- [Charles Jr.] Sola Scriptura matters 500 years later just as much as it did
during the days of the Reformation in the 16th century because the same issue is
at stake, the matter of authority.
By what authority do we know truth?
By what authority do we understand God?
By what authority do we defend the gospel?
Only God's word is the perfect revelation and carries the authority of God
Himself in it.
And in the day that we live in, that's just as much an important matter
as it was in the days of the Reformers.
Connected to that is not just a matter of authority but the matter of sufficiency.
Sola Scriptura affirmed that the Word of God is enough for us to reach
the lost, change the culture, nurture the saints.
We need that desperately in our day, not just confidence and the exclusive
authority of the sacred scriptures, but confidence in its total sufficiency
to reach this generation with the good news of Jesus Christ.
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- [Trevin Wax] Looking back over his life, Martin Luther once said,
"I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never by force.
I simply taught, preached, wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing.
And while I slept, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or
emperor did such damage to it.
I did nothing; the Word did it all."
When I hear that quote from Martin Luther, the first thing that I recognize in that
is someone who is so gripped by the power and majesty of God's Word, right.
You can sense that he feels like the Word is explosive.
It's dynamite in the hands of God's people.
But there's also something there that leads into this first very important
Sola Scriptura, because you have him taking the Word of God and he is standing
over against the papacy, the church tradition at that time.
And so it's not simply that statement a statement about the power of God's Word,
in general, it's of the authority of God's Word over all other things.
So that leads us to this first Sola Scriptura.
Kevin, how would you define this Sola of the Reformation?
- [Kevin Young] It's really foundational.
I think, in simplest terms, it means that the Bible has the final say
on everything that the Bible means to say something about, that there is no final
authority when you get to the end of the "Why do you believe what you believe" or
"What do we believe about what we believe" questions, that there's nothing
after "This is what Scripture says," that there's no authority beyond that to say,
"Well, how does that square with the church councils," or "How does that work
with the creeds that have already been written?"
All of those things that have their place, and they certainly do and can be helpful,
must finally be tested against God's Word.
It's not that it's the only authority that we ever look to, but it is
that final authority.
It has the last word.
So that we believe the Word of God is sufficient to do the work of God,
which is exactly what Luther was talking about there.
- [Trevin Wax] So the Bible says that is the final, the ultimate authority that we
would make an appeal to. - [Kevin Young] Yeah.
And of course, you know, it's the Bible as, you know,
at least be rightly interpreted.
People can, you know, quote the Bible wrongly.
But as much as sometimes people may think, "Well, that's sort of a naive position
to just land, and well, the Bible says it and I believe it."
But, yeah, because it's not just a book that we're, you know,
giving our allegiance to, but it's our conviction from this book
that this is not just a book, but this is God speaking to us,
living and active.
So how could we not give the Bible the final word if it is God's Word,
God Himself speaking?
If we believe God gets the final word, then His word has to have the final
word as well.
- [Trevin Wax] Dr. Mohler, a lot of people might be hearing this
and saying, "Well, of course, the Bible has the final word."
Why would anyone find this controversial today or have found this controversial
in the past?
So can you help us understand historically why this was such an explosive teaching
to come from Martin Luther and from the Reformers during their day?
- [Albert Mohler] Yeah, explosive is right.
I mean, you consider what this landed as, as a thunderclap in the middle
of the Reformation, and everyone knew that Sola Scriptura was where it would
begin and end.
And that's because this is what we call the formal principle of the Reformation.
This was the doctrine that led to all the other affirmations of the Reformation,
and they all lead right back to it.
And one of the first things we need to do is to say, when Luther says,
"God did it by His word," he meant by the scripture.
It's Sola Scriptura.
And so we're very clear that there were other claims to how God would speak.
That's the problem.
And in particular, the Roman Catholic Church claimed that God spoke through the
hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and, in particular, through the papacy,
in such a way that the church then became the vessel of God's revelation.
And so when the church was trying to decide what does this doctrine mean or how
should we affirm this, they will consult with one another.
Scripture will be a part of the conversation, but Scripture did not
end the conversation.
So you know, in law during the time of Luther, the question was,
what are the norms?
That was a very key question.
So this little state has this law.
This little state has this law. What norms it?
What is the ultimate authority?
And Luther brought that language right into the Reformation.
When he said, "The thing about Scripture is it is the final norm,
it has the final say," he had a Latin expression I love to use,
because you don't even have to know Latin to understand it.
- [Kevin Young] Those are the best ones. - [Albert Mohler] Yeah.
So he said, "Scripture is norm normans non normata."
And you could say, well, that sounds like a lot of Latin.
What he meant was it says that the Scripture is the norm of norms that
can't be normed.
So you do have other sources of authority, as Kevin said.
We do have reason and experience and tradition.
Even the Reformers were glad to quote Augustine and others when they believed
that the church fathers were right.
But ultimately, it's all down to Scripture, and the reason why it was so
controversial is because this was a direct statement that you don't need the papacy.
It was actually a little more than that, I guess.
It was a direct statement that the papacy is not a conduit of revelation.
Scripture alone is.
- [Trevin Wax] You know, another very powerful quote
from Martin Luther is when he says, "A simple layman armed with Scripture is
to be believed above a pope or a council without it."
And you think about the medieval church during that time and all of the things
that were coming to the pope and the councils.
That statement right there shows just why this was so controversial,
because it was standing up in judgment against the church at the time.
But you did mention though that there are other sources of authority,
and then you alluded to this as well, and I think this is important in our day
because some of the ways that these Solas can be misused or misread or wind
up devolving over time is that you wind up with a situation in which people will,
over against any kind of authority or church tradition, we see this today
in certain quarters when it comes to certain positions of morality that are no
longer popular in culture, to say, "Oh, we just go back to the Bible,
we reinterpret the Bible, we just look back over our interpretations
where we might have gotten things wrong, where the church could be wrong."
The Scripture is our only authority instead of seeing the Scripture
as the final authority.
So how would you explain the difference?
- [Albert Mohler] Well, the Reformers dealt with that
and Luther, in particular.
Luther said very clearly that the Bible is the sole final authority.
But you know, he made a very interesting statement.
He said, "The Bible is not a naked authority."
And what he meant by that was it comes clothed in the fact that we are able even
to use human language, as he points out, and there are all kinds of things
that do this.
And no one reads the Bible alone, but we choose with whom we read the Bible.
That's such an important point.
Luther said, "I'm going to choose to read the Bible the way the apostles
read the Bible."
I'm going to choose to read the Bible the way that he believed people who affirm the
gospel read the Bible.
He was a part of the conversation.
And that's why when you read Luther, he will cite who he's reading
the Bible with.
And it's the same way today.
And so we are not saying, "We're the first people to pick up the
Bible and read it."
We want to read the Bible, however, with the right people.
- [Kevin Young] Yeah.
I think humility is the key all the way through here, because it can sound
like you're being really spiritual to say, "Well, it's just me and the Bible,
and I just got this word, and I'm going back to the very beginning
as if nobody's ever read this."
I mean, the fancy term is it's the nativist fallacy to think that we can just
go back to the beginning and we can reconstruct all of it just
out of our own heads.
So, no, as Dr. Mohler said, we need to stand on the shoulders
of giants, as the sayings go.
We need to listen to what those in the past have said.
So we're not coming to this pretending that we're the only spiritual people
who've ever read this book, that nobody smarter than us has ever
come before us.
So yes, we want to listen to church councils and to church fathers
and to Reformers.
That's what we're doing here.
We're looking back to the Reformers with gratitude.
So it's a humility to say, "I'm not the only person who
can interpret this.
I'm not the only person to come to a conclusion on this."
But then it's a further humility to say, ultimately, it isn't any of those things
that humans have come up with, but it's God alone.
So we use all of that as the lens through which we try to understand it,
but the final say is God in His word.
And you're so right that it's the word, meaning this inscripturated word.
Because lots of groups would be happy to talk about God speaking in this way or
that way, but it is in this objective written down word that we have
the final word.
- [Albert Mohler] Trevin, can I add something to that?
The very first Luther quote that you cited comes from a context
that's really important.
Luther didn't just say that because he was thinking about how
to affirm the scripture.
He was preaching that to his students.
And as a seminary president, this hits really close to home.
And so Luther had the students, and they fired up with zeal
for the Reformation.
And they were trying to bring about the reformation by force.
They were using sledgehammers to tear down the altars in the mass.
And Luther knew he had a problem, because it wasn't that they wrongly
understood the mass.
They understood the problem.
The problem was that they thought they could bring about a reformation,
and that's why Luther said to them, "No, here's what you do, you preach the word,"
which gets to the other point about Scripture alone.
Luther and the Reformers believed that Scripture alone can reach the human heart
and bring about a true reformation and be the means whereby the gospel gets
into the human heart.
And so Scripture alone is not only a defensive statement.
Scripture alone, final norm, nothing else.
It is an absolute statement of confidence in Scripture.
Scripture alone is how God chooses to do His work.
- [Trevin Wax] You know, that brings Luther's challenge to us
directly today, because evangelical churches and many churches that would say
they come from the reformational tradition, we can sometimes have this
tendency to think that Scripture needs more in order to have power, right.
That somehow it needs to be propped up for the day that we live in.
And so how does Luther, the quote that I mentioned earlier that
you were talking about, talking about the explosiveness of the
Word of God and the power of the word alone getting to the heart of people,
how does that truth impact the way we do pastoral ministry today and the way we,
in our churches, will come to God's Word?
- [Kevin Young] I mean, as a pastor, week in and week out,
I keep going back to Sola Scriptura because, otherwise, I would be
adrift in ministry.
I mean, there are so many other things clamoring for our attention, for our time.
There are so many temptations.
I mean, every pastor or church leader has got to be honest that we're tempted
to think, "Does this really work?"
And I've often said to our congregation, "If we know how to make this church a
success other than by the Word of God and prayer, then we're not aiming
for the right things."
If what your church can become you can get there apart from the Word and prayer,
then it's not really church that Christ is building, but it's something else.
So even among, you know, many good Christians and Bible-believing
churches who would say, "Yes, I love the Bible, it's all true," there is
this implicit denial often of the sufficiency of Scripture.
Just what you said, Trevin.
It's not enough.
It's not enough when it comes to the real hard problems and counseling somebody who
has an eating disorder or a gender identity disorder, and we think, "Well,
we'd better send those people somewhere else."
We don't really have those, you know, solutions in the Bible.
Or how do we win the lost?
How does a church grow?
How do we disciple people?
That's why I just keep coming back to our conviction.
It must be a conviction that the Word of God is sufficient to do the
work of God.
I mean that Luther quote at the beginning is so powerful, as you guys know,
because it's not from Luther, ultimately, but he's just giving the parable that
Jesus tells in Mark Chapter 4, the farmer who did the same thing.
He sowed it and he slept.
And then it says that the harvest sprung up, and then in Greek, it says,
"automate," by itself, automatically.
Sow, sow, sow, God does the work.
- [Albert Mohler] You know, one of the interesting things is that,
in this conversation, you've said we have to be careful to say
that we don't require the scripture and anything.
That's almost true.
But the Reformers will step in and say, "The Scripture does require
something else, and that's the ministry of the Holy Spirit."
But that's the absolute confidence we have.
And so Calvin, probably more than anyone else, explained how that happened.
Luther, in the very quote we were just talking about, was telling his students,
"Here's how it happens, you preach the word.
That's your job."
"I preach the word," Luther says, "and that was my job."
I could get my voice to their ears, but I can go no further.
But he said, "That's where the Holy Spirit always honors the Word of God," because
the Holy Spirit alone can get the Word of God, that is the Scripture,
from their ears to their hearts.
I can only get to their ears, but the Holy Spirit will apply this word
to their hearts.
That's just really powerful. I think about that when I preach.
And you know, when people say, "How do you grow a church?
How do you build a church?"
Well, Luther would have us to know that you build a church by preaching the word
and getting the word to their ears.
And then you got to go home, eat lunch, and take a nap.
Because it's the Holy Spirit alone who can get the word from their ears
to their hearts.
- [Trevin Wax] Well, that's what we pray will be the reality
in the lives of churches all across our country, people watching this video,
and that the truth and the power of Sola Scriptura will be something that,
again, takes root in our churches, in our ministries, in our hearts so that
God can bring Him to us.
- [Albert Mohler] Amen. - [Kevin Young] That's right.
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