Notes on *Fundamentalism and the Word of God*
Fundamentalism and the Word of God, J. I. Packer (IVP, 1958)
Spurgeon: “Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion.”
Main Idea
Evangelical theology, in line with historic Christian doctrine, believes the Bible is the word of God, and should be thus defended against the assaults of Liberalism/subjectivism.
"In fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all- disagreement as to the principle of authority: for there can be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of Evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things they do believe, the critics have misses this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here that our discussion must center." (17)
"The scriptural approach to Scripture is thus to regard it as God's written testimony to Himself. When we call the Bible the Word of God, we mean, or should mean, that its message constitutes a single utterance of which God is the author. What Scripture says, He says. When we hear or read Scripture, that which impinges on our mind (whether we realize it or not) is the speech of God Himself." (89)
"Evangelicals, it is said, cling to the idea of biblical infallibility as drowning men cling to a straw- not because it is worthy of their trust, but because they want something to cling to and there is nothing else within reach. We can now see how perverse a misunderstanding this is. the evangelical certainty of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture is of exactly the same sort, and rests on exactly the same basis, as the Church's certainty of the Trinity, or the incarnation, or any other catholic doctrine. God has declared it; Scripture embodies it; the Spirit exhibits it to believers; and they humbly receive it, as they are bound to do." (122)
"We have seen what the real issues are: the authority of Christ and of Scripture; the relation between the Bible and reason; the method of theology, and the meaning of repentance; the choice between Evangelicalism and Subjectivism." (176)
Interaction
The question of Scripture is really, "What think ye of Christ?" (59)
The message of Scripture is Jesus. He is the key. (84)
See Vanhoozer, "First Theology" (86)
JIP is suspicious of the Biblical Theology movement in its earliest days, c.1950s. (155)
Liberalism repeats the same assault on Christianity that has been since its beginning: the contribution of sinful man to the work of Christ, which obscures Christ's glory. (173)
We, following the Reformation heritage, must oppose Liberalism today as the Reformers opposed Medieval Catholicism. (173)
Table of Contents
Foreword
I. 'Fundamentalists' under Fire
II. What is 'Fundamentalism'?
III. Authority
IV. Scripture
V. Faith
VI. Reason
VII. Liberalism
VIII. Conclusion
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
Foreword:
This book is a constructive re-statement of evangelical principles, aiming to fix the right approach to the Bible.
I. Fundamentalists Under Fire
Liberal critics are not going after mere evangelical practice, but actual principle. They consider the idea of biblical inerrancy to be unreasonable in our modern times.
And many of these critics blame Fundamentalists for being too parochial. They consider them to not get everything wrong — they’re not heretics — but they need to adjust a few things here and there. “If only Fundementalists would abandon their isolationism and come into these [more mainline] movements!”
JIP calls this analysis just flat wrong ...
“It reflects two characteristic weaknesses of ecumenical theology. The first is the tendency to treat every theological tradition as no more than a loosely linked collection of isolated insights, brought together by the mere accident of history. But the evangelical faith is a systematic and integrated whole, built on a single foundation; and they must be understood and assessed as such. ... [there actually is a major doctrinal issue separating the two sides, Mainlines and Fundamentalists] ... in fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all – disagreement as to the principle of authority: there could be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things that they do believe, the critics have missed this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here to our discussion must center.” (17)
“Our first task must be to test all the words of men by the authoritative Word of God, to receive only what Scripture endorses, and to reject all that is contrary to it.” (19)
II. What Is Fundamentalism?
On the connection between Christology and the doctrine of Scripture. As Timothy Ward also says, "people's view of Scripture is often largely determined by their view of Jesus Christ" (Words of Life, 41).
Matthew 5:17–18,
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
III. Authority
“The real question concerns the principle of authority.” (41)
“The problem of authority is the most fundamental problem that the Christian church ever faces. This is because Christianity is built on truth: that is to say, on the content of a divine revelation. Christianity announces salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, in and through whom that revelation came to completion; but faith in Jesus Christ is possible only where the truth concerning him is known.” (42)
Two classes of doctrinal division:
1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches
2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)
There are three distinct authorities to which final appeal might be made:
Holy Scripture (Evangelical)
Church Tradition (Rome)
Christian Reason (Liberal)
Evangelical view of authority:
“To learn the mind of God, one must consult His written Word. What Scripture says, God says. The Bible is inspired in the sense of being word-for-word God-given.” 47
“The proper ground for believing a thing is that God says it in His written Word, and a readiness to take God’s word and accept what he asserts in the Bible is thus fundamental to faith.” 49
The Teaching of Jesus:
“The fact we have to face is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who claimed divine authority for all that he did and taught, both confirmed the absolute authority of the Old Testament for others and submitted to it unreservedly himself.” (55)
“In conjunction with the teachings of Jesus, the written word of the Old Testament retains is full, divine authority. Attempts have been made by some who reject Christ’s view of the Old Testament to evade the force of this conclusion. This could be done only by denying Christ’s authority altogether. Christ’s claim to be divine is either true or false. If it is true, his person guarantees the truth of all the rest of his teaching (for a divine person cannot lie or err); therefore, his view of the Old Testament is true. If his claim is false, there is no compelling reason to believe anything else that he said. If we accept Christ’s claims, therefore, we commit ourselves to believe all that he taught—on this authority. If we refuse to believe some part of what he taught, we are in effect denying him to be the divine Messiah – on our own authority. The question, “What think ye of the Old Testament?”, resolves into the question, “What think ye of Christ?” And our answer to the first proclaims our answer to the second.” (59)
“The apostles clearly grasped their Master’s of teaching about Scripture. They proclaimed Christianity as the fulfillment of Scripture. They preached the authority of Christ on the basis of the authority of the Old Testament. They argued from Scripture, quoting its words as the speech of God. Indeed, they laid claim to the Old Testament as a Christian book. The oracles of God, entrusted to the Jews, had been written primarily, they maintained, for the benefit of Christian believers. ‘Whatsoever things were written beforehand were written for our learning.’ The events in the wilderness in Moses’s day ‘were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.’ The prophets who spoke of the sufferings and glory of Christ ‘were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you.’ The reckoning of righteousness to believing Abraham was recorded ‘not for his sake alone, but for ours also.’ The Old Testament Scripture were ‘able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.’ To Christians, who held the key to its meaning, the Old Testament was luminous, though to those who veiled their hearts by refusing to find its meaning in Christ it remained obscure.” *(62-62)
Rom 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 1 Peter 1:12, Rom 4:23; 2 Tim 3:15
“Apostolic utterances are the truth of Christ and possess the authority of Christ; they are to be received as words of God, because what they convey is, in fact, the word of God.” 64
“To deny the normative authority of Scripture over the church is the misconceive the nature of Christianity, and, in effect, to deny the Lordship of Christ. If the teaching of Christ and the apostles is to rule the church, the church must be ruled by Scripture.” (69)
“The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God.” (69)
“We may never assume the complete rightness of our own established ways of thought and practice and excuse ourselves the duty of testing and reforming them by Scripture.” (70)
“Scripture has complete and final authority over the church as a self-contained, self interpreting revelation from God. This is what evangelicals are concerned above all to maintain. What Scripture says, God says; and what God says in Scripture is to be the rule of faith and life in his church.” (73)
IV. Scripture
Scripture itself is alone competent to judge our doctrine of Scripture (76)
The Divine Origin of Scripture:
"Inspiration is to be defined as a supernatural, providential influence of God's Holy Spirit upon the human authors which caused them to write what He wished to be written for the communication of revealed truth to others." (77)
"The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. 'Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule sinful human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and Scripture tells us that this is what in fact He did. We are to think of the Spirit's inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers' own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God's work." (80)
"But it is more than a library of books by human authors; it is a single book with a single author — God the Spirit — a single theme — God the Son, and the Father's saving purposes, which all revolve round Him. Our Lord is therefore the key to Scripture, and its focal center; there is a sense in which all bears witness of Him, and in this common reference the heterogenous contents of the Bible find their unity. Not that all parts of Scripture are equally important, or witness to Chris and the kingdom of God in the same way. But no part of Scripture is without its bearing on these central topics, and no part of Scripture is rightly understood if read without its reference." (84-85).
"The biblical concept of Scripture, then, is of a single, though complex, God-given message, set down in writing in God-given words; a message which God has spoken and still speaks." (88)
"Leave man to guess God's mind and purpose, and he will guess wrong; he can know it only by being told it. Moreover, the whole purpose of God's mighty acts is to bring man to know Him by faith' and Scripture knows no foundation for faith but the spoken word of God, inviting our trust in Him on the basis of what He has done for us. Where there is no word from God, faith cannot be." (92)
"God's Word is affirmed to be infallible because God Himself is infallible; the infallibility of Scripture is simply the infallibility of God speaking. What Scripture says is to be received as the infallible Word of the infallible God, and to assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii)the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God." (96)
"The authority of Christ requires us to receive as God's Word all that the Bible asserts. No other attitude to biblical assertions is theologically warrantable." (100)
"God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, an, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it- grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope, and significance is to be adequately understood." (101)
"Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him." (104)
"Christians are bound to receive the Bible as God's Word written on the authority of Christ, not because they can prove it such by independent enquiry, but because as disciples they trust their divine Teacher." (108)
"But without the Spirit's help there can be no grasp of the message of Scripture, no conviction of the truth of Scripture, and no faith in the God of Scripture. Without the Spirit, nothing is possible but spiritual blindness and unbelief." (112)
V. Faith
"Just as the Spirit teaches all Christians to receive as authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative source of doctrine the Scriptures which assert them." (121)
VI. Reason
'All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them." (127)
"Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith." (128)
"Sinners are no more ready to acknowledge God in their thinking, by allowing His utterances authority over their judgment, than they are to acknowledge God in their actions, by allowing his utterances authority over their behavior." (139)
"Christian believers, who acknowledge the authority of Christ as a Teacher in other matters, ought equally to acknowledge it in their approach to the Bible; they should receive Scripture as He did, accepting its claim to be divinely inspired and true and studying it as such." (141)
"This is the only road to intellectual freedom, and its sole safeguard is the principle of absolute subjection to Scripture." (143)
"If anyone in the present debate lacks intellectual freedom, it is rather those whose minds are governed by the tyrannical modern axiom that what is newest must be truest, what is old must be out-of date, and change is always progress; those who feel they must deny what Christ affirmed about Scripture rather than break with nineteenth- century ideas of what assumptions are 'scientific' and what are not; those in the grip of a theological neuroses that makes them regard rationalistic principles of biblical criticism as an inviolable sacred cow." (143-144)
VII. Liberalism
"To defer to God's Word is an act of faith; any querying and editing of it on our own initiative is an exhibition of unbelief."(153)
"To accept all is consistent; to reject all is consistent; but no third course is consistent." (163)
"If man's judgment is to be the measure of some things in Scripture , why not of all things? If we are entitled to desupernaturalize the faith in part, why not altogether? It is hard to respect the liberal half-way houses, however much acuteness and learning goes into their erection; for they are arbitrary through and through." (163)
"History shows that Christian witness is strong and effective only when believers are humble enough to believe nothing less about God than His own Word tells us." (163)
"The apologetic strategy that would attract converts by the flattery of accommodating the gospel to the 'wisdom' of sinful man was condemned by Paul nineteen centuries ago, and the past hundred years have provided a fresh demonstration of its bankruptcy. The world may call its compromises 'progressive' and 'enlightened' (those are its names for all forms of thought that pander to its conceit); those who produce them will doubtless, by a natural piece of wishful thinking, call them 'bold' and 'courageous', and perhaps 'realistic' and 'wholesome'; but the Bible condemns them as sterile aberrations. And the Church cannot hope to recover its power till it resolves to turn its back on them." (168)
VIII. Conclusion
"The Bible asks to be regarded as a God-given, error-free, self-interpreting unity, true and trustworthy in all that it teaches." (169)
"The fact is that here we are faced in principle with a choice between historic Evangelicalism and modern Subjectivism."(170)
"Once men reverse the proper relation between Scripture and their own thinking and start judging biblical statements about God by their private ideas of God, instead of vice versa, their knowledge of the Creator is in imminent danger of perishing, and with it the whole idea of supernatural redemption." (171-172)
"Evangelical theology is bound to oppose the attitude which under-values the gift of Scripture and presumes to correct the inerrant Word of God, just as it will oppose all misguided endeavors to supplement by human merit the perfect righteousness of Christ."(174)
Notable Content
Two classes of doctrinal division: (44)
1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches
2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)
Packer is suspicious of the Biblical Theology Movement in its early days (see 151-160)
Four reasons why Liberalism is faulty (see 160-163)
