Lesson 5:

What is Theology?

December 17, 2023

Questions:

1. At the time of the 16th century _________________, the historians look back and say that the chief debate. The crucial issue that provoked the controversy which is called, the Material Cause, of the Reformation was the Doctrine of Justification by __________ Alone.

2. But, lurking behind the scenes and slightly under the present view was another issue that was very, very important, and it that was the question of ______________.

3. When Luther was engaged with debate in debate with the leaders of the church over the ______________ of Justification, and he had his disputations with … with the meetings at Leipzig and at Augsburg.

4. Luther was maneuvered into a position he had to ______________ publicly that his views did not agree with previous statements that the church had made in church Council; and also that his views didn't agree with certain statements that had been issued by former popes of the church now that provoked quite a crisis for Luther because the question was, “How dare you question the authority of the church or the authority of the Pope.”

5. And, Luther finally at the Diet of Worms said, “Unless I'm convinced by sacred __________, or by evident reason I can’ recant for my conscience is held captive by the_______of God!”

6. And out of that conflict came the slogan at that time called ______________ Scriptura and behind that brief little slogan which means simply the Scripture ______________.

7. Luther and the Reformers were saying that there is only ________ AUTHORITY, ultimately, that has the absolute right to bind our consciences.  Now Luther didn't demean the lesser AUTHORITY of the church, or the importance of historic church councils like Isa and Chalcedon and the rest, but he's saying even those church councils ____  _______ have the same AUTHORITY or the same level of AUTHORITY that the ______________ has.

8. And now, this focused attention on the nature & basis for such ____________ AUTHORITY.

9. Now, fundamental to the Reformers’ view of the primacy (1st place) of Scripture, and of the _____________ of Scripture was the question of the Bible's Authorship … notice the closeness between these two words AUTHORITY and AUTHORSHIP.

10. They both contain the word ____________ in it and what the Reformers were saying is that though it is certainly true that in the scope/movement/progression of human history the _________ appeared one book or one letter at a time written by human beings like you & I.

11. That nevertheless, the primary author, the ultimate author of the Bible … is ______ Paul or Luke or Jeremiah or Mose, but rather the ultimate author of the Bible is _________ himself.

12. God exercised his authority through the _____________ of human authors who were his spokespersons to reveal Himself (God) to the world so the question obviously that we face then how is it possible that __________ authors can be invested with the authority of God.

13. We saw in our last session that the _____________ for example would frequently say before they would utter their words not ‘Thus saith Jeremiah,’ … but they would say ‘Thus saith the Lord’ that the prophets claimed that their message came from ________ and that they were merely communicating to their hearers that which had its origin in ________.

14. That's why historically ________ Latin phrases have been used frequently to refer to the nature of sacred Scripture: verbum dei and vox dei.

15. Verbum Dei:  The Word of God … and … Vox Dei:  The ___________ of God.

16. Luther and Calvin believed that even though God did not personally write down the words on paper/on parchment for the _________ Scriptures, but that the Bible is no less His Word than if than if it were delivered to us directly from heaven, or if ________ would have been heard to speak audibly… that would make that Word no more His Word than it is right now.

17. So that raises this whole question of what we call the ________________ of the Bible?

18. Let me direct your attention back to 2 Timothy, which we've looked at for another reason earlier to consider the value and importance of _____________.

19. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “________ Scripture is given by Inspiration of God.” Now when Paul writes these words he uses the term GRAPHI which is the word for Scripture.

20. Now in a general loose sense the term GRAPHI simply means writings, and, somebody could come to this text and say, “Well, Paul was saying that everything that's ever been written down is inspired of God.” 

21. No, b/c for the ____________ people the phrase it is written was a technical term that they all understood to have specific reference to the Biblical writings, and also among the Jewish people the term GRAPHI had specific reference to the ______ Testament. This is significant here because when Paul is writing here he may not be including his own writings.

22. Although Peter does, later on, in his Epistles conclude Paul's writings with the rest of the Scripture, but the term _____________ here has specific reference to the Old Testament & then later by extension incorporates the writings of the Apostles in the _______ Testament.

23. The point that we have here that Paul is making is this astonishing claim when he says that all of these writings all of the _____________ are given by Divine Inspiration and what's he saying here now this may be a little bit confusing and so we're going to have to work our way through the following matters with the some caution and some care in the church we have a _______________ called Inspiration.

24. And the English translation of 2 Timothy ___:_____ that I just read, uses the term Inspiration, but I think that we must make a distinction between the use of the term inspiration here, and the way it's used Theologically in the history of the church, … but rather the emphasis in this text is on the _____________ of that information.

25. What Paul is saying, he uses the word:  Theopneust in the Greek here when he (Paul) says all Scripture is given by Inspiration … literally what this word means is ______-___________ and it means that which God has breathed __________ rather than that which God breathes _________.

26. Paul is saying here is that he is saying that all of Scripture is _____________ out from God.

27. Now, when we breathe out that means we are involved in expiration not in the sense of dying, but we _____________ at death because we breathe out for the last time and we don't breathe in anymore; but to breath out is expiration whereas to breathe in is inspiration. So, really if we were getting real technical here we should translate this phrase that __________ Scripture is given by EXPIRATION. 

28. Now so, what what's the difference between expiration and inspiration?  Here again the point that I'm jealous to make here is that what Paul is saying when he insists that ALL of the Scripture has been breathed out by God … he is saying that its ultimate origin is in Him.

    1. It is His _____________. 

    2. It is _________ speech.

    3. He is the __________ who is the source of these writings.

29. Now that's obviously assumed in the DOCTRINE that we call Inspiration, and when we speak of Inspiration as a concept, we are talking about the _____________ of God the Holy Spirit,  whom we read at various points in the Scripture, comes upon people; and so anoints them by His _____________ that He inspires them to write what they write not out of their own auspices, but rather that they are writing the __________ word of  God.

30. Now again how he does it is nowhere defined in Scripture, but that it is not of ___________ initiation is made clear and so when we talk about the DOCTRINE of Inspiration, we're talking about the way in which God superintends the writing of sacred Scripture … that God does ____ just act and let people respond with their own insight and their own imagination to set forth their view of what God has done; but that God is working by the Holy ________ to superintend that record to make sure that the record that is written is His ___________.

31. Now there's been lots of controversies, over this _____________ of Inspiration and some people have charged Orthodox Christianity with teaching a crass type of what's called Mechanical Inspiration … or sometimes called the Dictation Theory.

32. This is the idea that men who were the _____________ were reduced to robots or to machines, who had no room for their own personality or their own concerns in the writing of the _____________, but they were almost ouija boards in the hands of God who are involved in automatic writing where God was controlling their hand as they wrote the words on the parchment.

33. Or, that Inspiration involved a verbal, specific, dictation … where God said write this down just as I might say to my secretary take this letter, and then I dictate it and though the ____________ are written by her on the page it is still my message because I have dictated.

34. Explaining the DOCTRINE of Inspiration, the church has always _____________ herself from this kind of simplistic view of the matter … basically, we don’t know how the writing down of sacred Scripture.

35. The salient (important) point for the church today is that what we have in Scripture though it contains the personalities the vocabularies the concerns of the _____________ writers that the human writers were writing under the supervision of God, and they were not doing this in ___________ own power.  If they were simply writing under their own power, we would expect them to make all kinds of _____________.

36. Talking about the Inspiration of Scripture, also historically, the church has believed that the Inspiration of the _____________ is verbal that is to say that it extends not simply to the broad outline of the information that is communicated by the earthly authors, but rather that the Holy Spirit's operation of superintendence applies to the very words of Scripture themselves that's one of the reasons why the church has been so zealous to reconstruct this carefully as possible the _____________  __________________ of the Bible and have given such care to  studying the word meanings of ancient Hebrew and Greek terms because every _____________ carries with it the importance of Divine Authority.

37. The debate that _____________ had with Satan in the wilderness during his temptation, how that debate focused back and forth on citations from _______________, and sometimes Jesus will make his case against the devil or against the Pharisees by the turn __________ just of a phrase, but of a single word and Jesus himself self said that NOT a jot or a tittle of the __________ shall pass away until ALL is fulfilled.

38. At that point Jesus’ view of inspiration was even more detailed and specific than being verbal.  It was jot and tittle Inspiration for our _____________ saying that what He meant obviously by that expression is that there's NOT a word in the law of God that is superfluous or that is simply open to negotiation.  It ALL carries with it the weight of the binding authority of its ultimate _____________ (God).

39. Now in our day and age with the avalanche of criticism _____________ the Bible, there have been attempts to get out from under this concept of Inspiration.  We know that in the Boltmanian school and the Neo-Liberal school the whole idea of any kind of Divine Origin the Scripture has been _____________ in a wholesale manner.

40. Neo-Orthodox Theology, which among other things, was concerned to restore the _______________ of the Bible to the church, and to give a _____________ view of the Bible than what was left from 19th Century Liberalism also rejects Verbal Inspiration and rejects Propositional Revelation.

41. Carl Bart, for example, says that the way in which God reveals himself is through events NOT propositions.

42. Which is a very, very serious matter because the _____________ is NOT merely a narrative record of events ... where we are told the story of what happened, and then left for ourselves to _____________ its meaning.

43. But, the Bible gives us NOT ONLY the record of what happened, but the AUTHORITATIVE Apostolic and Prophetic interpretation of the _____________ of that event.

44. The _____________ is NOT a naked event that God performs in history, and says, “____________ interpret its meaning?” We understand how people looked at it differently.

45. For many of the disciples, it was a tragic disillusionment for Pontius Pilot.  It was a matter of political expediency as it was for Caiaphas.  It was a matter of political expediency.

46. And when Paul he expounds on the _____________ of the Cross, he talks about it as a cosmic act of ________________ where it was an Atonement offered to satisfy the ___________ of God that would NOT be immediately apparent by just looking at the event.

47. Or also the Neo Orthodox Theologians would say that the Bible is not Revelation, but it is a … a witness to Revelation; and in that sense that _____________ the level of Authority for the Bible significantly. (In summary, Neo Orthodox Christianity is insufficient and bad.)

48. ORTHODOX (regular) Christianity says:

    1. it NOT ONLY bears witness to the _____________,

    2. it is __________ TRUTH,

    3. it is the actual embodiment (JESUS) of Divine Revelation,

    4. it doesn't just point beyond itself, but in and of itself,

    5. it _____________ to us nothing less than the veritable (true) Word of God.

    6. (“And the _____________ became flesh and dwelt among us” in the King Jesus, our _____________!)

​

Answers:

1. At the time of the 16th century Reformation, the historians look back and say that the chief debate. The crucial issue that provoked the controversy which is called, the Material Cause, of the Reformation was the Doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone.

2. But, lurking behind the scenes and slightly under the present view was another issue that was very, very important, and it that was the question of authority.

3. When Luther was engaged with debate in debate with the leaders of the church over the Doctrine of Justification, and he had his disputations with Kon and with e with the meetings at uh lipick and at Augsburg.

4. Luther was maneuvered into a position he had to confess publicly that his views did not agree with previous statements that the church had made in church Council; and also that his views didn't agree with certain statements that had been issued by former popes of the church now that provoked quite a crisis for Luther because the question was, “How dare you question the authority of the church or the authority of the Pope.”

5. And, Luther finally at the Diet of War said, “Unless I'm convinced by sacred Scripture, or by evident reason I can’ recant for my conscience is held captive by the word of God!”

6. And out of that conflict came the slogan at that time called Sola Scriptura and behind that brief little slogan which means simply the Scripture Alone.

7. Luther and the Reformers were saying that there is only one AUTHORITY, ultimately, that has the absolute right to bind our consciences.  Now Luther didn't demean the lesser AUTHORITY of the church, or the importance of historic church councils like Isa and Chalcedon and the rest, but he's saying even those church councils DO NOT have the same AUTHORITY or the same level of AUTHORITY that the Bible has.

8. And now, this focused attention on the nature & basis for such Biblical AUTHORITY.

9. Now, fundamental to the Reformers’ view of the primacy (1st place) of Scripture, and of the AUTHORITY of Scripture was the question of the Bible's Authorship … notice the closeness between these two words AUTHORITY and AUTHORSHIP.

10. They both contain the word AUTHOR in it and what the Reformers were saying is that though it is certainly true that in the scope & movement & progression of human history the Bible appeared one book or one letter at a time written by human beings like you and I.

11. That nevertheless, the primary author, the ultimate author of the Bible … is not Paul or Luke or Jeremiah or Mose, but rather the ultimate author of the Bible is God himself.

12. God exercised his authority through the writings of human authors who were his spokespersons to reveal Himself (God) to the world so the question obviously that we face then how is it possible that human authors can be invested with the authority of God.

13. We saw in our last session that the prophets for example would frequently say before they would utter their words not ‘Thus saith Jeremiah,’ … but they would say ‘Thus saith the Lord’ that the prophets claimed that their message came from God and that they were merely communicating to their hearers that which had its origin in God.

14. That's why historically two Latin phrases have been used frequently to refer to the nature of sacred Scripture: verbum dei and vox dei.

15. Verbum Dei:  The Word of God … and … Vox Dei:  The Voice of God.

16. Luther and Calvin believed that even though God did not personally write down the words on paper or on parchment for the original Scriptures, but that the Bible is no less His word than if than if it were delivered to us directly from heaven, or if God would have been heard to speak audibly… that would make that Word no more His Word than it is right now.

17. So that raises this whole question of what we call the Inspiration of the Bible?

18. Let me direct your attention back to 2 Timothy, which we've looked at for another reason earlier to consider the value and importance of Theology.

19. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is given by Inspiration of God.” Now when Paul writes these words he uses the term GRAPHI which is the word for Scripture.

20. Now in a general loose sense the term GRAPHI simply means writings, and, somebody could come to this text and say, “Well, Paul was saying that everything that's ever been written down is inspired of God.”  

21. No, because for the Jewish people the phrase it is written was a technical term that they all understood to have specific reference to the Biblical writings, and also among the Jewish people the term GRAPHI had specific reference to the Old Testament; and this is significant here because when Paul is writing here he may not be including his own writings.

22. Although Peter does, later on, in his Epistles conclude Paul's writings with the rest of the Scripture, but the term Scripture here has specific reference to the Old Testament and then later by extension incorporates the writings of the Apostles in the New Testament.

23. The point that we have here that Paul is making is this astonishing claim when he says that all of these writings all of the GRAPHI are given by Divine Inspiration and what's he saying here now this may be a little bit confusing and so we're going to have to work our way through the following matters with the some caution and some care in the church we have a DOCTRINE called Inspiration.

24. And the English translation of 2 Timothy 3:16 that I just read, uses the term Inspiration, but I think that we must make a distinction between the use of the term inspiration here, and the way it's used Theologically in the history of the church, … but rather the emphasis in this text is on the source of that information.

25. What Paul is saying, he uses the word:  Theopneust in the Greek here when he (Paul) says all Scripture is given by Inspiration … literally what this word means is God-breathed and it means that which God has breathed out rather than that which God breathes in.

26. Paul is saying here is that he is saying that all of Scripture is breathed out from God.

27. Now, when we breathe out that means we are involved in expiration not in the sense of dying, but we expire at death because we breathe out for the last time and we don't breathe in anymore; but to breath out is expiration whereas to breathe in is inspiration. So, really if we were getting real technical here we should translate this phrase that all Scripture is given by EXPIRATION. 

28. Now so, what what's the difference between expiration and inspiration?  Here again the point that I'm jealous to make here is that what Paul is saying when he insists that ALL of the Scripture has been breathed out by God … he is saying that its ultimate origin is in Him.

    1. It is His Word.  

    2. It is His speech.

    3. He is the One who is the source of these writings.

29. Now that's obviously assumed in the DOCTRINE that we call Inspiration, and when we speak of Inspiration as a concept, we are talking about the work of God the Holy Spirit,  whom we read at various points in the Scripture, comes upon people; and so anoints them by His power that He inspires them to write what they write not out of their own auspices, but rather that they are writing the true word of  God.

30. Now again how he does it is nowhere defined in Scripture, but that it is not of human initiation is made clear and so when we talk about the DOCTRINE of Inspiration, we're talking about the way in which God superintends the writing of sacred Scripture … that God does not just act and let people respond with their own insight and their own imagination to set forth their view of what God has done; but that God is working by the Holy Spirit to superintend that record to make sure that the record that is written is His word.

31. Now there's been lots of controversies, over this DOCTRINE of Inspiration and some people have charged Orthodox Christianity with teaching a crass type of what's called Mechanical Inspiration … or sometimes called the Dictation Theory.

32. This is the idea that men who were the authors were reduced to robots or to machines, who had no room for their own personality or their own concerns in the writing of the Bible, but they were almost ouija boards in the hands of God who are involved in automatic writing where God was controlling their hand as they wrote the words on the parchment.

33. Or, that Inspiration involved a verbal, specific, dictation … where God said write this down just as I might say to my secretary take this letter, and then I dictate it and though the words are written by her on the page it is still my message because I have dictated.

34. Explaining the DOCTRINE of Inspiration, the church has always distanced herself from this kind of simplistic view of the matter … basically, we don’t know how the writing down of sacred Scripture.

35. The salient (important) point for the church today is that what we have in Scripture though it contains the personalities the vocabularies the concerns of the human writers that the human writers were writing under the supervision of God, and they were not doing this in their own power.  If they were simply writing under their own power, we would expect them to make all kinds of errors.

36. Talking about the Inspiration of Scripture, also historically, the church has believed that the Inspiration of the Bible is verbal that is to say that it extends not simply to the broad outline of the information that is communicated by the earthly authors, but rather that the Holy Spirit's operation of superintendence applies to the very words of Scripture themselves that's one of the reasons why the church has been so zealous to reconstruct this carefully as possible the original manuscripts of the Bible and have given such care to  studying the word meanings of ancient Hebrew and Greek terms because every word carries with it the importance of Divine Authority.

37. The debate that Jesus had with Satan in the wilderness during his temptation, how that debate focused back and forth on citations from Scripture, and sometimes Jesus will make his case against the devil or against the Pharisees by the turn not just of a phrase, but of a single word and Jesus himself self said that NOT a jot or a tittle of the Law shall pass away until ALL is fulfilled.

38. At that point Jesus’ view of inspiration was even more detailed and specific than being verbal.  It was jot and tittle Inspiration for our Lord saying that what He meant obviously by that expression is that there's NOT a word in the law of God that is superfluous or that is simply open to negotiation.  It ALL carries with it the weight of the binding authority of its ultimate AUTHOR (God).

39. Now in our day and age with the avalanche of criticism against the Bible, there have been attempts to get out from under this concept of Inspiration.  We know that in the Boltmanian school and the Neo-Liberal school the whole idea of any kind of Divine Origin the Scripture has been rejected in a wholesale manner.

40. Neo-Orthodox Theology, which among other things, was concerned to restore the preaching of the Bible to the church, and to give a higher view of the Bible than what was left from 19th Century Liberalism also rejects Verbal Inspiration and rejects Propositional Revelation.

41. Carl Bart, for example, says that the way in which God reveals himself is through events NOT propositions.

42. Which is a very, very serious matter because the Bible is NOT merely a narrative record of events ... where we are told the story of what happened, and then left for ourselves to interpret its meaning.

43. But, the Bible gives us NOT ONLY the record of what happened, but the AUTHORITATIVE Apostolic and Prophetic interpretation of the meaning of that event.

44. The CROSS is NOT a naked event that God performs in history, and says, “YOU interpret its meaning?” We understand how people looked at it differently.

45. For many of the disciples, it was a tragic disillusionment for Pontius Pilot.  It was a matter of political expediency as it was for Caiaphas.  It was a matter of political expediency.

46. And when Paul he expounds on the meaning of the Cross, he talks about it as a cosmic act of Redemption where it was an Atonement offered to satisfy the justice of God that would NOT be immediately apparent by just looking at the event.

47. Or also the Neo Orthodox Theologians would say that the Bible is not Revelation, but it is a … a witness to Revelation; and in that sense that reduces the level of Authority for the Bible significantly. (In summary, Neo Orthodox Christianity is insufficient and bad.)

48. ORTHODOX(regular) Christianity says:

    1. it NOT ONLY bears witness to the TRUTH,

    2. it is THE TRUTH,

    3. it is the actual embodiment (JESUS) of Divine Revelation,

    4. it doesn't just point beyond itself, but in and of itself,

    5. it gives to us nothing less than the veritable (true) Word of God.

    6. (“And the WORD became flesh and dwelt among us” in the King Jesus, our Amen!)