The Bible is not what men define it to be; it is what God declares it to be. Men can believe that or deny that, but they cannot alter that. The premise that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative, infallible, sufficient, and effective Word of God should be the foundation for the study of Scripture. All truth has its source in God and, consequently, His truth is universal and timeless. Although times change, truth is changeless. 

The Bible is unique; there is nothing like it. Sixty-six separate books written by multiple authors over a span of 1,500 years, the Bible is ultimately one book with one Author, God Himself. The Scriptures, therefore, are not what ancient men thought about God or divine matters; they are the very words of God expressing and revealing His mind. By a supernatural operation referred to as inspiration, God breathed out His words (2 Tim. 3:16) to holy men who were carried along in the writing process by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21). The Bible is God’s Word because it claims to be God’s Word, and faith believes it. That may seem to be circular reasoning, and perhaps it is, but it is reason that rests on God who is incapable of lying (Titus 1:2).
When we view the Scriptures through faith, we do so with a set of beliefs that we take for granted to be true. These presuppositions are essential and inevitable. It is absolutely impossible to come to the Bible with an open mind.1 Liberal scholars often claim they approach Scripture with an open mind in order to evaluate the Word of God and judge its accuracy. In reality they come with the presupposition that human reason is superior to divine revelation. That is not an open mind; it is a closed heart that evidences a mindset predisposed against God and truth. Man cannot stand as the judge of Scripture; Scripture stands as the judge of man. As believers, we must come with an open and receptive heart to receive and believe what God says. The mindset of a believer every time he opens the Bible must be the conviction that whatever the Bible says is true. The believer may not completely comprehend all that he reads, but he does not doubt its truth. We cannot trust our reason to determine what is true or false, right or wrong. By faith we believe in the inspiration of the Bible, and therefore we affirm its authority, infallibility, sufficiency, and effectiveness from cover to cover. Each of these corollaries to inspiration are topics for thorough treatises, but for now simple definition will suffice.2
Read More
Related Posts:

“Educator sexual abuse is a major problem that largely gets ignored because it’s so uncomfortable to talk about. While a very small fraction of educators and school employees prey on the children in their care, one bad actor can do damage to many students.”

(LifeSiteNews) – There has been quite a bit of debate on the Right over the past few months about the use of the term “groomer.” A “groomer” is defined as someone who develops a relationship with a child for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and the term has been used by those fighting against the sexualization of children and sexual indoctrination in schools.
In response to LGBT activists dubbing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill — which prohibits teaching kids in the third grade and younger about sexuality — the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, parental rights advocates coined the phrase: “Ok, groomer.”
During one of their Backstage events, Daily Wire hosts Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Jeremy Boering discussed the use of the term, with Walsh noting that he thinks the term applies literally to many of those pushing sexual ideologies in schools, while Shapiro stated that it is a rhetorically brilliant quip that should not be used literally.
Columnist (and gay rights activist) Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Murray also discussed the term during a conversation on Murray’s new book The War on the West, with Sullivan strongly objecting to its use.
Sullivan in particular has excoriated conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Twitter for mainstreaming the term, accusing him of smearing educators. Rufo has pushed back by posting a growing list of news stories exposing sexual abuse in public schools by teachers (although no specific evidence that these assaults are connected to the sexual indoctrination in question.)
Rufo recently told Fox News that the lack of research is appalling: “The public school system has a serious child sex abuse problem.” The last significant federal study on this topic, which was conducted by the Department of Education in 2004, suggested that millions of American schoolchildren are victims of teacher sexual misconduct in each generation of K-12 students—and there hasn’t been any significant research since then.

Related Posts:

Written by Richard A. Muller |
Friday, May 19, 2023
Without detracting at all from the achievement of the great Reformers and the earliest codifiers of the doctrines of the Reformation – writers like Melanchthon, Calvin, and Bullinger – we need to recognize that not they, but rather, subsequent generations of “orthodox” or “scholastic” Protestants are responsible for the final form of such doctrinal issues as the definition of theology and the enunciation of its fundamental principles, the fully developed Protestant forms of the doctrine of the Trinity, the crucial christological concept of the two states of Christ, penal substitutionary atonement, and the theme of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

As the seventeenth-century documents themselves reveal, the Reformed orthodox were well aware of differences between their “scholasticism” and the several phases of medieval scholasticism: indeed, they typically identified an earlier twelfth and thirteenth-century scholastic model as distinct from and less problematic than the scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – and they identified differences in method and in the balance of authorities between their scholastic method and the methods of the Middle Ages in general. Thus, when Protestant scholasticism is approached by way of the documents and materials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and an assessment of its style, methods, and contents is based directly on the definitions and the methods evidenced in the seventeenth-century systems, the result explicitly opposes the view of several recent scholars according to which “scholasticism” can be identified specifically with a use of Aristotelian philosophy, a pronounced metaphysical interest, and the use of predestination as an organizing principle in theological system.
In this theologically and philosophically broad but methodologically closely defined sense, the term “scholasticism” can be applied to a theology that is not a duplication of medieval scholastic teaching and method, that is distinctly Protestant, and that is not nearly as concerned to draw philosophy into dialogue with theology as the great synthetic works of the thirteenth century. Scholasticism, then, indicates the technical and logical approach to theology as a discipline characteristic of theological system from the late twelfth through the seventeenth century.
Read More
Related Posts: