Dr. John Bergsma

And we've had it wrong for 2000 years.

And if we do this, if we apply this fancy little hermeneutic to these couple of passages, it teaches something else.

And when you don't have a reverence for tradition, you're at the mercy

at any time of somebody coming along and making that argument, because you hold in principle that the church could always have been wrong about her fundamental teaching.

So what origin, the church father origin says, the scriptures are more truly written on the church's heart than on the page.

And the concept there is the Christian faithful understand the meaning of the scriptures and have been living out the meaning of the scriptures.

And we don't need a Bible scholar to come along and tell us that we've been wrong for 2000 years.

part of what tradition is, is the set of interpretations of scripture that we simply think to ourselves, that we take for granted.

There's all kinds of understandings that we simply take for granted from the scripture.

And that have been passed down to us by previous generations.

And the Holy Spirit guides that process.

And if you don't reverence that process, which is to say, if you don't have reverence for tradition, you do throw the door open,

to actual radical change.

Folks don't realize this.

They think that tradition is gonna mean change.

Actually, it doesn't because when you have reverence for how the previous generations have understood the word of God, it's a conservative force.

It makes it more resistant to flamboyant change rather than the other way around.

That is correct.

And I was shocked in seminary when I got to the seminary, my master's program, and I began to hear my professors in seminary talk about the reformed tradition, which is how Calvinism is often described by folks whose Calvinist roots come from the continent.

So Dutch and German Calvinists tend to call themselves reformed.