An Impromptu Study In Protestant Understanding of “Tradition”

As a related aside, the following two posts of mine marry well to the topic below:

Reading a book on hyper-preterism recently has been a great read. I am a pretty classic “pre-mil” guy, but recently I was watching a vlogcast and the guy started getting into his beliefs that were hyper-preterist. I had studied a bit of preterism in my theological studies… but this guy was saying some crazy, unorthodox, shite. So I got this book to learn more about this foreign viewpoint.

A small sentence from said book got my apologetic blood circulating:

  • Below I will highlight a few danger signals that suggest the we may be witnessing the sprouting of a new unorthodox sect that could eventually blossom into a full-fledged cult. (p. 13)

However, as I am reading through this book, I purchased a used book to follow the footnote a bit more thoroughly.

Wow.

So, I will first give the section in the original book, then the very extended excerpt from the book I got via footnote #175:

“Creeds Are Constantly Revised”

Hyper-preterists attempt to protect themselves from creedal con­demnation by arguing that the creeds are continually being revised. Stevens frequently argues that creeds “are constantly being made obso­lete by an ever better understanding” (CPO). He muses: “If the creeds of the early church were perfect and needed no revision, why were they revised and updated in succeeding councils?” (WICW). And “if the earlier creeds, confessions and catechisms were such infallible bas­tions of orthodoxy, why did the Reformers in various European coun­tries compose new ones or make changes to them?” (RGA). He quotes a statement made by the Reformed historian and social critic Gary North regarding the “progress of Christian creeds,” concluding that “That the creeds have been steadily improved” (RGA). Stevens asks of var­ious theological movements, “Why are even more doctrines constantly being developed today (such as the Reconstructionist movement, etc.)? Doesn’t this tell us something?” (WICW). Noe asks: “After all, if the creeds had it all right, what was the Reformation about?” (BET, 216).

We may quickly dispose of the question “What was the Refor­mation all about?” by referring the reader to the previous objections regarding the Reformation principle and the (alleged) contradictions in creedalism. In addition, I would point out that Davis reminds us that “it is important to realize that the sola scriptura principle did not imply for the Reformers a rejection of all church tradition. They affirmed the value and validity of the ecumenical creeds of the early church, and in fact believed that the weight of patristic authority supported the Reformed cause.”175 In fact, in section 4 of his “Prefatory Address to King Francis” in his Institutes, Calvin writes of his papal opponents: “It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the Fathers (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age), as if the Fathers were supporters of their impiety. Were the contest to be decided by such authority (to speak in the most moderate terms), the better part of the victory would be ours.”

However, the hyper-preterist argument is not just confused; its entire premise is mistaken. The creeds were not revised because of a change in the understanding of biblical doctrine; rather, they were expanded to include additional details that responded to new heresies. The later creeds left the system of truth unchanged, but the volume of truth declared was expanded. Ursinus writes: “Why were other creedsformed and received in the church after the Apostles’ creed? To this we would reply, that these are not properly other creeds differing in substance from the Apostles’ creed, but are merely a repetition and clearer enunciation of its meaning, in which some words are added, by way of explanation, on account of heretics, who took advantage of its brevity, and corrupted it.”176

Thus, it is absurd to allege that creeds are “constantly being made obsolete” (CPO). The newer material did not render the previous the­ology “obsolete,” but rather filled in more details. This is why, for instance, John Calvin could structure much of his discussion in the Institutes around the Apostles’ Creed. He agreed with it even at this much later stage of theological development. In the introduction to the McNeill edition of the Institutes, we read: “The body of the trea­tise of 1536 consists of six chapters. Four are on topics familiar in the history of Christian instruction and then recently employed in Luther’s Catechisms: the Law, the [Apostles’] Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”177


  1. John Jefferson Davis, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 226.
  2. Ursinus, Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, 117-18.
  3. Calvin: Institutes, ed. McNeill, 1:xxxv-xxxvi.

Keith A. Mathison, ed., When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response To Hyper-Preterism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004), 55-56.

After finding and reading the portion from Dr. Davis’ book, I loved the surrounding topic so much that I ended up reading the entire chapter (seven) where the quote was pulled from:

Tradition As Theological Authority

It was a great reading on Protestant tradition compared to the Catholic view.

So, here is footnote #175 expanded quite a bit. I will also expand a bit more footnote #176 as well. Both quotes from the source will be emphasized in the larger excerpts

  • PRO-TIP: I will put links in the footnote numbers, if you click it it will “jump” you to either the first-half of the notes, or the second half. Hit the back arrow in your browser to return to your place in the text.

John Jefferson Davis,
Foundations of Evangelical Theology
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 226-243.


Tradition in Protestantism

Sola scriptura and the Reformation

The principle of sola scriptura, a hallmark of the Protestant Re­formers, emerged in Luther’s debate with Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519. Luther argued that scripture and scripture alone was to be the standard by which councils, creeds, and all ecclesiastical traditions were to be measured. In the seventeenth century the principle was epitomized in the well-known statement of the Eng­lishman William Chillingworth: “The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.”5

Luther was not the first to voice this “Protestant” principle. John Wyclif, one of the forerunners of the Reformation in England, stated, “Even though there were a hundred popes and though every men­dicant monk were a cardinal, they would be entitled to confidence only in so far as they accorded with the Bible.” As J. Loserth has noted, “In this early period it was Wyclif who recognized and formulated the formal principle of the Reformation—the unique authority of the Bible for the belief and life of the Christian.”6

The authorities of the late medieval church did not appreciate the reforming spirit of John Wyclif and his criticisms of the papal system. After his death the Council of Constance (1414-18) de­clared Wyclif to be a stiff-necked heretic, ordered his books to be burned and his body exhumed. This last decree was carried out some twelve years later under the authority of Pope Martin V. Wyclif’s body was dug up, burned, and the ashes thrown into the Swift River flowing through Lutterworth, England.

It is important to realize that the sola scriptura principle did not imply for the Reformers a rejection of all church tradition. They affirmed the value and validity of the ecumenical creeds of the early church, and in fact believed that the weight of patristic authority supported the Reformation cause. As Calvin stated the point, “If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory—to put it very modestly—would turn to our side.” The Reformers were convinced that it was the papacy, and not they, who in fact had departed from the early Christian tradition. Later historical scholarship has confirmed this judgment.7

Sola scriptura meant the primacy of scripture as a theological norm over all tradition rather than the total rejection of tradition. Creeds, confessions, and councils were to be received insofar as they were consistent with scripture. The sola scriptura principle also presupposed the essential clarity of scripture. The central saving message of the Bible was plain enough to be understood by all and needed no priestly hierarchy to explain it. The Holy Spirit, and not the Roman hierarchy, was the true illuminator of scriptural truth. This Reformation principle of the perspicuity of scripture was later articulated in classic fashion in the Westmin­ster Confession of Faith’s chapter on scripture: “All things in Scrip­ture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and ob­served, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (I.vii).

This Reformation emphasis on the perspicuity of scripture has unfortunately been lost in some streams of later Protestantism. Luther complained about the “Babylonian captivity of the church;” with the rise of the historical-critical method there is some reason to be concerned about a “Babylonian captivity of the Bible” at the hands of the biblical critics. Many lay people in the churches have been alienated from the simple biblical message by the imposing developments of critical scholarship.8 By stressing the diversity or even “contradictions” of scripture, critical scholarship has ob­scured the essential clarity of the Bible’s saving message.

In a dialogue at Harvard Divinity School on liberal and evan­gelical theology, Gordon Kaufman stated his belief in the Bible’s obscurity. “There are many biblical positions on almost any topic you wish to take up,” he said. “The Bible is a pluralist library of books, of theological ideas, of values, of points of view. What the biblical position is is unclear. … Even if we could find the biblical position, how to interpret this as bearing on our situation is unclear.”9

It indeed seems ironic that the brand of Protestant liberalism represented by Kaufman has essentially reverted to the position of the late medieval Roman Catholic Church on the question of scripture. The message of the Bible is not plain; it must be me­diated to the people through either an ecclesiastical or scholarly elite. The result in both cases—Catholicism and Protestant mod­ernism—is a loss of spiritual vitality in the churches and the usur­pation of scripture’s divine authority by various human authorities.10

American Protestantism

American Protestantism has not been noted for its appreciation of church tradition. Thomas Jefferson once remarked, “As to tra­dition, if we are Protestants, we reject all tradition, and rely on the scripture alone, for that is the essence and common principle of all the Protestant churches.”11 Such comments need to be under­stood in the light of Jefferson’s own Unitarian and otherwise het­erodox views, but they are illustrative of a significant element in the American religious temperament. The streams of Protestantism influenced by deism and rationalism tended to appeal directly to the moral teachings of Jesus; later developments in church history—especially the great orthodox creeds—were an “obfusca­tion” of the simple religion of the Sermon on the Mount. As the English Unitarian Joseph Priestly saw it, church history was little more than a “sordid history of corruptions.”

Historian Kenneth S. LaTourette has noted the marked tendency of nineteenth-century American Protestants “to ignore the devel­opments which had taken place in Christianity in the Old World after the first century.”12 This low view of tradition is understand­able in part in view of the frontier conditions of early American experience. For those who came to America, and who later extended its boundaries in the West, the nation represented a new beginning, even a “new Eden.” Why encumber the new religious venture with the strife and controversy of the European past?

This ahistorical mentality was also reinforced by the revivalism of the nineteenth century. If the spiritual experience of the New Testament church could be reduplicated through the agency of revival preaching, what more could the believer need? Why bother with the ancient creeds? This anti-creedal mentality found expres­sion in the work of frontier revivalist Barton Stone (1772-1844). Stone was ordained as a Presbyterian, but later rejected Calvinism and in 1804 established the Christian Church (“Disciples of Christ”) through his preaching in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The Disciples of Christ were associated with the slogan, “No creed but the Bible.” Eighteen hundred years of church history were of little or no value; Stone had rediscovered the true “New Testament church.”

There is undeniable value in reaffirming the theology and prac­tice of the New Testament as an essential element of church re­form. However, the problem in rejecting all church history and tradition is that the reflections of less gifted minds tend to be substituted for the wisdom of the spiritual and theological giants of the past. Evangelicals can affirm the primacy of scripture with­out implying that the Holy Spirit has taught nothing to the church over nineteen hundred years. A slogan such as “No creed but the Bible” does not really eliminate all church tradition; it merely sub­stitutes new traditions—those of the denominational leader and his followers—for older ones.13 Anti-creedal and anti-traditional attitudes can lead, theologically and ecclesiastically, to counter­productive efforts that merely “reinvent the wheel.”

Recent developments

There are signs that American evangelicalism is seeking a greater appreciation of the traditions and liturgies of the early church. In Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity, Robert E. Webber of Wheaton College argues that “a return to the historic church, to the great fathers of the first five centuries, is a return to evangelical foundations.”14 Evangelicalism is certainly rooted in the Refor­mation of the sixteenth century and the great revival movements of the nineteenth century, but Webber is urging his fellow evan­gelicals to rediscover their roots in the faith and life of the ancient church. He argues that evangelical understandings of the nature of the church, of worship, of spirituality, of mission, and of theo­logy can all be strengthened through a new study and appreci­ation of the patristic heritage.

In May of 1977 a group of some forty-five evangelical leaders met to draft a statement which came to be known as the “Chicago Call.” The results of this conference, together with explanatory essays, was published in 1978 in a volume titled The Orthodox Evangelicals, edited by Robert E. Webber and Donald Bloesch, which affirmed: “We believe that today evangelicals are hindered from achieving full maturity by a reduction of the historic faith.There isa pressing need to reflect upon the substance of the biblical and historic faith and to recover the fullness of their heri­tage.”15 The drafters of the statement sought to recall their fellow evangelicals to a greater sense of “historic roots and continuity,” “biblical fidelity,” “creedal identity,” “holistic salvation,” “sacramen­tal integrity,” “spirituality,” “church authority,” and “church unity.”

The new interest in the theological and liturgical heritage of the early church is not limited to evangelicals. Thomas C. Oden, a professor of theology at Drew University, has chronicled his own personal pilgrimage from theological liberalism back to “classical Christianity” in Agenda for Theology. Liberal theology’s fascination with and subservience to the “modern mind” has reached the end of its tether, Oden concludes. It has become intellectually barren and spiritually and pastorally unsatisfying. Consequently, it is time for liberal Protestantism in America to rediscover the resources of classical Christianity–“the ancient ecumenical consensus of Christianity’s first millennium, particularly as expressed in scrip­ture and in the Seven Ecumenical Councils affirmed by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions.” Oden’s aim is to “help free persons from feeling intimidated by modernity, which . . . is rap­idly losing its moral power, and to grasp the emerging vision of a postmodern Christian orthodoxy.”16

The new appreciation for the patristic heritage among evangel­icals (and those newly sympathetic to evangelicalism) is an encouraging sign in the life of American Protestantism. While the early church can hardly be considered a model of either theolog­ical or spiritual perfection, nevertheless the new interest in patristics offers evangelicals some much needed historical depth and perspective. The early fathers faced a challenge much like our own—preserving and extending the Christian faith in a declining social order permeated by a decadent humanism. As evangelicals attempt to “recontextualize” the faith to meet changing social con­ditions, and to reconstruct a new social order on biblical foun­dations, there is much to be learned from the fathers of the early church.

In a somewhat different context the work of Brevard Childs in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, also represents a renewed appreciation for the positive role of tradition in American Protestantism. Childs argues that Old Testament scholarship must take more seriously the canonical shape of the biblical text as it has actually been mediated through the life of the religious com­munities which have preserved it. The dominant tendency of older critical scholarship was to virtually bypass the canonical text as a literary whole in its own right in a search for the (hypothetical) sources and documents behind the text. On the contrary, Childs argues, where the actual text of the Old Testament is concerned, “One begins with the tradition and then seeks critically to under­stand it.”17 This emphasis has the value of recognizing the tradi­tional role that the text played in the life of Israel as a religious community; the Old Testament becomes more than merely a text studied in the abstraction of a modern academic setting. The shape of the canonical text, reflecting actual religious traditions, also provides helpful clues for understanding the thematic unity of scripture as over against the fragmenting approaches of nine­teenth-century scholarship.

Beyond the confines of biblical and theological scholarship there are signs of renewed interest in the role of tradition in the knowing process among twentieth-century philosophers. The German phi­losopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has recently issued sharp criti­cisms of the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition in a quest for secular, self-grounded certitude. This quest, Gadamer believes, has not been successful. In ‘Ruth and Method, widely read by biblical and theological scholars for its insights in the area of hermeneu­tics, Gadamer argues that tradition is in fact the “horizon” within which we do our thinking. The process of human understanding involves placing oneself “within a process of tradition in which past and present are constantly fused.”18 Tradition is the embod­iment of the linguistic and intellectual heritage of a culture; one can no more think without the influence of tradition than one can think without language.

Michael Polanyi has written that “all mental life by which we surpass the animals is evoked in us as we assimilate the articulate framework of our culture.”19 Or again, “Human thought grows only within language and since language can exist only in a society, all thought is rooted in society.”20 Polanyi is arguing that the precon­ditions of all human knowledge are found in the linguistic heritage of a culture, a heritage which is traditional in nature.

A similar point was made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Phil­osophical Investigations, when he stated that the linguistic prac­tices of a community become conditions through which we see the world.21 These observations by Gadamer, Polanyi, and Witt­genstein, based on new insights in the philosophy of language, help to correct the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition and to restore to its rightful place the role of the intellectual labors of the past in the knowledge and discoveries of the present.

Tradition in Roman Catholicism

Early positions

Tradition plays a more prominent and authoritative role in Ro­man Catholic theology than in evangelical Protestantism. At the Second Vatican Council it was stated that “it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the church draws her certainty about every­thing which has been revealed. … Both sacred tradition and sa­cred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence,” (Documents of Vatican H, p. 117).

This position, however, represents a long process of development in Roman Catholicism away from an earlier one in which scripture was granted clear primacy over all church tradition. Prior to the fourteenth century the church fathers and medieval theologians generally held that the Bible was the unique and sole source of divine revelation. Aquinas, for example, could state that “arguments from scripture are used properly and carry necessity in matters of faith; arguments from other doctors of the church are proper, but carry only probability; for our faith is based on the revelation given to the apostles and prophets who wrote the ca­nonical books of the scriptures and not on revelation that could have been made to other doctors” (Summa Theologica 1.1,8).

In late medieval theology, however, the theologians begin to speak of church tradition as that which authorizes scripture. Duns Scotus, for example, claimed that the “books of the holy canon are not to be believed except insofar as one must first believe the church which approves and authorizes those books and their con-tent.”22 This latter formulation represents a clear denial of what came to be known during the Reformation as the principle of the self-attesting authority and essential clarity of scripture.

Rent and later developments

In response to the challenge of the Reformers’ sofa scriptura principle the Roman Catholic position on tradition as it had de­veloped in the medieval church was officially formulated at the Council of Trent in 1546. “Following, then, the example of the orthodox Fathers,” the council declared, “it receives and venerates with the same piety and reverence all the books of both the Old and New Testaments—for God is the author of both—together with all traditions concerning faith and morals, for they came from the mouth of Christ or are inspired by the Holy Spirit and have been preserved in continuous succession in the Catholic Church” (Denz. 1501).

The position of Trent was reiterated by the First Vatican Council in 1870, called to bolster Catholicism against the challenge of mod­ernism. On the matter of revelation and tradition, this council declared that “this supernatural revelation, according to the uni­versal belief of the church, declared by the Sacred Synod of Trent, is contained in the written books and unwritten traditions which have come down to us” (Denz. 3006). Again, the reference to the “universal belief of the church” is an assertion that can hardly be sustained by careful historical examination of the patristic sources.

The Second Vatican Council (1963-65) attempted to soften the distinction between scripture and tradition as it had been devel­oped at Trent and at Vatican I. According to this most recent coun­cil, “Sacred tradition and sacred scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God. … Both . .. flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end” (Documents of Vatican II, p. 117).

Vatican II was faced with an intramural Catholic debate be­tween two opposing views of scripture and tradition, prompted by revisionist interpretations of the meaning of the Council of Trent.23 The “two-source” view held that Trent had really under­stood scripture and tradition as separate and independent sources of revelation; the “one-source” view held that scripture alone, as interpreted by the church’s tradition, was the sole source of rev­elation, and that this view had been the real intention of Trent. As Wells has pointed out, the revisionist “one-source” interpretation of Trent lacks credibility in that it is in fact quite new. For three centuries after Trent, Roman Catholics understood that council to support a two-source view. This seemed especially clear during the nineteenth century.24 Vatican II did not resolve the debate but left the precise relationship between scripture and tradition some­what open. It did, however, wish to claim both as forms of divine revelation.

Some recent Roman Catholic scholars—e.g., Karl Rahner (The Vatican Council) and Hans Kling (Justification) —have spoken of the Bible as the “primary” and “unique” source of revelation. While such expressions may signify a greater appreciation of the Refor­mational sola scriptura principle, their critical views of scripture and appeals to “church consciousness” as a source of theological authority prevent any simple identification of their views with those of the Reformers.

Characteristic Roman Catholic traditions

Three Roman Catholic traditions in particular are held to be divinely revealed doctrines essential for salvation and represent special obstacles for Protestant-Catholic relations: the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; the dogma of papal infallibility; and the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. All three dogmas lack credible biblical and his­torical support.

The way for the proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception in 1854 by Pius IX had been prepared years earlier. In an encyclical letter to the Roman Catholic bishops of February 2, 1849, Pius IX had expressed his own zealous veneration of Mary: “You know full well, venerable brethren, that the whole ground of our confidence is placed in the most holy Virgin, since God has vested in her the plenitude of all good, so that henceforth, if there be in us any hope, if there be any grace, if there be any salvation, we must receive it solely from her, according to the will of him who would have us possess all through Mary.”25

Pius IX officially proclaimed the dogma on December 8, 1854, at St. Peter’s in Rome, with over two hundred cardinals, bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries present, declaring it to be a divinely revealed dogma, to be firmly believed by all the faithful on penalty of excommunication, “that the most blessed Virgin Mary, in the first moment of her conception, by a special grace and privilege of Almighty God, in virtue of the merits of Christ, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin.” Schaff describes the response of those present at the papal proclamation: “The shouts of the assembled multitude, the cannons of St. Angelo, the chimes of all the bells, the illumination of St. Peter’s dome, the splendor of gorgeous feasts, responded to the decree. Rome was intoxicated with . . . enthusiasm, and the whole Roman Catholic world thrilled with joy over the crowning glory of the immaculate queen of heaven, who would now be more gracious and powerful in her intercession than ever, and shower the richest blessings upon the Pope and his church.”26

For biblical support of the dogma Roman Catholic apologists cite Gen. 3:15; Song of Sol. 4:7; 12; and Luke 1:28, but none of these texts will bear the weight that is placed upon them. The citation of Gen. 3:15 from the Vulgate (“she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt assail her heel”) is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew, which makes the reference masculine, not feminine. In the Catholic misinterpretation, which refers the “she” to Mary, it is argued that the enmity between Mary and Satan is an eternal one, which would not be the case if she had ever been subject to original sin. Poetic descriptions of the fair and spotless bride (Song of Sol. 4:7) and references to the “garden enclosed, and fountain sealed” are fancifully applied to Mary. The Vulgate of Luke 1:28, “Hail [Mary], full of grace,” is said to imply her immaculate conception. Schaff’s comment on this type of biblical interpretation is apt: “frivolous allegorical trifling with the Word of God.”27 The dogma is explicitly contradicted by texts such as Rom. 5:12, 18; 1 Cor. 15:22; and Eph. 2:3, which include all in original sin except Christ.

The dogma’s rootage in ancient tradition is equally weak. Au­gustine, who surprisingly believed that Mary was free from actual sin, did not believe that she was conceived without original sin. The heretic Pelagius was apparently the first to espouse the doc­trine. It was opposed by Bernard of Clairvaux, Anselm of Can­terbury, Bonaventure, Aquinas,28 the popes Leo I, Gregory I Innocent III, Gelasius I, Innocent V, and Clement VI.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the dogma was ad­vocated by Duns Scotus, the “subtle doctor.” During the medieval period the belief became common in the church that though Mary was conceived in sin, she was sanctified in the womb like John the Baptist, and thus prepared to be a pure receptacle for the Son of God. Others, however, held the view that Mary was fully sanc­tified only when she conceived Christ by the Holy Spirit, not at the time of her own conception.

After the fourteenth century the question of Mary’s relation to original sin became a point of controversy between Thomists and Scotists, and between Dominicans and Franciscans, the various parties charging one another with heresy. Schaff notes that four members of the Dominican order, “who were discovered in a pious fraud against the Franciscan doctrine, were burned [at the stake] by order of a papal court in Rome on the eve of the Reformation. The Swedish prophetess, St. Birgitte, was assured in a vision by the Mother of God that she was conceived without sin; while St. Catherine of Siena prophesied for the Dominicans that Mary was sanctified in the third hour after her conception.”29

Needless to say, such accounts do not bolster confidence in the credibility of the dogma of the immaculate conception. A candid examination of the exegetical and historical data reveals the in­adequacy of their claims.

The doctrine of papal infallibility, also proclaimed by Pius IX, was officially defined on July 18, 1870, at the climax of the First Vatican Council, meeting at the Vatican in Rome. The dogma as­serted that the Roman pontiff, when speaking from his chair (X cathedra) on faith and morals, is infallible, and that such defini­tions are irreformable and not in consequence of the consent of the church. The pope on his own authority claimed the authority to define new and binding articles of faith, apart from either scrip­ture or general council.

The arrangements for the Vatican Council had been carefully orchestrated by Pius IX to secure a vote in favor of infallibility. The pope had selected the committee members responsible for pre­paring the draft reports in such a way as to secure the pre­ponderance of infallibilist sentiment. A revised order of business issued February 22, 1870, changed the traditional procedure re­quiring absolute or at least moral unanimity in definitions of faith and substituted for it a new rule requiring a mere numerical ma­jority. The ancient rule of catholic tradition (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est) was abandoned in order to secure a positive vote for infallibility despite the objections of a powerful minority. The pope also sought to control public opinion in Rome. Nothing was allowed to be printed in Rome during the council which opposed infallibility, while the proponents of the proposed dogma were given the full freedom to publish whatever they wished.

When Bishop Strossmayer, one of the most outspoken members of the opposition, during one of the debates criticized the prin­ciple of deciding matters of faith by mere majority votes, he was loudly interrupted by shouts from all sides of “Shame! Shame! Down with the heretic!” Other bishops leaped from their seats, rushed to the speaker’s platform, and shook their fists in Strossmayer’s face. The bishop was forced by the uproar to leave the platform.30

In a preliminary vote on infallibility eighty-eight bishops voted in the negative, including many distinguished for their learning and scholarship. Later, fifty-six of these and sixty others left Rome before the final vote was taken, rather than oppose Pius IX. As a result, when the final vote was taken on July 18, 1870, the new dogma of infallibility received an overwhelming vote of 533-2.

The procedural chicanery resorted to at the First Vatican Coun­cil reflects the intrinsic weakness of the arguments in favor of papal infallibility. The dogma is supported by the evidence of nei­ther scripture nor tradition. The evidence of church tradition and history is decidedly embarrassing to the dogma. The four great ecumenical creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Chalcedonian, Athanasian) and the ecumenical councils of the first eight centuries have no references whatever to papal infallibility. In terms of the canon of true catholicity, “that which always, everywhere, and by all has been believed,” this lack of evidence alone is a decisive strike against the doctrine.

One of the most damaging pieces of historical evidence, how­ever, involves the famous case of Pope Honorius I (625 — 638), who was later officially condemned for teaching heresy by an ecumen­ical council. As Schaff has pointed out,31 Honorius, in two letters to his heretical colleague Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, taught ex cathedra the Monothelite heresy, which was condemned by the sixth ecumenical council in 680.32 This council was rec­ognized as valid by both the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) branches of the church. The council condemned and excommun­icated Honorius as a heretic, and the seventh (787) and eighth (869) ecumenical councils repeated the anathemas of the sixth.

Subsequent popes down to the eleventh century, in a solemn oath upon their accession to the office, endorsed the canons of the sixth ecumenical council and pronounced an anathema on the authors of the Monothelite heresy together with Pope Honorius, who had aided and abetted the doctrine. The Roman Cath­olic popes themselves for more than three hundred years publicly recognized the facts that an ecumenical council may condemn a pope for heresy and that Pope Honorius was actually and right­fully so condemned.

Schaff remarks that the case of Honorius is “as clear and strong as any fact in church history.”33 Attempts by infallibilists to claim that the records of the councils or the letters of Honorius are forgeries are simply desperate expedients, without historical cred­ibility, to avoid the weight of the damaging evidence. The decisive fact remains, states Schaff, “that both Councils and Popes for sev­eral hundred years believed in the fallibility of the Pope, in flat contradiction to the Vatican Council.”34

The doctrine of papal infallibility is also discredited by the fact that forged documents were used during the Middle Ages to ad­vance the interests and power of the papacy. The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, supposedly compiled by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), are now recognized to contain forged materials. The decretals contain letters of ante-Nicene popes, all forgeries; canons of councils, mostly genuine; letters from later popes, thirty-five of which are forgeries. The decretals were intended to help free the bishops from the authority of the secular powers and to exalt the papacy. These documents, unknown before 852, contain obvious historical anachronisms, such as the use of the Vulgate in the decretals of the earliest popes. The obviousness of these historical errors has led even Roman Catholic scholars to acknowledge their spurious nature.

The so-called “Donation of Constantine” was also used to ad­vance the claims of the papacy. This document, which was fabri­cated during the eighth or ninth century, probably in the Frankish empire, had a wide influence during the Middle Ages. According to this forgery, the Emperor Constantine supposedly conferred on Pope Sylvester I (314 — 335) primacy over the churches of Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, and dominion over all Italy, including Rome. The Donation made the pope supreme judge of all clergy. The document was apparently first used to support papal claims in 1054 by Leo IX, and was thereafter consistently used by his successors. The Renaissance scholars Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla demonstrated its falsity during the fifteenth century.

The biblical texts cited in support of papal infallibility are as unimpressive as the evidence of church history and tradition. Most commonly cited are Matt. 16:18 (“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”); Luke 22:32 (“I have prayed for thee, that thy faith may not fail”—paraph. of luv); John 21:15 —17 (“Feed my lambs…. Feed my sheep”). Of these, Matt. 16:18 is the most important.

With respect to Matt. 16:18, Protestants have seen the “rock” as Peter’s confession and ultimately as Christ himself. Peter acknowl­edges Christ as the “rock” or “stone”: “Come to him, that living stone” (1 Peter 2:4); cf. Eph. 2:20, the household of God “built upon the foundation of the prophets and the apostles [Peter not unique], Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.”

In Matt. 16:19 Christ says to Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Note, however, that the “power of the keys” is given to all the apostles, not just Peter, according to John 20:22-23: “He breathed on them, and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” And according to Matt. 18:17-18 the power of excommunication is exercised by the church as a whole, not by a single individual.

While Peter was certainly eminent as a leader in the early church, Matt. 16:18 and the related texts teach neither Peter’s infallibility nor Christ’s intention to establish a succession of infallible teach­ers. Significantly, when the comments of the church fathers on Matt. 16:18 are examined, it is striking that not one finds papal infallibility in the passage. Sixteen take the reference to the “rock” to mean Christ; forty-four, including Chrysostom, Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine, understand the “rock” to refer to Peter’s faith or confession. The “unanimous consent of the fathers”—a hermeneutical norm for Roman Catholicism in matters of inter­pretation—is on this point simply nonexistent.

It is claimed that the popes, as the successors of Peter, are the true successors of the apostles. The “apostolic successors” of today, however, lack the essential qualifications of a true apostle, as specified in the New Testament. One must have been a witness to the resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 9:1, “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”; cf. Acts 1:21-22). A true apostle pos­sesses the power of performing miracles (2 Cor. 12:12; Rom. 15:18-19). The popes lack both qualifications.

The final Roman Catholic doctrinal tradition to be considered here is the dogma of the assumption of Mary into heaven. Pope Pius XII, on November 1, 1950, solemnly described what was be­lieved to be the crowning event of the Virgin’s life. In the papal proclamation Munificentissimus Deus the pope defined it to be an article of the Roman faith that the “immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” The language here teaches the perpetual virginity of Mary as well.

Belief in the assumption of Mary is reflected in apocryphal tra­ditions dating from about 400. The legend of the assumption was accepted as true by Pseudo-Dionysius and by Gregory the Great. Gregory relates the account thus: The apostles were assembled in the house of Mary to watch at her deathbed; Jesus appeared with the angels, received her soul, and gave it to the archangel Michael. On the following day the apostles were about to carry the body to the grave; Jesus again appeared and took Mary’s body up in a cloud into heaven, there to be reunited with her soul. John of Damascus relates the legend in yet a more elaborate form: Not only the angels but the patriarchs were present with the apostles at the deathbed; even Adam and Eve were there, blessing Mary for removing the curse which through them came upon the world.

As Hanson has observed, if the dogma involves belief in a his­torical fact, “it is a fact wholly unknown to the writers of the second and third centuries.”35 In other words, the dogma’s his­torical claims to be apostolic are nonexistent.

About the year 600 the emperor Maurice ordered the feast of the assumption to be celebrated in the Eastern church, fixing the date as August 15. About the same time Gregory the Great fixed the same date for the Latin church, where previously it had been celebrated on January 18.

At the First Vatican Council over two hundred bishops expressed a desire for a papal decree making the assumption an article of Roman faith. This desire was finally granted eighty years later by the pronouncement of Piux XII.

As to the possible biblical basis for this dogma, one Catholic scholar has admitted that there “is no explicit reference to the Assumption in the Bible.”36 Attempts have been made to relate the assumption to the doctrine of the resurrection, where sin and the sting of death are overcome in the victory of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:53-57). Mary, being free from sin, presumably “anticipated” the final resurrection victory of all believers in her assumption into heaven. Referring to Luke 1:28, “Hail [Mary], full of grace,” Pius IX suggested that the fullness of grace bestowed upon the Virgin was only finally achieved by her assumption. Perhaps Rev. 12:1, the description of the great sign in the heavens, a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and head crowned with twelve stars, has some reference to Mary as well as to the church. Mary as the “New Eve” in some sense shared in the re­demptive mission of Christ. “Christian intuition, guided by the Holy Spirit,” writes Langlinais, “gradually came to see that Mary’s share in Christ’s victory over sin began with her conception in a state free from all sin (the state in which Eve was created), and ended with her miraculous Assumption (an immunity from death and corruption which Eve enjoyed until the Fall).”37

Such references to the biblical data can have no claim to be recognized as serious historical-grammatical exegesis. “Christian intuition”—in this case, the vagaries of grass-roots piety—has led away from the teachings of the New Testament, obscured the su­premacy and uniqueness of the redemptive work of Christ, con­fused legend with historical fact, and placed the most serious obstacles in the path of Roman Catholic—Protestant relations. Evangelicals can learn much from a tradition of the patristic church, but can in no way compromise, in matters of doctrinal authority, the sola scriptura principle of the Protestant Reforma­tion. The Bible, and the Bible alone, must remain the final written authority for Christian faith and practice.

FOOTNOTES

  1. F.F. Bruce, Tradition Old and New, p. 168.
  2. Loserth, “Wyclif, John,” p. 463.
  3. E.g., it is interesting to note that the church father most frequently cited by Calvin in the Institutes is Augustine, the great exponent of divine grace and predestination.
  4. Recall the comments made in relation to James Smart’s The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church in Chapter 6.
  5. Priscilla Whitehead and Tom McAlpine, “Evangelical/Liberal Theology—a False Dichotomy?” p. 10.
  6. In the Harvard dialogue (1981) Kaufman prefaced his remarks by saying, “I am just speaking for myself.” This is indeed the Achilles’ heel of Protestant modernism: it speaks not by the authority of the Bible or tradition; it speaks merely “for itself.”
  7. Sidney E. Mead, “Protestantism in America,” p. 293.
  8. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. IV, p.428.
  9. Ably pointed out by F. F. Bruce in Tradition Old and New.
  10. Robert E. Webber, Common Roots, p.22.
  11. Robert E. Webber and Donald Bloesch, eds., The Orthodox Evangelicals, 11.
  12. Thomas C. Oden, Agenda for Theology, xii.
  13. Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, 101.
  14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Puth and Method, 258.
  15. Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, 31.
  16. Ibid., p.60.
  17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 116.
  18. Donald G. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, I, p. 57.
  19. See G. C. Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 89 —111; A. N. S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey”
  20. David F. Wells, “Tradition,” p. 59.
  21. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, I, pp.108-9.
  22. Ibid., p.110.
  23. Ibid., p.115.
  24. Aquinas, however, did believe that Mary, like John the Baptist, was sanctified in the womb after the infusion of the soul.
  25. Schaff, Creeds, 1:124.
  26. Ibid., p.145, n.2.
  27. Ibid., pp. 178-80.
  28. The Monothelites held that Christ had only one will, the divine. The orthodox position is that Christ had two wills, a human and a divine—will being an attribute of the nature rather than of the person. The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, pos­sessed a divine will; Christ, possessing a fully human nature, also possessed a human will. The Monothelite heresy thus denied the full and true humanity of the Savior. If in the incarnation the Logos did not assume a full human nature, then the comprehen­siveness of the redemption of human nature has been compromised.
  29. Schaff, Creeds, 1:179.
  30. Ibid., 1:180.
  31. Hanson, Tradition, 238.
  32. W. Langlinais, “Assumption of Mary,” p. 972.
  33. Ibid., pp. 972-73.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkouwer, G. C. The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, tr. L. Smedes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

Bloesch, Donald G. Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I. San Francisco: Har­per, 1978.

Bruce, F. F. Tradition Old and New. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970.

Childs, Brevard. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Muth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward, 1975.

Gallup, George, Jr., and Poling, David. The Search for America’s Faith. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980.

Hanson, R. P. C. Tradition in the Early Church. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962. Kiing, Hans. Justification. New York: Nelson, 1964.

Lane, A. N. S. “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey,” Vox Evan-gelica 9 (1975):37-55.

Langlinais, J. W. “Assumption of Mary,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. IV. New York: Harper, 1941.

Leith, John H., ed. Creeds of the Churches. Richmond: John Knox, 1973.

Loserth, J. “Wyclif, John,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1912.

Mead, Sidney E. “Protestantism in America,” Church History 23 (1954):291-320.

Oden, Thomas C. Agenda for Theology. San Francisco: Harper, 1979.

Polanyi, Michael. The Study of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Rushdoony, R. J. Infallibility: An Inescapable Concept. Vallecito, Calif.: Ross House, 1978.

Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. I. New York: Harper, 1877. Thiselton, Anthony C. The TWo Horizons. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980.

Webber, Robert E. Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.

Webber, Robert E., and Bloesch, Donald, eds. The Orthodox Evangelicals. Nash­ville: Thomas Nelson, 1978.

Wegenast, K. “παραδίδωμι,” New International Dictionary of New Testament Theo­logy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978. III, 772-75. (I added the PDF of this entire note for the Greek minded researcher)

Wells, David E “Tradition: A Meeting Place for Catholic and Evangelical Theol­ogy?” Christian Scholar’s Review 5 :(1975):50-61 .

Whitehead, Priscilla, and McAlpine, Tom. “EvangelicaVLiberal Theology—a False Dichotomy?” TSF Bulletin, Mar/Apr., 1982, pp. 8-11.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Zockler, 0. “Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910.

Okay, here is the Zacharias Ursinus quote from footnote #176


Zacharias Ursinus and G. W. Williard,
The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism
(Cincinnati, OH: Elm Street Printing Company, 1888), 117–118.


exposition

The term symbol or creed (symbolum) signifies in general a sign or mark by which one person or thing is distinguished from another, as a military symbol is a sign which distinguishes allies from enemies. The German has it: ein Feldzeichen, oder Losung. Or, it (symbola) signifies a collation or bringing together, as to a feast—zufammen schiessen. In the sense of the church, it signifies a brief and summary form of christian faith, which distinguishes the church and her members from all the various sects. There are those who suppose that this summary of our christian faith, as just recited, is called a symbol, or creed, because it was collated or formed by the Apostles, each one furnishing a certain portion of it. This, however, cannot be proven. It is more probable that it was so called because these articles constitute a certain form or rule with which the faith of all orthodox christians should agree and conform. It is called apostolic, because it contains the substance of the doctrine of the Apostles, which the catechumens were required to believe and profess; or because the Apostles delivered this sum of christian doctrine to their disciples, and the church afterwards received it from them. It is called Catholic, because it is the one faith of all christians.

We must here inquire, Why were other creeds, as the Nicene, the Athanasian, the Ephesian, and Chalcedonian, formed and received in the church after the Apostles’ creed? To this we would reply, that these are not properly other creeds differing in substance from the Apostles’ creed, but are merely a repetition and clearer enunciation of its meaning, in which some words are added, by way of explanation, on account of heretics, who took advantage of its brevity, and corrupted it. There is, therefore, no change as it respects the matter or substance of the Apostles’ creed in those of a later date, but merely a difference in the form in which the doctrines are expressed.

There are other weighty reasons which may have led and compelled the Bishops and teachers of the ancient church to form and construct these brief formulas of confession, especially when churches were multiplying, and heresies were springing up in different places. Among these reasons we may mention the following: 1. That all the young, as well as those of riper years, might be able to remember the chief points of christian doctrine, as thus briefly summed up and expressed. 2. That all might constantly have before their eyes the confession and comfort of their faith, knowing what the doctrine was on account of which they were called to suffer persecution. It was in this way that God formerly had the substance of the law and promises expressed and comprehended in a brief form, so that all might have a certain rule of life and ground of comfort continually in view. 3. That the faithful might have a certain badge or mark by which they might then and in all future ages be distinguished from unbelievers and heretics, who cunningly corrupt the writings of the Prophets and Apostles. This was also a reason on account of which those confessions were called creeds or symbols. 4. That there might be extant some perpetual rule, short, simple, and easily understood by all, according to which every doctrine and interpretation of Scripture might be tried, that they might be embraced and believed when agreeing therewith, and rejected when differing from it.

But although other confessions were formed, the Apostles’ creed greatly surpasses all others in importance and authority, and that for the following reasons: 1. Because almost the whole of it is expressed in the very language of the Scriptures. 2. Because it is of the greatest antiquity, and was first delivered to the church by apostolic men, either by the Apostles themselves, or by their disciples and hearers, and has been regularly transmitted down to the present time. 3. Because it is the basis and type of all the other creeds which have been formed by the consent of the whole church, and approved of by general synods, for the purpose of preventing and refuting the perversions and corruptions of heretics, by explaining more fully the meaning of the Apostles’ creed.

The truth of the other creeds, however, does not consist in the authority or in the decrees of men, or of councils, but in their perpetual agreement with the holy Scriptures, and with the teachings of the whole church from the time of the Apostles, retaining and holding fast to the doctrine which they delivered, and at the same time giving testimony to posterity that they have received this doctrine from the Apostles and those that heard them, which agreement is obvious to all those who will but give the subject a careful consideration. The power to give new laws concerning the worship of God, or to give new articles of faith binding the conscience, belongs to no assembly of men or of angels, but to God alone. We are not to believe God on account of the testimony of the church, but the church upon the testimony of God.

The Bible’s Influence on Music

Martin Luther believed that music was second only to Scripture in its ability to elevate the soul. In this brief clip, R.C. Sproul, W. Robert Godfrey, Steven Lawson, and Stephen Nichols discuss some of Luther’s most famous and heartfelt hymns.

The below is from Vishal Mangalwadi’s book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, chapter one:


Chapter One

The West Without Its Soul
From Bach To Cobain

For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the
branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than
anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came.
But unfortunately there had been a little mistake: The thing at the
bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed
wire . . . It appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple
surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency
to go septic.

—George Orwell, Notes on the Way, 1940


On April 8, 1994, an electrician accidentally discovered a dead body in Seattle, Washington. A shotgun had blown the victim’s head into unrecognizable bits. The police investigation concluded that the victim of this ghastly tragedy was the rock legend Kurt Cobain (b. 1967) and that he had committed suicide a few days earlier. Cobain’s previous attempts at suicide by drug overdose had been unsuccessful. His beautiful wife, singer Courtney Love, is said to have called the police multiple times to have them confiscate his guns before he killed himself or harmed others.

Cobain, the lead singer and gifted guitarist for the rock band Nirvana, captured his generation’s loss of anchor, center, or soul so effectively that their album Nevermind sold ten million copies, displacing Michael Jackson at the top of the charts.

The phrase “never mind” means “don’t bother,” “don’t concern yourself.” Why should you mind, if nothing is true, good, or beautiful in any absolute sense? Should a man be bothered about his adorable daughter’s ongoing need for a father? “Never mind” is a logical virtue for a nihilist who thinks that there is nothing out there to give meaning and significance to anything here —be it your daughter, wife, or life. In contrast, the modern West was built by people who dedicated their lives to what they believed was divine, true, and noble.

Nirvana is the Buddhist term for salvation. It means permanent extinction of one’s individual existence, the dissolution of our illusory individuality into Shoonyta (void, nothingness, or emptiness). It is freedom from our misery-causing illusion that we have a permanent core to our being: a self, soul, spirit, or Atman.

Here is a sample lyric expressing Cobain’s view of salvation as silence, death, and extinction:

Silence, Here I am, Here I am, Silent.

Death Is what I am, Go to hell, Go to jail . . .

Die[1]

As the news of Cobain’s suicide spread, a number of his fans emulated his example. Rolling Stone magazine reported that his tragic death was followed by at least sixty-eight copycat suicides.[2]

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” The Stanford students of the 1960s who chanted for the demise of the Western civilization were disgusted with hypocrisy and injustices in the West. Yet, their rejection of the soul of their civilization yielded something very different from the utopia they sought. Diana Grains, in Rolling Stone, noted that prior to the 1960s, teenage suicide was virtually nonexistent among American youth. By 1980 almost four hundred thousand adolescents were attempting suicide every year. By 1987 suicide had become the second largest killer of teens, after automotive accidents. By the 1990s, suicide had slipped down to number three because young people were killing each other as often as they killed themselves. Grains explained these rising figures among the offspring of the ’60s generation:

The 1980s offered young people an experience of unsurpassed social violence and humiliation. Traumatized by absent or abusive parents, educators, police and shrinks, stuck in meaningless jobs without a livable wage, disoriented by disintegrating institutions, many kids felt trapped in a cycle of futility and despair. Adults . . . [messed]-up across the board, abandoning an entire generation by failing to provide for or protect them or prepare them for independent living. Yet when young people began to exhibit symptoms of neglect, reflected in their rates of suicide, homicide, substance abuse, school failure, recklessness and general misery, adults condemned them as apathetic, illiterate, amoral losers.[3]

According to his biographers, Cobain’s early years had been happy, full of affection and hope. But by the time he was nine years old Cobain was caught in the crossfire between his divorcing parents. Like far too many marriages in America, his parents’ marriage had devolved into an emotional and verbal battlefield. One of Cobain’s biographers, commenting on a family portrait when Kurt was six, said, “It’s a picture of a family, but not a picture of a marriage.”[4] After the divorce, Kurt’s mother started dating younger men. His father became overbearing, more afraid of losing his new wife than of losing Kurt. That parental rejection left him displaced, unable to find a stable social center, incapable of maintaining constructive emotional ties either with his peers or with his parents’ generation. That instability inflicted a deep wound in Cobain’s soul that could not be healed by music, fame, money, sex, drugs, alcohol, therapy, rehabilitation or detox programs. His inner anguish made it easy for him to accept the Buddha’s first noble truth that life is suffering.

Psychotherapy failed Cobain. Having questioned the very existence of the psyche (roughly, the self or soul), secular psychology is now a discipline in decline. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed in the existence of self,[5] but their followers now recognize that their faith in “self” was a residual effect of the West’s Christian past—Jung’s father, for example, was a clergyman.

Jung’s truly secular followers, such as James Hillman, are recasting the essence of his theory. An increasing number of thinking people are recognizing that theoretically it is impossible to practice psychology without theology. Six centuries before Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either. Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one’s psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one’s being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman).

You don’t exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence.

This nihilism is logical if you begin with the assumption that God does not exist. However, it is not easy to live with the consequences of this belief, or rather, this nonbelief in one’s own self. To say “I believe that ‘I’ don’t exist” can be devastating for sensitive souls like Cobain. His music—alternately sensitive and brash, exhilarating and depressed, loud and haunted, anarchic and vengeful—reflected the confusion he saw in the postmodern world around him and in his own being. While he was committed to a small set of moral principles (such as environmentalism and fatherhood), he was unable to find a stable worldview in which to center those principles.

He was naturally drawn to the Buddha’s doctrine of impermanence: there is nothing stable and permanent in the universe. You can’t swim in the same river twice because the river changes every moment, as does a human being. You are not the same “thing” that you were a moment ago. Cobain’s experience of the impermanence of an emotional, social, spiritual center to his life had tragic consequences. He adopted the philosophical and moral emptiness that other bands lauded as the “Highway to Hell.”[6]

MUSIC AFTER GOD’S DEATH

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (AD 1844–1900) realized that having killed God, Europe could not possibly save the civilizational fruits of its faith in God. But not even Nietzsche realized that one philosophical implication of God’s demise would be the death of his own self. For fifteen hundred years prior to Nietzsche, the West had followed St. Augustine (AD 354–430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence (being), intellect, and will. After denying the existence of the Divine Self, it became impossible to affirm the existence of the human self. Therefore, many intellectuals are reverting to the Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion. As contemporary Jungian psychologist Paul Kuglar explained, in the postmodern philosophy, Nietzsche (the speaking subject) is dead—he never existed, for individuality is only an illusion created by language.[7]

Deconstructionists blame language for creating the illusion of the self, but the Buddha blamed the mind. It cannot be God’s image. Therefore, the mind had to be a product of primeval cosmic ignorance, Avidya. The Buddha’s rejection of the self made sense to the classical skeptics such as Pyrrho of Elea (360–270 BC), who traveled to India with Alexander the Great and interacted with Buddhist philosophers. After returning to Greece, he established a new school of skeptical philosophy to teach that nothing is truly knowable. If so, why should anyone pay philosophers to teach anything? No wonder education, philosophy, and science declined in Greece.

Denying the reality of a spiritual core as the essence of every human being makes it hard to make sense of music, because music, like morality, is a matter of the soul. Those who think that the universe is only material substance and the soul is an illusion find it hard to explain music. They have to assume that music evolved from animals, but none of our alleged evolutionary cousins make music. (Some birds do “sing,” but no one has proposed that we, or our music, evolved from them.) Charles Darwin thought that music evolved as an aid to mating. That might be believed if rapists took bands to lure their victims. By evolutionary psychology, rape could be seen as a natural form of mating and morality an arbitrary social control.

Music serves no biological purpose. As Bono, the lead singer for U2 put it, “music is a matter of the spirit.” Some contemporary music moves toward God—for example, Gospel Music. Other genres—for example, the Blues— may be running away from God and seeking redemption elsewhere. Nevertheless “both recognize the pivot that God is at the center of the jaunt.”[8] Even in the Bible, all prophetic poetry is not singing praises to God. Beginning with Job, biblical poetry includes penetrating questioning of God in the face of suffering and injustice. Music that blames God for evil, affirms God as the only available source of meaning and our right to pass moral judgment.

The Buddhist skepticism that Pyrrho brought to Europe is logical and powerful. The West escaped its paralyzing influence only because thinkers such as St. Augustine succeeded in refuting it. Augustine affirmed the certainty of the human self because the Bible taught that God existed and had created man in his own image. Augustine also affirmed the validity of words. He believed language can communicate truth because communication is intrinsic to the triune God and man is made in the image of a God who communicates. Now, having rejected those biblical foundations, the West has no basis for escaping the Buddha’s radical pessimism.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—his inner chaos, Cobain remained so popular that in 2008 the music industry ranked him as the number one “Dead Artist.” His albums outsold Elvis Presley’s. Years after his death, in 2002 his widow was able to sell the scraps and scribbles in his journals to Riverhead Books for (reportedly) four million dollars. Two decades ago, a publisher anywhere in the world would have rejected his notes as meaningless, misspelled graffiti. At the dawn of the twenty-first century in America, cultural gatekeepers rightly recognize that Cobain represents America’s soullessness better than most celebrities. In a sample of relatively meaningful meaninglessness, he wrote:

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs. (But my Body And mind won’t allow me to take them.) I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. I like vinyl. I like feeling guilty for being a white, American male. I love to sleep. I like to taunt small, barking dogs in parked cars. I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance. I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity . . . I like to complain and do nothing to make things better.[9]

I have seen entries similar to Cobain’s journals and lyrics in students’ private diaries in art exhibitions in American colleges. Prior to Cobain, in the 1960s and ’70s, countercultural students at these colleges believed they were on the cusp of inaugurating utopia. By Cobain’s time they knew that nihilism leads only to escapism. Steven Blush studied the music of the early 1980s that directly preceded Cobain both chronologically and stylistically. Popularly it is called “hardcore,” a genre marked by its brashness and intentional existence outside the mainstream. He concluded:

Hardcore was more than music—it became a political and social movement as well. The participants constituted a tribe unto themselves. Some of them were alienated or abused, and found escape in the hard-edged music. Some sought a better world or a tearing down of the status quo, and were angry. Most of them simply wanted to raise hell. Stark and uncompromising . . . Lots of [messed]up kids “found themselves” through hardcore . . . the aesthetic was intangible. Most bands couldn’t really play that well, and their songs usually lacked craft. They expended little effort achieving prevailing production standards. However, they had IT—an infectious blend of ultra-fast music, thought provoking lyrics, and f[orget]-you attitude.[10]

The postmodern “rebels without a cause” were Living in a world of my own.[11]

Cobain’s music appealed to contemporary America because it was a full-throated disharmony of rage, anguish, hatred, despair, meaninglessness, and obscenity. His song titles included “I Hate Myself, I Want to Die” and “Rape Me” (later changed to “Waife Me”). Most of what Cobain sang cannot be deciphered, and many of his lyrics that can be deciphered have no apparent meaning. Whether he knew it or not, his lyrics were Zen koans, counter-rational sayings such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Such words do not make sense because (in the absence of revelation) reality itself makes no sense. Words are merely mantras—sounds without sense—to be chanted or shouted.

Cobain committed suicide because Nothingness as the ultimate reality does nothing positive. It cannot provide joy to the world, let alone meaning or hope for the mess in one’s life. Its only consequence is to inspire people to seek an exit from the world—Nirvana. A culture of music does not flourish in the soil of nihilism. Cobain’s gift as a musician blossomed because he had inherited a unique tradition of music.

Music seems a natural, perhaps even essential, part of life to the Western mind because it has been an integral part of traditional worship and education. For example, Oxford and Cambridge universities have played pivotal roles in shaping the second millennium. However, a person who has never visited these cities may not know that they are cities of churches and chapels. The chapel is the most important building in traditional colleges and a pipe organ is often the centerpiece of a chapel. That is not the case in every culture.

Turkmenistan is the latest country to put restrictions on music: on state holidays, in broadcasts by television channels, at cultural events organized by the state, in places of mass assembly, and at weddings and celebrations organized by the public.[12] Nations such as Saudi Arabia have had restrictions on music for a long time. In Iran and Afghanistan, women cannot sing on the radio, let alone on television or in person before mixed audiences. In post-Saddam Iraq, radical Muslims have assassinated sellers of music CDs. Mosques do not have keyboards, organs, pianos, orchestras, or worship bands because according to traditional Islam, music is haraam or illegitimate. [The idea that music is “haraam” or is illegitimate is based on Qur’an 17.64, 31.6, and 53.59–62. Historically, Islamic theologians working in the tradition of Qur’anic interpretation developed by Ibn Masood, Ibn Abbas, and Jaabir after the death of Prophet Muhammad have interpreted these passages as condemning all music. Other modern interpreters contend that the Qur’an does not ban music.]

These cultures see Western music as inextricably mixed with immoral debauchery. For them, musicians such as Kurt Cobain are undesirable role models. Indeed, on the cover of his album Nevermind, Cobain brazenly depicted the values he lived by: an infant with a long penis underwater reaching out to a dollar bill on a fishhook. On the back cover, Cobain’s mascot, a chipmunk, sits on a vagina. Open debauchery was a part of “pagan” music until the Bible extricated music from it by recentering the locus of the music to God.

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit . . . Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.[13]

Buddhist monks in Asia developed sophisticated philosophies, psychology, rituals, and psycho-technologies to try to escape life and its sufferings. They perfected techniques such as Vipasana [Yoga attempts to control breathing in its quest to realize self. Vipasana observes breathing as a means of silencing one’s mind to experience that there is no self or soul inside us but only Nothingness, Emptiness, Void, Shoonyta or Selflessness] to silence not just their tongues but also their thoughts. Buddhism originated in India and prior to its disappearance enjoyed powerful political patronage for centuries. It built such massive monasteries that Buddhist art is a cherished aspect of our national heritage. Yet, Buddhism left no discernible musical tradition or instrument in India. No Buddhist monk started a band such as Nirvana, because in Buddhism salvation is not a heaven filled with music.[14] As a pessimistic philosophy of silence it could not produce music of hope and joy. Buddhism could not celebrate existence because it saw suffering as the essence of life. Some forms of modern Buddhism have embraced music, partially because of the efforts of Western converts, such as Kurt Cobain, who grafted the Western tradition of religious music into the Buddhist faith.

To say that music is a new phenomenon in Buddhist temples is not to suggest that pre-Buddhist Tibet or China had no music.[15] Music is intrinsic to the universe and to human nature even if some worldviews, including Darwinism, do not understand, recognize, or promote it. China’s fertility cults and sexual rites involved choirs of boys and girls singing alternately and together to symbolize Yin and Yang dualism as early as 2000 BC. A thousand years prior to that, the worshippers in Sumero-Mesapotamia used music in their temple rituals.

The musical ragas of Hindu magical rituals have survived for thirty-five hundred years. Most of the Vedas are hymns and chants. The Vedic priests understood sound as well as anyone else in the world and developed a highly complex system of chanting, even if Hindu monks and priests did not develop music into the complex medium that Western music became. Thankfully this is changing now. Bollywood has played a great role in inspiring some Hindu ashrams to develop great music. It has also raised the standard of Qawwali, which began as a part of Sufi tradition [Sunnis and Shiites consider Sufism a Muslim heresy], but is now loved by Hindus as well as by Muslims—including in Pakistan.

WRITING MUSIC INTO THE WEST’S DNA

St. Augustine, the author of the six-volume On Music, was a key figure in inserting music into Western education and worldview. His first five volumes are technical and could have been written by a Greek philosopher. But Augustine was most excited about his sixth book, which gives a biblical philosophy of music. Music is, of course, integral to the Bible, in which the longest book is Psalms. The last psalm, for example, asks creation to praise the Lord with the trumpet, lute, harp, tambourine, strings, pipe, and cymbals.

Why are these physical instruments able to make music? Augustine saw that the scientific basis or essence of music lies in mathematical “numbers” or scores at the core of creation. Since music is mathematical, Augustine argued, it must be rational, eternal, unchangeable, meaningful, and objective—it consists of mathematical harmony. We cannot make a musical sound from just any string. To get a precise note, a string has to have a specific length, thickness, and tension. This implies that the Creator has encoded music into the structure of the universe. This insight was not new. It had been noted by Pythagoras (570–490 BC), whose school Plato attended before starting his Academy. Augustine promoted this “pagan” insight because the Bible presented a view of creation that explained why matter could make music.

Augustine taught that while this musical code is “bodily” (physical), it is made and enjoyed by the soul. For example, the book of Job deals with the problem of inexplicable suffering. In it God himself tells Job of the connection between music and creation: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”[16]

The Bible taught that a sovereign Creator (rather than a pantheon of deities with conflicting agendas) governs the universe for his glory. He is powerful enough to save men like Job from their troubles. This teaching helped develop the Western belief of a cosmos: an orderly universe where every tension and conflict will ultimately be resolved, just as after a period of inexplicable suffering Job was greatly blessed.

This belief in the Creator as a compassionate Savior became an underlying factor of the West’s classical music and its tradition of tension and resolution. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, Western musicians shared their civilization’s assumption that the universe was cosmos rather than chaos. They composed consonance and concord even when they experienced dissonance and discord. That is not to suggest that classical music did not express the full range of human emotions. It did. A bereaved composer would write a tragic piece; someone abandoned by his love would express his desolation. But such outpourings of a broken heart were understood as snapshots of real life. Given the cultural power of the biblical worldview, no one thought of them as Kurt Cobain did, as evidence of the breakdown of cosmic order or the nonexistence of order in the universe.

In the novel The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien gives us a beautiful, fictional exposition of the Augustinian perspective on the relationship of music, creation, the fall (evil), and redemption. Tolkien’s Middle-earth experienced much more suffering than the Buddha’s India. Tolkien’s “earth” was to be captured, corrupted, and virtually controlled by evil. Suffering was real, brutal, and awful. Yet the Bible taught Tolkien that the Almighty Creator, who was also a compassionate Redeemer, was loving enough and powerful enough to redeem the earth from the greatest possible mess, sin, and suffering. This helped Tolkien to celebrate creation, both in its origin as well as in its ultimate destiny:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony. . . .

Then Iluvatar said to them: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music.”

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.[17]

Prior to becoming a follower of Christ, Augustine had been a professor of Greek philosophy. He knew that although music was encoded into the structure of the physical universe, being finite, it could never provide ultimate meaning to life [Augustine’s intellectual mentor, Plato, believed that epistemologically no finite particular can make sense without an infinite reference point]. Therefore, he reasoned that to be meaningful, music had to be integrated into the ultimate aim of human life, which was to love God and one’s neighbors. To love one’s neighbor is to “always mind” his welfare.

Over the centuries, the influence of Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music kept growing. Originally, church music was dominated by monophonic plainsong, a single line of melody as in the Gregorian chant. Roman Catholic churches began to develop polyphonic music. This style, which combines several differing voice parts simultaneously, began to flourish at Notre Dame (Paris) by the eleventh century. That development in Christian worship laid the foundation for the entire spectrum of Western classical music, religious and secular [Augustine did not have much influence over the Eastern Church and that may be one reason why its music did not develop much beyond the chant].

In the tenth century AD, Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music inspired a group of Benedictine monks to build the world’s largest pipe organ in the cathedral of Winchester, England. The organ required seventy men and twenty-six bellows to supply wind to its four hundred pipes. Technologically, the pipe organ was the world’s most advanced machine until the invention of the mechanical clock. Europe’s organs stood as emblems of the West’s unique desire and ability to use the arts, science, and technology for the glory of God as well as for the relief of humanity’s suffering and toil.

Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music was an important tributary that contributed to the river of mechanical arts that began to flow out of Christian monasteries and churches. This tradition used technology to worship God and to love one’s neighbors.

TAKING MUSIC TO THE MASSES

Martin Luther (AD 1483–1546) took the biblical-Augustinian philosophy of music out of the cloister and choir loft to Europe’s masses. An Augustinian monk and pioneer of the Protestant Reformation, Luther was and remains a polarizing figure. Some love him; others hate him. Yet many critics agree that Luther may have been the most influential figure of the second millennium.

Luther was a “Protestant” because he saw plenty in his world to protest against. But he did not become a reformer simply because he protested. He changed Europe because he found something worth singing about, something worth living for, and something worth dying for. He found a covenant relationship with the Almighty God [Later some Enlightenment thinkers secularized the biblical idea of divine covenant as “social contract.” The idea lies at the root of modern constitutionalism. It enabled the West to become a society built uniquely on trust. See Robert N. Bellah The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Crossroad Books, 1975)]. A relationship he could count upon. It was a faith, a worldview upon which his decadent world could be rebuilt. Yet, it was far more than an idea or creed. It was a vibrant relationship with someone who was worth dying for; a love affair worthy of songs.

Luther got excited about the Bible partly because it taught that he could not and did not need to do anything to qualify for God’s love. Salvation— forgiveness from sin and the restoration of a person’s relationship with God —was a free gift of grace to be received by the empty hands of faith. The Bible gave Luther a deep, Abraham-like, inner assurance of God’s acceptance. God’s friendship gave such a value and meaning to his life that he had something to sing about. Yes, in a world that had rebelled against the Creator, there was suffering. Yet, because God is love, there is hope for pardon, peace, progress, and prosperity. This gospel made the West uniquely optimistic, enabling it to sing, “Joy to the world”—a message opposite to that of Cobain.

Luther helped this biblical worldview to become the soul of Western civilization. His spiritual followers summed up his discovery of the Bible’s essence in songs of hope, assurance, and certainty, such as “Amazing Grace,” written by reformed slave trader John Newton (1725–1807):

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

Luther became a reformer because he realized that in order to conform to God’s Word, all God’s children would need to have that Word in their native languages. He translated the Bible into his own German dialect. His translation went into hundreds of editions and turned his dialect into the “Standard German” for the whole of the German-speaking world. Together with Luther’s German hymnal, his Bible forged the soul of the German-speaking nations. Luther’s work inspired other reformers, such as William Tyndale, who began translating the Bible into English. That crucial beginning made the Bible the soul also of the English-speaking world. Following Jesus and the apostles, the early church sang worship together until Jerome the Great encouraged priests to take over chanted worship in the fifth century. Since then until Luther’s time, congregations rarely sang during Christian worship—and then only in Latin, which they did not understand. By and large it was the priest’s job to worship and pray. Luther rediscovered the New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of all believers [As we shall see in chapter 15, this profound discovery based on 1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 1:6, etc., became an important source of the West’s economic development and political liberty.], which made it necessary for the entire congregation to worship God by singing as well as by prayer and other means. “God,” he believed, “has created man for the express purpose of praising and extolling Him.”[18] Because of his belief in the priesthood of all believers, Luther wrote hymns in the language of his people —German—and brought music to the lungs and lips of even the poorest peasants in the congregation.

For Luther the reformation of the university was second in importance only to the reformation of the Church, and music had to have a prominent role in education as well:

I have always loved music; whoso has skill in this art, is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music, or I would not regard him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers, unless they have been well exercised in music.[19]

In putting music at the heart of worship and at the core of his curriculum of education, Luther simply followed the Jewish (biblical) tradition of temple musicians and singers who were “prophets” or “sons of prophets.” The biblical phrase “sons of prophets” often meant the students of prophets. An early meaning of the phrase “to prophesy” was ecstatic singing accompanied with music.[20] King David—the driving force behind the temple worship in Jerusalem—was Israel’s musician, singer, and poet par excellence. The Bible calls him a “prophet.”[21] The New Testament asked the followers of Christ to seek the gift of prophecy.[22] In the light of the Old Testament, that exhortation had to include learning music, as did the “sons of prophets.”

The modern West confirmed Luther’s educational philosophy that musical literacy produces people with an intuitive awareness of a logical and orderly universe. It is not a coincidence that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge that have a distinctly Christian heritage still hold music in greater respect than most of the universities founded upon secularism during the twentieth century.

THE FLOWERING OF WESTERN MUSIC

It takes barely five minutes to walk from the Bach house at Eisenach, Germany, to the house where Luther had lived as a student, and it takes less than ten minutes to drive up the hill to the castle of Wartburg where Luther translated the New Testament into German. By the time Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was born, that area had become a Lutheran province. Philosophically, Johannes Kepler reinforced the biblical-Augustinian-Lutheran view of creation and music by teaching that music mirrors the divinely ordained mathematical harmony of the universe. Bach was a musical genius because he was a mathematical genius who received as a part of his education this (non-polytheistic) biblical outlook of an orderly creation. In that mind-set, aesthetics was inseparable from ultimate harmony. One of his biographers, Wilfrid Mellers said,

At the school which Bach attended in Ohrdruf the system of education was little changed from the old [Augustinian-Lutheran] prescription. Music was second in importance only to theology, and was taught by the same master, who believed that music makes the heart ready and receptive to the divine Word and truth, just as Elisius [Elisha] confessed that by harping he found the Holy Spirit.[23]

For Bach, as for Luther, “true music” pursues as its “ultimate end or final goal . . . the honor of God and the recreation of the soul.” Bach believed that music was a “harmonious euphony for the glory of God.”[24] Obviously, this is not meant to suggest that Bach’s musical talent was nurtured only by theological beliefs. His family was a key factor in developing Bach’s talent. In chapter 15 we will see that it was Luther’s exposition of the Bible that made his family different from Cobain’s family. In his formative years, Bach drew heavily on his family’s musical heritage, which extended back to his great-great-grandfather. The Bach clan had developed into an expansive network of musical apprenticeship and encouragement. This network proved to be pivotal in Bach’s development.

What does a German monk, a Roman Pope, and a Spanish Emperor have to do with music history? Today we look at the events that surrounded 15th and 16th Century German music – particularly that of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Bach and Cobain shared more in common than their talent for music. They both lost their parents when they were nine years old, Cobain’s parents to divorce and Bach’s to death. A tragic event such as his parents’ death could have irreparably upset Bach’s emotional balance. But back then the “family” was more than parents and children. Johann moved in with his older brother, who taught him to play the organ and develop his talents as a composer. Following his brother’s example, Johann later tutored his own children to become some of the best musicians of their generation. His youngest son became, in his own right, one of the most important influences on Mozart’s work.

It is tempting to interpret the order and harmony of Bach’s music as a metaphorical reflection of the order of his family. The stability and support of his wider family gave Bach the emotional strength to overcome his heartaches. This strength is reflected not only in his life but also in his work. Yet, the family alone cannot explain his ability to celebrate “The Passion” (suffering) of St. John or St. Matthew. This ability to celebrate suffering came from his faith in the resurrection— God’s triumph over suffering and death.

Philosophically speaking, Bach’s inner power to cope with his parents’ death came from his belief in a sovereign and loving God. His life and his compositions were saturated with the book that had given him profound personal and social hope.[25] Life taught him that evil was real and powerful, but the Bible taught him that God was at work redeeming the world, working all things together for good.[26] This biblical faith had been the key to the optimism and music of Western civilization: for Augustine as the Roman Empire was collapsing around him, for Luther as his own life was threatened by a powerful empire and a corrupt religious leadership, and for Tolkien as he lived through the horror of two World Wars.

These people knew evil and suffering, as did the Buddha and Cobain, but the difference was that the Bible gave them a basis for hope in this life as well as in the next. This biblical faith in a Creator who made human beings in his image and loved them enough to come to save them, made it possible for the West to sing, “O come, all ye faithful/ Joyful and triumphant.” In contrast, Cobain’s career demonstrates that without this faith the West’s hope and celebration are turning into a sense of abject despair. If we may borrow the language of musicologists, the West is losing its “tonality”—its “home/ key note,” its soul, its center, the reference point that allowed the relaxation/resolve of tension.

THE LOSS OF “TONALITY” IN WESTERN MUSIC

For centuries, Western music was tonal. That is, its hallmark was loyalty to a tonic key/home note. Every single piece gave preference to this one note (the tonic), making it the tonal center to which all other tones were related. The breakup of tonality in Western music is said to have begun with Adolf Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner (1813–1883), who experimented with “atonality” in his opera Tristan and Isolde. Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Grand Master of the occult Rosicrucian lodges in France, took that experiment further. The West’s descent into the chaos of atonality accelerated in the twentieth century in Vienna, the capital of Europe’s cultural decadence [for example, the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg].

Eventually the atonal composers had to create a new organization in their art to replace tonality—an artificial tonality called serialism. By dismissing tonality—the center—they lost something they hadn’t considered—form. Technically, Cobain retained tonality, but in a philosophical sense the loss of tonality in Western culture culminated in Cobain’s music, the icon of America’s nihilism and an unfortunate victim of a civilization that is losing its center, its soul. It must be added in his defense that by killing himself, Cobain demonstrated that he lived by what he believed. His sincerity makes him a legitimate icon. Most nihilists do not live in the grip of what they believe to be the central truth about reality. For example, French existentialists Sartre and Camus advocated choice in spite of the nihilism they embraced. In so doing they made a way out of Cobain’s problem. For them suicide was not necessary if one could create his own reality by choices.

Cobain remains popular because while many people claim to be nihilists, they don’t fully live it out. He did. He lived without creating his own reality through choice (or tonality through serial technique). He lived in the nihilism, in the “atonality,” and in that nihilism he died. In that sense Cobain stands as the direct opposite of the life, thoughts, and work of J. S. Bach. Whereas Bach’s music celebrated life’s meaning as the soul’s eternal rest in the Creator’s love, Cobain became a symbol of the loss of a center and meaning in the contemporary West.

While Western music has gone through dozens of phases with thousands of permutations since the time of Luther and Bach, in some ways it was only during the 1980s that a phenomenon like Kurt Cobain became possible. The rejection of a good, caring, and almighty God and a rejection of the biblical philosophy of sin ensured that there was no way to make sense of suffering— personal, societal, or environmental. Reality became senseless, hopeless, and painful.

THE AMPUTATION OF THE SOUL

Today, many people reject the Bible because they consider it to be irrational and irrelevant. Others believe it to be responsible for racial prejudices, sectarian bigotries, slavery, the oppression of women, the persecution of witches, opposition to science, the destruction of the environment, discrimination against homosexuals, and religious wars. However, this criticism itself reveals the powerful influence the Bible had during the last millennium. During that time, hardly any intellectual position or social practice could become mainstream in Christendom unless it could be defended on biblical grounds, real or mistaken; nor could beliefs and practices be challenged unless their opponents demonstrated that their call for reform was biblical.

Criticisms of the Bible are recognition of its unique cultural power. It has been the West’s intellectual and moral compass, the “sacred canopy” (Peter Berger) that gave legitimacy to its values and institutions. The West’s rejection of the Bible ushered in what historian Jacques Barzun called its “decadence.”[27] It brought an abrupt end to the Modern age [by that I mean the period from the sixteenth through the midtwentieth century when the Bible remained the dominant culture-shaping force, even though skeptics, agnostics, and atheists kept condemning the Bible], just when Western civilization seemed set to win the world. Now, having amputated the Bible, the Western educational machinery is producing “strays,” lost like Cobain. It can make good robots but it cannot even define a good man. The postmodern university can teach one how to travel to Mars but not how to live in one’s home or nation.[28]

India-born British author George Orwell (1903–50) was a socialist, inclined toward atheism. The horrors of Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the two World Wars forced him to face the consequences of the “amputation of the soul.” In his “Notes on the Way,” Orwell wrote that the writers who sawed off the West’s soul included “Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendahl, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce —in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs.”

These “Enlightenment” writers led the West into its present darkness.

In his essay Orwell was reflecting on Malcolm Muggeridge’s book The Thirties, which describes the damage these writers had done to Europe. Muggeridge, then still an atheist, was astute enough to perceive that,

we are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress.” Trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s. . . . There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but no one fears God; therefore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babel after another . . . downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate.[29]

I first discovered the Bible as a student in India. It transformed me as an individual and I soon learned that, contrary to what my university taught, the Bible was the force that had created modern India. Let me, therefore, begin our study of the book that built our world by telling you my own story.

Epigraph: George Orwell’s “Notes on the Way” was first published in Time and Tide, March 30—April 6, 1940. It is reprinted in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).

NOTES

[1] “Endless, Nameless” on Nevermind (Los Angeles: Geffen Records, 1991). This song is a hidden track at the end of some copies of the CD.

[2] The Rolling Stone editors, Cobain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 128. See “Suicidal Tendencies” by Diana Grains, 128–32.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven (NY: Hyperion, 2001), 15.

[5] Freud’s second topography undermines the modern, Cartesian understanding of selfhood that most in the West understand by “self.” Freud’s self is decentered.

[6] Band AC/DC.

[7] For a simple summary see Connie Zweig’s essay, “The Death of the Self in a Postmodern World” in The Truth About The Truth: Deconfusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (NY: Penguin Putnam, 1995), 145–150.

[8] Rolling Stone, November 3, 2005, 54.

[9] Kurt Cobain, Journals (NY: Riverhead Books, 2003), 108–09.

[10] Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles; NY: Feral House, 2001), 9.

[11] A lyric by Agent Orange, “Living in Darkness,” Agent Orange (Warner/Elektra/ Atlantic, 1981).

[12] On February 25, 2009, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour submitted the 2008 Human Rights Report for Turkmenistan: “The government demonstrated little or no support for non-Turkmen music, but classical music was taught and performed throughout the country. The previously banned government-supported symphony orchestra was reestablished at the National Cultural Center and began monthly concerts of Turkmen and world classical music. The president decreed that the circus reopen, and the first opera performance took place in June. Traditional local music, which had not been performed for years, was played in concerts and social events.” US STATE DEPT (accessed January 16, 2011).

[13] Ephesians 5:18–20 NIV.

[14 ] For a biblical description of music in heaven, please see Revelation 5:7–9, 14:1– 3, 15:1–4.

[15] “Tibetan Buddhist Monk Nominated for Grammy award,” 3 February 2006, International Campaign for Tibet (accessed December 4, 2010).

[16] Job 38:4–7.

[17] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 15–16. Tolkien’s fictional passage is an expression of the Bible’s teaching in Job 38, John 1, and the book of Revelation.

[18] Martin Luther’s Foreword to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Lucundae, a collection of chorale motets published in 1538, reprinted in From Liturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich S. Leupold; trans. Paul Zeller Strodach; vol. 53 of Luther’s Works, American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965).

[19] Martin Luther, The Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. and ed. William Hazlitt (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857), 340.

[20] For example, see 1 Samuel 19:18–24 or 1 Chronicles 25:1–6. “David and the chiefs of the service also set apart for the service the sons of Asaph, and of Heman, and of Jeduthun, who prophesied with lyres, with harps, and with cymbals. The list of those who did the work and of their duties was: Of the sons of Asaph . . . who prophesied under the direction of the king. Of Jeduthun, the sons of Jeduthun . . . who prophesied with the lyre in thanksgiving and praise to the LORD. Of Heman, the sons of Heman . . . the king’s seer, according to the promise of God to exalt him . . . They were all under the direction of their father in the music in the house of the LORD with cymbals, harps, and lyres for the service of the house of God.”

[21] Acts 2:30.

[22] 1 Corinthians 14:1.

[23] Wilfrid Mellers, Bach and the Dance of God (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 82.

[24] Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (NY: Norton, 2000), 8.

[25] Ulrich Meyer, Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Cantata Libretti of Johann Sebastian Bach (London: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 177–216. Bible references that Bach quoted or alluded to in his compositions and writings.

[26] Romans 8:28.

[27] Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 years of Western Cultural Life (NY: HarperCollins, 2000). His concept of “decadence” is explained in his introduction.

[28] Stanley Fish, who retired as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago argued in an article, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower,” NY Times, May 21, 2004, that the Univ. should not even try to teach morality or good citizenship. He wrote, “Performing academic work responsibly and at the highest level is a job big enough for any scholar and for any institution. And, as I look around, it does not seem to me that we academics do that job so well that we can now take it upon ourselves to do everyone else’s job too. We should look to the practices in our own shop, narrowly conceived, before we set out to alter the entire world by forming moral character, or fashioning democratic citizens, or combating globalization, or embracing globalization, or anything else.”

[29] Ibid. Quoted by Orwell.

A Worldview/RPT Rant On a Reasonable Zuby Quote

I think the below is applicable to many things. Like masks, mandatory vaccines for colds. etc. But I can also see how the below will be used to counter life and the freedom the Founding Documents of this nation afford. This is to say I like the quote, but can see it being misused as well.

That is the reason for the post — just to counter what I can see others using it for.

So, how does this play out with the Left? [Or, strict Libertarians.] Below I will use some personal experience as well as some legal interpretation and thought experiments – with a dash of religious philosophy to get us started.

WORLDVIEWS IN THE MIX

Before we begin, many who know the site know that I speak with informed knowledge in my Judeo-Christian [theistic] worldview to those of other adopted worldviews [known or unknown] to change hearts and minds. Often people do not know what a worldview is or if they hold one, or that knowing of it even has purpose. Nor do they know that higher education just a couple generations ago thought it educations purpose to instill it. A quote I came across in seminary that I kept discusses this:

Alexander W. Astin dissected a longitudinal study conducted by UCLA started in 1966 for the Review of Higher Education [journal] in which 290,000 students were surveyed from about 500 colleges.  The main question was asked of students why study or learn?  “Seeking to develop ‘a meaningful philosophy of life’” [to develop a meaningful worldview] was ranked “essential” by the majority of entering freshmen.  In 1996 however, 80% of the college students barely recognized the need for “a meaningful philosophy of life” and ranked “being very well off financially” [e.g., to not necessarily develop a meaningful worldview] as paramount. [1 & 2]


[1] Alexander W. Astin, “The changing American college student: thirty year trends, 1966-1996,” Review of Higher Education, 21 (2) 1998, 115-135.

[2] Some of what is here is adapted and with thanks to Dr. Stephen Whatley, Professor of Apologetics & Worldviews at Faith International University… as, they are in his notes from one of his classes.

I wish to highlight the “a meaningful philosophy of life.” This is known as a worldview, or, tools to dissect life and define reality. So the question becomes, what then is a worldview? Why do we need a coherent one?

WORLDVIEW: People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently based on these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize.  By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world.  Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists.  People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world.  Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.  “As a man thinketh, so he is,” is profound.  An individual is not just the product of the forces around him.  He has a mind, an inner world.  Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it.  People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world.  The inner thought world determines the outward action.  Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.  But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after careful consideration of what worldview is true.  When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room” — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions.

— Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.

So, even if one isn’t necessarily aware they have a worldview, they operate as if they do — borrowing from what they perceive as truths but are often a patchwork of interpretations that if questioned on, the self-refuting nature of these personally held beliefs are easy to dissect and show the person is living incoherently. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “worldview” this way:

1) The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world; 2) A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.” 

What are these self-refuting aspects people find themselves moving in-between? What are the worldviews? Here are some listed, and really, that first list of seven is it. That is as broad as one can expand the worldview list:

  1. theism
  2. atheism
  3. deism
  4. finite godism
  5. pantheism
  6. panentheism
  7. polytheism[1]

Others still reduce it further: Idealism, naturalism, and theism.[2] C.S Lewis dealt with religious worldviews much the same way, comparing: philosophical naturalism (atheism), pantheism, and theism.[3]


[1] Doug Powell, The Holman Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics (Nashville, TN: Holman Publishers, 2006); and Norman L. Geisler and William D. Watkins, Worlds Apart: A Handbook on World Views (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers);

[2] L. Russ Bush, A Handbook for Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991).

[3] Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Macmillan Inc, 1943).

Knowing what “rose-colored-glasses” you are wearing and if you are being internally coherent in your dissecting of reality is important because of the cacophony of what is being offered:

Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics (Newburgh, IN: Trinity Press, 1978), 152-153.

Joseph R. Farinaccio, author of “Faith with Reason: Why Christianity is True,” starts out his excellent book pointing a way to this truth that a well-informed public should know some of:

  • This is a book about worldviews. Everybody has one, but most individuals never really pay much attention to their own personal philosophy of life. This is a tragedy because there is no state of awareness so fundamental to living life. — (Pennsville, NJ: BookSpecs Publishing, 2002), 10 (emphasis added).
  • “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our well being.” — James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 122 (emphasis added).

Is this part of the reason so many today, especially young people, do not have “well-being”?

(More on worldviews can be found in my first chapter of my book titled:INTRODUCTION: TECHNOLOGY JUNKIES” — PDF | As well as my WORLDVIEW POST on the matter)

The Law of Non Contradiction

I bet many reading this will have used the phrases or ideas below without realizing it was incoherent at best. I link to my chapter above, but here is an excerpt from it to better explain why a person’s worldview should be internally sound:

The law of non-contradiction is one of the most important laws of logical thought, in fact, one textbook author goes so far as to say that this law “is considered the foundation of logical reasoning.”[1]  Another professor of philosophy at University College London says that “a theory in which this law fails…is an inconsistent theory.”[2]  A great example of this inconsistency can be found in the wonderful book Philosophy for Dummies that fully expresses the crux of the point made throughout this work:

  • Statement: There is no such thing as absolute truth.[3]

By applying the law of non-contradiction to this statement, one will be able to tell if this statement is coherent enough to even consider thinking about.  Are you ready?  The first question should be, “is this an absolute statement?”  Is the statement making an ultimate, absolute claim about the nature of truth?  If so, it is actually asserting what it is trying to deny, and so is self-deleting – more simply, it is logically incoherent as a comprehensible position[4] as it is in violation of the law of non-contradiction.  Some other examples are as follows, for clarity’s sake:

“All truth is relative!” (Is that a relative truth?); “There are no absolutes!” (Are you absolutely sure?); “It’s true for you but not for me!” (Is that statement true just for you or is it for everyone?)[5] In short, contrary beliefs are possible, but contrary truths are not possible.[6]

Many will try to reject logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs; often times religious pluralism[7] is the topic with which many try to suppress these universal laws in separating religious claims that are mutually exclusive.  Professor Roy Clouser puts into perspective persons that try to minimize differences by throwing logical rules to the wayside:

The program of rejecting logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs is not, however, just a harmless, whimsical hope that somehow logically incompatible beliefs can both be trueit results in nothing less than the destruction of any and every concept we could possess.  Even the concept of rejecting the law of non-contradiction depends on assuming and using that law, since without it the concept of rejecting it could neither be thought nor stated.[8]

Dr. Clouser then goes on to show how a position of psychologist Erich Fromm is “self-assumptively incoherent.”[9] What professor Clouser is saying is that this is not a game.  Dr. Alister McGrath responds to the religious pluralism of theologian John Hick by showing just how self-defeating this position is:

The belief that all religions are ultimately expressions of the same transcendent reality is at best illusory and at worst oppressive – illusory because it lacks any substantiating basis and oppressive because it involves the systematic imposition of the agenda of those in positions of intellectual power on the religions and those who adhere to them.  The illiberal imposition of this pluralistic metanarrative[10] on religions is ultimately a claim to mastery – both in the sense of having a Nietzschean authority and power to mold material according to one’s will, and in the sense of being able to relativize all the religions by having access to a privileged standpoint.[11]

As professor McGrath points out above, John Hick is applying an absolute religious claim while at the same time saying there are no absolute religious claims to religious reality.  It is self-assumptively incoherent.  Anthropologist William Sumner argues against the logical position when he says that “every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is delusion.”[12]  Authors Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl respond to this self-defeating claim by showing that Sumner is making a strong claim here about knowledge:

He says that all claims to know objective moral truth are false because we are all imprisoned in our own cultural and are incapable of seeing beyond the limits of our own biases.  He concludes, therefore, that moral truth is relative to culture and that no objective standard exists.  Sumner’s analysis falls victim to the same error committed by religious pluralists who see all religions as equally valid.[13]

The authors continue:

Sumner’s view, however, is self-refuting.  In order for him to conclude that all moral claims are an illusion, he must first escape the illusion himself.  He must have a full and accurate view of the entire picture….  Such a privileged view is precisely what Sumner denies.  Objective assessments are illusions, he claims, but then he offers his own “objective” assessment.  It is as if he were saying, “We’re all blind,” and then adds, “but I’ll tell you what the world really looks like.” This is clearly contradictory.[14]

Philosopher Roger Scruton drives this point home when he says, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely negative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”[15]


[1] Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with Readings (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), p. 51.

[2] Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York, NY: Oxford Univ Press, 1995), p. 625.

[3] Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies, 46.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004), 40.

[6] Ibid., 38.

[7] Religious Pluralism – “the belief that every religion is true.  Each religion provides a genuine encounter with the Ultimate.” Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 598.

[8] Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2005), 178 (emphasis added).

[9] A small snippet for clarity’s sake:

Fromm’s position is also an example of this same dogmatic selectivity. He presents his view as though there are reasons for rejecting the law of non-contradiction, and then argues that his view of the divine (he calls it “ultimate reality”) logically follows from that rejection. He ignores the fact that to make any logical inference — to see that one belief “logically follows from” another — means that the belief which is said to “follow” is required on pain of contradicting oneself. Having denied all basis for any inference, Fromm nevertheless proceeds to infer that reality itself must be an all-encompassing mystical unity which harmonizes all the contradictions which logical thought takes to be real. He then further infers that since human thought cannot help but be contradictory, ultimate reality cannot be known by thought. He gives a summary of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist expressions of this same view, and again infers that accepting their view of the divine requires him to reject the biblical idea of God as a knowable, individual, personal Creator. He then offers still another logical inference when he insists that:

Opposition is a category of man’s mind, not itself an element of reality…. Inasmuch as God represents the ultimate reality, and inasmuch as the human mind perceives reality in contradictions, no positive statement can be made about God.

In this way Fromm ends by adding self-referential incoherency to the contradictions and self-assumptive incoherency already asserted by his theory. For he makes the positive statement about God that no positive statements about God are possible.

Ibid., 178-179. In this excellent work Dr. Clouser shows elsewhere the impact of logic on some major positions of thought:

As an example of the strong sense of this incoherency, take the claim sometimes made by Taoists that “Nothing can be said of the Tao.” Taken without qualification (which is not the way it is intended), this is self-referentially incoherent since to say “Nothing can be said of the Tao” is to say something of the Tao. Thus, when taken in reference to itself, the statement cancels its own truth. As an example of the weak version of self-referential incoherency, take the claim once made by Freud that every belief is a product of the believer’s unconscious emotional needs. If this claim were true, it would have to be true of itself since it is a belief of Freud’s. It therefore requires itself to be nothing more than the product of Freud’s unconscious emotional needs. This would not necessarily make the claim false, but it would mean that even if it were true neither Freud nor anyone else could ever know that it is. The most it would allow anyone to say is that he or she couldn’t help but believe it.  The next criterion says that a theory must not be incompatible with any belief we have to assume for the theory to be true. I will call a theory that violates this rule “self-assumptively incoherent.” As an example of this incoherence, consider the claim made by some philosophers that all things are exclusively physical [atheistic-naturalism]. This has been explained by its advocates to mean that nothing has any property or is governed by any law that is not a physical property or a physical law. But the very sentence expressing this claim, the sentence “All things are exclusively physical,” must be assumed to possess a linguistic meaning. This is not a physical property, but unless the sentence had it, it would not be a sentence; it would be nothing but physical sounds or marks that would not) linguistically signify any meaning whatever and thus could not express any claim — just as a group of pebbles, or clouds, or leaves, fails to signify any meaning or express any claim. Moreover, to assert this exclusivist materialism is the same as claiming it is true, which is another nonphysical property; and the claim that it is true further assumes that its denial would have to be false, which is a relation guaranteed by logical, not physical, laws. (Indeed, any theory which denies the existence of logical laws is instantly and irredeemably self-assumptively incoherent since that very denial is proposed as true in a way that logically excludes its being false.) What this shows is that the claim “All things are exclusively physical” must itself be assumed to have nonphysical properties and be governed by nonphysical laws or it could neither be understood nor be true. Thus, no matter how clever the supporting arguments for this claim may seem, the claim itself is incompatible with assumptions that are required for it to be true. It is therefore self-assumptively incoherent in the strong sense.

Ibid., 84-85 (emphasis added).

[10] Metanarratives, or, Grand Narratives – “big stories, stories of mythic proportions – that claim to be able to account for, explain and subordinate all lesser, little, local, narratives.” Jim Powell, Postmodernism for Beginners (New York, NY: Writers and Readers, 1998), 29.

[11] Alister E. McGrath, Passion for Truth: the Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP,  1996), 239.

[12] William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Chicago, IL: Ginn and Company, 1906), in Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted firmly in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 46-47.

[13] Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 47.

[14] Ibid., 48

[15] Modern Philosophy (New York, NY: Penguin, 1996), 6.  Found in: John Blanchard, Does God Believe in Atheists? (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000), 172.

This is part of a larger audio piece on Relativism:

Okay, that should get us all prepped for the next section…

….which is slightly more historical.

THEISM & AMERICA’S FOUNDING

Theism was the basis for our Founding Documents that undergirded our nations birth. For instance the phrase in the Declaration of Independence,Law of Nature and Nature’s God.” AMERICAN HERITAGE EDUCATION FOUNDATION discusses this phrase a bit, of which I excerpta portion of:

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 tells much about the founding philosophy of the United States of America.  One philosophical principle that the American Founders asserted in the Declaration was the “Law of Nature and Nature’s God.”  This universal moral law served as their moral and legal basis for creating a new, self-governing nation.  One apparent aspect of this law is that it was understood in Western thought and by early Americans to be revealed by God in two ways—in nature and in the Bible—and thus evidences the Bible’s influence in America’s founding document.

The “Law of Nature” is the moral or common sense embedded in man’s heart or conscience (as confirmed in Romans 2:14-15).  It tells one to live honestly, hurt no one, and render to everyone his due.  The law of “Nature’s God” as written in the Bible and spoken by Jesus Christ consists of two great commandments—to love God and love others (as found in Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 7:12, Matthew 22:36-40, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28).  The first commandment, first found in Deuteronomy 6:5, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.”  The second commandment, often referred to as the Golden Rule and first found in Leviticus 19:18, is to “love your neighbor as yourself” or, as expressed by Jesus in Matthew 7:12, to “do to others as you would have them do to you.”  Thus the content for both the natural and written laws is the same.

The law of Nature and God can be traced through the history and writings of Western Civilization.  This principle is found, for example, in medieval European thought.  In his 1265-1274 Summa Theologica, published in 1485, Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas acknowledged a “two-fold” moral law that is both general and specific:

The natural law directs man by way of certain general precepts, common to both the perfect [faithful] and the imperfect [non-faithful]:  wherefore it is one and the same for all.  But the Divine law directs man also in certain particular matters….  Hence the necessity for the Divine law to be twofold.[1]

Aquinas explained that the written law in the Bible was given by God due to the fallibility of human judgment and the perversion of the natural law in the hearts of many.  In the 1300s, medieval Bible scholars referred to the “Law of Nature and God” as a simple way to describe God’s natural and written law, its two expressions.  The phrase presented this law in the same order and timing in which God revealed it to mankind in history—first in creation and then in Holy Scripture.

During the Reformation period, French religious reformer John Calvin affirmed this two-fold moral law in his 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, observing, “It is certain that the law of God, which we call the moral law, is no other than a declaration of natural law, and of that conscience which has been engraven by God on the minds of men.”[2]  He further explains, “The very things contained in the two tables [or commandments in the Bible] are…dictated to us by that internal law whichiswritten and stamped on every heart.”[3]  Incidentally, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who led a large migration of Calvinist Puritans from England to the American colonies, identified God’s two-fold moral law in his well-known 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, delivered to the Puritans as they sailed to America.  He taught,

There is likewise a double law by which we are regulated in our conversation one towards another:  the law of nature and the law of grace, or the moral law and the law of the Gospel….  By the first of these laws, manis commanded to love his neighbor as himself.  Upon this ground stands all the precepts of the moral law which concerns our dealings with men.[4]

During the Enlightenment period, British philosopher John Locke, who was influential to the Founders, wrote of the “law of God and nature” in his 1689 First Treatise of Civil Government.[5]  This law, he further notes in his 1696 Reasonableness of Christianity, “being everywhere the same, the Eternal Rule of Right, obliges Christians and all men everywhere, and is to all men the standing Law of Works.”[6]  English legal theorist William Blackstone, another oft-cited thinker of the American founding era, recognized the two-fold moral law in his influential 1765-1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England.  This law, he believed, could be known partially by man’s imperfect natural reason and completely by the Bible.  Due to man’s imperfect reason, Blackstone like Aquinas observed, the Bible’s written revelation is necessary:

If our reason were always, as in our first ancestor [Adam] before his transgression, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task [of discerning God’s law and will] would be pleasant and easy.  We should need no other guide but this [reason].  But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience, that his reason is corrupt and his understanding is full of ignorance and error.

This [corruption] has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of divine providence which, in compassion to the frailty, imperfection, and blindness of human reason, has been pleased, at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation.  The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures.[7]


[1] Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, pt 2/Q 91, Article 5, trans Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947) in Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org <https://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html >.

[2] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 3, bk. 4, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia, PA:  Philip H. Nicklin, 1816), 534-535.

[3] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion:  A New Translation, vol. 1, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, Scotland:  Printed for Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 430.

[4] John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630, in Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN:  Hackett Publishing, 2003), 75-93.

[5] John Locke, First Treatise of Civil Government, in Two Treatises on Government, bk. 1 (London:  George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 142, 157, 164.

[6] John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as delivered in the Scriptures, Second Edition (London:  Printed for Awnsham and John Churchil, 1696), 21-22.

[7] William Blackstone, Blackstone’s Commentaries in Five Volumes, ed. George Tucker (Union, NJ:  Lawbook Exchange, 1996, 2008), 41.

The researcher may benefit from my “The Two Books of Faith – Nature and Revelatory

I also wish to commend to you an article by James N. Anderson (Professor of Theology and Philosophy, at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte) in the Reformed Faith & Practice Journal (Volume 4 Issue 1, May 2019).

Abraham Williams preached a sermon where he drilled down on the idea at an “election day sermon” in Boston Massachusetts’s, New-England, May 26. 1762.

  • “The law of nature (or those rules of behavior which the Nature God has given men, fit and necessary to the welfare of mankind) is the law and will of the God of nature, which all men are obliged to obey…. The law of nature, which is the Constitution of the God of nature, is universally obliging. It varies not with men’s humors or interests, but is immutable as the relations of things.” 

Amen pastor.

A good resource for resources on this topic is my bibliography in a paper for my class on Reformation Church History in seminary — and I steered the topic to the Reformations influence on America. The paper is titled, REFORMING AMERICA (PDF), the bibliography is from pages 16-19. I commend to the serious reader Mark Noll’s book, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

Moving on from the “do you even worldview bro?” section to the application process.

One area I see the Left saying YES! to Zuby is on Same-Sex Marriage (SSM).

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

SSM, I argue, flouts Natural Law in many respects, and becomes an utennable special right.

The “potentials” in the male-female union becoming a separate organism is not found in the male-male or female-female sexual union. Nor is this non-potentiality able to be the foundation [pre-exist] for society (Is Marriage Hetero?). The ideal environment – whether from Nature or Nature’s God – to rear children, sorry Hillary. Etc. Or religious: No Religious or Ethical Leader in History Supported SSM (does wisdom from the past matter?). [I would add until very, very recently.] Even gay men and women oppose SSM being normalized LIKE hetero-marriage:Another Gay Man That Opposes Same-Sex Marriage #SSM.

Another Example via Personal Experience.

Many Gays Reject Court Forced Same-Sex Marriage

For some time, a few years back, I and about 10-20 gay men and women… and at times their extended family would meet monthly. All were lovers of the Constitution — what brought us together was the website GAY PATRIOT (gaypatriot[dot]net – now defunct, sadly) and admiration of what Bruce Carroll and other gay writers boldly forged in countering current cultural trends.

Some of these people I met with and have communicated with over the years [friends] held the position that same-sex marriage should not be placed on the same level in society as heterosexual marriage, as, the family pre-dates and is the foundation for society. All, however, held that what is not clearly enumerated in the Constitution for the federal government to do should be left for the states. And thus, they would say each state has the right to define marriage themselves. Speaking out against high-court interference – as they all did about Roe v. Wade. (All were pro-life.)

As an aside, we met once-a-month at either the Sizzler in Hollywood or the Outback in Burbank, exclusively on Mondays. (All coordinated by “GayPatriotWest” – Daniel Blatt). Why? Those two CEOs gave to Mitt Romney’s campaign. And on Mondays because the L.A. City Council asked people not to eat meat on Mondays to help the planet.

A joint hetero [me]/gay [them] “thumb in LA City Councils eye.” Lol.

What I respect are men and women (gay or not) who protect freedom of thought/speech. Like these two-freedom loving lesbian women I post about on my site.

Here is a Christian, conservative, apologist — Frank Turek — making a point (in an article titled: “Freedom: Another Casualty of the Gay Agenda”):

  • …. Imagine a homosexual videographer being forced to video a speech that a conservative makes against homosexual behavior and same sex marriage. Should homosexual videographers be forced to do so? Of course not! Then why Elane Photography?”

Now, here is a gay “Conservatarian” site, Gay Patriot’s, input (in a post, “New Mexico Gets It Wrong” – now gone in the ether of the WWW):

  • it’s a bad law, a law that violates natural human rights to freedom of association and to freely chosen work. It is not good for gays; picture a gay photographer being required by law to serve the wedding of some social conservative whom he or she despises.”

However, I also live in a Constitutional Republic — even if by a thread. So, items not clearly enumerated in the Constitution are reverted to the States to hash out. So, I get an opportunity to vote on items or influence state legislatures to come down on, say, marriage being between a man and a woman. So, as a Conservatarian, what I call a “paleo-liberal,” I get to force my morals on others for lack of a better term. (See my Where Do Ethics Come From? Atheist Convo | Bonus Material | and Norman Geisler and Frank Turek’s book, Legislating Morality: Is It Wise? Is It Legal? Is It Possible?”)

What those freedom loving gay men and women and I have in common is the rejection of Judicial Activism. We all agreed that in California, the H8 bill passed by a slight majority of Californians should have been law defining marriage as between male and female. Why? Because this is what the Constitution in the 10th Amendment clearly stated:

  • The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

And that like Roe v. Wade, the courts interfering with the body politic hashing these things out on the state level. This Court interference created more division and lawfare down the road. As well as bad law. Some examples of this rather than just my statement:

Roe v. Wade — which ruled that the U.S. Constitution effectively mandates a nationwide policy of abortion on demand — is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions in America history.

As Villanova law professor Joseph W. Dellapenna writes,

  • “The opinion [in Roe] is replete with irrelevancies, non-sequiturs, and unsubstantiated assertions. The Court decides matters it disavows any intention of deciding—thereby avoiding any need to defend its conclusion. In the process the opinion simply fails to convince.”

Even many scholars sympathetic to the results of Roe have issued harsh criticisms of its legal reasoning. In the Yale Law Journal, eminent legal scholar John Hart Ely, a supporter of legal abortion, complained that Roe is “bad constitutional law, or rather … it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” He wrote:

  • “What is unusual about Roe is that the liberty involved is accorded a protection more stringent, I think it is fair to say, than that the present Court accords the freedom of the press explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-a-vis the interests that legislatively prevailed over it. And that, I believe is a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years. At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.”

Below are criticisms of Roe from other supporters of legal abortion.

  • “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” — Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard law professor
  • “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose.Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.” — Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun
  • “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.” — Archibald Cox, Harvard law professor, former U.S. Solicitor General
  • “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As a constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.” — Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania law professor
  • “Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the Court. Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
  • “In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges.” — Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor
  • “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy). … [C]lear governing constitutional principles are not present [in Roe].” — Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor
  • “[O]verturning [Roe] would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary. … Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” — Jeffrey Rosen, legal commentator, George Washington University law professor
  • “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.” — William Saletan, Slate columnist, writing in Legal Affairs
  • “In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky. [Roe] is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” — Benjamin Wittes, Brookings Institution fellow
  • “Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching.” — Michael Kinsley, columnist, writing in the Washington Post.

Abortion and Gays… Why Manny Are Pro-Life

Some gay men and women oppose abortion for religious reasons. Other view this as a life issue. Here is an example of what I am thinking of:

“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it.  Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”

— Dale A. Berryhill, The Liberal Contradiction: How Contemporary Liberalism Violates Its Own Principles and Endangers Its Own Goals (Lafayette, LA:  Vital Issues Press, 1994), 172.

THE BLAZE has a flashback of Ann Coulter saying pretty much the same thing: “The gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting” — yep

Ann Coulter has a penchant for making controversial statements that often lead to snickers, jeers and plenty of other reactionary responses. In an upcoming episode of Logo’s “A List: Dallas,” the well-known conservative pundit told Taylor Garrett, a gay Republican and a cast member on the show, some things about liberals and abortion that will surely get people talking.

The general premise of her words: Gays and lesbians should become pro-life, because liberals may start aborting their unborn gay children once a homosexual gene is discovered.

“The gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting,” she said. Watch her comments, below: ….

“All Gays Should Be Republican” | Ann Coulter Flashback

The rule of nature in this situation would be to always promote and protect innocent life. Once you start deviating from that rule that is the foundation of our Constitution found in the Declaration:

  • We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

You start to create “special rights,” and these “special rights” are then put under the jurisdiction of politicians and special interest groups. And we all know what happens to the integrity of an issue or topic when that happens. Here is one example:

Feminists, Gays, Abortion and Gendercide | Ezra Levant Flashback

So as much as the quote by Zuby at the outset is a good one in a universe governed by reason and natural law and Nature’s God…. the progressive Left will always destroy what it touches… life and family being two issues exemplified above. So to adopt a quote wrongly is on the easier side of the Left ruining an idea.

From the Boy Scouts to literature, from the arts to universities: the left ruins everything it touches. Dennis Prager explains.

An example of the BOY SCOUTS via PRAGER:

…. Take the Boy Scouts. For generations, the Boy Scouts, founded and preserved by Americans of all political as well as ethnic backgrounds, has helped millions of American boys become good, productive men. The left throughout America — its politicians, its media, its stars, its academics — have ganged up to deprive the Boy Scouts of oxygen. Everywhere possible, the Boy Scouts are vilified and deprived of places to meet.

But while the left works to destroy the Boy Scouts — unless the Boy Scouts adopt the left’s views on openly gay scouts and scout leaders — the left has created nothing comparable to the Boy Scouts. The left tries to destroy one of the greatest institutions ever made for boys, but it has built nothing for boys. There is no ACLU version of the Boy Scouts; there is only the ACLU versus the Boy Scouts.

The same holds true for the greatest character-building institution in American life: Judeo-Christian religions. Once again, the left knows how to destroy. Everywhere possible the left works to inhibit religious institutions and values — from substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” to removing the tiny cross from the Los Angeles County Seal to arguing that religious people must not bring their values into the political arena.

And, then there is education. Until the left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent — look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the left has gotten for education — America now spends more per student than any country in the world — the worse the academic results. And the left has removed God and dress codes from schools — with socially disastrous results.

Of course, it is not entirely accurate to say that the left builds nothing. It has built vast government bureaucracies, MTV, and post-1960s Hollywood, for example. But these are, to say the least, not positive achievements.

In his column this week, Thomas Friedman describes General Motors Corp., as “a giant wealth-destruction machine.” That perfectly describes the left many times over. It is both a wealth-destruction machine and an ennobling-institution destruction machine.

2 Thessalonians 2:15… Oral Tradition (Roman Catholicism)

Can the things which Rome wish to bind upon us in the name of Oral Tradition had been taught to the Thessalonians?

Then we looked at 2 Thess. 2:15 as quoted by Jay Dyer in his “10 Reasons” video we started responding to last week. All Dividing Line Highlights’ video productions and credit belong to Alpha and Omega Ministries®. If this video interested you, please visit aomin.org/ or http://www.sermonaudio.com/go/336785


2018 Flashback


Is Roman Catholic Views of Tradition, Biblical?

This is from a larger debate between Ken Samples and Fr. Mitch Pacwa . I think this intro does it’s due diligence in explaining many of the false views I have heard from people as of late. In other words, one should not define Protestants as believing Sola Scriptura wrongly, and then responding to this false view.

The below is from an excellent book by William Webster:

  • William Webster, Salvation, The Bible, and Roman Catholicism (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust, 1990), 13-20

AUTHORITATIVE STATEMENTS OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD

The Documents of Vatican II

Hence there exist a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit. To the successors of the apostles, sacred tradition hands on in its full purity God’s word, which was entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit . . . Consequently, it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence. Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which is committed to the Church.[1]

The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism

59. Where do we find the truths revealed by God?

We find the truths revealed by God in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

60. How does Sacred Scripture compare with Sacred Tradition?

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of inspired persons.[2]

89. Why is Sacred Tradition of equal authority with the Bible?

The Bible and Sacred Tradition are of equal authority because they are equally the word of God; both derive from the inspired vision of the ancient prophets, and especially from the infinite wisdom of God incarnate who gave to the apostles what he came down on earth to teach, through them, to all of mankind.[3]

TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD – SUMMARY OF NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

The first issue to be addressed in any discussion of spiritual truth is that of authority. To say something is true or false implies an authoritative standard by which we can make such a judgment. But is there such an authoritative stand­ard by which we can judge whether a particular teaching or system is true or false? The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. That authoritative standard is the Word of God, the Bible. Jesus Christ himself said of the Bible, ‘Thy word is truth’ (Jn. 17:17). In settling issues of spiritual controversy the Lord Jesus always appealed to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and false­hood.

Mark’s Gospel records an incident in which certain Sad-ducees came to Jesus to question him. The Sadducees were the religious liberals of Jesus’ day and they rejected many of the teachings espoused by the more orthodox sect of the Pharisees. They did not believe in angels or in the resurrec­tion of the dead. A number of these men came to Jesus to ask him a trick question about life after death. Jesus demolished their trick question but went on to say this:

Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God?… But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken (Mk. 12:24,25-27 NASB 1963).

Twice in this passage Christ tells these men they are greatly mistaken in their views. The reason is that they do not understand the Scriptures. He appeals to those Scriptures to correct the false concepts these men held. He points to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and error. These men are greatly mistaken because the views they hold and the doctrines they teach contradict the Word of God.

Here you have two opposing views of truth. One says there is no resurrection from the dead, the other says there is. How do you determine which is true? You go to the Word of God. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is God in human flesh and therefore whatever he teaches is absolute truth. And according to him the Word of God is the final and authoritative standard by which all claims to truth are to be judged.

This principle obviously has a direct bearing upon the whole issue of tradition. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that tradition as well as the Bible constitutes the revealed Word of God. It teaches that the teaching of the Church Fathers, the Church Councils, and the Traditions of the Church are all ‘one sacred deposit of the Word of God’.

John Hardon S. J. makes the following statements in his Question and Answer Catholic Catechism:

Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of God that the prophets and apostles received through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and, under His guidance, the Church has handed on to the Christian world.[4]

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of in­spired persons.[5]

Jesus Christ had some interesting things to say about tradition:

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, ‘Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.’ And He answered and said to them, `And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, “Honor your father and mother”… But you say, “Whoever shall say to his father or mother, ‘Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,’ he is not to honor his father or his mother.” And thus you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men”‘ (Matt. 15:1-9).

In a parallel passage in Mark 7:5-13 much of the same teaching by Jesus is recorded. The Pharisees ask why the disciples do not walk according to the tradition of the elders. In response Jesus denounces the scribes and Pharisees and their observance of tradition which is in violation of the Word of God. In effect they have elevated the teachings of men above the Scriptures. The following sums up Jesus’ evaluation:

  1. You teach as doctrines the precepts of men.
  2. Neglecting the commandment of God you hold to the tradition of men.
  3. You set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.
  4. You invalidate the Word of God by your tradition which you have handed down.

We should note that Jesus is not condemning tradition simply because it is tradition. All tradition is not wrong. What he is condemning is the elevating of tradition or the teaching of men to equality with the Word of God. He condemned the scribes and Pharisees for following tradition which violated and invalidated the Word of God. And then he rebuked them for so teaching others.

Tradition is not necessarily wrong, but tradition is not the Word of God, and for tradition to be acceptable to God, it must never contradict or violate the clear teaching of the Bible. All tradition must be judged by the truth of Scripture, including traditions which have their original roots in Scripture. The traditions that the scribes and Pharisees adhered to, but which Jesus denounced, were traditions which had their roots in mistaken interpretations of the Bible.

There is one obvious and definitive test which we can apply to all teaching and tradition to determine if it is true. That test is this: if the tradition or the teaching, even though it arises from the interpretation of a passage of Scripture, contradicts the clear teaching of another portion of Script­ure, then that particular tradition or teaching is incorrect, for Scripture never contradicts Scripture.

The Word of God alone is our final authority, never tradition. We are told in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 that ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.’ All Scripture is inspired and is therefore authoritat­ive. And because it is inspired, that is, because it is the Word of a self-consistent God, it will never contradict itself.

Consequently, we can judge whether or not a particular teaching or tradition is true by comparing it to the Word of God. If it is consistent with the Word of God, then we can accept it as truth. However, if it clearly contradicts the teaching of the Bible or makes the Word of God contradict itself, then we know that it is error, and is to be rejected. Otherwise we shall fall into the same condemnation which Jesus uttered against the Pharisees.

One question this whole issue brings up is this: can the true church of God fall into error? The answer to that question, based upon the history of God’s people in the Bible is ‘yes’. It is possible for the church leadership to fall into error and be led astray from the truth. For example, the apostle Peter was publicly rebuked by Paul for the hypocrisy of which he was guilty (Gal. 2:11-14).

On an earlier occasion the apostle Peter was rebuked by Christ because he tried to hinder the Lord from going to the cross. ‘But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s”‘ (Matt. 16:23). The Lord Jesus actually addressed Peter as Satan, for Satan was using Peter to try to divert him from the will of God. This all transpired after Peter had been told that he was to be given the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:18-19).

Of course, the example of God’s chosen people, the Jews, during the time of the Lord Jesus himself, shows us clearly that it is possible for the church’s leadership to be deceived. Jesus’ words about tradition were spoken against the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leadership of God’s chosen people and the true church of that day. They had fallen into error and had become so blind that they failed to recognise

Jesus as the Messiah. They fell into the error of misinterpret­ing the Word of God and of elevating tradition and the teachings of the elders to a level equal in authority to the Scriptures, even though those teachings contradicted the Word of God. In addition to this Jesus claimed that the religious leadership of his day, because of their adherence to tradition and misinterpretation of Scripture, were actually responsible for hindering people from entering the kingdom of God: Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered’ (Lk. 11:52). ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from men; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in’ (Matt. 23:13). If this was true of the religious leadership of God’s chosen people in the day of Jesus Christ, there is absolutely no guarantee that a church leadership will not fall into error and mislead people.

Were the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day intentionally trying to deceive people? Not necessarily! Many of them were doing what they sincerely felt was right. But they were wrong and consequently they were deceiving people and leading them astray. Sincerity is no guarantee against error. A man can be sincerely wrong. In the final analysis, as Christ taught, the Word of God is the final authority for determin­ing what is truth and what is error. Any teaching which contradicts the Word of God must be rejected: ‘To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them’ (Is. 8:20, A.V.).

Luke records that when Paul came to Berea, and preached the gospel in the local Jewish synagogue, the Bereans ‘were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily, to see whether these things were so’ (Acts 17:11). The Bereans compared Paul’s doctrines with the Word of God to see if his teachings were consistent with the teachings of the Word of God. Only then would they accept the gospel he was preaching. They knew that any teaching that truly originates from God would not contradict what he had already revealed in his Word.

It is in this spirit that we shall examine the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church….

[1] Walter M. Abbot S.J., The Documents of Vatican II (Westchester, IL: Follett Publishing Co., 1966), 177.

[2] John A. Hardon, S.J., The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism (New York, NY: Image Books, Doubleday, 1981), 37.

[3] Ibid., 41.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 41.

Traitor? No. Lover of Christ? Yes. Saved by Grace? Doubtful.

(THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED BY MYSELF IN JUNE OF 2007 AND IS AN IMPORT FROM MY OLD BLOG)

My views have changed a bit on Dr. Beckwith over the years since the original post seen below. Three posts summing up some doctrinal issues Protestants have with Catholicism are as follows:

In other words, Dr. Beckwith has traveled so far into Catholic doctrine that I fear he is not saved by Calvary’s Cross.

I have slightly edited this import due to sites I originally got quotes from going defunct/under. Compared to the original post the extended quotes still have the same Beckwith quote in them, just some addition thoughts added.


IMPORT


From Catholic to Evangelical, to Catholic Again

On May 5th (2007), Francis Beckwith resigned as President of the Evangelical Theological Society, and the ETS in short order accepted this resignation.

Accepting members of the ETS:

  • C. Hassell Bullock, President-Elect (Wheaton College),
  • Bruce A. Ware, Vice-President (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary),
  • Edwin M. Yamauchi, At-large member (Miami University),
  • Craig A. Blaising, At-large member (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary)
  • Gregory K. Beale, At-large member (Wheaton College),
  • David M. Howard, Jr., At-large member (Bethel Seminary),
  • James A. Borland, Secretary-Treasurer (Liberty University),
  • Andreas J. Köstenberger, JETS Editor (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary).

Besides Beckwith, a few others have recently joined the Catholic Church from Protestant backgrounds; some worth mentioning are Dr. Robert Koons, J. Budziszewski, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Scott Hahn, as well as Richard John Neuhaus (editor of First Things, a Catholic theological and philosophical journal).

Before I get into this whole thing I want to say that I am a huge, I mean huge, Beckwith fan. I have read every book he has edited and authored, as well as articles, and audio CD/DVD. My favorite books being:

  • Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air, co-authored by Greg Koukl;
  • Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights;
  • Are You politically Correct? Debating America’s Cultural Standards;
  • Do the Right Thing: A Philosophical Dialogue on the Moral and Social Issues of Our Time;
  • To Everyone and Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview.

Some of the very fun and enjoyable CD’s and DVD have been:

  • Relativism (Summit Ministries);
  • The Pluralist game (Summit);
  • Political Correctness (Summit);
  • Responding to Relativism (Stand to Reason Ministries – DVD).

I will probably continue to read all his works and follow his career, a career I hope to make a splash into at some point (that is, a professor). I also hope Summit Ministries keeps him on as a guest lecturer for the Colorado summer camp. My sons are getting close to the age of going and I would love to have Beckwith’s influence as one of many other godly men and women that take time out their schedules to inculcate truth into these young men and women, namely my two sons.

There’s my intro, take it or leave it. Remember that Luther wanted to “fix” the Church originally… not wanting to leave it (Luther did escape a waiting death sentence and died of old age… others weren’t so fortunate). BUT, there are a few principles both he and us “Protestors” have taken an unspoken oath to die for… peaceably. And Luther and others did die for those principles. That being said, all Christians are under assault not only by culture, but also by Islamo-Fascism. So if God has chosen to put Beckwith into a Church that desperately needs to realign with the conservative traditions that all of our faiths are founded on… who am I to get in the way of a larger and greater plan? I seem to get in the way of the plans He has for even my wife and I let alone a stalwart like Beckwith bringing sound thinking to Catholic seminaries and lay people. For instance, I will highlight just a small snippet of what Beckwith said in this interview:

You spent 32 years in the evangelical world. What could Catholics learn from evangelicals?

I learned plenty, and for that reason I do not believe I ceased to be an evangelical when I returned to the Church. What I ceased to be was a Protestant. For I believe, as Pope Benedict has preached, that the Church itself needs to nurture within it an evangelical spirit. There are, as we know, too many Catholics whose faith needs to be renewed and emboldened.

There is much that I learned as a Protestant evangelical that has left an indelible mark on me and formed the person I am today. For that reason, it accompanies me back to the Church.

For instance, because Protestant evangelicals accept much of the Great Tradition that Catholics take for granted — such as the Catholic creeds and the inspiration of Scripture — but without recourse to the Church’s authority, they have produced important and significant works in systematic theology and philosophical theology.

Catholics would do well to plumb these works, since in them Protestant evangelicals often provide the biblical and philosophical scaffolding that influenced the Church Fathers that developed the catholic creeds as well as the Church’s understanding of the Bible as God’s Word.

But these evangelicals do so by using contemporary language and addressing contemporary concerns. This will help Catholics understand the reasoning behind the classical doctrines.

In terms of expository preaching, as well as teaching the laity, Protestant evangelicals are without peers in the Christian world.

For instance, it is not unusual for evangelical churches to host major conferences on theological issues in which leading scholars address lay audiences in order to equip them to share their faith with their neighbors, friends, etc. Works by evangelical philosophers and theologians such as [J.P.] Moreland, [Paul] Copan, and William Lane Craig, should be in the library of any serious Catholic who wants to be equipped to respond to contemporary challenges to the Christian faith.

I read much of the works of Catholic philosophers, like Peter Kreeft and others. I would love to meet a new generation of Catholics that read evangelical authors like the ones mentioned above. Another question posed to Beckwith will follow a post by Beckwith from his blog. The below is a small snippet of what will soon be a flood of explanations and kindly debates as to why Dr. Beckwith left the “Protestors” to join the Catholic Church. Here is an excerpt from behind his reasoning from REFORMATION 21:

I have been asked my opinion both on this blog and in other conversations about the recent announcement by Frank Beckwith.

Dr. Francis Beckwith’s conversion, better yet, reversion to Rome was very interesting to me. For those of you who don’t know, Francis Beckwith is a well-known scholar, professor, and president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He resigned his position as president of ETS a few months ago when he declared that he had become a communicant in the Roman Catholic Church, the religion of his childhood.

In the letter explaining his return to the Roman Church Dr. Beckwith writes:

“During the last week of March 2007, after much prayer, counsel and consideration, my wife and I decided to seek full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. My wife, a baptized Presbyterian, is going through the process of the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). This will culminate with her receiving the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation. For me, because I had received the sacraments of Baptism, Communion, and Confirmation all before the age of 14, I need only go to confession, request forgiveness for my sins, ask to be received back into the Church, and receive absolution.”

I am saddened by the language of Dr. Beckwith’s letter. This goes to show that smart men can make large errors. How sad it is for a man who once affirmed Sola Scriptura to now embrace a religious system that rejects the sole sufficiency and unique authority of the Bible. What is also tragic is that he has rejected Jesus Christ as the one mediator between God and man and now seeks forgiveness of sins and “absolution” from the Roman Church.

Further on in his letter Beckwith writes:

“The past four months have moved quickly for me and my wife. As you probably know, my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.”

Well, we could argue all day about whether or not Rome is a more faithful interpreter of the early church fathers. For now I will say that it is my conviction that the Protestant Reformers were far more faithful to the likes of Athanasius and Augustine than were leaders of the Roman Church during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. However, what is most important is that the Protestant Reformers were faithful to the Scriptures…..

The National Catholic Register (now found at Catholic Education Resource Center) interviewed Dr. Beckwith recently and they got to the nitty gritty of the matter. By the way, in case someone asks after reading this interview, I am a “First Things” evangelical! Here is the question posed followed by Beckwith’s response:

  • “What led you back to the Church?”

Dr. Beckwith’s partial answer:

Until a few weeks ago, Francis Beckwith was president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of 4,300 Protestant theologians. Now he has returned to the Church of his baptism.

[….]

There isn’t just one reason. One reason alone isn’t enough. That’s like someone asking, “Why do you love your wife?” There are 15 different reasons. It’s the whole package.

My nephew asking me to be his sponsor for his May 13 confirmation merely sped up what I had intended to do in November after my term as ETS president had ended.

I didn’t fully realize it until the beginning of 2007 that I had assimilated much of a Catholic understanding of faith and reason, the nature of the human person, as well as the progress of dogma.

Looking back, the beginning of my return to the Church, though I didn’t realize it at the time, probably occurred at a conference on John Paul II and Philosophy at Boston College in February 2006.

Several months earlier I had published a small essay in the magazine Touchstone: “Vatican Bible School: What John Paul II Can Teach Evangelicals.” I incorporated portions of that essay in my BC paper in which I made a case for why anti-creedal Protestants hold to an incoherent point of view on faith, reason, and the nature of the Christian university.

The first question from the audience came from Laura Garcia, a BC philosophy professor, who is a Catholic and former evangelical Protestant.

She asked, “Why aren’t you a Catholic?”

The question took me by surprise.

I gave her an answer — if I remember correctly — that appealed to the doctrines of the Reformation as making all the difference to me. I also tried to account for the church’s continuity as being connected to the reformers and their progeny as well as their predecessors in the Catholic Church. In this way, I could defend the creeds as Spirit-directed without conceding the present authority of Rome on these matters.

That episode at Boston College, nevertheless, got me thinking.

So, I read Truth and Tolerance by Ratzinger and portions of his Introduction to Christianity. Out of curiosity, I picked up a book I saw while browsing the stacks at a local bookstore: David Currie, Born Fundamentalist, Born-Again Catholic.

I was not entirely convinced by all his arguments, but he did raise some issues about the Church Fathers and the Catholic doctrines of the Eucharist and infant baptism that led me to more scholarly sources.

In mid-November I was elected president of ETS while still embracing Reformation theology on the four key issues I just mentioned.

In early January 2007, I began reading the Early Church Fathers and the Catechism, focusing on the doctrines that I thought were key.

I also read Mark Noll’s book, Is the Reformation Over?

This led me to read the “Joint Declaration on Justification” by Lutheran and Catholic scholars. While consulting these sources, I read portions of a book by my friends Norm Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences. It is a fair-minded book.

But some of the points that Norm and Ralph made really shook me up and were instrumental in facilitating my return to the Church.

What was their take on the issue you had just read about, justification?

For example, in their section on salvation, they write: “Although the forensic aspect of justification stressed by Reformation theology is scarcely found prior to the Reformation, there is continuity between medieval Catholicism and the Reformers” (103).

Then when I read the Fathers, those closest to the Apostles, the Reformation doctrine was just not there.

To be sure, salvation by grace was there. To be sure, the necessity of faith was there. And to be sure, our works apart from God’s grace was decried. But what was present was a profound understanding of how saving faith was not a singular event that took place “on a Wednesday,” to quote a famous Gospel song, but that it was the grace of God working through me as I acquiesced to God’s spirit to allow his grace to shape and mold my character so that I may be conformed to the image of Christ. I also found it in the Catechism.

There was an aesthetic aspect to this well: The Catholic view of justification elegantly tied together James and Paul and the teachings of Jesus that put a premium on a believer’s faithful practice of Christian charity.

Catholicism does not teach “works righteousness.” It teaches faith in action as a manifestation of God’s grace in one’s life. That’s why Abraham’s faith results in righteousness only when he attempts to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God.

Then I read the Council of Trent, which some Protestant friends had suggested I do. What I found was shocking. I found a document that had been nearly universally misrepresented by many Protestants, including some friends.

I do not believe, however, that the misrepresentation is the result of purposeful deception. But rather, it is the result of reading Trent with Protestant assumptions and without a charitable disposition.

For example, Trent talks about the four causes of justification, which correspond somewhat to Aristotle’s four causes. None of these causes is the work of the individual Christian. For, according to Trent, God’s grace does all the work. However, Trent does condemn “faith alone,” but what it means is mere intellectual assent without allowing God’s grace to be manifested in one’s actions and communion with the Church. This is why Trent also condemns justification by works.

I am convinced that the typical “Council of Trent” rant found on anti-Catholic websites is the Protestant equivalent of the secular urban legend that everyone prior to Columbus believed in a flat earth.

In another interview Dr. Beckwith gives some more insight into his decision to join the Catholic Church. I, of course, would disagree with some of the points Noll’s makes, but I enjoyed the response by Beckwith:

(I CANNOT FIND THIS QUOTE ANYWHERE BUT MY PRESERVATION OF IT, AS, IGNATIUS INSIGHTS IS GONE)

IgnatiusInsight.com: You’ve mentioned, in past interviews, that Dr. Mark Noll’s book, Is The Reformation Over? (Baker, 2005), was a helpful work for you to read. Do you agree with Noll’s assessment that “the central difference that continues to separate evangelicals and Catholics is not Scripture, justification by faith, the pope, Mary, the sacraments, or clerical celibacy … but the nature of the church”? How significant is the issue of ecclesiology in current and ongoing Catholic-Evangelical dialogue?

Dr. Beckwith: I partly agree with Noll. I think he is right that logically that once the authority question is answered, the other issues that he mentions fall into place. However, practically, the process is more organic, as it was in my case. Once I saw that the Catholic view of justification could be defended biblically and historically, and that the sacraments, including a non-symbolic understanding of the Eucharist, have their roots deep in Christian history prior to the fixation of the biblical canon, the authority issue fell into place.

Something else concerning authority factored into my internal deliberations as well. But I do not think I can conjure up the words to properly express it. So, I will just rely on an elegant insight offered in First Things by a recent Catholic convert, R. R. Reno, which perfectly echoes my own sentiments: “In the end, my decision to leave the Episcopal Church did not happen because I had changed my mind about any particular point of theology or ecclesiology. Nor did it represent a sudden realization that the arguments for staying put are specious. What changed was the way in which I had come to hold my ideas and use my arguments. In order to escape the insanity of my slide into self-guidance, I put myself up for reception into the Catholic Church as one might put oneself up for adoption. A man can no more guide his spiritual life by his own ideas than a child can raise himself on the strength of his native potential.”

I hope to write a book about my journey in the next year. There are a lot of people who are clamoring for my reasons and what went into my decision. This is why I have consented to several of these interviews, since they give me a chance to provide, however superficially, the reasons for my decision.

But given my status in the Evangelical world, I think a more detailed memoir of my pilgrimage is needed. It will not be a polemical work. What it will be is a narrative of my own reflections and what led my wife and me to first consider and then choose to seek full communion with the Catholic Church.

One of the points that I want to make clear in the book is that my reception into the Catholic Church has not changed my vocation as a Christian philosopher. I will continue to work on projects that offer to the Christian and secular worlds reasons for the Christian faith and the moral and social implications that follow from it. In that sense, there has always been a catholicity about my work. I do not anticipate that changing.

Another article worth reading, if only for the Hulk Hogan connection, is one in the Washington Post. Mainly the article points to a generalization of Beckwith’s points when it wrote that “Beckwith said his decision reflects how dramatically the divisions between evangelicals and Catholics have narrowed in recent decades, as they have stood shoulder to shoulder on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and school vouchers.”

Untill some of the big-boys on the block hash this out, I will sit by and take notes and watch. I really think the main reason Beckwith decided to leave Protestantism is one grounded more in a subjective feeling that Evangelicals do not have a grounding in what the early Church Fathers taught, or that we somehow lack a connection to history and tradition. His “decision to leave the Evangelical church did not happen because [he] had changed [his] mind about any particular point of theology or ecclesiology,” it was more for the feeling that “a man can no more guide his spiritual life by his own ideas than a child can raise himself on the strength of his native potential.” Obviously he wasn’t part of a strong, well balanced church and felt like an orphan. That’s too bad, but does this orphanage require one to accept transubstantiation and other doctrines in order to feel “adopted?”

In the case of Dr. Beckwith it apparently did.

How the Reformation Shaped Your World

Can one man change the world? The life and work of Martin Luther prove the answer to that question is an unqualified, “yes.” Stephen Cornils of the Wartburg Theological Seminary details the rebellion that fractured a centuries-old religion and changed the course of history.

Doctrinal Differences Still Matter Between Catholics and Protestants

Difference Between

Going to Heaven?

Do you want to see some theological white-washing (postmodern approaches to the Bible) of important issues facing the Church… that is, salvation through Christ Jesus… here Josh C. posted the following:

If faith without works is dead, and if works are acknowledged as a necessary result of faith, then quite frankly, what does it matter when God “justifies” us? This to me seems a matter of pure theory, in some ways unknowable by human beings. And yet it has divided masses of Christians who could otherwise be joining hand in hand to obey Jesus’ commandments in a world that needs such things. Real Christians have been stymied in the doing of real works for the sake of purely abstract mental constructs of which no man will ever have full knowledge. I find this an insult to the very spirit of Christianity. Jesus’ clear and unavoidable command of obedience, and his clear and unavoidable wish and prayer for unity, has been disavowed in favor of defeating other Christians on the battlefield of metaphysical abstractions! Nonsense.

I responded simply by saying: ‘I hope your OP was not about Catholic doctrine compared to Protestant.”

Stephen C. commented later by noting that,

Fighting 16th century debates that no one cares about any more is an utter waste of time and a slanderous representation of our Lord and his intents for his church and its testimony in the world.

To which Josh C. thumbed up (Facebook ya’ know). Here I responded with the following:

Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses claim Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross was to merely remove Adam’s sin from us. And now they work towards building up their salvation through good works (differing levels of heaven for LDS or an opportunity to serve on a new earth for J-Dubs). Apologists and theologians rightly show that this is a misrepresentation of salvation in the Scriptures. So while I will invite these theological and dangerous cults into my home and discuss these issues… I cannot point out that infant Baptism in the Catholic Church removes Adam’s original sin and now Catholics get the opportunity to work towards lessening of time in Purgatory? That is an unimportant theological issue?

Josh clarifies a bit…

I think there are people on all sides who get it wrong. The point isn’t “there aren’t issues.” The point is people claiming to know with absolute certainty what I do not believe, even with the Bible, they can know. Even worse, and my main point, is the using of these debate points to divide people and break fellowship.

I respond to the above

My wife’s whole family is Catholic (accept for her dad). A person I admire greatly for his authorship converted (I posted on it here many years ago)

I understand about not dividing in issues of policy, politics, and relations. I also understand there are “Evangelical Catholics” who reject Mariology and the like. Fine. I treat everyone as individuals.

BUT, as an organisation, if a person were to believe doctrine as taught by the Roman Catholic Faith, or Eastern Orthodoxy… I would be as adamant as the Reformers that this doctrine is in the spirit of anti-Christ, as, it opposes the finished work of Calvary.

And?

Grace is another word for salvation and our status in sight of God being clothed with Jesus righteousness. Mary is not full of grace to be able to share with sinners. That is Christ’s (God’s) position alone to fill.

Am I suppose to not be able to express what the Bible teaches? Or how Jerome in the Latin Vulgate mistranslated a word and a pillar of Catholic doctrine is build on that false edifice (that the Greek corrects).

If that truth[s] divide, then so be it, but I am still close to my wife’s family ~ and her uncle, Father Joe, still asks me to convert at every family gathering (of which my wife is the oldest of about 44 grandkids/great-grandkids).

But on essential doctrine I do not budge. Sorry. 

  • In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love

BTW, I have a whole chapter (my largest) in my book on Evangelicals that get it wrong.

Mariology

Purgatory

Are Roman Catholic Views of Tradition, Biblical?

This is from a larger debate between Ken Samples and Fr. Mitch Pacwa . I think this intro does it’s due diligence in explaining many of the false views I have heard from people as of late. In other words, one should not define Protestants as believing Sola Scriptura wrongly, and then responding to this false view.

The below is from an excellent book by William Webster:

  • William Webster, Salvation, The Bible, and Roman Catholicism (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust, 1990), 13-20

AUTHORITATIVE STATEMENTS OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD

The Documents of Vatican II

Hence there exist a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit. To the successors of the apostles, sacred tradition hands on in its full purity God’s word, which was entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit . . . Consequently, it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence. Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which is committed to the Church.[1]

The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism

59. Where do we find the truths revealed by God?

We find the truths revealed by God in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

60. How does Sacred Scripture compare with Sacred Tradition?

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of inspired persons.[2]

89. Why is Sacred Tradition of equal authority with the Bible?

The Bible and Sacred Tradition are of equal authority because they are equally the word of God; both derive from the inspired vision of the ancient prophets, and especially from the infinite wisdom of God incarnate who gave to the apostles what he came down on earth to teach, through them, to all of mankind.[3]

TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD – SUMMARY OF NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

The first issue to be addressed in any discussion of spiritual truth is that of authority. To say something is true or false implies an authoritative standard by which we can make such a judgment. But is there such an authoritative stand­ard by which we can judge whether a particular teaching or system is true or false? The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. That authoritative standard is the Word of God, the Bible. Jesus Christ himself said of the Bible, ‘Thy word is truth’ (Jn. 17:17). In settling issues of spiritual controversy the Lord Jesus always appealed to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and false­hood.

Mark’s Gospel records an incident in which certain Sad-ducees came to Jesus to question him. The Sadducees were the religious liberals of Jesus’ day and they rejected many of the teachings espoused by the more orthodox sect of the Pharisees. They did not believe in angels or in the resurrec­tion of the dead. A number of these men came to Jesus to ask him a trick question about life after death. Jesus demolished their trick question but went on to say this:

Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God?… But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken (Mk. 12:24,25-27 NASB 1963).

Twice in this passage Christ tells these men they are greatly mistaken in their views. The reason is that they do not understand the Scriptures. He appeals to those Scriptures to correct the false concepts these men held. He points to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and error. These men are greatly mistaken because the views they hold and the doctrines they teach contradict the Word of God.

Here you have two opposing views of truth. One says there is no resurrection from the dead, the other says there is. How do you determine which is true? You go to the Word of God. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is God in human flesh and therefore whatever he teaches is absolute truth. And according to him the Word of God is the final and authoritative standard by which all claims to truth are to be judged.

This principle obviously has a direct bearing upon the whole issue of tradition. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that tradition as well as the Bible constitutes the revealed Word of God. It teaches that the teaching of the Church Fathers, the Church Councils, and the Traditions of the Church are all ‘one sacred deposit of the Word of God’.

John Hardon S. J. makes the following statements in his Question and Answer Catholic Catechism:

Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of God that the prophets and apostles received through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and, under His guidance, the Church has handed on to the Christian world.[4]

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of in­spired persons.[5]

Jesus Christ had some interesting things to say about tradition:

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, ‘Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.’ And He answered and said to them, `And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, “Honor your father and mother”… But you say, “Whoever shall say to his father or mother, ‘Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,’ he is not to honor his father or his mother.” And thus you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men”‘ (Matt. 15:1-9).

In a parallel passage in Mark 7:5-13 much of the same teaching by Jesus is recorded. The Pharisees ask why the disciples do not walk according to the tradition of the elders. In response Jesus denounces the scribes and Pharisees and their observance of tradition which is in violation of the Word of God. In effect they have elevated the teachings of men above the Scriptures. The following sums up Jesus’ evaluation:

  1. You teach as doctrines the precepts of men.
  2. Neglecting the commandment of God you hold to the tradition of men.
  3. You set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.
  4. You invalidate the Word of God by your tradition which you have handed down.

We should note that Jesus is not condemning tradition simply because it is tradition. All tradition is not wrong. What he is condemning is the elevating of tradition or the teaching of men to equality with the Word of God. He condemned the scribes and Pharisees for following tradition which violated and invalidated the Word of God. And then he rebuked them for so teaching others.

Tradition is not necessarily wrong, but tradition is not the Word of God, and for tradition to be acceptable to God, it must never contradict or violate the clear teaching of the Bible. All tradition must be judged by the truth of Scripture, including traditions which have their original roots in Scripture. The traditions that the scribes and Pharisees adhered to, but which Jesus denounced, were traditions which had their roots in mistaken interpretations of the Bible.

There is one obvious and definitive test which we can apply to all teaching and tradition to determine if it is true. That test is this: if the tradition or the teaching, even though it arises from the interpretation of a passage of Scripture, contradicts the clear teaching of another portion of Script­ure, then that particular tradition or teaching is incorrect, for Scripture never contradicts Scripture.

The Word of God alone is our final authority, never tradition. We are told in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 that ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.’ All Scripture is inspired and is therefore authoritat­ive. And because it is inspired, that is, because it is the Word of a self-consistent God, it will never contradict itself.

Consequently, we can judge whether or not a particular teaching or tradition is true by comparing it to the Word of God. If it is consistent with the Word of God, then we can accept it as truth. However, if it clearly contradicts the teaching of the Bible or makes the Word of God contradict itself, then we know that it is error, and is to be rejected. Otherwise we shall fall into the same condemnation which Jesus uttered against the Pharisees.

One question this whole issue brings up is this: can the true church of God fall into error? The answer to that question, based upon the history of God’s people in the Bible is ‘yes’. It is possible for the church leadership to fall into error and be led astray from the truth. For example, the apostle Peter was publicly rebuked by Paul for the hypocrisy of which he was guilty (Gal. 2:11-14).

On an earlier occasion the apostle Peter was rebuked by Christ because he tried to hinder the Lord from going to the cross. ‘But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s”‘ (Matt. 16:23). The Lord Jesus actually addressed Peter as Satan, for Satan was using Peter to try to divert him from the will of God. This all transpired after Peter had been told that he was to be given the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:18-19).

Of course, the example of God’s chosen people, the Jews, during the time of the Lord Jesus himself, shows us clearly that it is possible for the church’s leadership to be deceived. Jesus’ words about tradition were spoken against the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leadership of God’s chosen people and the true church of that day. They had fallen into error and had become so blind that they failed to recognise

Jesus as the Messiah. They fell into the error of misinterpret­ing the Word of God and of elevating tradition and the teachings of the elders to a level equal in authority to the Scriptures, even though those teachings contradicted the Word of God. In addition to this Jesus claimed that the religious leadership of his day, because of their adherence to tradition and misinterpretation of Scripture, were actually responsible for hindering people from entering the kingdom of God: Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered’ (Lk. 11:52). ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from men; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in’ (Matt. 23:13). If this was true of the religious leadership of God’s chosen people in the day of Jesus Christ, there is absolutely no guarantee that a church leadership will not fall into error and mislead people.

Were the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day intentionally trying to deceive people? Not necessarily! Many of them were doing what they sincerely felt was right. But they were wrong and consequently they were deceiving people and leading them astray. Sincerity is no guarantee against error. A man can be sincerely wrong. In the final analysis, as Christ taught, the Word of God is the final authority for determin­ing what is truth and what is error. Any teaching which contradicts the Word of God must be rejected: ‘To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them’ (Is. 8:20, A.V.).

Luke records that when Paul came to Berea, and preached the gospel in the local Jewish synagogue, the Bereans ‘were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily, to see whether these things were so’ (Acts 17:11). The Bereans compared Paul’s doctrines with the Word of God to see if his teachings were consistent with the teachings of the Word of God. Only then would they accept the gospel he was preaching. They knew that any teaching that truly originates from God would not contradict what he had already revealed in his Word.

It is in this spirit that we shall examine the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church….

[1] Walter M. Abbot S.J., The Documents of Vatican II (Westchester, IL: Follett Publishing Co., 1966), 177.

[2] John A. Hardon, S.J., The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism (New York, NY: Image Books, Doubleday, 1981), 37.

[3] Ibid., 41.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 41.

Is Christianity Bad News for Women? (Amy Orr-Ewing)

Center for Public Christianity (2017) – Amy Orr-Ewing delivers the 2017 Richard Johnson Lecture at NSW Parliament House.

Q & A