Church Blog

November 13 2008 at 2:12 pm

Studying “The Courage to Be Protestant”

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Right now the pastoral team is studying a book together called The Courage to be Protestant. It’s written by David Wells and explores the troublesome drift in evangelicalism away from sound doctrine. “It takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant,” Wells writes. “To live by the truths of historic Protestantism, however, is an entirely different matter. That takes courage in today’s context.” Yesterday the pastors discussed a chapter titled “Truth” that deals with how people’s view of truth has been shaped by dramatic changes in culture. In discussing a right view of God’s word, Wells writes:

The Holy Spirit first inspired this word, whose principal work is now to point men and women to Christ and so to work in them that they are now able to bow before him, accept him for who he is, and by faith receive his death in their place. The Holy Spirit, in doing this, uses this Word to glorify Christ. There is no saving knowledge of God except through the truth of Scripture, except as our trust is placed in Christ by its teaching, and except as the Spirit imparts to us the desire to trust Christ in this way. We cannot know God in any other way. Whoever “does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God” (2John 9).


Some may want to quarrel with the claims of Scripture makes of itself, and how the apostles used it, and the place it has in bringing us the knowledge of God in Christ. But we should not be in doubt about what those claims are. Scripture does not merely contain truth. It is not a sublime statement of our understanding of God. It does not mark the forward progress that the human spirit has taken. It is not the result of the questing human spirit reaching out for something absolute. It is not a human guess. It is not just an approximation of what is out there. No. It is, instead the result of the supernatural work of God in the human writers, and what we now have is “the truth.” It is not partial truth, or incomplete truth. It is the full, accurate, and complete revelation of all that God wants the church to have. This written truth is fully sufficient for the church’s life in this fallen world.

Please pray with your pastors that our church would always have the courage to stand unflinching on the fully sufficient, perfect word of God.





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