Dr. Stephen Nichols
speaker
59 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Stephen Nichols’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Every word and all of the words are the Word of God. And because this is God, who is true and who does not err, it is inerrant. It is without error. And therefore, it is entirely trustworthy.
You know, I remember when he said that, Nathan, and I thought it was a great statement. I remember seeing something he had said back in the early 70s that said, you know, it's very important to read the Bible, of course. But then he writes next to it, we must study. And I think he underlined study two or three times. We must study the Bible.
So for decades, at the beginning of Ligonier and in the final years of Dr. Sproul's life, he was stressing Bible study. And there's one reason why we read this book, why we study it, why we put so much effort to understand it, why we at Ligonier spend so much time producing resources to help people understand God's Word, is because it is the Word of God. It is holy.
Paul's going to call it sacred writings. It is the holy, authoritative word of God. And we would do well to read it, to study it, to follow Dr. Sproul's advice, and to submit to it.
Yeah, that's a great question. We're talking about the doctrine of the authority of Scripture. Well, what does that mean? How do we flesh that out? And over the centuries of church history, we've landed on two key words that under the doctrine of authority of Scripture. The first is inspiration, which of course is a biblical term itself.
And what inspiration means is that God is the source of the Bible. It is God-breathed. We speak of God using human instruments, and He certainly did. And you don't have to be a student of Greek or a student of Hebrew to recognize that the biblical books read differently.
They had different levels of education, they had different experiences, different contexts, writing for different audiences, even using different genres. So we sense some differences as we move from author to author. So God certainly used the personality of the author, but God superintended those human authors so that every word would be the word of God.
Two key words here when we speak of inspiration. verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration. So verbal means the words. It's not thoughts. It's not as if God sort of implanted in Matthew's head thoughts and then Matthew wrote the actual words. No, the very words. And then plenary is just a word that means full, complete. So all of the words are inspired.
The next keyword is inerrancy, which means without error. And so this only follows from inspiration. If the Bible is sourced in God, then it is true. So yes, when we talk about the authority of Scripture, we're talking about inspiration and inerrancy.
Yeah, absolutely. It's almost in every age of the church God's Word is going to be challenged, of course from without, but sadly even from within. So we go back to the turn of the 20th century, and modernism is in the culture, liberalism is in the church.
And this has greatly affected the seminaries, and of course, the American seminaries, and seminaries in Great Britain, for that matter, and universities. And so as the seminary goes, so goes the pulpit. And as the pulpit goes, so goes the church.
And so we were seeing folks in all the denominations, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, moving away from the authority of Scripture and seeing Scripture as more of the human construct, more of the human expression of the divine encounter, rather than the very Word of God. And so people like J. Gresham Machen and the Princetonians B.B.
Warfield took a very strong stand for inspiration and inerrancy in their day back in the early 20th century.
Yeah, that's a popular thesis, and you'll hear it from time to time. It's a modern invention. It only came about because of the sort of scientific way we do things. You can find it in the Church Fathers. It's all through Augustine, speaking specifically of inerrancy. But you can even push back and find that Scripture itself expresses authority. Go back to Jesus and his temptation with the devil.
And it's those words of Scripture that Jesus is holding on to. As he interacts with the Pharisees or the Sadducees, the religious leaders at different moments, he appeals to... actual words of Scripture, specific words of the Old Testament to make his case. Paul does the same thing as he appeals to the Old Testament.
Peter calls Paul's writings Scripture when he says there's hard stuff in Paul, things difficult to understand, as with the rest of Scripture. So how does Scripture view itself? is where we start. And then we have it in the Fathers, of course, we have it in the Reformation. So it is not accurate, this idea that the Princetonians created the doctrine of inerrancy.
Yeah, well, similar things happened with the doctrine of Scripture, but rather than coming through the quest for the historical Jesus, or did Moses write the Pentateuch, or was it a later expression again of the Israelite community of their encounter with God? Two key figures that had an influence on the evangelical church in America were Bultmann and Karl Barth.
And Bultmann introduced this idea of mythology and the idea that here we are in the 20th century, the scientific universe. We need to understand scripture differently. We need to demythologize it because scripture was written in a mythological age. And of course, they're going to speak of things like the resurrection. We know now in our moment that that doesn't happen.
People don't rise from the dead. So we demythologize the history of the text and we understand it as myth. Now, in a Table Talk article, Nathan, Dr. Sproul said this about Bultmann. He said, "...the historical character of Judeo-Christianity is what markedly distinguishes it from all forms of mythology. A myth finds its value in its moral or spiritual application."
That's what Bultmann was trying to do. while its historical reality remains insignificant. Again, that's what Bultmann was teaching. R.C. replies, fairy tales can help our mood swings, but they do little to give us confidence in ultimate reality. But at the seminary where R.C. studied, for instance, his professors were Boltmanian. They actually believed in this demythologization.
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