We’ve said a lot already about the doctrine of Scripture. We’ve touched on the authority of Scripture, its necessity, and clarity and our hope is that you’ve come to see a bit more of what a precious treasure the word of God really is. The truth is that we shouldn’t expect anything less from the Bible if God is its author. Each of these truths forms a wonderful facet of the beautiful diamond through which the light of divine truth shines, but you might be left asking if the Bible, as wonderful as it may be, is really enough. Is the Bible sufficient for us to navigate our way through the various questions, trials, and tasks of life? When you take the time to really think about it, life is full of diverse questions, unique problems, along with countless troubles strewn along the way. Maybe the Bible’s not really up to the task. Perhaps we need something more.
The reformation, now over 500 years ago, will forever be remembered for its focus on the doctrine of Justification and the recovery of the gospel from the darkness of Rome’s sacramental theology. However, Justification is really just the material principle of the reformation. There was a lot more going on beneath the surface. The question of the Bible’s sufficiency formed the reformation’s epistemological core. While justification was the material principle of the reformation, Sola Scriptural was the formal principle. But we need to be careful to define it rightly. Sometimes Sola Scriptura—the idea that Scripture is the only sufficient rule by which we can evaluate all other claims and live by so as to please God in everything—gets sloppily redefined as Solo Scriptura—the idea that we can do away with every other authority and tradition altogether and lock ourselves away in a cold dark closet alone with our Bible’s.
With that warning in mind, the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture needs to be recovered in the church of Christ once again. It’s so easy to build walls of separation between religious/theological truths and practical questions about life and morality. For many, there is an ever-expanding list of things that apparently fall outside of the grasp of Scripture. The Bible has nothing to say about these things and we’re left on our own to come up with the answers. For some, the Bible gets absorbed into some greater body of truth where it stands on an equal plane of authority with the talking heads of our culture and the pop psychology of modern thought. Others are looking for a new word from God. The wrinkled pages of Scripture don’t seem to really scratch the itch and really feel irrelevant to life and ministry in the 21st century. Against each of these tendencies, it’s time for the church to reclaim the doctrine of sufficiency.
Here is the final sermon of our conference. Pastor Keith Falconer on the Sufficiency of Scripture.