This article is my counterterrorism effort. That is to say, this is my effort to open our eyes to various ways we can drift from the sufficiency of Scripture. By “the sufficiency of Scripture” I mean the conviction that everything God thought we needed to know he put down in the Bible. As such, the Bible is “our only rule for faith and practice.” Or as the reformers framed it, Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone. Some need to be convinced that Scripture’s sufficiency even matters; this article isn’t for you. This article is for those who are already part of Border Protection.
After 9/11, security efforts at airports intensified drastically. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes. So our vigilance in preventing another hijacking seems warranted. At the same time, it would be foolish to think that heightening airport security makes us altogether safe from terror. Most likely, future terror attacks will exploit what is currently a blind spot in our counterterrorism efforts.
But this article is not about terrorism. It’s about the sufficiency of Scripture, a doctrine near and dear to most readers. Seeing liberal or mainline churches drift away from confidence in the Scriptures, we have fortified our defenses against liberal inroads that would undercut our confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture. I’m deeply grateful for these efforts and for the many churches that continue to hold the line against liberal drift. But I worry that our focus on this one front may leave us susceptible to drift in other ways. Most likely for the people reading this article, a move away from the sufficiency of Scripture will come from what is currently a blind spot to us.
This article is my counterterrorism effort. That is to say, this is my effort to open our eyes to various ways we can drift from the sufficiency of Scripture. By “the sufficiency of Scripture” I mean the conviction that everything God thought we needed to know he put down in the Bible. As such, the Bible is “our only rule for faith and practice.” Or as the reformers framed it, Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone. Some need to be convinced that Scripture’s sufficiency even matters; this article isn’t for you. This article is for those who are already part of Border Protection.
In our “counterterrorism,” we would do well to guard against all four of these attacks on the sufficiency of Scripture.
1. Liberalism
At the core of liberalism is the conviction that the way to make the gospel most attractive to the world is to strip it of the non-essential entrappings that might be unpopular. If miracles are hard for the modern mind to believe, deny all the miracles but the resurrection. If gender distinction is a non-starter today, find ways to negate what the Bible says about gender distinction. And on it goes.
When we find ourselves tempted to alter or negate an unpopular biblical teaching so that we can better propagate the gospel, it is the siren call of liberalism. We can follow those seductive notes only after we’ve cut ourselves loose from the anchor of Sola Scriptura.
