Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, December 20, 2021
As we embrace the season of questions, before an inexplicable answer comes in God made man, we need to learn to voice our deepest complaints to the Lord himself. The Bible is full of people doing so, it is not impious or ungrateful or insufficiently reverential, tell him how you feel. When you do this you will be met by a tender God. We may also encounter rebuke like Habakkuk did, like Job did, if our hearts require it. Ok, that’s not fun, but certainly needed. Even then, they are not rebuked for asking questions.

Advent is a season of questions. Which is good, because I’ve got plenty. Have you?
Sometimes people act like you can’t ask questions in church life, as though you just have to ‘have faith’, which is true but not in the way that people who usually say it mean. I think they act like this because well-meaning people have told them so.
They shouldn’t have told you that, friends.
Jesus loves your questions. He really does. We need to grow churches where people can ask their genuine questions—not their gotchas or the ones designed to make them look like they’ve got it all worked out, but their genuine heart-felt questions that burden and burn their soul.
We need to grow churches that help them look for answers—there are answers—but that don’t rush to the pat and simple answer that papers over our nervousness that they asked the question at all. We need to be churches, and Christians, who wrestle with the difficult questions. We have to allow ourselves to feel the force of them, the strangeness of them, without rushing away from the pain.
And then lovingly shepherd questioning people to the Answer to all our longings: Jesus the Christ, in whom answers can be found—though occasionally to different questions than the ones we first asked.
There is such a thing as a bad question, there really is. Questioners do have to be willing to be told, “I’ve got a better question for you,” but we all need to get more comfortable with the difficulties and questions people in our congregations have but often don’t voice.
People who say this sort of stuff often want to ask questions so they can swiftly deny a bunch of key tenets of the faith. That isn’t what this is, I love the Bible—it is the words of life, I love Jesus—he is my King, and I love the orthodox faith represented in the creeds, and the Fathers, and the Medieval theologians, and the Reformers, and all the saints from the Apostles to those living today. The tradition has held the answers to some of my difficult questions, and others won’t be answered I suspect until I behold the face of Almighty God and he wipes away my tears with his fingers.
But this is true: Jesus loves your questions. He loves them because he loves you.
Have you read Habakkuk? This book that starts with the prophet’s complaints against God, and God’s responses, before ending in a Psalm of praise.
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There is no Christ-following that will take us back to an America we once knew and loved. Following Christ takes us somewhere better. It takes us to where Christ is – to our heavenly country, our true home. As Thomas Adams once said, “Christ did not die to purchase this world for us.”

Some years back Google prepared a little celebration on their main page for Claude Debussey (1862-1918). It was a delightful animation honoring the French composer on his birthday. Google called the animation a doodle, wherein they recreated a moonlit trip down the river Seine while Debussy’s most famous piano piece, Clair de Lune played in the background.
A riverside view from the period scrolls along, synchronized to DeBussey’s sweet melody. The evening sky is star-filled. The moon is full. The boardwalk is lined with gas lamps. A man wearing a cap is riding a penny-farthing. A windmill silently turns. Rooftop chimneys puff smoke into the air keeping time with the music. A Model T jostles along. A covered riverboat chugs by.
It is absolutely charming. So charming, in fact, it got me thinking about the power of nostalgia.
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the term nostalgia as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.”
Nostalgia is that strange ability all humans have of remembering the past without remembering the dirty and devilish details of it. We, of course, are capable of remembering past events that include the dirty details, but that is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is remembering all the good of an event, of a season of life, or even of a person. Why? Because we long for goodness. We long for the world to be good, making nostalgia, even though it is about the past, a kind of hope.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century philosopher, and mathematician said: “Do you miss something you’ve never had? Do you grieve the absence of a third leg or the loss of a second pair of eyes? No. We ache only when something we once knew, held, tasted, goes missing.”
Our English word nostalgia comes from two Greek words: nostos, “returning home,” and algos, “pain.”
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Scripture is truly a living and active Word and it takes a living and active God to interpret it rightly. Thankfully, the people of God made alive by the Spirit are given everything we need for life and godliness—both in the Scriptures and in the Spirit. 

Writing about Sola Scriptura in his book Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity, Kevin Vanhoozer notes that the reformation principle of Scripture Alone “implies the sufficiency of Scripture” (114). But then he asks and important question: “Sufficient for what?” What does the sufficiency of Scripture promise? And what does it mean?
To that question, he gives four answers—one negative and three positive. Here they are in abbreviated form.

Scripture is not sufficient for anything and everything that it may be called upon to do or describe.
“Scripture is sufficient for everything for which it was divinely inspired. ‘[My word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (Isa. 55:11).”
“Scripture is materially sufficient (‘enough’) because God has communicated everything we need to know in order to learn Christ and live the Christian life: ‘all things that pertain to life and godliness’ (2 Pet. 1:3).”
Scripture is formally sufficient, which means when it comes to interpretation “Scripture interprets Scripture” so long as the interpretive community (i.e., the church) relies upon all the means of grace created by the Holy Spirit.

Understandably, these four answers need further elucidation, and in his chapter on “Scripture Alone,” Vanhoozer explains each point that I have abbreviated above. Here are a few quotes and explanations to help round a sufficient doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency.
Four Aspects of Biblical Sufficiency
1. Sufficiency Caricatured
Introducing the topic, Vanhoozer asserts that Scripture is not sufficient for everything. He writes,
To say “Scripture is sufficient for everything—stock market investments, leaky faucets, clogged arteries—is to saddle it with unrealistic expectations, and eventually to succumb to naïve biblicism and the quagmire of pervasive interpretive pluralism.” (114)
Sadly, many have taken the Bible to address everything in creation. But this only creates more problems than it solves. Instead of overpromising what the Bible can do, we should read the Bible and learn what it says it can do.
2. Sufficiency Simpliciter 
If the Bible does not say that it is sufficient for everything, it does say what it is sufficient for—namely knowing God in Christ and how to live by faith in the promises of God.
Scripture is sufficient for everything for which it was divinely given: “[My word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:11). Paul tells Timothy that Scripture is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). These verses help us see what sufficiency means and does not mean. The Bible is sufficient for the use that God makes of it, not for every use to which we may want it put. In John Webster’s words: “Scripture is enough. This is because Scripture is what God desires to teach” [Domain of the Word, 18]. Scripture is “enough” to learn Christ and the Christian life. (114)
Indeed, this is the simple answer to the question of what Scripture is sufficient for. However, Vanhoozer presses deeper to explain what “enough” means.
3. Material (or Doctrinal) Sufficiency
Going beyond the basic statement that Scripture is enough, Vanhoozer states,
Scripture is materially sufficient (“enough”) because God has communicated everything we need to know in order to learn Christ and live the Christian life: “all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3). Article VI of the Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles makes exactly this point: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” The material sufficiency of Scripture excludes any possibility of Scripture needing an external supplement in order to achieve the purpose for which it was sent. The Westminster Confession forbids adding any new content to Scripture, “whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men,” thereby echoing statements in Scripture itself, such as Revelation 22:18: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described this book.” What God has authored is adequate for his communicative purpose: “Scripture is materially sufficient for the bearing of propositional content (the presentation of Jesus Christ as the means of salvation) and for the conveying of illocutionary force (the call or invitation to have faith in him)” (Timothy Ward, Word and Supplement, 205). (114–15)
In short, the Bible reveals everything necessary for knowing God and living before him (Coram Deo). Still, there is something else and Vanhoozer shows us that a full doctrine of Scripture must consider another kind of sufficiency—namely, one that grapples with the interpretation of Scripture, and not just its doctrinal content.
4. Formal (or Interpretive) Sufficiency
Acknowledging the difficulty of interpretation and the criticisms leveled against Protestants, especially those who ignore their confessional heritage, Vanhoozer states that material sufficiency does not “authorize its own interpretation, or to adjudicate between rival interpretations” (115). That is, affirming that Scripture contains all that is necessary for life and godliness is not the same thing as stating that all who read Scripture are sufficient to interpret correctly. We are not, and this is why many will criticize the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura.
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