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Greetings!Rev. Scott Jones has been an American Baptist minister since 1997. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, growing up in Iowa and South Dakota. He received his Bachelor of Arts in vocal music at Iowa State University in 1994 and earned a Masters in Divinity from Northern Seminary in 1997. He was ordained in 1997 in the Mid-America Baptist Churches (Iowa and Minnesota). Scott is the 21st minister of the First Baptist Church of Greensburg.
Scott first responded to Jesus in faith as a young child and was baptized at age 13. He has been blessed throughout his life with wonderful role models in his parents, ABY youth group, and ABC summer camp, where he was invited to say “yes” to the Lord’s call on his life. His ministry is about worship, preaching, teaching, evangelism, and relationships. He uses his musical background to lead people into the presence of God. He is involved in our Region as instructor of New Testament with the Academy of Christian Training and Service (ACTS), our lay-pastor training institute. He also sings with the Irwin Male Chorus. |
Pastor's Newsletter
One of the Scriptures sure to be read this year at Christmas, and every year, is The Gospel of John, chapter one. In beautiful, visual language, John proclaims the ultimate expression of God’s grace toward us: the Incarnation of Jesus amid humanity. John uses a mysterious word to describe our Lord here: logos, the Word. It’s intriguing that any person would be likened to a word; of course, we understand that John calls Jesus the Word, and that it means much more than symbols on a page.
When John calls Jesus the Word, he’s saying that Jesus is God’s message to us. His manner of expressing it, though, doesn’t have the limitations of a human book. He’s a Person, much more than words on a page. God is so gracious that He loves sharing Himself with His human creatures. He knows how high above us are His ways and thoughts, and that we can’t possibly attain to an understanding of Him without a tremendous amount of help. Since we can’t reach up to His level, He lovingly reaches down to ours. Jesus came in human form, speaking human-level words and showing His nature through human actions. John wrote, in verse 14, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Word is God the Son. Though He has taken on a human nature, He is fully God. As such, Jesus is the exact representation of God’s image (Hebrews 1:3), on a level we can understand. Nothing is missing in Jesus’ representation of God or His message to us. Mere words carry much meaning, but relationships with real people, over time, can communicate in ways far deeper than words. the Word—Emmanuel, God with Us—is God’s ultimate sharing of Himself with us.
Jesus, the logos, richly deserves to be called The Word. If He is God’s supreme revelation to us, though, how do we understand the place of the Bible, which is also called the Word of God? Written words are innately limited in conveying the essence of the author as a person. How do we avoid saying that the Scriptures are limited in the same way? It’s particularly important to consider this, given that God chose to convey His spoken and written message to us through the intermediary of human authors. When we read the Bible, how much is God’s undiluted message, and how much reflects the limitations of the human authors? And how do we know? This touches on the doctrine of inspiration, the process by which God communicates His truth, mediated through His human servants.
People differ about how God did this, or to what extent. Some argue that the writers of the Bible were inspired only in such a manner as all Christians are “inspired” to serve the Lord according to their gifts. Others say that the inspiration of Scripture takes place within the reader. It “becomes” the word as the person encounters it personally, individually and subjectively. Their interpretations and applications are unique to them. Then, there are those who say the Bible is inspired, but only just sufficiently to proclaim enough saving truth that people can be eternally saved through it. They say that the humanness of the authors is incompatible with absolute truth; they’re too bound by their place in time, their cultural context, and their human failings. Since we are similarly bound by those things, our reading of the Bible must also be imperfect. God still managed to get enough of His message through the text of Scripture to secure the salvation of those who believe, but they believe there’s a lot of human error in it, too.
Instead of saying the Bible is the Word of God, they would say that the Bible contains the word of God. I had seminary professors who claimed this. The trouble, of course, is in determining who gets to determine which parts of the Bible are God’s Word and which parts aren’t. They glibly assure that we can somehow identify the needle of God’s word amid the haystack of human words, but their own logic has already cut them off. As Lutheran theologian, Theodore Engelder, wrote, they “refuse to believe that God performed the miracle of giving us, by inspiration, an infallible Bible, but are ready to believe that God daily performs the greater miracle of enabling men to find and see in the fallible word of man the infallible Word of God.” When put that way, the idea is shown to be absurd, and that’s how Engelder meant it to appear. Over all, the critics all have this in common: they stress the humanness of the Scriptures so much that they effectively foreclose on the possibility that Scripture is divinely inspired.
Those who emphasize the humanness of the biblical authors don’t do justice to what the Bible says about itself: that though the Scriptures are written down by humans, they are also God’s Word. God has an overriding interest in Scripture to reveal Himself to us, and thus He intervenes to influence both the human writers but also the end product. His purpose to make Himself known rightly to us justifies His intervention in the process. The end product is as Paul described it in 2 Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
It’s not until the Age of Enlightenment that doubts about the divine inspiration of the Bible started to take hold. The first 1700 years of church history united believers in the understanding that the Bible was written down by men but is also the Word of God. As a result, it has the genuine characteristics of both. The trouble that modern doubters have is that they fail to recognize the superintending work of the Holy Spirit to ensure that the everything about the Word we’ve received is God’s Word, conveying God’s intended message.
It’s about here that some will object. People jump to the conclusion that this would mean God had to personally dictate every word in the Bible—that the authors of Scripture were nothing but God’s secretaries. Of course, there are a number of times in the Bible when God specifically commanded someone to “write this down”: think of Moses, for example, or John writing down the exact messages Jesus wanted to send to the seven churches in Revelation. There are also the Prophets, who were sent with specific messages from God. They were prefaced with, “Thus saith the Lord...” and they were to give the message exactly as God relayed it. So yes, in some cases God dictated, word for word, what the authors were to write.
In other cases, the experiences and viewpoints of the authors are evident. Take the passages which report sinful actions and words: the fact that the Bible chronicles them does not mean that God endorses them. Consider also the wisdom of Solomon, accumulated by God’s gifting, but also by the king’s righteous and sinful behavior. Ecclesiastes contains many warnings not to repeat Solomon’s mistakes! Then there is the beautiful poetry and music of David: these are clearly his compositions, reflecting every human emotion, good and bad. The Psalms are filled with David’s creative responses to God; it would be strange for God to dictate the exact wording by which David was to offer spontaneous worship. David was clearly not serving as God’s secretary at that time; he was glorifying God out of his own heart. And yet the Holy Spirit inspired these compositions and moved in David’s heart as he wrote them. Thus, the Psalms are God’s words, even as they are David’s.
There are a few, fringe people who uphold the dictation theory even today, but it’s a cynical move to assume that everyone who believes in God’s infallible Word subscribes to it. As J.I. Packer put it:
- This “dictation theory” is a straw man. It is safe to say that no Protestant theologian, from the Reformation till now, has ever held it...The Spirit’s mode of operating in the writer’s mind [was] in terms not of dictation, but of accommodation...God completely adapted His inspiring activity to the cast of mind, outlook, temperament, interest, literary habits and stylistic idiosyncrasies of each writer. (“Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, 1958)
God’s ability to work with, and not to override, the personal characteristics of each biblical author is actually, as they say in computer lingo, “a feature, not a bug.” Some would object that any infusion of the human into Scripture would be to corrupt it, for the essence of humanity is corruption. We have to be careful of that kind of language, because human nature as God originally created it was not corrupted. We suffer under the deprivation of sin now, but that’s a defect introduced as a result of the Fall. To see what God intended in the creation of humans can clearly be seen in Jesus. Though truly God, He’s also truly human; if we insist that true humanity is sin, our next step would be to say that Jesus was necessarily corrupted by sin when was incarnated among us. We all know that is absolutely not the case. Though Mary was as human as any of us, God overruled any sinful legacy she might have passed on—Jesus was born without our corruption. He lived a perfect, sinless life. He is the embodiment of what God envisioned when He created the human race. Human He was born, human He was crucified and resurrected, and human He was when He ascended. When He returns, we will see that He remains in His humanity. He will dwell with us through eternity, fully God and fully human.
I say all this to make a point: that God has the ability to overrule the corruption of human sin to work out His own, saving purposes. If that is so, He surely had the ability to transmit His Word to human authors in such a way that, for a limited time, those authors could be inspired by the Holy Spirit to record God’s revelation to us without it being tainted by human sin. That’s not to say that He had to put them into some kind of mind-control mode, a trance in which they wrote exactly what He wanted. Rather, He could actually use the godly interests and passions, the temperaments and experiences of each writer to give us a Bible that speaks accessibly to ordinary humans. As B.B. Warfield expressed, the Spirit was continually “working confluently in, with and by them, elevating them, directing them, controlling them, energizing them, so that, as His instruments, they rise above themselves and under His inspiration do His work and reach his aim.” (The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 1970)
The process by which God inspired the writers of Scripture, so that the message we have is what He intends, is explained by Peter, in 2 Peter 1:21: “For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” The Greek word for “carried along,” pheromenoi, is the same used for the way a sailing vessel is carried along by the wind. As the wind blows and subsides, so must the ship. And though the sailors can use their sails to tack, to and fro, to “guide” the ship where they want, they must still work with the prevailing direction of the wind. And that’s a limited analogy for the way the “wind,” pneuma, of the Holy Spirit can accommodate the human characteristics of the biblical authors to ensure that the final product is God’s true Word. He could either work so powerfully that they wrote, verbatim, what God wanted, or He could impress the minds and emotions of the authors so subtly that they might have thought they expressed their own, free thoughts--but those thoughts were put there by the Holy Spirit.
The end product of the Scriptures is therefore God’s Word, communicated through the vehicles of very human people living real lives in real situations. We get to see how God moves and transforms in the midst of daily realities: victories and tragedies, holy lives and sinful lives, perilous adventures and mundane living. The Bible isn’t a book that floats above us, aloof from what it’s like to be a real human being, with cryptic language or trite platitudes. Through the Word (and THE Word), God comes to us where we are and shows us how we can live His way practically. He offers to lift us beyond the corruption of sin, and transform us into the sons and daughters He envisions us to be.
Your Brother and Servant,
Pastor Scott.
