The Return to Divine Revelation, Part 1 | The Authority of Revelation

Selected Scriptures

Last time we took up the question that David Wells asked in the sub-title of his book No Place for Truth. And the sub-title, the question in the sub-title is Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology. It’s a good question and tonight we’re going to get into the issue at the heart of David Wells concern there about whatever happened to evangelical theology. At the heart of David Wells’ concern is the church’s need to return to the divine authority of the scripture. Toward the end we’re going to talk about general revelation and then next week we’ll start working our way through special revelation.

But we need to get back to divine authority and understand the authority of God, his right to tell us how to think, because he sustains us, and he’s created the world in which we live and the air that we breathe, and he created the rules that govern this physical world. He also gave us a book to interpret all that we live in and all that we understand. So, it is his right and it’s our privilege to ground ourselves in the scripture’s authority.

So, as I said, in No Place for Truth and other books that David Wells has written at the heart of his concern is our need, is the need of the church, the Evangelical Church to return to divine authority and particularly divine authority in the scripture. To return to a weighty view of God. And that’s, that’s in a time when God’s word has become, in our day, just one option among many and a time when God, himself, has become weightless or David Wells’ word is inconsequential. God rests too inconsequentially upon the church is what he said.

So, Wells answered that question: Whatever happened to evangelical theology, by identifying and tracing the impact of modernization. Modernization, he describes as a secularizing force that has been reshaping the world over the last century and it’s reshaping the world according to ideals of the enlightenment. Enlightenment understanding, enlightenment ideals. Wells describes four forces of modernization which you’ll, immediately as I say them, you should recognize them. You probably will recognize them as benefits in our world.

So, four forces that are forces of modernization that reshape the world in a secular direction. And yet we find great benefit from them. Capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications. These are things we live in and they’re part of the warp and woof of our life. They’re part of our culture, part of society, we’ve benefited greatly. And yet, they are shaping influences. They create a culture for us, they shape the way we think, they shape our assumptions and our presuppositions.

Capitalism has reshaped the world to create this massive integrated system that supports growing commerce all around the world. New technology, over the past century or so, has accelerated industry and productivity in industry, that’s the supply side. It also creates or enables private owners to distribute goods to new markets and new customers. So, that’s the demand side and that’s not only in the state and the country but this technology has allowed capitalism to reach all around the world. Technology that upholds and strengthens capitalism. Technology brought new energy into that symbiotic relationship between buyer and seller and increasing supply and meeting demand. So, the growth of capitalist economies is dependent in large part on the advancement of technology to increase that productivity. And transportation technology in particular, shipping, railroads, automobiles, airplanes, all that has enabled the wide-spread, world-wide distribution of goods.

That productivity and industry has centers, urban centers. And so that’s urbanization the process of concentrating large numbers of people in small areas. Obviously, that started with factories and industry as more and more things are being built and more people coming into small areas, coming into cities. All the finance and banking and everything that supports that and builds off of that. That’s accelerated, obviously, over the past century and it’s driven by economic and financial interest and financial opportunities. We get that.

Telecommunication. Those technologies, they overcome limitations of space and time increasing connectivity. So, we think about going all the way back to when we just had rotary dial phones and wires or you can take even go further back than that, the telegraph. How it connected people with communication and news spreading at a fast rate. But all that has increased as we have cellular phones and internet technology and all the rest.

So, that joins together people, businesses, regions, nations, creates an international world like what David Wells called a world cliché culture. As culture spreads all around the world and you can find kids in Samara and kids in Ethiopia and kids in South American and North America and Asia, you can find them listening to all the same tunes and repeating all the same lyrics, having all the same heroes, Lebron James and all the rest. All around the world.

So, we tend to see those features of the world, capitalism, technology, urbanization, telecommunications, we tend to see them as gifts to us. Gifts to the world, not threats, but gifts. All those things enter into our lives with a frontloading list of advantages that they’re going to offer to us. Showing us all the ways that they’re going to improve and simplify and reward our lives and they do that. There’s a simplification, there’s a connectivity, who doesn’t want to be in one location and be able to connect around the world with your grandkids in some other part of the world? We really appreciate that. Over time though, we can start to discern the darker side of all these forces. For example, we tend to evaluate the world in economic terms.

We see productivity and efficiency and profitability as the most important measures of value and we assign that even to people. We don’t think of people as people, we think of them as producers or are they productive, are they efficient? That’s how we judge people. We value things that get big, things that grow, things that have success, things that make money. We even bring that idea into the church, as if the bigger the church, the more money flowing through the church, the more successful it is.

God, though, he values what is faithful. He values fidelity to the truth, and faithfulness, and fidelity to the truth are missed and passed over in a busy, productive, success-oriented world. Consider how production technology can undermine faithfulness. There’s an increaseof goods, there’s the power of modern marketing that taps into human covetousness, fanning the flames of discontent.

But, we’ve become in this production and in always releasing new things, new, new products, new versions, updates, we’ve become biased against what is old. We always prefer what is new and improved and, sadly, that same attitude governs what many churches do these days. It governs how they think, it governs their ministry philosophy. They try to be innovative and keep up with a changing world all the time rather than just going back to old truths and preaching the scripture.

Transportation technology, the automobile in particular that can undermine the discipline of the church. I mean, think about it this way, if I don’t like what the elders say, if I want to avoid accountability and shirk the judgement of a church, I can just get in my car and drive to another church. I can pass that church by and never think about it again. So, what authority, then, does the local church have over people with cars? And many people think like that today. They just assume that. If they, if things get, start getting too difficult in a church, they’re gone. They’re out the door and you never see them again.

Telecommunications technologies means we’re more connected than ever. We search the world for answers that come from outside the Bible and we’re used to that; we’re used to looking to other’s authorities. Local churches then become host to an increasing, increasingly distracted audience. An audience with different voices in their heads. With different voices on their phones, telling them that they need to listen to this expert and that expert and submit to that authority and this authority and follow that guru. They’re used to the mediums of communication the connectivity of the tech giants this technopoly industry that we’re finding ourselves entering into. They’re used to all that and they bring those assumptions into the church.

Urbanization, that other force, that brings different people together, different kinds of people from all different tribes, tongues, nations, creeds, all different belief systems, all different worldviews. It engages all of them in a single enterprise, using them for productivity, economy, industry. All of them combined, joining forces together to work toward a common goal, to increase the bottom line of a company or produce something together. There is a kind of unity in that and we rejoice in that, we appreciate that. It appears to be, on the surface, very useful, very productive. All that comes though, by, if you think about it, setting aside the deeper theological and worldview divides that lie beneath the surface of each of those individuals. You have Hindus and Buddhists, Muslims and Catholics, and all those coming together, and they can accomplish something together without having to get into any theology, any doctrine. Well then didn’t they just prove what they can accomplish without actually dealing with theology? Doesn’t that create a sense of unity on the surface. That is very misleading, but in public they ignore those questions, don’t have those discussions anymore and they privatize their religion.

That’s very difficult to pastor through, I can tell you. We begin to see the values of diversity, tolerance in society. We’ve seen pluralism, relativism, subjectivism, all that seems to win the day and as David Wells said quite literally, “There is no place for truth.” Truth doesn’t win anymore in the public square. So, all that is just a very brief overview to try to get you to see that the challenges we face on this issue of authority are deep and they’re systemic and they’re somewhat invisible to us.

We’ve all grown up in the modern world. We’ve all come to depend on and appreciate the gifts that modernity has brought to us. And in those four forces of modernization, they’re so effective in shaping the modern world and giving it its culture and setting its agenda; Sets its expectations, directs ambitions, it puts boundaries around what is acceptable thought and what is forbidden thought in the public square.

All this has been so effective and so successful in large part because its influence is invisible to us. The forces of modernization hide behind its gifts.

So, the point is not to get into all that but it’s just to say that this world that we live in, all the gifts that it provides us, it also comes with a darker side. It comes with, behind all those gifts is an agenda. Behind all those offerings are something that we buy into subtlety and without even thing about it. What is chiefly at stake in all that I’m describing here is this fundamental matter of authority and the question always is going to be, what voice will we listen to? What voice are we going to obey? God’s voice or the constant stream of information that comes to us from the world around us. That’s how David Wells describes some of these challenges.

James Boice watched the effect of that modernizing influence in the protestant mainline denominations and he was seeing the same thing happening in evangelicalism in the 1990s, that happened to the protestant mainline denominations when the Presbyterians and the Lutherans and Methodists all went Liberal. He saw that and then was very concerned to see the same signs happening in Evangelicalism in the 1990s.

Evangelicals had not learned any lessons from the Protestant mainline churches. They were following the same course. As he put it, they became enamored with the world’s wisdom. They embraced the world’s theology, followed the world’s agenda, and employed the world’s methodology. It was happening big time in the seeker sensitive movement. Also, you can see it in the emergent church movement, and you can see it in liberalizing elements in the church today as well.

Wells described all of this as a struggle between Christianity and modernism. Boice talked in terms of liberalism. And liberalism had embraced modernity. And it opposed fundamental or reformed Christianity. So, Boice and Wells they were seeing the same problem, they were just considering the nature of the problem from different perspectives. Boice described the changes in Christian churches from within Christendom. And Wells described the changes as consequence of fundamental changes in the modern world. We could add to that the critique that came, I believe it was in 1992, from John MacArthur. He dealt with the problem of the worldliness in the church in a book called Ashamed of the Gospel, bub-titled When the Church becomes like the World.

David Wells looked the problem historically and philosophically, talking about the forces of modernity. James Boice looked at the problem theologically, looking at the forces of liberalism and John MacArthur addressed the problem pastorally and ecclesiologically; thinking about the forces of worldliness that were setting the agenda for the church. At the heart of each man’s critique is this fundamental matter of authority. What sets the direction for us as Christians? What sets the direction for the church? Who commands the conscience? What methods are we going to employ in the church? What agenda are we going to follow? That’s always the question at the heart of every matter.

I want to speak a little bit about modern authority, the world today. It was the secular humanist, Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book back in 1931 called Brave New World. Huxley offered a futuristic vision of a utopian society. He described a, a perfect world of eugenics where from childhood, children were basically farmed, and they were produced like on an assembly line. And they were produced to perform certain functions in society, based on certain chemicals introduced to them not in the womb, but in a birthing lab, nurturing process, and turned them into different levels of, you know, people who ruled the world and people who just served them and got things done and all the rest.

So, perfect world of eugenics, a world of unhindered promiscuity, all that inculcated in children from youngest ages. There was unrestricted access to all kinds of entertainment and diversion and when none of that would keep you feeling happy, there was a safe medication you could take to make the blues go away called soma. The fear of getting down, quick pop a soma.

One of the characters in the book, a world controller at the top level of society, is a figure named Mustapha Mond and he thinks, quote, “That there quite probably is a god, but did he manifest himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times, he manifested himself as a being that’s described in these books.” And by these books he’s pointing to the bible, other supposedly holy books. “But now” Mustapha Mond says, “he manifests himself as an absence. As though he weren’t there at all. Called the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

That’s happened in our modern world. Those who are like rabid atheists, that’s a very small minority of society. In most of society, God, he may be tacitly acknowledged, but he’s wholly ignored. They don’t mind his presence because, really, he’s there and he’s just faint memories of a pre-modern world that people, people, used to believe that kind of stuff and now it’s quaint, outdated, outmoded. They just ignore him.

Huxley, in the voice of Mustapha Mond, almost a hundred years ago now, he’s been very clear laying down the options. There are two choices before us. They are always two choices. One is to keep listening to that old, antiquated voice of divine authority. But in today’s world and in the modern mind, that’s no choice at all. Because all divine voices have been rendered obsolete by civilization. Served by its machines and science and technology and medicine. All designed to provide happiness to all, after all isn’t that what religion is for. Isn’t that what gods are for, to pray for them so you can get the stuff you need so you can be happy. Well, that’s all been replaced because of civilization, because of progress, because of technology, because of advancement.

Huxley really put his finger on it, or his pen. He put his pen on the heart of modern idolatry. And at its heart, modern idolatry is the rejection of divine authority. A heart of idolatry is finding a god substitute to exchange the creator for the creature, preferring the creature over the creator. Since we can’t manipulate the creator and his inflexible book, we abandon him, we abandon his word and find a more malleable god that will give us what we want. And in that sense, you can see how the part of modern idolatry, it really isn’t all that new. It’s not really that modern, it’s actually as ancient as the world is.

Paul wrote in Romans 1, “This is the very heart of idolatry, the exchange of the God the creator to worship what he created.” It’s the rejection of the authority of God’s word and an embrace of a more malleable, not inflexible word at all. That’s the word of mortal man. We see how the word of mortal man is changing all the time.

So, the pre-modern, superstitious world, and the modern anti-supernatural, secularized world they really are one and the same in that regard. Pre-moderns trusted in gods represented by statues. People of the modern world trust in the god of progress, man’s reason, scientific discovery, medical advances, technological development. In the words of the serpent, it’s about having your eyes opened, becoming like God, making your own judgements about good and evil. Again, it all comes down to a matter of authority.

It’s so important that we start right here with the issue of divine authority. We’ll talk about God’s authority in general revelation, but it’s primarily as we think about special revelation, as we think about Sola Scriptura. The first thesis of the Cambridge Declaration is about a return to Biblical authority, because the Cambridge Declaration follows the five solas of the reformation and that first one is Sola Scriptura; formative principle of the reformation.

This is what the Cambridge Declaration says in that first thesis. “We affirm the inerrant scripture to be the sole source of written, divine revelation which can alone bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured. We deny that any creed, council, or individual may bind a Christian’s conscience, that the Holy Spirt speaks independently of, or contrary to, what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.”

So, the reformers referred to that idea as Sola Scriptura, Scripture Alone. No councils, no popes, no ecclesiastical authority above them, no state authority could command the conscience of an individual, only the word of God can command the conscience. That’s, they called that the formal principle of the reformation. Not formal as versus informal, but formal in the sense of formative. They’re talking about the authoritative source of reformation theology, foundation of the church, and what forms the boundaries around that reforming work.

God’s revelation of himself, it sets the boundaries of our thinking. God’s revelation of himself creates channels of thought, into what we’re supposed to stay in. It’s to ensure that we know him, know him in all of his glory and that we’re able to investigate the world that he made for the most benefit to us and, again, to bring him glory. Because if we think with a biblical lens and then we go out and do our science or our medicine or our technology or whatever it is in the world, if we think with a biblical lens, then we’re driving down the lanes that he has established for us, we’re staying within his boundaries.

So, God’s special revelation, the scripture sets the boundaries for God’s general revelation; for everything we see in creation, in the world, in conscience, all the rest. Sola Scriptura, therefore, is the formal principle it gives formation for all of life.

So, the contrast between Christians and the unbelievers of this thoroughly modernized world is clearest in this fundamental matter of authority. For us, it’s sola scriptura. For them it’s sola sui or s-u-i, the self alone. Immanuel Kant said it in his way, “It’s about having the courage to use your own understanding without guidance from another.” That’s their formative principle, sola sui. They’ve chosen to believe in the unaided use of reason. They’ve chosen to use their minds unhitched from any consideration of divine authority.

You can hear that same rebellious spirit captured in that famous poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley. It ends with this stanza, “It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll.” In other words, he’s saying, I’m not interested in passing through the narrow gate. It’s a reference to the King James Bible, the straight gate. It says, I’m not afraid of the divine punishments recorded in holy scrolls of scripture. “Matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

What mister Invictus and his fellow moderns fail to realize is that the world they intend to navigate their vessels through, this world belongs to God. The world that they navigate through, it’s his. He created the world; he continues to govern the world according to laws he established from the very beginning. The world is not the atheist’s playground. It’s not floating around in some sphere of existence that’s completely apart from God, detached from his authority, where the unbelieving modernists, scientist, rationalist, skeptic is free to investigate it all in a neutral environment, making their own path, choosing their own course. The world is God’s revelation of himself to mankind. Which means the world has an essentially moral nature to it. Even general revelation, the creation, even the things that God has made and put out there for us to view, has a moral element to it. It’s moral by design.  Description for this block. Use this space for describing your block. Any text will do. Description for this block. You can use this space for describing your block.