Welcome to our new series, Sound Doctrine! What is a doctrine? In
English, the word “doctrine” comes from the Latin word docere, which means “to teach,” and this word leads to doctor, which means “teacher,” and this
word in turn leads to doctrina, which
means “teaching.” In the context of Christianity, a doctrine is a teaching of
what the Bible has to say about a particular topic.
The title of our series alludes to Titus
2:1, which says,
You,
however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine. – Titus 2:1
To understand the “however” in this verse
we need to look back in chapter 1. Here we find the following:
For there are many rebellious people, full of
meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they
are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and
that for the sake of dishonest gain. – Titus 1:10-11
Paul is speaking of the people in the
church here. They were teaching unsound
doctrine, and it was having extremely negative effects on the church. Does this
go on today? Unfortunately, yes. There are many individuals and groups under
the Christian umbrella (Christian at least in name) that teach things contrary
to the Bible. There are of course also even more people outside of Christianity
who also teach things opposed to the Bible and its claims.
Really, almost the entire remainder of the
book of Titus focuses on particular instructions Paul wants Titus to teach the
people around him. Now what is interesting to me is that most of the things
Paul wants Titus to teach the people are extremely practical – how to live day
by day. For example Paul tells Titus to teach the older men to be temperate,
worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love, and in
endurance. That’s an extremely tight summary; we could easily spend an entire
message on each of these, but my point is that these are probably not the kinds
of things you think of when you think about doctrine. In fact, a negative stereotype
of “doctrine” is that it is a dry kind of esoteric, detailed instruction of no
practical use. The classic example is, when discussing the nature of angelic
beings, trying to argue just how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I
strongly encourage you to get this kind of thinking out of your head; doctrine,
at least in the Biblical sense, should be eminently practical.
But doctrine is also much more than just a
list of dos and don’ts, or a list of practical instructions. In Titus, for
example, Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, does gives lists of practical
instructions to various groups of people in Titus’ fellowship, but then he goes on to explain the theology
behind why people should pursue all
these things. In particular, he writes:
For the grace of God has appeared that offers
salvation to all people. It
teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live
self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our
great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself
for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for Himself a people that
are His very own, eager to do what is good. – Titus 2:11-14
There is an incredible amount of theology
going on in these few verses! Doctrinal themes touched upon include grace,
salvation, self-control, waiting for Christ’s return, redemption, and
purification. We will look at many of these themes in later portions of our
series. My point for now, though, is simply that theology and practical
instruction go hand-in-hand, and from a Biblical perspective, both would fall
into the category of “sound teaching” or “sound doctrine.” So although, in one
sense, our church has not specifically taught a doctrine series before, in
another sense most if not all of our teachings do contain doctrine (and,
hopefully, sound doctrine).
Now this series is really a combination of
mini-series; the first group of three messages focuses on the Bible. Now we believe that the Bible is a unique and
special book – unlike any other book ever written, unique in its history, its
makeup, its wisdom, its fulfilled prophecy, and most of all in its message. We
believe the Bible is actually God’s words passed down through men who were
inspired and led by God to write down what God wanted humanity to know about
Him. For this reason we often call it the Word of God.
In his Answers
to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask about the Christian Faith, I love what Josh
MacDowell writes about the Bible. This is a long quotation, but bear with me:
Christianity
believes and teaches that the Bible alone is the revealed Word of God. Even
though it was written by men, the ultimate author was God Almighty. This claim
was not invented by the Church, but is the claim the Bible makes for itself.
“The word of
the Lord endures forever” (1 Peter 1:25). “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2
Timothy 3:16). “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21).
Over 2,000
times in the Old Testament alone there are clauses such as, “And God spoke to
Moses,” “the word of the Lord came unto Jonah,” and “God said.” Moreover,
the Bible claims to be a record of the words and deeds of God; thus, the Bible
views itself as God’s Word.
The mere
fact that the Bible claims to be the Word of God does not prove that it is
such, for there are other books that make similar claims. The difference is
that the Scriptures contain convincing evidence as being the Word of God.
One reason
that the Bible is different from other books is its unity. Although this book
was composed by men, its unity reveals the hand of the Almighty. The Bible was
written over a period of about 1,500 years by more than forty different human
authors. These authors came from a variety of backgrounds, including Joshua (a
military general), Daniel (a prime minister), Peter (a fisherman), and Nehemiah
(a cupbearer).
The authors
of the various books wrote in different places, such as the wilderness (Moses),
prison (Paul), exile on the Isle of Patmos (John). The biblical writings were
composed on three different continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe), and in three
different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek).
The contents
of the Bible deal with many controversial subjects. Yet, the Bible is a unit.
From beginning to end, there’s one unfolding story of God’s plan of salvation
for mankind. This salvation is through the person of Jesus Christ (John
14:6). Jesus Himself testified that He was the theme of the entire Bible.
“Search the
scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which
testify of Me. . . . For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for
he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My
words?” (John 5:39, 46, 47).
In another
place: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in
all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27).
The Old
Testament is the preparation (Isaiah 40:3). The Gospels are the manifestation
(John 1:29). The Book of Acts is the propagation (Acts 1:8). The Epistles give
the explanation (Colossians 1:27). The Book of Revelation is the consummation
(Revelation 1:7). The Bible is all about Jesus.
The entire
Bible is a unity with each part needing the others to be complete. Dr. W. F.
Albright puts it this way: “To the writers of the New Testament, the Hebrew
Bible was Holy Scripture and they were the direct heirs of its prophets. It is,
accordingly, quite impossible to understand the New Testament without
recognizing that its purpose was to supplement and explain the Hebrew Bible. Any
attempt to go back to the sources of Christianity without accepting the entire
Bible as our guide is thus doomed to failure.”
Lest anyone think
this isn’t something marvelous, we’d like to give you this challenge. Find ten
people from your local area having similar backgrounds, who speak the same
language, and all are from basically the same culture. Then separate them and
ask them to write their opinion on only one controversial subject, such as the
meaning of life.
When they
have finished, compare the conclusions of these ten writers. Do they agree with
each other? Of course not. But the Bible did not consist of merely ten authors,
but forty. It was not written in one generation, but over a period of 1,500
years; not by authors with the same education, culture and language, but with
vastly different education, many different cultures, from three continents and
three different languages, and finally not just one subject but hundreds.
And yet the
Bible is a unity. There is complete harmony, which cannot be explained by
coincidence or collusion. The unity of the Bible is a strong argument in favor
of its divine inspiration. The unity of the Scriptures is only one reason
among many which supports the Bible’s claim to be the divine Word of God.
Others which could be explained in detail are the testimony of the early
church, the witness of history and archaeology, and the evidence of changed
lives throughout the centuries, to name but a few.
These
factors led the great archaeologist, W. F. Albright, to conclude, “The Bible
towers in content above all earlier religious literature; and it towers just as
impressively over all subsequent literature in the direct simplicity of its
message and the catholicity [universality, inclusiveness] of its appeal to men
of all lands and times”.
The Bible is
special. It is unique. No other book has any such credentials. No other book
even comes close. “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England
made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England” (Victor Hugo).
I would only add to McDowell’s excellent
description that this unity includes fulfilled prophecy, something that I can
only describe as miraculous. For me in my pre-Christian, atheist days, it was
these fulfilled prophecies that captured my attention and demanded an alternate
explanation, for which I could come up with nothing even remotely credible. The
Old Testament has hundreds of specific prophecies about Christ, but it also
hints of the need for Christ through parallel events, foreshadowings,
yearnings, and countless other mechanisms – this is a part of that unity
McDowell talks about, but it also goes beyond it. Even the staunchest critic
cannot claim that the Old Testament was written after Christ; we have copies of
it scientifically dated prior to the events of Jesus’ life. And then there are
things written later, especially in the Book of Revelations but also in other
Old Testament and New Testament books, that describe things that will happen
when Christ returns that were patently impossible until the last few decades,
things such as the whole world instantly knowing when something would happen –
with TV and the Internet this is no big deal at all, but we quickly forget how
only a little while ago, such a thing would have been unimaginable. Yet not
only was it imagined, it was predicted. This is just one example. But my point
is that we can trust the Bible. We can trust it with our lives. And if you are
a Christian, this is really what you are doing. You are trusting with your life
that what the Bible says about God, about Jesus, about salvation, and about so
much more, is trustworthy and true.
Now a common question people ask about the
Bible is the following: How do we know what belongs in the Bible and what does
not belong? After all, there are plenty of other religious books out there –
how did people decide what would be in the Bible? This is an important
question, and I want to address it at least in brief today.
The term for what books belong in the
Bible is canon (not cannon!); the
canon of Scripture is the list of books in the Bible. If you open your Bible
and look at the Table of Contents, you can see the list of books. There are 39
books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament, for a total of 66
books. The Old Testament books can be categorized as the 5 Law books (Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) telling of the times from the
beginning of creation and Adam and Eve through the Noah and then Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob until the death of Moses, the 12 History books (Joshua,
Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd
Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and
Esther) telling of the history of the Israelites from entering the Promised
Land through the times of the judges, then King Saul, King David, King Solomon,
and the later kings, and then the times of the exile and captivity, and finally
the return to the Promised Land, the 5 Poetry and Wisdom books (Job, Psalms,
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon), the 5 Major Prophets (Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel), and the 12 Minor Prophets (Hosea,
Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai,
Zechariah, and Malachi). The New Testament books can be categorized as the 4
Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) telling of the birth, life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, 1 History book (Acts) telling of the events of
the early church, the 13 Letters of Paul (Romans, 1st and 2nd
Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and
2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy, Titus,
and Philemon), the 8 General Letters (Hebrews – which may have been written by
Paul but it doesn’t explicitly say that, James, 1st and 2nd
Peter, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and Jude), and
the 1 book of Prophecy (Revelation).
It is important that we get the canon
“right,” because including books that should not be in there, or removing books
that should be included, could certainly result in unsound doctrine. It is interesting to me that both the Old and New
Testaments warn about this. In the Old Testament, Moses warns,
Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract
from it, but keep the commands of the Lord your God that I give you. – Deut. 4:2
And in the New
Testament we have the famous and surprisingly similar words at the end of
Revelation:
I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of
this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the
plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God
will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy
City, which are described in this scroll. – Rev. 21:18-19
So how did the
canon come to be? Scripture itself gives us lots of answers. The Ten
Commandments were written down on stone, not by Moses but by God Himself:
When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount
Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone
inscribed by the finger of God. – Ex. 31:18
This is emphasized
repeatedly:
Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two
tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides,
front and back. The
tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on
the tablets. – Ex. 32:15-16
Recall that Moses broke the first set of
tablets when he witnessed the great sinning of his people upon his return. And
so Moses went back up and God wrote the tablets again:
So I made the ark out
of acacia wood and chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I
went up on the mountain with the two tablets in my hands. The Lord wrote on these tablets what He had written before, the Ten
Commandments He had proclaimed to you on the mountain, out of the fire, on the
day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them
to me. Then I came back down the mountain and put the
tablets in the ark I had made, as the Lord commanded
me, and they are there now. – Deut. 10:3-5
Now, Scripture also tells us that Moses
wrote more, and he kept it beside the ark:
After Moses finished writing in a book the words of
this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the
covenant of the Lord: “Take this Book of the Law and place it
beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God.
There it will remain as a witness against you. For I
know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you have been rebellious
against the Lord while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel
after I die! – Deut. 31:24-27
Now you might argue from this that Moses
was not particularly skilled in building people’s self-esteem, and this
probably goes against everything written in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, but Moses was essentially
right. But we are wandering off topic – the point I want to make here is that
Moses is describing writing at least Deuteronomy, if not more, and keeping it
alongside the ark. There are other examples. In Exodus 17, not long after
crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites had to defend themselves against an attack
by the Amalekites. This was the episode in which the Israelites were winning as
long as Moses’ hands were raised (one of those foreshadowings of Christ
mentioned earlier). When the Amalekites were defeated,
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as
something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will
completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” – Ex. 17:14
Other examples:
Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said. – Ex. 24:4
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words,
for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with
Israel.” – Ex. 34:27
At the Lord’s command Moses recorded the stages in
their journey. – Num. 33:2a
So Moses wrote down this song that day and taught it
to the Israelites. – Deut. 31:22
We don’t have absolute evidence, but many
scholars believe Moses is also the author of Genesis, based on the writing
style, and that Moses may have compiled many earlier accounts and put them
together to include them “beside the ark.”
Other people, usually prophets, continued
this practice, and Scripture notes this. Here are some examples:
Samuel explained to the people the rights and duties
of kingship. He wrote them down on a scroll and deposited it before the Lord. – I Sam. 10:25a
This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a
book all the words I have spoken to you. – Jer. 30:2
And of course the
book of the Old Testament are evidence themselves that these books continued to
be written.
The content of the Old Testament canon was
completed with Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Malachi, likely all completed by 435
BC. Following this period, from other writings we know that it seems as if God
suddenly stopped communicating directly with prophets. Now the later history of
the Jewish people was written down in later writings, but even the Jews did not
give them anywhere near the weight or importance of those that we have in our
Old Testament today. There was a strong sense among the Jewish people that
things were “on hold” until the Messiah were to come. Even in the non-Bible
book called 1st Maccabees, written around 100 BC, the author writes
about a defiled altar, saying, “so they tore down the altar and stored the
stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until there should come a
prophet to tell what to do with them.” Nobody had the authority of God to lead
them, to tell them what to do next. The Jewish historian Josephus, born about
38 AD, wrote “From Artaxerxes [who died in 423 BC] to our own times a complete
history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with
the earlier records because of the failure of the exact succession of the
prophets.” This idea is repeated in Rabbinic literature. For example, in the
Babylonian Talmud it says “After the latter prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and
Malachi had died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.” So the Old Testament
(not called “old” then) was considered complete for about 4 centuries before
Christ.
Now I mentioned Maccabees. This is one
example of a number of books that together are called the Apocrypha, books
written in this 4 century gap. The names of the Apocrypha books are 1st
and 2nd Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus
(not to be confused with Ecclesiastes), Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the
Prayer of Manasseh, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, and
“additions” to the books of Esther and Daniel.
As already explained, the Jews never
considered the Apocrypha in any way equal in weight, value, or accuracy to the
books in our Old Testament. Neither did the early New Testament believers. It
is interesting to note that the New Testament authors directly quote the Old
Testament almost 300 times (this includes their quotes of Jesus quoting the Old
Testament), but they never quote from the Apocrypha. Neither did the early
believers. The oldest list of Old Testament books by an early Christian that we
have today is from Melito, bishop of Sardis, from about 170 AD. He lists all
the Old Testament books except Esther, and lists none of the Apocrypha.
The Roman Catholic Church for centuries
viewed these books as useful, but not canon, until finally in 1546 at the
Council of Trent they officially declared them to be part of the canon (1st
and 2nd Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh were declared canon
earlier). The timing of this is not coincidental – the Council of Trent was
largely a response to the rapid defections from the church to the exploding
Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther and others. The Roman Catholic
Church believed that these books helped support their positions that prayers
should be offered for the dead and that salvation was not by faith alone but by
faith plus works. By this time the Roman Catholic Church had already come to
the belief that it had the authority under God to declare as of God anything
that it so chose, in other words, it believed that it had equal or even higher
authority than Scripture itself. The Protestants of course did not believe
this; they believed (and still believe, as we believe) a church has no such
authority. I should mention that if you read these books, even with an open
mind, it is extremely difficult to see them as anything approaching what we
call canon. They are inconsistent and certainly sometimes quite contrary to the
rest of Scripture; my impression is that they feel like they are pulling you
away from Scripture, whereas the rest of Scripture indeed has this amazing
“pulling together” kind of unity that McDowell talks about. Here is a link that
discusses these problems with the apocrypha further:
Now let’s look at the New Testament. For
this I am going to read another passage, this one from the book The New Testament Speaks by Glenn
Barker.
In the one-hundred-year period extending
roughly from A.D. 50 to 150 a number of documents began to circulate among the
churches. These included epistles, gospels, acts, apocalypses, homilies, and
collections of teachings. While some of these documents were apostolic in
origin, others drew upon the tradition the apostles and ministers of the word
had utilized in their individual missions. Still others represented a summation
of the teaching entrusted to a particular church center. Several of these
writings sought to extend, interpret, and apply apostolic teaching to meet the
needs of Christians in a given locality. […]
As the amount of material circulating
increased, it was inevitable that similar materials should be collected
together in order to protect against loss as well as to make them more
available for study and use within the churches. There appears to be some
evidence that the first formal collection consisted of ten of Paul's letters which
were bound together and published as a single corpus sometime prior to A.D.
100.
Not longer after, the Gospels were also
collected and published as a single corpus. The consequence of this action was
to prove an even greater benefit to the church than had the publication of the
Pauline corpus. Prior to this event, each of the Gospels had been identified
with a particular geographical region: Mark with Rome, Matthew with Antioch and
Syria, John with Ephesus and Asia, and Luke with Paul's churches in Greece. The
differences among them were freely acknowledged, but only when the Gospels
began to circulate beyond their own immediate environment were these
differences accentuated. This invited not only comparison but even choice among
them, as some groups preferred one Gospel and some another. The collection of
the four Gospels into a single corpus, and its publication as the fourfold Gospel
of the church, preserved all four documents for the life and edification of
each church. No longer required to compete for their existence, the Gospels
were now allowed to complement each other.
These two collections of material served as
the solid core for a new body of literature which began to take its place
alongside the Old Testament Scriptures. Very early the Book of Acts, First
Peter, First John, and Revelation were added to this core. […]
It was probably the rise of
heretics—especially Marcion, who adopted as his canon a truncated form of Luke
and Paul's ten letters to churches—which forced the church to declare itself
regarding the relative authority of the documents currently read in the
churches. This new body of Christian literature only gradually imposed its
authority on the church. In spite of the practice of publicly reading from the
newer documents in services of worship, there is no clear, early evidence that
they were considered to be equal in authority to the scriptures of the Old
Covenant. If the term "Scripture" could be applied to Paul's letters
(2 Peter 3:16) or later to the Gospels (II Clement, Justin), not until the end
of the second century were the expressions "inspired writings,"
"Scriptures of the Lord," and "the Scriptures" used
indiscriminately of both the Old Testament and the core of the New. At this
time the designation "the New Testament" made its appearance and
ultimately displaced all earlier names for the collection of the new books.
Henceforth it was no longer a question of the nature of the canon, but only of
its extent.
By A.D. 200, twenty-one of the books of the
New Testament had a secure position in the canon. […] Questions of authorship,
authenticity, style, and doctrine [for the other six books] subsided by the
middle of the fourth century, and these documents also took their place in the
lists of books accepted by the bishops of the church. The church fathers Jerome
and Augustine acknowledged the entire twenty-seven books of the canon, as did
the councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. By the end of the fourth
century the limits of the New Testament canon were irrevocably settled in both
the Greek and Latin churches. Only in the churches of Syria and elsewhere in
the East did the question continue to be debated. Even here all of the books
accepted elsewhere in the church finally achieved recognition.
The fact that substantially the whole church
came to recognize the same twenty-seven books as canonical is remarkable when
it is remembered that the result was not contrived. All that the several
churches throughout the empire could do was to witness to their own experience
with the documents and share whatever knowledge they might have about their
origin and character. When consideration is given to the diversity in cultural
backgrounds and in orientation to the essentials of the Christian faith within
the churches, their common agreement about which books belonged to the New
Testament serves to suggest that this final decision did not originate solely
at the human level.
No less remarkable is the way in which this
fourth-century conclusion continued to be vindicated and maintained throughout
the history of the church. The canon of twenty-seven books endured the schisms
of the fifth century, the division of the church into East and West in the
ninth century, and the violent rupture occasioned by the Reformation in the
sixteenth century. When diverse elements within the church found it impossible
to find or maintain agreement on any other subject, they continued to honor the
same canon.
I would add to this that the church father
Irenaeus (born 130 AD) treated all of the New Testament as equivalent to Old
Testament scripture except (by omission) Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John,
and Jude. Origen (born 185 AD) had a similar list except he accepted Hebrews.
And Athanasius (born 296 AD) accepted the entire New Testament except he had some
personal reservations about the content of Revelations.
Glenn Barker’s point that every regional
association of churches, though independent, came to the same conclusions about
what to include as Scripture is really powerful. I agree with him that God was
at work making this happen.
The bottom line here is that we can trust
the Bible to be God’s instructions to us faithfully preserved, accurate,
trustworthy, and true. To me this makes the Bible incomparably precious. Maybe if you are younger than
me, you have not had the following happen to you, but I have had the experience
of having something written down on paper that was extremely important – and
then misplaced the paper. The result was extensive, somewhat panicked searches
to find that piece of paper! In our digital age with electronic search it is
harder to lose things, although I have had emails mysteriously disappear. Today
the Bible is everywhere, online with a few keystrokes, available in apps and
websites and on paper in multiple good translations, study versions, in various
shapes and sizes. We don’t understand what it is like to not have the Bible,
and because of that we lose sight of the incredible blessing it is to be able
to read it whenever we want. My missionary friends in Mongolia are rejoicing
this year because finally a decent
translation of the Old Testament is available in Mongolian! They have literally
waited decades for this to happen, prodding translation agencies, contacting
individual translators, etc.
The Bible is God’s love letter to you. The
Bible is God’s invitation to you. The
Bible is God’s opening Himself up to you, His being transparent with you. The
Bible is a doorway to God’s heart. Treasure the Bible by reading it, and you
will discover the greatest treasure of all, a real, vibrant, personal
relationship with God Himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment