Just as many Christians have abandoned a Christian worldview, many have abandoned the doctrines of Scripture. Many Christians have too low a view of the power and uniqueness of the Bible. They have absorbed the culture’s skepticism and disregard for any person or book that claims authority over them.
In the last book he completed before his death in 2000, James Montgomery Boice, considered by many to be among the greatest preachers of the twentieth century, wrote about the five solas of the Reformation—the doctrines through which Protestantism was defined. The first of these, sola scriptura, or Scripture alone, is foundational to all of Christian theology. The Cambridge Declaration, formulated by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, defines the doctrine in this way:
“We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation, which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.”
Sola scriptura declares that the Bible is the one and only perfect measure God has given to us as our guide in matters of life and faith.
Thirty years ago, the doctrine of the Bible’s inerrancy, the doctrine which states that the Bible is without error, came under attack from both within the church and without. Protestant leaders such as Boice, J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul, and Francis Schaeffer began an organization to clarify the Bible’s teaching about itself and to defend it against those who sought to defraud it of its unique position. This battle was fought and largely won. Yet in his last book, written many years later, Boice had this to say:
“Inerrancy is not the most critical issue facing the church today. The most serious issue, I believe, is the Bible’s sufficiency.”[i]
Dr. Boice’s words are true. While all Christians are eager to embrace the Bible and to treat it as precious possession, few are willing to give to it the preeminence it demands for itself. Charges of bibliolatry, or Bible worship, are thrown about with reckless abandon. People read and obey the Bible on their terms, expecting it to govern only what they allow it to. And yet the Bible demands that we allow it to be sufficient to address all areas of life and practice, whether evangelism, sanctification, guidance, social reform, or discernment.
Almost every evangelical church would somehow include in its statement of faith that they believe in sola scriptura, the doctrine stating that the Bible is our only perfect standard of right and wrong. Most of these churches do believe in such crucial doctrines as the Bible’s authority, inspiration, and inerrancy. However, few would believe and put into practice the doctrine of the Bible’s sufficiency. The evidence of this is visible in churches all around us. Many churches no longer look to the Bible as being the key to evangelism. Instead they put their trust in music, drama, outreach programs, and less imposing but more attractive church buildings. When people do come to church, they are not challenged by the gospel. Many churches no longer look to the Bible as their guide to counseling, opting instead to follow the latest methods of psychology. In so doing that they deny that the Bible is truly sufficient to guide us in even these matters. And the examples could go on and on.
When we have rejected the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, we allow Christians to depend on things other than the Bible as their guide to matters of life and faith. In particular, people begin to depend upon mysticism, upon ways of supposedly knowing God apart from the Bible. They look inward for intrinsic wisdom rather than outward to the Bible for its extrinsic wisdom. They forsake biblical reason in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for spiritual discernment must be founded upon God’s objective revelation of himself in Scripture. We can only judge between what is wrong and what is right when we know what God says to be true. We can know this only from Scripture.
—Tim Challies, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2007), 46-47.
Footnotes
- James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 72. [↩]
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