.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Yeah, that's a popular thesis, and you'll hear it from time to time. It's a modern invention. It only came about because of the sort of scientific way we do things. You can find it in the Church Fathers. It's all through Augustine, speaking specifically of inerrancy. But you can even push back and find that Scripture itself expresses authority. Go back to Jesus and his temptation with the devil.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And it's those words of Scripture that Jesus is holding on to. As he interacts with the Pharisees or the Sadducees, the religious leaders at different moments, he appeals to... actual words of Scripture, specific words of the Old Testament to make his case. Paul does the same thing as he appeals to the Old Testament.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Peter calls Paul's writings Scripture when he says there's hard stuff in Paul, things difficult to understand, as with the rest of Scripture. So how does Scripture view itself? is where we start. And then we have it in the Fathers, of course, we have it in the Reformation. So it is not accurate, this idea that the Princetonians created the doctrine of inerrancy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Yeah, well, similar things happened with the doctrine of Scripture, but rather than coming through the quest for the historical Jesus, or did Moses write the Pentateuch, or was it a later expression again of the Israelite community of their encounter with God? Two key figures that had an influence on the evangelical church in America were Bultmann and Karl Barth.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And Bultmann introduced this idea of mythology and the idea that here we are in the 20th century, the scientific universe. We need to understand scripture differently. We need to demythologize it because scripture was written in a mythological age. And of course, they're going to speak of things like the resurrection. We know now in our moment that that doesn't happen.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
People don't rise from the dead. So we demythologize the history of the text and we understand it as myth. Now, in a Table Talk article, Nathan, Dr. Sproul said this about Bultmann. He said, "...the historical character of Judeo-Christianity is what markedly distinguishes it from all forms of mythology. A myth finds its value in its moral or spiritual application."
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
That's what Bultmann was trying to do. while its historical reality remains insignificant. Again, that's what Bultmann was teaching. R.C. replies, fairy tales can help our mood swings, but they do little to give us confidence in ultimate reality. But at the seminary where R.C. studied, for instance, his professors were Boltmanian. They actually believed in this demythologization.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And the other figure was Karl Barth. And here's something for you, Nathan. Dr. Sproul actually had, as a seminary professor, Barth's son was at the seminary where R.C. Sproul went. Anyway, Barth tried to say that the Word of God, the Bible, contains the words of God, but stopped short of calling it the Word of God. Well, here's what happened.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Every word and all of the words are the Word of God. And because this is God, who is true and who does not err, it is inerrant. It is without error. And therefore, it is entirely trustworthy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
The Bardian influence, the Boltmannian influence was all through the seminaries, both transatlantic and here in the United States. And again, just as earlier with the Princetonians in the turn of the 20th century, as the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit, and as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And so these churches that had come out of the modernist-liberalist controversy, now they were selling their birthright. And again, this was trans-denominational. It was in the Baptist Church, in the Presbyterian Church, in the Lutheran Church, among the Methodists, among the independent sort of church world, a wavering and a compromising of the doctrine of inerrancy.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And they were beginning to ask, is there another way to understand God's Word apart from inerrancy? And that was a crisis in the life of the church in the late 1960s.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Well, Nathan, Chicago is known for so many things. It's right here on the shores of Lake Michigan. And some people know Chicago for its sports teams. They might even be their favorite teams. Know Chicago for the art museum or the architecture and the tall buildings. But it actually plays a role. The city played a role in 20th century evangelicalism and in church history in 1978.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
A group of theologians, several hundred of them, theologians, church leaders, and not only from the United States, but many countries were represented, gathered here and signed and affirmed the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. That statement, as the statement proper, consists of five points. It's followed by 19 articles of affirmation and denial.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And it was the product of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. This was a small group of theologians. R.C. Sproul was a leader among them. Also included J.I. Packer and others. Dr. Sproul's buddy, what he called his foxhole buddy, James Montgomery Boyce from 10th Press in Philadelphia.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Norman Geisler was part of that, Earl Rodmacher, several others formed that committee and produced the Chicago Statement at this very city where we are back in 1978.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
It does, in a very fascinating way, Nathan. We leave Chicago and go back to the Ligonier Valley Study Center in western Pennsylvania. And in 1973, Dr. Sproul convened what I actually think might be Ligonier's very first conference And it was a conference on the inerrancy of Scripture.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
It was held not at the Study Center, but a few miles away at a retreat center nestled in the woods, a little waterfall, big rocks all around the property, a beautiful property, just a retreat in the woods. And there at that retreat center, a couple hundred people were gathered. About eight folks came that were invited by R.C. to present papers. And at that conference, R.C.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Sproul presented a statement that he wrote that was called the Ligonier Statement on Inerrancy. It's from 1973. I'm going to read this. It's a little long, but as you follow with it, you'll hear some really important points that are being made in this statement. So it begins, we believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired and inerrant Word of God.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
We hold the Bible as originally given through human agents of revelation to be infallible, and see this as a crucial article of faith with implications for the entire life and practice of all Christian people. With the great fathers of Christian history, we declare our confidence in the total trustworthiness of the Scriptures.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
urging that any view which imputes to them a lesser degree of inerrancy than total is in conflict with the Bible's self-testimony in general and with the teaching of Jesus Christ in particular. Out of obedience to the Lord of the Church, we submit ourselves unreservedly to this authoritative view of holy writ. Now that is a densely packed, but a great statement on the doctrine of Scripture.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
And it was written... Five years before the Chicago Statement and really became the seed of what would become the Chicago Statement. And Dr. Sproul was a significant driver, both to stress the need for it, but then when the council happened to be a significant contributor to it.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
It's Dr. Sproul, right? Don't do anything by halves, and especially doctrines that are so crucial and critical. And of course, this is what we see in church history. This was Luther. It just wasn't a stand. It was a bold stand for solo scriptura and scriptural authority when it was challenged. This was Hodge. This was Machen. And this was that group of men in 1978 that gathered. here in Chicago.
Renewing Your Mind
Upholding the Authority of Scripture
Yeah, when I saw these lines in the notebook, I could hardly believe it. But R.C. was talking about inerrancy, and he was presenting a lecture on inerrancy at the Study Center. And then he just puts this note at the very end of his notes. He writes, "...need an evangelical summit." may fail, but must try.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
Oh, they absolutely are. Not only in terms of the drama of the storytelling, but also the theme of the stories that are in these books. So this Prince's Poison Cup, I mean, this is the story, isn't it? This is the story of our fall and the story of our redemption in Christ. And That proclamation of the gospel in a winsome and compelling way, that was very much at the heart of what R.C. was about.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
We think of what was his 100th book, which was also a children's book, The Knight's Map. is all about the authority of Scripture and sufficiency of Scripture. That goes back to the 70s and R.C. 's role in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy and helping the church find its way back to this pivotal, essential, central doctrine of the authority, the inerrancy, the infallibility of Scripture.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
And it's his 100th book in a children's book. So you're exactly right. It's not only the drama that's reflective both in R.C. 's teaching and in his children's books, but also the content and the themes that he's talking about.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
Yeah. I remember listening to Vesta saying this at one point about R.C. He just loved to learn, and he loved to learn things from people. And that's why she thought that he loved being around people so much. And there was a wonder to him. He ends this great story with a twinkle in his eye. There was a wonder to him. There was a sense of wonder.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
There was a sense of always wanting to learn and especially always wanting to help people learn of all ages and not just learn, but learn those truths that are a matter of not simply life and death, but a matter of eternal life and eternal death.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
Oh, absolutely. And you think of this in terms of the cup of God's wrath. There's probably not a biblical phrase that is full of more drama than that phrase. And when we think of Christ's death for us, we must realize that Christ endured the cup of God's wrath. And all that says about us and our sinfulness and all that says about the necessity of Christ, it's just a wonderful story.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
And the thing that we love about the book is at the end, it has this series of questions related to the plot as it unfolded in the book. And each question is simply answered with Scripture. And that's another hallmark of why R.C. 's teaching was so compelling. It's almost like watching a brilliant doctor at work. They can analyze the disease, and they know exactly what to prescribe.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
He knew what our theological disease was, and he knew not only that the cure was Scripture, he knew chapter and verse where we needed to go to get the proper cure. And that's in the back of the book.
Renewing Your Mind
The Prince’s Poison Cup
Oh, of course. Yeah, many times. And the ideas were always percolating. And when he sat down to write, he already had it worked out in his head where he was going to go. He had already spent the time in the sources. And so once he had sort of spent all that time, he could sit down and it could flow onto paper. But don't let that deceive you. A lot of work went into those words flowing onto paper.