Holy Scripture (WCF Chapter 1)

[Music] Welcome to the Faculty Podcast brought to you by the Washington and New York campuses have performed theological seminary now with an extension site in Chicago. Every week we bring you a pastoral and multi-disciplinary discussion on theology, scripture, and the work of the ministry. And as we begin 2026, this is our first recording of the year. We are starting a new series that I'm calling theology sprints. And as is our tradition, if we come up with a better name at a later date, we will change it and confuse everybody. We are now. We are just going through the Westminster Confession of Faith. So we're going to just how to let sprinting through the Westminster Confession of Faith. Sprinting through the Westminster Confession of Faith. So the idea here is one episode per chapter and if you're thinking there's no way that they can be complete and thorough and exhaustive with one episode per chapter of this giant confession. You're correct. I wonder if we should take bets on how long it will take us to break the rule of one week per chapter. But in theory, one week per chapter, it's a rule moving through the confession, hitting highlights. The goal is neither to provide a complete summary, though we will summarize. Nor is it to be exhaustive, as we already said, but rather to use these confessional chapters as springboards for talking about the relevance of ancient theology for the modern world, how these topics impact the conversation that's going on in and around the church, in contemporary theology. And of course, as always, just our musings off the top of our head. So I've got in the studio, Dr. Grace Utanto and Dr. Peter Lee and we each have our own copies of the confession. I actually have this wonderful version that I got years and years and years ago called Reform Confessions Harmonized, edited by Joel Beakey and Sinclair Ferguson. So I have not only the Westminster Confession, but the Catechisms and the Hylvedic, yep, and the Heidelberg right there, Canons of Dor-- oh, and the Belgium. So I am set. Great. I am set. That actually is nice. Yeah, it's been very helpful as I've been writing and doing some research. So chapter one and Gray, I'm going to throw it over to you because the Westminster Confession is a bit unique in that its first chapter is not as might have been expected on God, but on Scripture. Why is that? Well, I think the confession really wants us to understand that the only way to know God is if he actually condescended to reveal himself to us. And Scripture is the verbal revelation of God to us, disclosing to us his character, his will, and his plan of redemption particularly. And so I think the confession is very aware that without this revelation of God, we would end up projecting, we would end up only with the light of nature, as was the confession of faith, one says, and the light of nature is sufficient to know God as our creator and as our judge, but not so much our redeemer, our savior, and our father, therefore, by a way of the salvation of Jesus Christ. Now, compared to other confessions and creeds, this is a bit unusual right to start with Scripture. That's not the way that other creeds are working. Is that correct historically? Yeah, so I think a lot of other confessional texts and commitments might begin with with God, but I think it is becoming more of an emphasis within the Protestant tradition to begin with Scripture. And actually to mention one medieval work that is a summative document on theology, Bono Venture's Brevoloquium actually begins with Scripture rather than God, to emphasize that we only know God by revelation. And fun fact, Bobbing actually argues that his structural organization is to be preferred over any other medieval theologian. Bono Venture. Bono Venture's Brevoloquium, his summary of theology. And you're a big fan of Bono Venture. I am a big fan of Bono Venture. What can I say? Well, I can testify that the harmonization that I have does not begin with Westminster Confession 1-1. It took me actually a little while to find the Westminster Confession. It does start with theology proper. But another distinctive of the Westminster standards that I learned just a couple of days ago or was pointed out to me just a couple of days ago is the Westminster standards are one of the few confessional standards that actually list out the books of the old and new testament. So specify which books are considered canonical. I didn't realize that. It is always kind of interest and impressive just the sheer size of chapter 1 on Scripture. When you compare it to the other chapters in the Confession, it is significantly longer. A lot more thought has been put in. I mean, well, a lot of thought, excuse me, has been put into it. It's so thorough. If I remember right, historians I think have commented that this really is special and that the chapter is so in terms of its length and treatment on this particular subdued Scripture. I think the Confession really sets up nicely but the necessity of Scripture here in chapter 1, article 1. Because in this particular passage, it's communicating to us that the former ways of God's revelation having now been seized, which is deconfessional statement on the doctrine of what we now know as cessationism. Scripture is necessary to propagate the truth, to protect the church, to protect us from the temptations of Satan and to establish and comfort the church ungoingly until the Lord's return. And so I think what it's really setting us up for here is the recognition that if we want to hear the voice of God now, we have to go to Holy Scripture. We don't look for new apostles, we don't look for new prophets. Those former ways have now seized. Now we have Scripture to guide us in this present state of redemptive history and then that's where they identify the names of all the books that are canonized in Holy Scripture. And I think part of the reason this is the case is in WCF13, paragraph 3, or article 3. It talks about the epokrpha. And so the reason why it's listing the canon here is because in the counter-reformation order, the Roman Catholics had argued that the epokrpha belonged to the canon of Scripture, that they're inspired. And in WCF13 here, it says, the books commonly call the epokrpha, which is the intertestimental text, you know, the text between the old and the testimons, are not divinely inspired. And there are no part of the canon of Scripture and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be in any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings. So there are interests historically that you could think you'd be read, fruitfully, but there are merely human writings. So there, it's a polemical text here still, again, it's important to keep in mind that the Westminster standards here is written to counter at least two movements, the Roman Catholic tradition in the one hand, and the radical reformation or the enthusiasts on the other. Those who argue that they can hear the spirit of God directly without the mediation of the Church or anything like that. Let's pause on that a little bit, because I've been doing some writing on the on canon, on the on cessationism, a little bit thinking a little bit about that from 2 Peter. Where would you gentlemen go to talk about the canon as a, let me put it this way, the canon as canonical. How do you establish the authenticity of our theology of canon from Scripture itself? Yeah, so I would say Ephesians 220, right? The foundation has been laid and the foundation has the cornerstone of Jesus Christ was the foundation, the prophets and apostles, and they both testified to Jesus. And then I would also say the self-consciousness of the authors, the apostles, especially the New Testament. I think of 1st Sessalonians 1 and 2 where Paul says, "You have said them my word not as the word of men, but as the word of God." And Peter in 1 Peter 1 would say, "The word of the Lord never fails, the flower withers, the grass fails, but the word of the Lord remains forever." And then he continues to say, "And this is the word that we preach to you, the gospel." So he applies an Isaiah and a passage about Scripture to his own preaching, which is a really bold move. So the Patreon letters are included for that reason. And so I think we get the sense of not only the apostles pointing back to the Old Testament, but the apostles pointing to themselves as the culmination of Scripture. - Yeah, uniquely authoritative. Peter? - Well, I guess, you know, I thought immediately the prophetic ministry, like Deuteronomy 18, "The Lord will raise up a prophet like Moses." I will, the Lord saying, "I will put my word in his mouth." So when the prophets speak, they are speaking the-- So one way of knowing canonicity is if it's a prophetic writer or some sort. And in fact, there is witness actually within-- interesting within the apocrypha itself in the book of Maccabees, that actually is a witness to itself as not canon and acknowledges the fact that revelations were deceased in the days of Ezra Niyamaya that time there. So if that ceased, then anything after that is not inspired of the Holy Spirit, thus not canonical. And so there is witness in terms of the prophetic nature of the word. And thus we know it's divine origins in other words, because it is revealed from God. We have witness in even extrabiblical literature of how it seems to have been a general understanding within the community, the pre-Christian Jewish community, that revelation ceased right around the time when we have acknowledged that Old Testament revelation. So from an Old Testament standpoint, which is obviously something I would know more, there is ample evidence to suggest that the canon that we have is the canon. Even in the New Testament era, when you read people like Josephus, Fourth Ezra, that talk about the canon, unfortunately they don't list the actual books. Josephus gives us a number. I think he gives us a number right. So we have a number, but not exact. He kind of groups it, but he doesn't give us the number he gives us is 22. Fourth Ezra I think gives us 24. Depending on, presuming if you count Niyamaya separate, Ruth separate, but it's not more than that. I guess the numbers coincide with our canon of the Old Testament. So even very early in the life of the Church, they seem to have acknowledged. And he said, collections. Yeah, and one of the things that Josephus makes Josephus really interesting is he boasts about how the numbers small. Unlike the Greeks who just add to their religious canon, innumerable revelations, somewhat parallel to this idea of enthusiasm, we have just 22. And it's set. And everybody knows what they are. And there's no debate. Josephus is very proud of his closed Hebrew Bible. Right. You could almost see how, because these, again, from an Old Testament standpoint, these books being Hebrew, that if you're a Christian and you're trying to break from a Jewish origin that you want Greek texts, and thus some of the apocryphal books that were written in Greek, just looks more Christian because it's in Greek. And it's almost you swung the pendulum too hard, and thus you are canonizing books that you don't need to necessarily. I'd add to the list of scriptures that Gray mentioned, and that you mentioned, second Peter 3, Peter writing at the end of his life. And very much, I think, conscious, if you look at chapter 1, very much conscious of the closing of the apostolic age, that his death is a synetic key for the apostolic death of the apostles. In chapter 3, he says, "This is now the second letter that I'm writing to you, and both of them I'm stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder that you should remember the predictions of the Holy Prophet." So that's our Old Testament. And the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, and that phrase there, the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, I mean, Klein would have loved it. If Peter had hyphens, it would all be hyphenated. The grammar is such that he's kind of linked all of those. It's the commandment of the Lord of the apostles commandment, and almost as a single unit. So the divine Jesus' word comes via apostle. Yeah, that's cool. And that is the very word of Christ. So the church is not to look forward to some future revelation, but is to remember to be in the mode of memory what has once and for all been delivered to the saints. I was wondering as well, another thing that almost always comes up in my class is gray, and it came up last night, in fact, in hermeneutics. We were talking about the distance between ourselves and scripture from a historical point of view. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what this or that phrase means. For example, when Paul says, "You should wear head coverings because of the angels." There's all sorts of speculation. What does he mean there? What does because of the angels have to do with it? There's this gap between us and the original audience. We were talking about that last night, and the question came up, "Well, what about the clarity of scripture?" And that makes an appearance in our chapter as well. We've got the necessity of scripture, but we've also got the perspacuity of scripture in chapter, or excuse me, in paragraph seven. So all things in scripture are not a light plane unto themselves, or a light clothe clear unto all, but yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or another, that not only the learned, but the unlearned by a due use of ordinary means, can attain sufficient knowledge. Talk to us about perspacuity of scripture. Yeah, so I think the clarity of scripture, the perspacuity of scripture, doesn't mean that a common sense immediate reading of the Bible will yield the exact meaning for you. I think sometimes in evangelical circles we get this idea that because scripture is clear, we can just read a passage and then go around the room and ask the question, "Well, what does it mean to you?" And then immediately that's the sense. And I think that's a mistake. The emphasis of the Westminster divides and the emphasis of the classical reform tradition would basically say that if we would make use of the ordinary means, the ordinary due use of education, of listening to your pastor, of learning, Greek and Hebrew, grammar, and so on, we will be able to access the intended meaning of scripture. So it doesn't mean that it's immediately going to be a self-evident to you, but it does mean that if you apply yourself, you can actually understand the central core of what scripture wants to communicate to you, which is how you might get saved and how you might become mature and wise in Christ that you would be trained at righteousness, that you would learn sound doctrine. But it doesn't mean that every verse as to confession goes on to clarify is going to be accessible in exactly the same sort of way. The central core is meaningful and accessible. And that clear parts of scripture will illumine the less clear parts of scripture. And I think that passage and Paul, and I think that's first Corinthians 11, do not wear a hood covering like the angels and so on, that's a really hard passage. And I think we can actually say, we're not exactly sure what that means, but just because we're not sure what that means doesn't mean that we don't know what it means when we understand Jesus' love commands, so love God with all your heart's will in mind, until all your neighbors yourself. It doesn't mean that we don't understand what Paul has said in first Corinthians 15. This I tell you, first importance, that Jesus Christ was dead, was buried, was raised, far since. So those passages are so clear and we can hang onto that as a kind of foundation in bedrock. And when we come to the harder parts of scripture, it's okay. And to actually punt in some of those sections and say, we don't know. And not every hard passage is like that passage for first Corinthians 11. There are other hard passages that I think we can have a educated understanding of, even if we're not 100% certain about the clear sense there. So it does specify, you know, unto salvation. Right. So in terms of a clear soteriology that you're saved by the grace of God alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, is a clear understanding on a re-iniscrepture. I think also, you know, it does, I mentioned the use of ordinary means. So it does require some thought. And so, you know, I tend to think that people might associate perspiration with, I don't need to think, which I don't think is true. You know, the confession seems to work in such a way that there are use of means. There is some thought that needs to be put in, but at the same time with all of that, when it's applied, the clear message of our doctrine of salvation, it's clear. So I do, you kind of read it and you see that it is kind of putting parameters a little bit within this stuff. It's actually pretty highly qualified. Do use of ordinary means not all things are clear. And there's also a variability that's important to recognize. There are times when the church will go through trials or turmoil or struggle with a heretical thought in such a way that what was once seemingly clear is obscured. So this frequently happens, a doctrine that we thought we got it down. We've got that one down, Pat. And something, you know, some new idea will pop into the conversation and make that feel confusing again. Paul Rokura calls this like new naivete. We can obtain information that makes something that was clear, unclear, seemingly unclear. And that can feel threatening. It can feel like, "Oh, everything's up for grabs." It can feel like I don't know what I thought I knew. But that's actually not what's happening. What's happening is we're refining and learning with greater clarity. We're actually seeing with greater clarity what once was what we were content to have less clarity at in a previous generation. So I think we can recognize that we are learning, growing in our knowledge, of scripture, but also not denying the perspacuity of scripture. And pastorally, it's so important to be able to say, "I don't know." There's this fear that if we say, "Oh, I don't know," that the scriptures are at stake and they're not. They are clear. They are clear even if you're not clear what they teach. Yeah. And I think that's really, really important because I remember having a conversation with one of my Roman Catholic good friends during my PhD years and I was talking about some sense in scripture. I think it was probably about predestination. She was like, "Well, the Bible is just not clear on this." And I'm just like, "No, it is actually pretty clear on this." And then her retort was, "Grey, I wish you good Protestants and reformers that I could believe that the Bible is just immediately clear." I'm like, "That's not what I believe in. When I say that it is clear, it means that again, we need to have some more flow. And then we need to have some more flow. You're going to struggle to get clarity in that. And I think this is where I'm in lute there, what have this distinction between subjective or internal clarity versus objective clarity. And I think the point that he's trying to make is that scripture is actually clear in itself, but subjectively speaking in terms of our demonstration of it and might not be clear immediately. And I think that's, of course, we can use the analogy of the sun there. The sun is always luminous and bright, but our eyes are the ones that are weary and aging and so on. And so therefore, even if the sun is bright, we might still fail to see the sun and the rays and the things in front of us in light of it. So perhaps we can broached this question. Okay, if scripture is clear, and Tom, you've mentioned the idea of the use of philosophical categories. If scripture is clear, and we believe in so that's scripture. What do we use? Why do we use these philosophical categories? Why do we approach the Bible with her? With hermeneutical rules that are not themselves found in the Bible. This is something again that some are Roman Catholic friends that are all at me as if it's a defeater to my Protestant beliefs. Well, you believe in the Nicene Creed, don't you? So therefore, you don't really believe in so-called scripture. Or, you know, the lists of the books of the canon are not there in scripture itself. Or your hermeneutical rules that you got to read in a lot of history and so on are not in the Bible itself. So as an added defeater to so-called scripture, shouldn't you be billbicists? It sounds like a great question. It does sound like a great question. What do you say, "Grey"? Well, you are the only through what the philosophical categories are. I'm here from you all. You know, it's interesting. There's a parallel in our field in biblical studies to the philosophical parallels and its ancient Near Eastern backgrounds. So that the thing I will get often in class, as I mentioned, is if why do we need to understand ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to understand the Bible isn't that anathema to the perspicuity of scripture? And it's interesting in the systematic theologian, you have the same kind of issue when we use those Aristotelian categories or to describe things. The way I navigate the historical issue is actually the Bible frequently reminds us that it is historically circumscribed. And that we need to understand the details of history. So again, thinking about last night, we did very familiar story, the David and Goliath story, and the class was kind of surprised as we were reading it. And how much time is set up talking about the geography of the battle, where the two armies are, there's a valley in between them, and there's a lot of information about how much things weigh, all of this detail that seems to be setting the historical context in a way, that you can't actually understand this battle and the significant details without understanding geography. So it's a reminder to us of the fact that scripture revelation comes to us, embedded in history, that the way God teaches us and tells us about Himself is irreducibly historical, as opposed to other religions, which might be more, all you need is the propositional content, all you need is the moral teaching. On the contrary, scripture is a historical witness and testimony to what God has done in space and time. And so you have to understand space and time, what God has done with human beings. So you have to understand how human beings work. And so I would pull on some of those anthropological categories, many of which are intuitive and we assume, and many of which you have to think about and learn and study, anthropological categories, historical categories, geography, all of these things are part of the backdrop in which scripture arises and are therefore helpful in understanding what it says. Philosophy, I'll let you speak to, but I have a thought. What's your thought? It's a half-baked thought. I want to hear your thought so that my thought will bake a little more. Yeah, good question. So I think, you know, first of all, we've got to also observe in WCF-16 that it talks about these, not that we just have to believe in what is expressly said down in scripture, but also that there are certain things that we've got to believe by good and necessary consequence. And so we would argue that the contents of our creeds, even the list of the canon itself, is what we can deduce from good and necessary consequence, from scripture itself, even if it's not expressly said down. And so we've got to also remember that solar scripture doesn't mean that scripture is your only source or your only authority, but it doesn't mean that it's your final authority, which means there's other subordinate authorities, so we've got to believe in, like your pastor is a subordinate authority, your creeds are a subordinate authority, and the creeds again are things that we draw from good and necessary consequence. There's a spectrophilosophy and how these philosophical categories, like essence and persons, get utilized in the creeds. These categories, I would argue, are drawn from what the confession has already said in WCF-11, the light of nature. In my view, philosophies merely are approximation or are attempt to categorize what we intuitively know from the light of nature. So I think before we formalize, for instance, scientific theories, we were already doing scientific experimentation informally. Right. So like for us to know that, you know, what flowers are like, we in an ordinary walks of life would probably pick up a few flowers and we would deduce, oh, the third flower they'll pick up will probably have the same sort of features as my first two flowers. And then we could formalize that in a scientific theory and formula and so on and so forth. And the same sort of way, I think before we can come up with the term essence or persons, we've all, we've always been doing that in our ordinary interactions with one another. Like we are already ordinarily distinguished between people from animals. Right. And why is that the case? Well, we would argue people are persons. What do we mean by persons? People have a capacity for wisdom. People have a capacity for deeper relationships, whatever else. And so the philosophical categories are not like alien, quote unquote, or satelianism, we're imposing on scripture. It's just our ordinary way of thinking. been, you know, of communicating, being formalized. - Yeah, we're specifying more clearly what we are naturally already doing. - Exactly, and I think we actually see this in scripture itself where Paul talks about Christ who was in the very form of God. - Right. - The Lancer of Morphe, they, all right, or you could even trust that as the essence of God. So scripture uses quote-unquote philosophical categories. - Right. - Because Paul there wants to distinguish between the divine way of being and the human way of being. And we do that all the time. We just say, God is different from us. Well, what do you mean God is different from us? Well, we say, we can formalize that and say, God's essence is different from our essence. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And I think, you know, we, not, we, but everyone who study scripture will, you know, categorize, make categories to kind of help us understand what scripture teaches. I mean, you know, if a child asks, you know, who is God, they're asking a systematic question. There is no, there might be a couple of verses we can point to, but what we, essentially, are doing is taking a couple of, verses here, they're, that talks about God, and organizing that in the logical kind of construct. So, you know, the, so in order to really understand what the scripture teaches, you can study it as a kind of historical progress of divine revelation. Or another way of doing it is just to categorize systematically, but that requires certain, you know, philosophical categories that we have to use in order to kind of deal with these types of questions. So, it's not that one is better than the other, than the other, you know, even if a Roman Catholic challenge is a Protestant on why we do that. Roman Catholics also do a systematic kind of theology. The question is, which system is most true to the teaching scriptures? - And only add to that, I mean, Gray, you perfectly expressed my half-baked thought. So, thank you. (laughing) - You guys are just like two peas in a pod, I guess. - The only thing I add is, there's an aspect here also of just passing along generational knowledge. You know, I hear a lot of Christians will say things like, just back to the Bible, I just wanna start over, just, you know, start from scratch, as if that that's what, you know, quote unquote, pure theology is to do, is to just be exogetical. And there's a mistake in assumption, there's a couple of mistaken assumptions involved in that. But there's also just a practical and pragmatic loss. You don't do that with any other field. Like the scientist does not say, we need to start over. We need to rethink math. We need to rethink physics. You know, you begin with an inherited knowledge, generational inheritance of human learning on a subject, and that allows you to take the next step forward to build on the previous generation, and the same thing with theology. - Well, wonderful brothers, this has been a fascinating discussion, and I'm looking forward to this. I think this is gonna work. - Yeah, I think so too. - I think we're gonna be able to do, if we can do scripture in a week. - We could do God in a week. (laughing) - I foresee no issues. - Yeah, amen. - Okay. Anything to plug, anything to say before we sign off for our first episode of the year? - Well, at the risk of tuning my own horn here, I do wanna give in a plug for the essential bovinc reader. - Hey, yeah. - Well, it just, it's not here. It's about bovinc. - It's all about bovinc. - It's about, it's a theological sprint through his classic text and the main influential text from Bobbi's corpus. We collected it together into one volume, so that we could stop assigning PDFs to people even in my bovinc class, for instance. And we also have explanatory introductions to each of the selections. So there's gonna be our commentary on each of the selections and not just the core bovinc text itself. So we've condensed probably like a few thousand pages into 500 pages. And I'm really excited for it. It's already out in pre-order from Baker Academic and it's already, it's gonna be out June, 2026. And if you pre-order now, it's 40% off right now from the Baker Academic website. - I remember the battle days of seminary. We didn't have, back in my day, Peter. We didn't have, we didn't have, that was my days as well. - You didn't have, my days before your days. - I remember we had, they would, the professors would photocopy, as big bundles of like coffee, and stuff like that. And you spent like 40 bucks, which in those days was a lot of money. On these just photocopied binders that the professors had made. So, great, thank you. - And now you can spend 40 bucks on a non-photo-clopied, actually a nice book. - It's a beautiful book that we fit and-- - And nice heart back to, yeah. - I have shelves of these old buchters. So do I. - It's crazy. So thanks, Greg, for contributing to the-- - Amen. - There we go. - Next generation. And dear listener, thank you for joining us. Please do like, subscribe, leave a review. I was talking to somebody last night. We also accept questions. I told this gentleman that we would be happy to answer questions on the podcast and he threatened to send a thousand questions to us. So hopefully we'll have some Q&A episodes to cover in the near future. Just send your questions to any of our email addresses, which you can find at our website, rts.edu/washington. And if you'd like to learn more about rts, that's a great place to visit. You can find places to support the seminary, to register for classes. We've got Peter Lee, we're sending him to Chicago in the next two weeks. We're soed for a class on, what's your class? - Joshua Daster. - To historical books, Old Testament Historical Books. If you're interested in working through a degree, and if you're in the Chicago Land Area, definitely sign up for that. There is still time in the meantime though. Farewell. (upbeat music)