How has the Catholic Church eroded the church's foundation by slowly moving away from the sufficiency of Scripture? How has the social justice movement, modern apologetics, and modern theological systems done the same?

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And so Jason, we've talked about this just a little bit over the last 20 years, haven't we? We have, and we've talked Jeff Johnson into coming back. Amazing, I know.

Jeff Johnson, so good to have you with us, brother. Thanks, guys. I can't believe you want me back. Oh, man. Well, you know, we want to talk about what is one, well, I think is one of your favorite subjects because you write about it all the time and I, it occurred to me that, you know, both of us, the things that we write really are so connected to the sufficiency of Scripture.

So we want to examine various matters of the sufficiency of Scripture. We're going to go fast first how the Roman Catholic Church has eroded the foundation of the sufficiency of Scripture, and secondly, what does it have to do with the social justice movement? Thirdly, what does it have to do with apologetics? And fourthly, what does it have to do with theology? Because a veering away from this efficiency of Scripture has a profound effect on all of those things.

We want to do a quick overview. We won't be able to cover everything that should be covered But we want to throw these issues out to help us discern the times and But I'd like to define the term sufficiency of Scripture I'd like to quote from the 1689 Baptist Confession, the first chapter on Scripture. The first paragraph opens with these words, the holy scriptures are the only sufficient, certain, and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience." And then the sixth paragraph, the whole counsel of God concerning everything essential for his own glory and man's salvation, faith, and life is either explicitly stated or by necessary inference contained in the Holy Scriptures. Nothing is ever to be added to the Scriptures, either by new revelation or the spirit by human traditions. So in summary, the Suficiency of Scripture teaches us that Scripture alone is enough to know how to be saved, how to live, how to think, how to shape your conscience, how to function in the church, how to function in your family, how to function before the government, and all other authorities are subservient to the Word of God.

So that's a definition I think we probably, you know, all embrace. There's a lot more to say about it. But the first thing we want to talk about is how the Catholic Church has eroded the foundation of the sufficiency of scriptures and veering people away from regarding scripture as sufficient. So, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, well I love Ephesians 2.20 where Paul says that the foundation is the apostles because they're the ones that took the writings or the teachings of Christ and put it into our text, the scriptures, and that the foundation of the church is going to be the apostles with Christ Jesus at the cornerstone.

And in that we have the sufficient scriptures because a foundation to the church not only is the infrastructure in which the church would be built upon, it would uphold the church, but it also sets the parameters of where the church is to be built. No one lays a foundation and builds off of it, or on the sand, you have to build on the foundation. And what I think Satan sought to do is attack the church quickly with persecution, and secondly, a long-term plan is to slowly build the church off the foundation, to get a lean-to and start building there until eventually you have a whole different structure built on a whole different foundation where the scriptures are basically ignored. But you didn't do that overnight. You did it by slowly adding, not saying the scriptures are not authoritative, but add to it.

And if you add to scriptures, you're undermining scriptures. And that's one of the sufficiencies of scriptures is so important, is it's not, you can't add to it. It's not just the scriptures can't be scriptures plus something else And the Catholic Church did that principally through their apostolic secession and they did it through tradition, the tradition of the apostles. And it wasn't just like tradition, tradition had to be governed because it's not objective. Well how do you govern just tradition?

Everybody said, well I've heard this from someone who told me that it comes from someone that comes from the apostle Paul. Well, how do you control that? The only way you can control tradition is to have apostolic succession, where you can say, This bishop has been ordained by this bishop, who's been ordained by this bishop, who was eventually ordained by one of the apostles, and God has safeguarded tradition through apostolic succession. And that was an early doctrine of the early church. Even in the third, fourth century, apostolic succession was taught.

And it's not taught in scriptures, but it was taught by the early church. And that is, if you were the beginning of denying the sufficiency of Scriptures. Right, and that's how the Roman Church became a house of inventions. I speak about this in this book, Family Reformation, the Legacy of the Soul of Scripture in Calvin's Geneva, but I just want to read, what were the additions, What were the traditions that were added? I mean, you had prayers for the saints, you had pilgrimages, you had indulgences, you had altars kneeling in communion, you had the cult of Mary, you had prayers for the dead, you had the cross, crucifixes, images, you had a plain song in the churches in contrast to the organs and all the hoopla that was in the Roman church.

And the Roman church became a house of inventions. And I think that is the outgrowth of what you were communicating, Jeff, about the matter of succession. Jeff and Scott, I think the Catholics did something really dangerous, which is this. They always talked nice about the scriptures. They always praised the scriptures, but they just elevated their traditions to the level of scriptures.

And any time you do that, only the scriptures are perfectly pure. So Any of your traditions at best are a mixture. And when you elevate something to the level of Scripture, you're actually ceding superiority to the traditions. But while at the same time, out of your lips, praising Scripture and making the case that we're on the same team, where we're really not standing on the same foundation at all. It shouldn't surprise us that modern evangelicalism is also a household of inventions.

We invent all kinds of positions, all kinds of programs. It's kind of like the pilgrimages. You just have to create something really cool that people will get people interested in. Yeah, I don't think Satan's going to tempt us by saying, hey, throw your Bible away. That's hard to buy that one.

But how about, here's the Bible, let's add these things. That's easier to sell, and it's easier to buy into. That's what's happening. Yeah, and so the Suficiency of Scripture says that Scripture alone should shape everything that happens. Particularly in church life, we embrace the principle of the regulator principle that only God can regulate worship.

It's not for man to create patterns of worship. It's for God and for God alone. So the sufficiency of Scripture is always something that's going to be thrown, being thrown overboard because people want something interesting. They want something more interesting than God. New.

They want something new. Yeah, it's like the Athenians who did nothing but talk about things that were new. It makes you feel so meditative to have candles, you know, makes you feel just so amazing to have these remarkable stained glass pictures that are supposed to guide your heart. So anyway, the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture is so critical for church life. So let's move on.

Let's talk about the social justice movement. The sufficiency of Scripture has been at the center of the debate over the modern social justice movement. So let's talk about that a little bit. Why would I say such a thing? So the essence of the sufficiency of Scripture is to allow Scripture to insist that Scripture define the terms.

And social justice is one of many, many categories where people have started at the wrong place because they've started with definitions that aren't grounded in Scripture, and so it is with the social justice movement. You have to go to the Bible to understand what real justice is according to the God of heaven. If you don't start with that definition, you'll never end up at a good end point. Yeah. A lot of people will object by saying, well, the Bible doesn't tell me how to change the oil in my car.

It doesn't tell me how to fix a broken bone. So where the Bible doesn't touch on something, we have the right to go to other sources, if it be science or physicians or experts in the field, we have just as much right to go to them. And they say, well, the social justice is kind of the basic findings of sociology. The Bible doesn't touch on these things, therefore we can integrate the findings of sociology into Christianity. But the great error is that the Bible does address these things.

It does address moral behavior, what's wrong with humanity. It does define justice and what's not just. Like you've said, the Bible addresses these issues that are germane to the Christian life and Christianity as a whole, and therefore to integrate non-biblical sources is competing with the scriptures, especially when they have contradictory definitions. Right, and it's a category mistake to say that the changing of the oil is compared to the way that you treat people, because the Bible speaks very clearly about how you treat people, and the social justice movement has created a whole new language for how you treat people and how you think about people. And Scott, even how you categorize people.

So the Bible acknowledges believers and unbelievers, and the Bible acknowledges men and women, male and female. But the advocates of social justice have added categories that the Bible doesn't even acknowledge as legitimate. Yeah, and they're corrupting. They really overturn biblical categories of relationships. They completely overturn them.

Right. Yeah, and it's sad because you've got churches looking outside the Bible to get answers to how to behave and interact with society that are not only extra-biblical but are contrary to the teachings of scriptures. Yeah, churches, they're looking to make their elder teams more diverse, but they ought to really just be looking to make their elder teams qualified. Right. Right.

That's what the Bible says. We don't look at people that way. We're one blood, and we have a particular way that we're obligated to conduct ourselves with everybody in the world. Yeah. If you look at justice in the Bible, It's not to favor the rich or the poor.

It's actually to be blind to those things. And we have Lady Justice with the blindfold on. That's actually very biblical. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, so it's social justice is a direct attack upon Christianity and the Bible itself, but it's done so subtly by denying the sufficient scriptures.

And that's the importance of holding to the sufficient scriptures is that, again, we've been talking about it's not like the devil comes after the authority of scriptures first, he gets to this authority of scriptures by first undermining the sufficiency of scripture. So that's where the battleground is to begin with. So we have to hold that line there or we're gonna lose the war later on. Yeah, and we're holding to words. We're holding to the words of God.

And, you know, we've seen this before. I mean, just in my short lifetime. You know, I remember the Seeker Sensitive Movement using different words to describe the church and the way that we do everything in the church. Then after that, you know, you had the emergent church movement. They were using different words to describe what we're doing.

And now we have another, it's just another wave. It's the same old thing. And there will be more ahead. It'll be interesting to know what the next one is But we shouldn't be surprised when the words of God are replaced with the words of men And of course in the social justice movement We're talking about the replacement of the holy words of God with corrupt men who hated God. And we don't do that in the church.

We hang with the words. We love the words and the way that God describes things. So, okay, anything, you wanna say something else about that before we move on to the next category? Well, one more thing maybe it'd be important to know is that the scriptures doesn't tell us how to change our own or our car, but it does give us the foundational principles of our worldview of what is ultimate reality and how we're to behave and how we know what we know. It gives us the basic questions, it gives us the basic questions of life.

Well, when you look outside the Bible, If you're looking at pagan philosophy and secular thought, they're building a whole worldview in opposition to the biblical answers, that there's not a God, or some form of naturalism or atheism or some form of worldview that it's contradictory at the foundational level. Both worldviews may agree that this is how you change the oil in your car, but they fundamentally disagree at the foundational level. And so we can't borrow from Pagan philosophy or worldly thinking that at the foundational level is in direct contradiction to the biblical worldview Amen and by the way Jeff you wrote a book on social justice. It's good book. Yeah Y'all ought to go out check it out at that book Okay, let's let's talk about thirdly Apologetics, of course apologetics is the defense of the faith.

It does include an offense and a defense. Cornelius Van Til defined apologetics as, quote, the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life. And of course, he's speaking about this in terms of the way that you defend the faith. So what does the sufficiency of Scripture teach us about how we defend the faith? There's a type of apologetics that goes to rational arguments and really builds upon rational arguments.

So you debate atheists on rock layers and the meaning of those things. I think when you go to Romans 1, what you find is Paul taking a very different track, which is he's essentially asserting that rock layers isn't the issue, that man suppresses the truth and unrighteousness, and if you convinced him on rock layers he would just shift the ground to the next thing and then to the next thing and to the next thing and it would be endless because it's not really the real issue. The real issue is that he wants to displace God and not to be governed. He wants to protect his life of the sin that he loves. And so really, you have to have an apologetic that can get at that and not just argue at a rational level about ground that will always shift even if you happen to win a battle, you won't win the war because you're not talking about the real issue.

You'll lose it in the next scientific revolution where everybody changes their mind about that element of science. Right, right. Well, yeah, natural revelation tells us that everyone knows there's a God. So that's pre-installed. People know that.

That's not the problem. It's that they hate what they know. So they suppress the truth and unrighteousness. So it's not a matter of we need to prove something that God's already done. Like, God's already told us He's done that, so why are we thinking we have to do that?

It's almost an act of unbelief on our part to try to do something that God said He's already did. So our goal is to build our apologetics on an objective authority, and the only authority that we have is the Word of God. And so if I'm building my authority on something outside the Word of God, then that becomes my ultimate authority. It's not God's Word. It's whatever rational argument I had or whatever philosopher that I might have appealed to to begin with, that becomes the foundation behind my belief in the Bible.

So I think the Bible itself is its own authority. It testifies of its own power and authority, and that's where we should begin in our apologetic approach. It doesn't mean we don't have apologetic. It doesn't mean we don't defend the faith, but we defend it upon a solid authority rather than some subjective authority that ends up undermining the sufficient scripture. It's interesting, Martin Lloyd-Jones was a pastor preacher in England at his peak in probably the mid 1900s and He started as a medical doctor He had a very sharp mind and he got invited to a lot of debates because they were popular at the time, come debate the atheist on the existence of this or the legitimacy of that.

And he very quickly began to turn down those invitations because he said, the gospel is a message to be declared. You don't argue people into the gospel. The gospel is good news that is just heralded by, And this is really to build on the foundation of Scriptures. You know, there are two terms that explain these two different ways of doing apologetics. Presuppositionalism, which declares that you argue from the presuppositions of the Bible and evidentialism, which means that you explained it earlier, you look for various evidences, rational evidences.

You know, for example, There is a professor here nearby who wrote a big thick book in 2015 to try to refute the You know the homosexual marriage Proposition and he brought me the book and I read it and it was all it was just all arguments from reason you know it's bad for these people it's bad for those people I said I said what why didn't you use biblical arguments why did you just use you know the problems that that stem from homosexuality he said well you know the politicians won't listen to any other arguments, so I didn't wanna use the Bible. Well, that's sort of an evidentialistic methodology, rather than a presuppositional methodology, which starts with the Bible and stays with the Bible to argue for the faith. And it's not to say that there's not a place for both of these things, but the evidential arguments are proof that the Bible arguments are true. The Bible arguments are true, and therefore these things have resulted that are observable. I think another thing to keep in mind, we're looking at a worldview approach.

You have, like, if you think of atheism, atheists can have some solid truth about what they believe about mechanics and mathematics. It's not like atheists, everything they believe is wrong. So there are some common things that we hold with atheists, but at the foundation of their worldview of the way they think about mathematics and science and history and everything else is built upon a faulty foundation of materialism, that there's nothing but the material world. So we fundamentally disagree with atheists. We're not just disagreeing about a secondary truth, we're disagreeing with the whole foundation.

So if I'm using an atheistic approach, something like, hey, this is what atheists agree with. And I'm taking that as my foundation. One, that undermines the sufficient scriptures. But two, we believe that the atheistic foundation or the philosophy will crumble on itself. It's not a trustworthy worldview.

It can't uphold itself because without God, nothing upholds itself. And so if we can't borrow from pagan philosophy that has a worldview at the foundational level that is an opposition to the Christian worldview. So we may agree with them on tertiary issues, but their system is fatally and fundamentally flawed. So we can't borrow from their system that is already we already know is is wrong. And so that's why we don't, it's like the Bible is the only source that gives us a holistic worldview that we can trust and it explains to us science and math, ethics and everything else that we need to know about life.

You know, that brings us to the next subject, Jeff. You've set us up to theology. You know, what does the sufficiency of Scripture have to do with theology? And, you know, you have theology remarkably being influenced by people like Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus and Aquinas. And, you know, how this is the discussion of how does the approach to theology impinge on this idea that scripture is sufficient.

Yeah, I mean, I'm battling this today. It seems like there's a reassurgence of Aristartelian philosophy that's been brought into the church. And it's under the skies that, hey, there's some common overlap. What Aristotle said, the Bible affirms, but the problem with Aristotle's God, his God, based upon the cosmological argument that you can get to God through the study of natural science, that everything in the world's in motion, and therefore there has to be some unmoved mover to put the things in motion that are in motion. But this unmoved mover cannot move himself, and the God of Aristotle therefore is a God that can't create, because the act of creation is an act of energy exercising motion.

Therefore, for Aristotle, the universe has to be eternal and therefore, co-essential with God. So Aristotle's God is a God, yeah, he's a God, but he didn't create the universe. The universe is also essential and eternal. And that's not the God of the Bible. So we may say we could use that cosmological argument, but why we use it when it doesn't lead to a creator creature model that we have presented to us in the Bible.

It presents a God who can't act, a God who can't interact and be relational. And so it ends up creating a false God. And I'm saying that God doesn't need to be modified and adapted and brought into the Christian God, it needs to be rejected. And all pagan philosophy that doesn't build itself on revelation alone and confirmed by special revelation needs to be rejected or otherwise it will mess up the God of the Bible. It will distort the God of the Bible.

And if you want to read a book on this, Jeff Johnson has a book. It's called The failure of natural theology. You'll get the whole story in this book. It's a great book. Jason, any final comments on this thing?

None from me, no. Hey, whenever you get pagans or confuse people trying to affect the way we do theology, you're going to get bad theology. Hey, the Bible is sufficient. Aren't you glad that God described the origin of the universe and the nature of God the way he did? I mean, like, even we can pretty much understand it, you know?

You don't have to be a rocket theologian to understand it. Yeah, you just need the Bible. You just need the Bible. So God's ways are pleasant ways. All his paths are peace.

His word is sufficient. It's true. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. I think that's all we're really trying to say here, isn't it?

Yes. Amen. Well, thank you, brothers, for the discussion. Hope to see you next time, next Monday, at the Church and Family Life podcast. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.