The Subtle Undermining of the Sufficiency of Scripture
There is always a war waging over the Bible. It will be different at different times, but it will be waging. In the last few generations we have seen battles over the full inspiration of Scripture and postmodern approaches to hermeneutics (what it means to me). One of the latest battles over the Bible has to do with sufficiency. People will say that the Scripture is from God and is fully inspired and inerrant, but Scripture is not enough. They say life is too complicated to rely only upon Scripture.
More and more resources are being deployed in this battle and we can be thankful for faithful people trumpeting the true nature of God’s word. For this blog post I wanted to highlight what has become one of my favorite articles concerning the sufficiency of Scripture. It is actually a chapter found in the book Scripture and Counseling: God’s Word for Life in a Broken World. The chapter is by Jeremy Pierre and is entitled Scripture is Sufficient, But To Do What?
I want to highlight some of the wonderfully insightful portions of this chapter and commend the book, and this chapter in particular, to you.
First, the needed opening acknowledgment about outside information:
You rely extensively on sources of knowledge outside what is revealed in Scripture. This reliance is a good thing because God designed you that way. But extrabiblical knowledge is not sufficient for you to know who you are or why you do what you do. God designed you to need Him to tell you about His world so that you can understand your own observations of it.
So what are we to know and believe about the information we get outside the Bible? We must filter it through the Word of God to see if it stands up against what is ultimately and inerrantly true.
Scripture is the sufficient means by which we understand extrabiblical information in its ultimate sense. God has given us everything we need to form a God-oriented (and therefore an exclusively true) perspective of everything we study.
Here comes a pivotal statement. Since our certainly about this world is based upon what God says about his world in the Bible, what does that mean about all the things that aren’t addressed in the Bible?
We have already established the obvious fact that Scripture does not tell us everything there is to know about the world — or about human life, for that matter…Yet it is precisely because Scripture does not contain everything God could say that we must pay careful attention to what He has said — it reveals what He intends to be the priorities of our knowledge.
Priorities of our knowledge. That is critical. What are the most important things we are to know and what do we shape our lives and eternities around? Scripture has an emphasis to it, and therefore it is an authoritative emphasis. We must know what God thinks is important due to its inclusion in Holy Scripture.
[The Bible] has emphatic authority, meaning that whatever God draws our attention to as primary ought to capture our primary attention. In short, sufficiency is not just a matter of the specific information contained in the Bible (encyclopedic), but of how those divine words demand a priority of perspective on information not contained in the Bible (emphatic).
So what does this mean about the information we learn about people?
All other information we gain about human life, be it developmental, cognitive, neurological, or otherwise, is necessarily interpreted in light of God’s primary concerns. In one sense, emphasis is everything.
How does this change how we treat the sufficiency of Scripture?
It is not sufficient to acknowledge that Scripture is authoritative about every topic it addresses. A person can do this and still have an entirely lopsided view of any number of things. We are also required to acknowledge that Scripture sets the agenda for what we focus on. God’s interpretation of reality demands that our interpretation follow suit.
How does this specifically change how we treat the sufficiency of Scripture in terms of counseling and psychology? What does this “lopsided view” look like?
The [psychology-integrated Christian counseling] approach understands secular psychologies as necessary to constitute a complete view of the human experience. The observations that psychologists make from various secular theories make a vital external contribution to a biblical psychology. Such a view attempts to honor the encyclopedic authority of the Bible — whatever topic the Bible speaks on, it does so with authority. It’s just that those topics are not plentiful, at least as far as psychology is concerned. And so progress in a comprehensive view of human experience is a matter of expanding research of external theories; and the Bible is seen as an encyclopedia of static and rather limited subject matter. This approach does not adequately acknowledge the emphatic authority of Scripture. It does not allow the doctrine of Scripture to control the priorities, emphases, and interests of its research. Instead, its agenda of concern is set by worldviews that do not have God as the source, center, or goal of human experience. These folks love the Bible; the problem is, they miss how radically world defining and perspective controlling it can and must be.
Pierre gives this quote from Michael Horton:
“It is possible to hold a high view of biblical authority and sufficiency in theory while yielding a magisterial role in practice to sociology, politics, marketing, psychology, and other cultural authorities.”
Here is an example of how it sounds when you hold to the sufficiency of Scripture in an encyclopedic way, but forsake the sufficiency of Scripture when it comes to emphatic authority.
Consider the following sentences, both of which contain the same information, but are subordinated differently.
- While it’s true that Isaiah Smith grew up in a culture that condoned slavery, he is responsible for owning and mistreating his slaves.
- While it’s true that Isaiah Smith is responsible for owning and mistreating his slaves, he grew up in a culture that condoned slavery.
The difference in emphasis makes us end up with two very different points. Both sentences acknowledge the truth value of both concepts in the pairing, but they assemble them differently, resulting in completely different sentence functions. The first sentence functions to condemn Isaiah Smith’s actions, and the second functions to explain them.
Here is one more example he gives:
- While it’s true that developmental and psychosocial realities have shaped who you are today, Scripture addresses you as a moral agent who actively responds to life in covenantal ways.
- While it’s true that Scripture addresses you as a moral agent actively responding in covenantal ways, developmental and psychosocial realities have shaped who you are today.
Scripture is sufficient. But when we say that, we must mean that Scripture shapes and drives our thinking, priorities, and interaction with all things and all people in every arena. Let us “not lean on our own understanding” but look to God’s word for what matters, what we talk about, and how we talk about it.
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