David Randall reflects as a denomination pulls away from the Word of God
The Church of Scotland has changed.
Over recent years, many ministers, elders, and members have been disturbed by the denomination’s movement away from its professed adherence to Holy Scripture as the basis and foundation of its beliefs and decisions.
Some have been led to follow the line of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vivid metaphor: ‘If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.’ 1 The train may be rushing along at 90 mph and, if you realise it is going the wrong way, you will not accomplish much by running back along the corridor in the other direction at, say, 5 mph. You are still on a train that is careering along in the wrong direction.
The title of this article has a double meaning. It refers to the sadness of those who have decided to leave the Church of Scotland, but it also points to the sad reality of the denomination’s departure (through its decision-making body, the General Assembly) from submission to the authority of Scripture.
General Assembly decisions
It was in May 2009 that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland decided that it was in order for an Aberdeen congregation to proceed with a call to a minister who was living in a homosexual relationship with another man.
The Presbytery of Aberdeen had sustained the call,2 and subsequently some members of that Presbytery appealed to the General Assembly to overturn the decision. The Assembly voted by 326 to 267 to uphold the Presbytery’s decision. Whether people like it or not, decisions taken at the Assembly define the position of the Church of Scotland.
This decision has been confirmed by subsequent Assemblies, and the fall-out has been considerable. It represents a clear departure from the attitude to the Bible that has been professed by the denomination, as well as by the worldwide church, over the centuries. It is this question of the position and authority of the Bible in the Church that is at the heart of the present controversy. The secular press often represents the dispute as a struggle over whether the Church should be ‘pro-gay’ or ‘anti-gay’, but the basic issue is that of the relationship of the Church to the Bible.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones wrote: ‘the problem of authority has always been crucial in the life of the individual and the church; and to Protestants that authority has always been found in the Lord Jesus Christ himself mediated to us through “the infallible Word.” The Bible and our attitude to it has always therefore been at the very heart and centre of the conflict between … liberal and modernistic Protestantism.’3
In seeking to assess what has happened, we do not intend to be disrespectful to anyone – homosexual people, people who experience same-sex attraction, the Church of Scotland, the General Assembly, or evangelicals who believe it right to stay in the Church of Scotland. But the question of biblical authority must be addressed.
Not all parts of Scripture are equally easy to understand. There are parts of Scripture that we find difficult. But one is often reminded of the remark attributed to Mark Twain that the parts of the Bible which bothered him were not the parts he did not understand but the parts he did understand only too well!
Jesus and the Sadducees
On one occasion Jesus said to the Sadducees (Matthew 22.29): ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ He was addressing a group of people who were ridiculing the idea that there was any life after death.
The Sadducees who confronted Jesus wanted to make fun of him. They were the rationalists of their day; they would have said that they believed in God, yet they were characterised more by what they did not believe than by what they did. In particular, they did not believe in the resurrection of the body and the life eternal (verse 23). They would have dismissed such notions as a naive flight of fancy for those not enlightened enough to accept that this life is the only life there is. Matthew 22 is a passage that challenges us as we read it today; do we stand with the Sadducees, breathing the suffocating air of the sceptical secularism that is all around us, or are we among those who believe Jesus’ Word in his teaching about the life to come?
What he said to the Sadducees was: ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ He also said to them: ‘As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?’ (Matthew 22.31). He directed them to the Scriptures which they were supposed to believe and it is the same challenge that comes to us today, whether the issue is that of life after death, homosexual practice, or any other.
Reverence for Scripture
We cannot separate the Lord from his Word. The right attitude is that described by Luke in his account of Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul and Silas had left Thessalonica, where they had been vilified by their opponents as people who were turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6), and had gone on to Berea where, Luke tells us: ‘These Jews were more noble than those at Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so’ (Acts 17.11).
It is not that we are called to worship a book; it is wrong for critics to accuse evangelicals of bibliolatry. We worship the triune God, but when we ignore, set aside or turn away from his Word, then we are opening ourselves up to deception and falsehood. When Calvin said, in his comment on 2 Timothy 3.16, that we owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God, he was not lapsing into the worship of a book, but recognising that since the Bible comes to us from the mouth of God (cf. Matthew 4.4) we must respect it, honour it, and obey it.
There is no greater threat to the health of the church than the side-lining of the Bible.
We err when we think we know better than God’s Word; better by far to rely on his truth. As Proverbs 3:5 says: ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.’
Honouring the Lord
We honour the name of the Lord when we trust the Word of the Lord. The two are brought together neatly in a paragraph of Jim Packer’s in which he makes use of some words of Handley C. G. Moule (1841– 1920), the evangelical Bishop of Durham: ‘The Christian’s use of the Bible must correspond with Christ’s own use of the Bible. For, to quote some words of Bishop Handley Moule, “He, in the days of his flesh, was the supreme Bible student, the supreme lover, employer, and expositor of the Bible …Walk to Emmaus with him, and see him spending the whole Easter afternoon upon the Bible. He had come that morning from the grave, conqueror of death, Lord of life, and he came as it were with the Bible in his hands.”
‘He trampled upon many popular opinions of his day, where he thought they needed correction, but he did not trample upon the universal Jewish belief that the Bible was divine, the written Word of God, declaring God’s truth and imbued with God’s authority. No, that belief he sanctioned and sanctified.’ (Packer, Under God’s Word, 103–104).
How serious then are the decisions taken by recent General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland relating to human sexuality. As Sinclair Ferguson has written: ‘what makes it so staggering is that the Church of Scotland has for all practical purposes declared herself and not Scripture to be the ultimate authority in a matter of both faith and life. Now vox Ecclesiae Scotticanae, vox Dei – the voice of the Church of Scotland is the voice of God!’
This is an edited extract from David J. Randall, A Sad Departure: Why We Could Not Stay in the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2015), 216pp. paperback, £7.50.
FOOTNOTES
1. E. Metaxas, Bonhoeffer (Nelson, 2010), p.187.
2. A procedure whereby a Presbytery agrees that there is no hindrance to a proposed induction.
3. D. M. Lloyd-Jones in Foreword: The Infallible Word, Westminster Seminary Symposium (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1946), p.ix.
