- All three of us have seen
foci on this theological issue or that theological issue,
sometimes getting way, way, way out of hand.
How important is it for correcting these things
to keep pushing Scripture,
it's authority, it's comprehensiveness,
how you use it,
how you read it carefully
again and again and again and again
without just sounding as if you're a one-string person?
And yet, we can all tell stories about how
that really is the fundamental issue, isn't it?
- Yeah, it is.
One of the great things about being a pastor is that
you preach enough Sundays on enough things
that you don't get excused of being a one-string person,
by your own people anyway, too often,
if you're working your way through the Bible.
But I'm eager to say that as I'm listening today
to various voices, this book is the watershed.
And it's this book read seriously, rigorously, precisely
with a heartfelt and a disciplined mind
submission to every sentence in it.
Every sentence in it.
And you can just kinda,
after you talk to a person awhile
or after you listen awhile, you get this sense
they're hovering too high above this text.
They're feet aren't here.
They're not walking through the propositions
and asking how that one relates to that one or that one.
And how the structure makes a point,
and that point is true because it's there.
That's what I'm lookin' for.
And I just wanna encourage young guys
that they make their points manifestly from the Bible
because that's our only--
- To this man will I look, he who is of a contrite spirit
and who trembles at my word.
- I'd like to hear what both of you have to say
to what I'm about to say, but especially Don, I guess,
because he teach New Testament.
One change, since we're talking as old guys here,
one change I've seen since I went to seminary
a long time ago, is the student's coming out of seminary
increasingly have been shown how complicated it is
to do hermeneutics.
You gotta take in the literary context
and the social context.
And hermeneutics, actually when I think of,
I came up on that side of Thistleton
and that side of the hermeneutical spiral
and that side of all that.
I have Berkhof "Principles of Biblical Interpretation."
- Or Bernard Ramm maybe? - Yeah, well yeah,
that was really high-level.
And I've read, I've kept up.
And it is true that it is more complicated.
There should be a humility about it.
We shouldn't be rushing into saying
you open the Bible, you see a text
and you say, oh, I see what this means.
And all that should make you humble.
But what I'm afraid it's done is given a lot of young guys
the feeling like nobody really knows.
It's almost impossible to be sure
what these texts are saying, except for a few of them.
And there's a lot of throw up the hands and say,
"Well, who knows what the Bible says about that really.
"There's so many different views and it's so hard."
And I'm actually impressed by
Peter Berger, in a "Rumor of Angels" actually has a chapter,
it's not got to do with the Bible at all.
It's called Relativizing the Relativizers.
And it's all about the fact that,
and he was part of this,
as a sociologist, he says, "Yes, we now know
"that knowledge tends to be socially conditioned.
"We have a tendency to believe
"what we have been conditioned by our society to believe."
In other words he said, he agrees
that we're not very objective.
We tend to be, to a great degree,
influenced by our community.
And therefore, he says, yes, he's been a part of that
but then he says, in the end,
just to say all truth is culturally conditioned,
that itself would be a culturally conditioned truth.
And in the end, you have to come back and say
though we have to be chastened and we have to be careful,
we still have to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
You still have to do that.
You can't say, oh, it's so hard to know.
And I actually feel in the end,
that we should be chastened.
We still have to find out what the Bible teaches
and base what we say on the Bible.
But I actually see a sense on the part of more guys
not to go, like John just said, through it carefully
and ground everything you say in it.
And I think to some degree, I blame the hermeneutics courses
and all these big thick books that they have
to work through, and I do think their eyes glaze over.
Now, I don't know what you all think about that.
I feel like I wanna call 'em back to say,
"You still gotta preach the word with a confidence
"you could preach years ago.
"You should be chastened and humbled and careful.
"Or maybe you should do more time on your exegesis
"than I did 30 years ago, but in the end,
"you still have to do it."
- Yeah, agnosticism in the ultimate sense
and in the practical sense is an unlivable view of life
because every decision you make every day,
you're jumping off the fence on one side or the other.
If you don't do something 'cause you don't know what to do,
you're doing something here and saying
that I'm making a choice.
So existentially, you must decide.
You have to come down to a decision.
And the humility factor, I think, Chesterton here,
he says humility, today, has settled on the wrong organ,
the organ of knowledge instead of the organ of ambition.
And so to say I don't know
is the ultimate statement of humility.
Even the multiplication table is the way he says it.
And I think he's right about that.
It's not obvious that a person who preaches
with great conviction is an arrogant person
because he may be a person totally under authority.
He's submitted.
Whereas the person who's kinda hovering with a relativized
epistemology above it, could be a very arrogant person.
- That's not really humility, that's uncertainty.
What you want is spiritual humility,
not epistemological uncertainty.
They're not the same thing.
- [Don] But they are cast as the same thing.
And it's bound up in a whole lot of the contemporary debate
on what tolerance is.
There's a new definition for tolerance
that's come along now, too.