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The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The All of Life podcast, hosted by Nate Claiborne, provides weekly episodes that help further our mission to call, form, and send disciple-makers. At NewCity, we want to see Orlando flourish by filling it with people who say "Follow me as I follow Jesus in all of life."
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The Scripture Practice with Benjamin Kandt
In this episode, Nate Claiborne and Benjamin Kandt discuss the practice of engaging with Scripture as part of the Common Rhythm. The central theme revolves around prioritizing "Scripture before screens," emphasizing the importance of immersing oneself in God's word before being influenced by the myriad of voices from technology, social media, and daily distractions. Their discussion highlights the different ways people engage with Scripture—whether through reading, listening, studying, or meditating—and how the key posture should be one of receiving from God rather than merely completing a routine.
The conversation delves into the historical context of how Scripture has been engaged with over time, including communal memorization before the advent of the printing press. They also touch on practical strategies, such as using the M'Cheyne reading plan and overcoming the "battle of the threshold"—the spiritual and mental resistance to starting the practice. They conclude with reflections on the authority of Scripture, its role in shaping believers’ lives, and how the Holy Spirit confirms its truth in the hearts of those who read it with faith. The episode ultimately encourages listeners to approach the Bible as a means of encountering Jesus, rather than just a book of knowledge or moral instruction.
You can find resources for the M'Cheyne reading plan on the NewCity Church Center App here
Welcome to another episode of the All that Life Podcast. I'm your host, nate Claiborne, and I'm here today with Benjamin Kant, two weeks in a row. Yeah, let's jump in, let's talk about scripture, nate, that's right. Yeah, we're here to talk about the common rhythm. Practice of it used to be scripture before screens. Now it's just scripture.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, we wanted to make each of the common rhythm practices one word, and particularly a Bible word, so that the practices are rooted in scripture. This one maintains the before screens aspect of it in the definition which is the scripture practice is hearing God's voice in scripture before all others, and that idea of there's a lot of voices that bombard us when we wake up in the morning, some of them inside our own head, some of them are news apps, some of them are social media feeds, some of them are email inbox right. All of those voices as soon as you wake up are kind of vying for your attention and we're saying, hey, actually part of the common rhythm is resisting the encroachment of technology into every area of your life, and so let's try to do scripture before screens and that's the original name for it, and so the essence of it is still there, even though we simply call it the scripture practice.
Speaker 1:That's right. So yeah, so it gives you the spirit of what you're trying to do and we can even tease out a little bit more. I like how you highlight the voices that you're listening to, because it's not, strictly speaking.
Speaker 2:you cannot look at a screen until you've done the scripture practice I mean a lot of people use their phone as an alarm.
Speaker 1:It's one thing to grab your phone, turn your alarm off, become a person, wake up that kind of thing. It's a different thing to grab your phone and the first thing you do is check Facebook or you check your messages or you immediately are just thrown into the day when you go about that way. And that's what we're trying to avoid with this practice.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, that's well said. In fact, many mornings I listen to the McShane Plan through a Bible app called Dwell, and it's a fantastic Bible app. I'd recommend it to everybody and that is one of my favorite ways. Maybe I'll grab coffee and then go for a walk around my neighborhood while listening to the Bible app and then I'll come back and maybe choose one of those chapters to really zero in on and meditate on a verse or a chunk or something like that, or maybe even study it, depending on what I want to do with that.
Speaker 2:But this language of hearing God's voice in Scripture is actually it's a really rich way to consider reading the Bible or engaging with Scripture. And I'll give you maybe a couple quotes to kind of back that up. Okay, In the 10 Theses of Bern from 1528. Okay, you're going old.
Speaker 1:Which everybody's been reading. I'm sure, yeah, when you think of theses, you think of the 10 Theses of Bern. Right, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly it. The first thesis, which is a big deal right. This is the first one. This is where they start. They say this the holy Christian church, whose only head is Christ, is born of the word of God, abides in the same and does not listen to the voice of a stranger. I love that language. That to be the church is. We do not listen to the voice of a stranger. We and they're getting that thing from John 10, the sheep, the shepherd calls, and the sheep hear his voice and they don't listen to the voice of another. And so where do we hear the voice of Jesus? We hear the voice of Jesus in the scriptures. That's where he speaks to his people authoritatively, that's where he speaks to his people primarily. That's. That's the place where he wants to begin the conversation with us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that also I feel like that it delineates a posture that we're expecting in this practice. We were talking before we recorded. There's really a spectrum of ways you could engage scripture and you could, and sometimes there is value to reading it just like any other book, reading like a reader's edition.
Speaker 2:Some of the literary ones. Yeah, where it just looks like another book.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have all the apparatus around it with the cross-references, footnotes. Verse numbers even. Yeah, sometimes it's just text. And so you sit down and you read it and you experience scripture a certain type of way doing it like that. Then there's more intensive, like Bible study, where you're actually like, hey, I don't understand what this word means.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go, pull this dictionary off, or if I'm in a Bible app, maybe I can double click on it. It's going to tell me what the word means. And so now you're kind of pausing and lingering over each word, but you're really doing it in like a intellectual. I'm trying to make deeper sense of it. And then there's this sort of meditative I'm trying to. I like the way you said it a few minutes ago. You're trying to like work scripture into you and it's this posture of listening and receiving. That's not that you're not doing that in study or just reading to read, but it's a little more of an intensive, just stance that you're taking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I think to that point the common rhythm practices really are ways for us to commune with God. God has promised his presence in Scripture, and so we want to receive from God and respond to God in Scripture. And one of my favorite Scriptures about scripture is in John 5.
Speaker 2:Jesus says to the teachers, to the Jewish religious leaders, he says you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. So pause for a moment. They were diligent Bible students, right, they're searching the scriptures, which is a good thing. In the Bible we think about the Berean church that's commended for searching the scriptures to make sure what Paul's saying is up to par with what the Bible says. And so the searching the scriptures is important. But he says but it's because you think that in them is eternal life. But he says it is they that bear witness about me, in other words, Genesis through Malachi, I guess you could say. Or now we would say, genesis through Revelation really is a, it's a witness, it's a testimony to, which is related to the word testament. It's, it's, it is bearing witness to Jesus. And then he goes on in that verse. He says you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. And so one of the dangers of engaging the Bible and I think plenty of people that have been Bible readers in the past and aren't anymore for various reasons, or just don't really experience it as life-giving is because they aren't coming to Jesus through their reading of the Bible. Uh, they're not. They're not engaging scripture as as a witness, a testimony to Jesus, to come to Jesus in your reading of scripture. That makes sense, and so I think that that's a really big deal.
Speaker 2:Now, I am a Bible nerd. I love studying scripture. I love the original languages. I'm not as good as them at them as I wish I was, but I love reading commentaries. I love the original languages. I'm not as good at them as I wish I was, but I love reading commentaries. I read commentaries on my day off for fun, because it's not work for me.
Speaker 2:Like I work through Augustine's commentaries and the Psalms on Saturdays. That's like my Saturday read and because I just I love the Bible. I love it so much, and yet there's a way you can engage scripture that you actually use it to distance yourself from Jesus or you use it to keep him at arm's length and he's saying that's not the right way to go about it. Don't refuse to come to me in your engagement with the Bible. Actually, let the Bible be the means by which you come to me, and I think that that makes all the difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and some of what you're teasing out here, we're doing it in the context of talking about scripture as a practice, but it really could apply to the other practices as well.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Because it's. You can, in a mechanical way, go through the other practices with the wrong posture and technically be doing them but not engaging with them the way we're talking about engaging the scripture practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's well said and I think the big this actually was a significant shift. That happened for me a few years ago and it was Sarah Nixon, in a staff meeting, mentioned something along these lines and it had so much resonance with me that it's really shifted my posture with engaging with scripture and that is that I want to show up to receive and I think many of us show up. It's a spiritual discipline, right, and so we show up like we show up to go for a run or like we show up to go to the gym, or like you show up, and there's effort and there's intentionality and there's I'm going to, you know, really pour myself out into this thing and hear me say like they are spiritual disciplines, like there is a discipline component to it. But when I come to the Bible, I don't want to come and think that I have to like give God something like God, I'm giving you my morning, I'm giving you my evening, I'm giving you.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like I actually want to show up to the Bible to receive from God, to say I'm ready to listen to your voice, like, what do you have to say to me? How can I receive from you in this, and that subtle posture shift in every practice, I think, changes the game for each of them. But in Scripture in particular, you're showing up to receive his voice. Can you hear the voice of God in Scripture speaking to you? What is he saying to you today, this morning, I think, about Hebrews. We're preaching through Hebrews this spring and Hebrews will talk about if today, if you hear his voice, basically listen, don't harden your heart. There's a contemporary aspect of God's voice in Scripture that the Spirit speaks through the Scriptures in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think we've done a really good job of sketching out the spirit, so to speak, of the practice or the vision that we have for it, the posture that we need to bring to it. Let's talk a little bit about some of the logistics, and I'm even thinking of barriers that people might experience. So you and I I think it's probably fair to say are mourning people to some extent by grace, not by nature. By grace, yeah, I was going to say, I became a morning person via working at Starbucks in college.
Speaker 1:And when you have to be at work at 5.30 in the morning and then 4 and 4.30, it kind of does something to you if you do it long enough.
Speaker 1:I believe that. But I think not everyone's a morning person and so I think I can hear people I won't name names, but I can hear people objecting to the. Well, you know, I don't want to do that first thing in the morning, like I'm not really alive until like late morning, you know, after several cups of coffee, like, if we're thinking about, you know, the receiving element, I think does help. Because if we're thinking about the receiving element, I think does help. Because if you're thinking about, well, if I wanted to give God my firstfruits, my firstfruits are not the best, they're not first thing in the morning, so that's not going to be the best time for me to engage Scripture, but the receiving posture does make a difference.
Speaker 1:But, what would you say for people that, yeah, mornings are just not my thing? Why can't I just do this practice in the evening.
Speaker 2:Why can't I?
Speaker 1:do it on my lunch break.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, if I wanted to be cheeky I would say oh, that's totally fine, just do morning and evening. Yeah. Because, that's what the Bible actually says, right, the Psalm 1 man is one here.
Speaker 1:Well, the McShane plan You've got two chapters in the morning, two in the evening. That's it.
Speaker 2:So I think there's actual precedence to say I totally get, if you're not your best self in the morning, still show up and hear God's voice, but maybe it's not your best engagement with the Bible. Maybe that's actually going to be in the evening for you, because the person in Psalm 1 is the man who meditates on the law of the Lord day and night, which is a what a merism, I think, which basically just means all day, every day. It's not actually talking about daytime and nighttime, but it is saying, yeah, daytime and nighttime and everywhere in between. And so I actually think one of the things that you know we were talking about this before of like historically, how people have engaged with a scripture practice you know, literacy rates were lower than they are now. Access to scripture was certainly lower than it is now.
Speaker 1:Luther changed the game really in a lot of ways, not just that that led to the Protestant Reformation, but also he was the first one to really make extensive use of printing. That was a new technology and so it kind of fast-tracked things. And even the personal Bible study is something Luther taught in his classrooms. It was he gave his students the text of scripture and had them write notes on it, and so we trace a lot back to there. But if we go back before then it's a little murkier as far as what are the average Christian do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I think that what I know about even early Jewish formation, though, to get into the rabbinical schools you had to have had memorized the whole of the Torah, so the first five books of the Bible memorized, and then you most likely had the Psalms and the Proverbs memorized. And so I do think the point of, you know, publication, the publishing of scripture, is a fairly modern thing. That's maybe with Gutenberg in the late 1400s or something like that. You can fact check me on that yeah.
Speaker 2:The printing press right, but memorization of scripture has always been a thing that people of God have done, and so you probably would have known the Bible better than we do now, because now we have externalized it into this paperback thing that we can carry anywhere with us or a device that we have.
Speaker 2:And so I actually do think that there is a meditation and an indwelling, the scripture, dwelling in our hearts richly, as Colossians 3 says it. That is true to the people of God for thousands of years, for millennia, but where would they have learned it? They would have learned it in a gathered environment, actually, not individualistically. So I think that is a shift in our modern moment, which is most of us think about the scripture practice as me and Jesus, with my Bible, a cup of coffee, with a lamp, you know wherever I am sitting and reading it, maybe with a pen in hand in a journal, which I am for 100%. That's a great, that's a good start to a good day right there, or a good capper to a good day. But actually the way that scripture was mostly engaged with was in the memorization and recitation in community.
Speaker 2:So I think there's something really important about the communal engagement of the Bible, which is why this is called a common rhythm. We actually do it together, engagement of the Bible, which is why this is called a common rhythm. We actually do it together. It's a shared life for a shared love in that way. So to get to the logistics, though, I think that we probably want to name some of the things for showing up to do this practice, what it might look like in people's lives you want to share, maybe like some of the principles of things that people might have to be aware of, and then maybe we can share from our own practice, or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you do have to have a plan.
Speaker 1:I think it's probably the first thing is how are you actually going to engage scripture? Is it going to be print? Is it going to be digital? Are you going to do what you were saying earlier and primarily listen to it? Are you going to primarily read it? Or I mean, don't sleep on this as a tactic, to kind of, especially if you're slower in the mornings to listen to it, as you are looking at the text when it's sort of it's being read to you, but you're also engaging visually by reading along, and it keeps your mind from wandering In some ways.
Speaker 1:It keeps you focused on the text and not getting sidetracked on other things, and so some general sense of what's the best way for you to actually engage scripture, just as the tools that you're going to use first and foremost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's well said. And for us at New City we have a plan. We use the McShane plan for some reasons because it has a rich historical pedigree and it is a. It's a good plan. It has a. It has you in different parts of the Bible at on a daily basis. You can do one chapter, you could do two, three, four chapters. You can do it however you want to. You're not doing it. You know RX, as they say in the CrossFit world, only if you read all four chapters. In fact, the plan is actually divided into two sets of two chapters. So either for personal worship and family worship, or for morning worship and evening worship, however you want to frame that out, or you could just say I'm just going to engage with one of these chapters.
Speaker 2:That's totally fine. For me, that shifts based on what my circle's doing, and so in our circle we discern together. Hey, right now we wanna read through. We read through Nehemiah in my circle recently and it was actually it was in the McShane plan, but we just really singled in on that book and read it pretty deeply. We took a whole week and just spent the whole week in Psalm 37 together, and so we're engaging the text of Scripture together in our circle space, which has been a really important piece of the Scripture practice for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's probably fair to say we really are trying to promote and double down on the McShane plan as a default. Mm-hmm, that's right, and it really is a. If you don't know where else to start, start here. If you have some other thing that like, oh, I've been doing this chronological reading plan for the past 10 years or five years or whatever it's like, this is just what I do every year, then keep doing that. If you have a thing already that works for you, that you really enjoy, do that thing. If you really don't know where to start, as you're listening to this, today in the McShane plan we finished one of the tracks that's going through the New Testament epistles. We finished Romans today, and so if you don't know where to start, start tomorrow. 1 Corinthians 1.
Speaker 1:And just it's a chapter a day till you get to the end of the New Testament. You don't have to put any more thought into it. If you really wanted to make it a variable plan, then it's a chapter of the New Testament a day, every day that I do it. You'll get out of sync with the broader McShane plan, but that's at least a manageable approach of you. Don't have to put too much thought into it. I'm just going to read a chapter of the New Testament each day that I do this practice Because, let's be honest, when you're trying to start a new practice, it's hard to go from zero to 60.
Speaker 1:Or, in some case, in this framework framework from zero days a week to seven days a week, you know, but to go from zero days a week to two, days a week to four days a week to you know, just incrementally adding a day. That's the way most people ease into practices, so we don't want to make it seem like, hey, if you're not doing something, you need to do it seven days a week starting tomorrow, or we're.
Speaker 2:you know, we're going to come looking for you.
Speaker 2:That's right, and and you know let it be known, if I miss a day of the McShane plan, I do not catch up, I start on whatever day the plan is on. Okay, I think that's a big deal. So I cut my losses and that's. And let me be clear, I miss days, um and so, uh, I I just keep up with wherever the plan is supposed to be for that day of the year, and that actually helps me, because if I feel like I'm behind and I'm trying to catch up and I'm, then it's just it gets too much in my head and so I'm just going to pick up where I am and I'm like, oh man, I wonder what happened to Joseph and his, you know, like he was in prison last time, now he's ruling Egypt.
Speaker 2:But it's just one of those moments where I recognize this is a. This is a long game. I want to have been a Bible reader my whole life, not somebody who feels bad coming to the Bible because I miss days and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:I will say, though, I'm the exact opposite. I'm a completer. I love it, and so if I miss several days in a row, I still feel compelled to read all of them. But I will say, when I do that, it does shift into more of just I'm reading because I want to keep up with it.
Speaker 2:I'm not really lingering through here. You got permission either way. Whichever way you are, yeah.
Speaker 1:I will say it's kept me from. It's helped me finish a lot of good books. It's also forced me to finish a lot of bad books because, I'm just like oh, I started this. I guess I got to finish it now, that's good, I love this.
Speaker 2:I guess I got to finish it. Now that's good, I love that. One of the things that you know is I've only heard one person talk about this in this conversation, and it's John Stott, and he calls this the battle of the threshold, which is such a powerful way to put it, and it's. It's basically. We all know this. It's the. It's the same reason why people who say, if you want to become a runner, put your shoes out by the door and lay your running clothes out so that when you wake up in the morning you don't have to make any choices. You just, you just go right.
Speaker 2:And this is what John Stott says. He says we need to win what I like to call the battle of the threshold. I sometimes imagine a very high stone wall and the living God is on the other side of the wall, in this walled garden. He's waiting for me to come to him. It does seem a rather childish contrivance, but it helps me. There's only one way through the wall into the garden a tiny little door. Outside the door stands the devil with a drawn sword, ready to contest every inch of the way and to stop me from getting through into the presence of God. Now, it is at that point that we need to defeat the devil in the name of Christ, and that is the battle of the threshold. I think there are many of us who give up praying before we have won the battle of the threshold. The best way to win this, in my experience, is claiming the promises of scripture.
Speaker 2:Okay, the reason why I'm saying this is every one of us you might listen to this podcast and have a have really good intentions to wake up tomorrow and to really get back into reading scripture and engaging it, and I want, I think, what John Sott's doing here is he's naming reality for us, which, according to Max Dupree, is the first thing that leaders do is they define reality. He's leading us right now. He's saying hey, in his experience and I would say this is true to my experience as well there is a battle of the threshold to get started to actually and I mean like in the morning you're ready to go, or in the evening, or on your lunch break, and there's so many things vying for your attention that we think that they're innocuous, but they actually might be demonic. Let me just say it that, like the notifications on your phone might be being utilized by the devil in order to prevent you from reaching, like entering into the presence of God. Why wouldn't he stop you from that? Or at least a demon, you know, like the evil one in his cohorts, right? And so the reason why I say that is I love his answer. It's not. You know, muscle up, get in there, go hard.
Speaker 2:He says the best way to do is to claim the promises of scripture. So you go, you just tell the truth about where you are. Father, I don't really want to come, I don't want to do scripture before screens, I don't want to open up my Bible right now. What I want to do is like go back to bed, or what I want to do is watch another episode or whatever. And but help me, I'm weak, and you say that your grace is your power is made perfect in my weakness.
Speaker 2:2 Corinthians 12, right? And so you're just telling the truth about where you are. God knows. And I think that winning the battle of the threshold is. I'll say it this way I think many of us lose the battle of the threshold and we don't realize that we're actually in a spiritual battle, that there is an enemy who wants more than anything else, for you to not listen to the voice of the beloved, or the voice of your lover who's speaking over you as their beloved, and it makes a lot of sense to me that the evil one would work hard to keep you at bay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of the equivalent of I know I draw everything back to gym analogies, but I feel like it just it works. But it's kind of the equivalent of pre-workout. So, like in the morning when I'm getting up, I don't have to summon the motivation to get all the way to the gym, I don't have to summon the motivation to start working out. I just have to get out of bed and go downstairs and drink my pre-workout and then give it a little bit and then I have to go to the gym like it's. I can't just be like, you know, I'm gonna go get back in bed like that's not gonna work and kind of.
Speaker 1:What you're describing is like you don't have to summon all the motivation to do the whole mcsain plan first thing. When you wake up in the morning, you just have to pray what you were just talking about praying right, be honest about hey, I'm tired, I'm groggy, lord. This is not where I want to be right now, but that is the equivalent of not pre-workout but pre scripture, practice power, you know.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's. I think that's well said. There's something to the um, like the momentum that's. That's probably another way to say. It is like there's an inertia and you need to. You need to kind of get momentum in a direction and the inertia is going to be away from engaging in a workout in the morning or engaging in scripture. So maybe, to close, I've got a few things here.
Speaker 2:One is, you know, I've thought about this for a while we are a unique people. Christians, that is Now Jews and Muslims both ascribe authority to a sacred text, and so do some other religious beliefs and faiths. But there's something unique about us, like we really do believe that the Bible has a really prominent role in our lives, that it's meant to guide our decisions and our actions, from how we spend our money to where we give our attention to the people we spend time with, the people we, uh, you know, serve. Like all those things are shaped by this book. Um, so you know, it's worth reflecting on for a moment.
Speaker 2:What is the Bible? Sure, why, like? Why? Why scripture? Why this? Why this book? This book and I'd love to hear your thoughts and I'll maybe frame it like this just to say the Bible in one sense is it's a library. It's a library of 66 texts written in three languages by over 40 authors from three continents across about 2,000 years, all telling one unified story that leads us to Jesus. But you've got authors that are fishermen and kings, and politicians, and priests and shepherds, and farmers, and murderers and doctors, and it was like this is a wild book and, christians, if you're a disciple of Jesus, you give this book authority, you give it a pride of place, of authority in your life. What's going on there, nate Like? Help us think about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know if I can answer this on the spot. I need to be able to answer it on the spot for comps for sure.
Speaker 1:But I think one of the things that ties all of these writings together because, let's be honest, there's other writings from around the time of the New Testament that are not in the Bible that maybe read very similarly we know less about what's around in the Old Testament time that didn't make the cut for the Old Testament. We have a hint of it from and we won't go into this rabbit trail of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have more books in their Old Testament than we do and there's some disputes there that, if you're really curious, find me in the back at church on Sunday and I'll explain it to you.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:There is a sense in which the books that are in there are because they were recognized in this communal space as a text that God spoke through, and it wasn't just one person felt really jazzed about. Hey, whenever I read this one letter from Paul, I feel like God's speaking to me and everyone else is like I don't know, man. I don't hear it, he just sounds angry.
Speaker 2:That's how it would be done today, by the way, with our expressive individualist culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 2:I like the way it makes me feel when I read it.
Speaker 1:That's right. But yeah, it was the different churches. We use Paul's letters as an example. The churches that he wrote letters to, some of them had this spirit, authenticated sense to them and were collected together and then began circulating among the churches. And there's other letters that Paul wrote that they accomplished a purpose that he intended, but the churches didn't have that same sense of this is inspired, and we don't mean inspired in the sense of like makes me feel really good, or like.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's just inspirational. It's like there was a sense in which no, it bears this mark to it that we're recognizing as a community, and so that's. It is this it's something that the spirit does through the writings as we engage with them. That has been recognized for thousands of years. That is happening with the Bible. That's not necessarily happening. When you read the church fathers, even as you may benefit and be, you know, you may draw a lot from them, you may be encouraged from them Edification.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all these things, but you mentioned reading Augustine's commentaries.
Speaker 2:It's like.
Speaker 1:There's no real sense of like. Well, these seem inspired. Yes right, you know, and that could have been the case, but he's been around, he's been read by thousands and millions of people. And they all agree that he's a very important theologian, but nobody's saying well, since he's so good, what if we? Just what? Do we just sneak him in there?
Speaker 2:after Revelation you know.
Speaker 1:Maybe not everything he wrote. Just you know some of the better stuff. It's like no, there's just. There's something clearly different about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even Augustine would agree with that right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So our confession of faith, the Westminster Confession and then the Catechisms are. They're a treasure trove. So, listener, if you ever want to know anything about theology and doctrine, plumb the depths of our confessions, because they're great. In chapter one, which is about Holy Scripture, section five, it says this we may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. In other words, we can look to the church and say, yeah, the church has always recognized these books as having a significant role in what we would call the canon. You know, and you could say always, and you could argue if that really happened in the 300s or when that really? And I would say no, always.
Speaker 2:I think it's pretty clear that the earliest church fathers were ascribing authority to these books. It wasn't, maybe collectively agreed upon by the church until a little bit later, but there was an agreement there. It goes on. It says the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies and the entire perfection thereof are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God. Yet, notwithstanding our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority, thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness.
Speaker 2:I love that because it gives us I understand three different kind of sources of why we would put authority in this book. The first one it references is that the church, the church, is bearing witness to these scriptures as being authoritative. It matters, it's just not the only, it's not the end. All be all right, because our Roman Catholic friends would say it took the church to give us the Bible. So how can the Bible basically not, how can the church not have a certain level of authority on par with the Bible, something like that.
Speaker 1:That's probably not entirely true. It's really more in the Catholic thinking, because I just had to write a paper on this this idea of Scripture and tradition, kind of are twin sources of authority and the magisterium is this sort of third interpretive and it's like, well, yeah, you have Scripture and tradition, but how are you going to make sense of these two things? And so they see both as like these are. God spoke through Scripture and through tradition.
Speaker 1:There is something true to that. And then there is I don't want to get too deep in the weeds there, but there is a sense in which, yeah, we do value tradition, but we want to say scripture is on a different level.
Speaker 2:That's right. Well, and we confess in the Nicene Creed, I believe in the Holy Spirit, and then, in that same section, I believe in the communion of saints, right? So I think that the Holy Spirit for sure has been speaking and acting through the church for millennia. And yet then the second move, it's not just the church, it's actually the Bible itself, like it goes on, the heavenlies in the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, in other words, it actually has an internal authority. That is in the text, which makes sense, because if it's going to be your ultimate authority, then no other source of authority could validate that as the ultimate authority, because then that would be the new ultimate authority. So the Bible has to be its own authoritative, like authenticating source, yeah, self-authenticating it yeah, self-authenticating.
Speaker 2:It has to be self-authenticating, otherwise it's no longer your highest authority. The church is, then, and we as Presbyterians, as Protestants, would say absolutely not. The church is born of the word of God, the church abides in the word of God, and the church doesn't listen to the voice of a stranger, and so we believe that we are a creature of the word, the churches. We are a creature that is born and made of the word of God, not the other way around. The church does not determine what the Bible is. The Bible determines what the church is in that sense. And then the third thing, though, that it gives here is the inward work and the bearing witness, by and with the word in our hearts, that the Holy Spirit does. There's something really remarkable about the existential nature of this. Like you know, presbyterians aren't known for being, you know, experiential feeler types.
Speaker 1:Right To put it mildly.
Speaker 2:To put it mildly. That's right. Not all of us, some of us are, but this one's saying that the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts, is what really gives us full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth. I love that because what it's saying is there actually is this resonance that happens in the heart, in the new heart, not in a heart of stone, but in a heart of flesh, the new, regenerate heart, that this is the word of God, and if you don't have that, you might not be regenerate. I think that's what I would take that to be.
Speaker 2:The spirit of God bears witness with our spirits here, that this is that the voice of God is actually in this book, and I think there's something so powerful about that. Yeah, the church can speak to it, yeah, the Bible itself is self-authenticating and yeah, the Holy Spirit existentially does something. And you get the three of those together and it gives you this pretty validating claim about the authority of this book as we open it up and pour ourselves into it day after day after day, and put ourselves under it in order to really understand it.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think that's a good word to end on, because that really does undergird what we were saying at the beginning of the posture we want you to bring to the scripture practice. It only makes sense if scripture is what you were just talking and describing it as yes, that's right, Let me.
Speaker 2:Can we end with actually Wilhelmus Abrakel getting the last word yeah. Because I think one of our listeners was wondering if we were going to quote Wilhelmus Abrakel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they've been waiting this whole time. Sure, you got, you know.
Speaker 2:And they would have been disappointed. So this is what he says Talking about the church. It says she listens to what Jesus has to say to her, turns herself to his word, deeming it to be the voice of her beloved. This is particularly true when the clarity, power and sweetness he impresses a text of scripture upon her heart, causing her to speak to him in return, giving expression to all the questions generated by her love, which in turn causes Jesus to reply to her. In doing so, the soul will lose and forget herself, and it will grieve her if this dialogue is broken off or if her body is too weak to endure the intensity of her desires as well as the kisses and influences of his love. That's the kind of stuff you write when you actually take the Song of Songs seriously, which we don't do anymore.
Speaker 1:That's a topic for a different day. That's right, but I love that.
Speaker 2:I love this. It's invitation into communion with the triune God. It's invitation into communion with the triune God and Vihamas Abrakel got that. He wasn't some like stuffy, you know this guy, I mean you can tell his heart is warmed before the scriptures as he's engaging with this dialogue with her, with the beloved of the soul, which is Jesus himself. So I think Vihamas Abrakel gets the last word, because those are just two good points.
Speaker 1:That is true, and we will circle back to this topic.
