The Sufficiency of Scripture in Doing Christian Theology by the Book

 The Scriptures reveal who God is, who humans are in relation to God, and how we should portray this relationship in worship of our Creator. The Scriptures are sufficient to ground our trust in God and to know what God requires of us. However, when we say that Scripture is sufficient, we do not mean that Scripture alone is necessary for our growth in the gospel. Scripture tells us that God calls the church to gather together to worship him (Heb. 10:25), and he has provided teachers and preachers to expound the Scriptures for our edification and spiritual growth as Christians (Eph. 4:11–12). Likewise, the Lord gives elders and deacons to govern the church wisely and to guard the doctrinal affirmations of the Christian faith (1 Tim. 3:1–13).

Most Christians have heard pastors, Bible teachers, or friends return from Israel raving about how their recent tour of the Holy Land “unlocks the Bible” for them. With wonder, they recount how standing on Mount Carmel brings to life the prophet Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). They tell of how traversing the streets of Galilee, where Jesus walked, opens up the four Gospels as never before. They effusively recount walking in the footsteps of Jesus along the Via Dolorosa and entering the empty tomb. This naive posture tends to render Christians susceptible to the notion that some crucial aspects of understanding the Bible reside outside the biblical text.

Even Bible teachers fall prey to this notion. During my first tour of Israel, our group had the privilege of hearing a presentation by a renowned biblical scholar who frequently lectured throughout the Middle Eastern countries. Reputed to be a foremost interpreter of the Jewish culture during the life of Jesus, he presented a lecture on John 4, the account concerning Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Many in the classroom sat spellbound as he expounded the account by drawing from his numerous observations of Middle Eastern culture as a resident.

This lecturer observed that the well would not have had a bucket tied to a rope for drawing water. He claimed that travelers would have carried a foldable leather bucket to collect water, but evidently, Jesus’s disciples had the bucket with them when they departed and went into town. Likewise, drawing on his cultural observations, this biblical scholar explained that the Samaritan woman’s journey to the well alone during the midday heat hints that she was an outcast among her fellow Samaritans. While Jesus approached the well, cultural mores called for him not to engage the woman in conversation, but to retreat several feet from her to show it was safe and appropriate for her to come closer. Jesus, however, did not withdraw from her but instead held his ground, and worse, he broke the social taboo by speaking to her.

While listening to the lecture, I was struck by two observations. First, I noticed how others sat spellbound as if hearing the account from John 4 for the first time. Second, I marveled that the lecturer enraptured his hearers with details that are almost all present within the biblical text itself, but he, perhaps without realizing it, framed those aspects as if he discovered them in resources outside the text of John’s Gospel.

Following the lecture, through conversations with others who heard the presentation, I realized that many naively came to think that (a) the apostle John’s account was insufficient by itself, and (b) background knowledge derived from other resources was essential for grasping the truths being conveyed. I realized that I was witnessing an exercise, doubtless intended for good by the lecturer, that nonetheless was misleading many to suppose that the Fourth Gospel’s account of Jesus and the woman at the well was not sufficient, calling for the acquisition of social-cultural knowledge outside the Bible to grasp the account’s significance.

The truth is that anyone who reads the account concerning Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman can readily discern from the text of John’s Gospel, either explicitly or implicitly, that the woman was on society’s fringe. Jesus characterizes this woman as one who has had multiple husbands and was in an illicit relationship with a man who was not her husband (John 4:16–18). One can readily infer from the text that this is why the woman came to the well by herself during the middle of the day (“about the sixth hour”)—when other women would not be present because of the heat (John 4:6).^[1] Also, the text expressly states, by way of the woman’s attentiveness, that Jesus had no means by which he could draw water from the deep well (John 4:11). Likewise, John the Evangelist plainly informs the reader that when Jesus’s disciples returned to him, “they marveled that he was talking with a woman” (John 4:27).

Because John’s Gospel sufficiently informs readers concerning each of these cultural aspects integral to the account, special knowledge of the culture derived from outside the biblical text is both extraneous and superfluous. Thus, whenever we read the Scriptures, especially narrative portions such as in the four Gospels, we should expect that the immediate textual setting sufficiently provides what is necessary for correctly understanding the passage.

The occasion portrayed above may seem innocent and harmless because the interpretive details derived from outside the biblical account are truly present in the biblical text. Yet a question is fitting: Do such incidents become the seductive gateway to a sinister subjection of Scripture to external authorities? The demeanor of both the Holy Land lecturer and his listeners exhibited an inclination to look to resources outside the Bible to authorize the correct interpretation of the biblical text.

Does this posture pose a challenge to Scripture’s authority? If so, does it threaten the proper grounding of our Christian faith? Hence, we must consider whether appeals to resources outside the Holy Scriptures subvert our longstanding Protestant doctrine called “The Sufficiency of Scripture.”

Scripture’s Sufficiency

What do we mean when we speak of Scripture’s sufficiency? Question and answer 3 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism succinctly expresses the range of Scripture’s sufficiency:

Q. What do the Scriptures principally teach?
A. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.^[2]

This means that the Scriptures are sufficient for the specific task for which God gave them. The Scriptures reveal who God is, who humans are in relation to God, and how we should portray this relationship in worship of our Creator. The Scriptures are sufficient to ground our trust in God and to know what God requires of us. However, when we say that Scripture is sufficient, we do not mean that Scripture alone is necessary for our growth in the gospel. Scripture tells us that God calls the church to gather together to worship him (Heb. 10:25), and he has provided teachers and preachers to expound the Scriptures for our edification and spiritual growth as Christians (Eph. 4:11–12). Likewise, the Lord gives elders and deacons to govern the church wisely and to guard the doctrinal affirmations of the Christian faith (1 Tim. 3:1–13).

Likewise, we must not subject God or his Scriptures to mockery as if the Bible answers every question we could ever pose. It does not. Most of our daily routines—cooking meals, our vocational callings, home ownership and maintenance, car repair, problems with our computers, etc.—call for authoritative information outside the Bible. Nevertheless, we Protestant Christians believe that Scripture suffices as the ground of our knowing God and ourselves in relation to our Creator.

Thus, all our affirmations must be consistent with Scripture’s teachings. So, Scripture suffices as our governing guide for Christian faith and behavior. While Scripture does not specifically state how we Christians are to position ourselves in relation to our culture or to cast our voting ballots in any election, local or national, the Bible contains sufficient authoritative guidance concerning what our view of the world should be in whatever culture we find ourselves.

Scripture’s Sufficiency and Resources Outside the Bible

The Scriptures came to us by the direct agency of God’s Spirit working harmoniously with the divinely appointed human writers so that the result of this concursive process is that the human authors’ activities of thinking and writing were not coerced. Their activities were free and spontaneous, yet at the same time, divinely prompted and governed. Thus, Scripture, written for our good, is not merely a human production but God’s own authoritative word concerning the redemption of his created order. The Bible has human authors and one overarching divine Author.

God’s written word authorizes ministers of the gospel to train Christians concerning the good news that is in Jesus. It authorizes Christian parents to do the same for their children. When we affirm the sufficiency of Scripture, we do not put resources that supplement the Bible out of bounds for ministers and parents. Scripture’s sufficiency does not prohibit our use of a rich and vast library of resources to assist our study of God’s word.

Thus, Abraham Kuyper’s biblical reasoning is praiseworthy when, during his inaugural address at the dedication of The Free University of Amsterdam (1880), he asserted:

Man in his antithesis as fallen sinner or self-developing natural creature returns again as “the subject that thinks” or “the object that prompts thought” in every department, in every discipline, and with every investigator. Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”^[3]

Kuyper offered this appraisal to counter anyone who might allow for Christian theology to have its own department in a university but who would dismiss the notion that theology is a constituent aspect of every academic discipline, whether the sciences, medicine, law, economics, history, psychology, or linguistics. He correctly envisioned the Christian university wherein all learners acknowledge that theology is the core discipline of learning and the one that permeates the entire curriculum so that every academic discipline submits to Christ’s Lordship as revealed in Scripture. Oh, how far short of this ideal our Christian institutions of learning fall!

As Protestants, we correctly affirm sola Scriptura because Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith and conduct, the final authority by which we are to judge (a) the Bible itself and (b) the Christian doctrine and practice that the Bible teaches. Yet, we must be wary lest we fall into either of the two ditches that line our pathway.

The first temptation, to shut ourselves up to Scripture alone as our only resource of learning for human life, is to find ourselves in the ditch of obscurantism, restricting knowledge concerning God’s world to what is revealed in the Bible. The Bible is not an encyclopedic life guide. In fact, Scripture itself teaches us that God reveals himself in his created order (Rom. 1:18–21).

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