GYC 2012 Acts: The Revolution Continues

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2012 Seminar: The Reformers Speak to Today's Church

Nick Miller

Scriptural Authority: Solo V. Sola Scriptura?

This message was presented at the GYC 2012 conference in Seattle, Washington.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

Well, welcome to the seminar for this afternoon.

I'm a professor in the seminary there in the Church History Department where I also direct the Church State Study Center at Andrews, and I am presenting a series of lectures, presentations, Bible lessons, history lessons on the topic of what would the Reformers say to today's church.

And I'm glad to see so many people here who are interested in history.

But this series of presentations isn't going to just be about history.

It's going to involve looking at history to better understand a number of the issues and even conflicts and controversies that we have in the church today.

My overall argument or thesis is that when we study the Bible, while we have to be personally convicted of truth ourselves, that we need to actually study the Bible in community with others.

And I'll be going through and showing how the Bible itself teaches that.

But the suggestion is going to be that the community we need to study with is more than just those sitting in this room or attending GYC or in our churches at home, but to really study the Bible well and in a well-rounded way and a healthy way, we can also study it with the Christians of ages past, the great Bible students of old.

Why should the fact that somebody's dead stop them from contributing to the church's knowledge and understanding on a biblical topic?

And I think there are some Bible texts to support this, and I'll share those with you, but first I want to give you an overview about where we're going with this series of presentations so that you'll have a sense of what we're talking about over the next 2 days that we have got to do this, 2 and a half days.

It may be that 1 or more of these topics will interest you more than others.

I know there are many other presentations going on, so I want to let people know, hey, I'm really interested in this topic, creation or religious liberty or last day events.

And so here we have a little outline that I'll put up at the beginning of every meeting, just briefly.

Today I'm going to talk about the question of biblical authority.

Many of the controversies in the church, whether it be to do with creation and evolution, the sanctuary, ordination, they all revolve around the question of how we approach and treat scripture.

Everyone seems to claim that they speak, that they hold the Bible in high authority, but what does it really mean to do that?

What does the Bible say about how the Bible should be treated in terms of other kinds of sources of information?

There's some very practical questions about how we use the Bible in our own lives and in our own personal spiritual experiences.

Tomorrow, we will look at the great controversy theme.

Is this something that's merely a product and stuck in the 19th century?

Or does it continue to be of vital relevance today?

And if so, how does it continue to be of relevance?

Sunday afternoon we'll look at the question of creation and evolution.

There's been a lot of talk in our church over whether, can we understand creation as being carried out over long periods of time?

Can God be the creator and create through the processes of evolution?

And that wouldn't be an atheistic view of the world.

It would be 1 where you believed in God, but with a different understanding of Genesis.

What do the reformers have to say about that?

And those of you interested in religious liberty, which is in some ways my area of specialty.

I'll tell a little bit more about my background, but I have both a law degree and a practice as a lawyer.

And I do have an advanced degree in church history and the history of the church since the time of the Reformation.

And so I'll have 2 sections that touch on issues of church and state.

Where do we draw the line between keeping church and state separate?

We don't want the government setting down spiritual standards.

And yet many of us grow nervous when certain questions of morality are left untouched by the state.

Like, is it alright just to have pornography everywhere?

Can anyone marry anyone they want to under any circumstances.

And I use the reformers quite broadly, not just to refer to Martin Luther or Calvin, I include them in Zwingli, but later reformers, Jacob Arminius, the Westleys, nearly 2 centuries later, And even William Miller and Ellen White continued to be reformers in the church.

So we'll be talking about this whole group of individuals.

On Monday, I'll also talk about Sunday laws, which is another religious liberty topic.

A little update on what's happening in Europe and elsewhere, but also the question, are Sunday laws the only things we should be concerned about as far as the final test, the final part of the great controversy?

Or could a focus on Sunday laws stop us from missing some other important issues and questions?

And then finally on Monday afternoon, I want to look at the question of last generation theology, of the sanctuary, of the message of righteousness by faith and perfection, and what we can learn about those topics from understanding both the history of the Christian church and the history of our own church that I think can bring a greater sense of balance to these topics than we sometimes find.

It's an adventure through history that will also be very modern and contemporary.

And I would like you to join me in bowing your heads, asking the Holy Spirit to be with us in our adventure together.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of the Word of God.

We also thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit that helps us understand that Word and apply it to our lives.

But we also thank you for the gift of your body, the Church, that exists in this world that the Spirit and the Word work through to help us more fully understand truth and to help keep us from error.

We pray that your Spirit may be on our time together here and we pray this in Jesus' name.

Now I want this to be a little bit interactive.

I'm going to try to pace my talk so I have 5 or 10 minutes left for questions at the end.

But it's also difficult to fit all the questions in sometimes.

And so I want to invite people to also send questions in 1 of 2 ways.

Feel free to use your cell phones and text me questions during my presentation if you like.

I won't answer immediately, but at the end I will look at my phone and see if I have questions to respond to.

Email, you can have a little further reflection.

I won't be able to answer that right now.

But this evening, I'll look at email questions I've got.

And in the beginning of the next presentation, I'll try to do a response to the main questions that I might get.

So you'll note here, Nicholas at andrews.edu.

I teach at Andrews, so that's not a hard 1 to remember.

Or there's my cell phone number, 574-274-5207, and feel free to text me if you have a particular question.

Now I'm going to give you a little bit of background about me because 1 of the things you learn as a historian that you learn about truths, you speak about the past through the lens of your own experience.

None of us can move away from and move outside our own bodies.

We understand everything from our own point of view.

Now you can take this too far and modern thinkers have done this a bit in saying, therefore, we can never understand what truth is or anything about it.

And I'm not saying that at all because the Holy Spirit can bring us truth, but the Holy Spirit still brings truth to us where we are in our own time and place.

And the experience of the individual with Christ is so important.

I resonate with the words of 1 John, which says that John says that we're sharing with you that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life.

Now, none of us here have touched Jesus in the flesh ourselves, but if we're Christians, we've had our own experiences with Jesus, haven't we?

We've all walked the pathway, we've heard the voice, we've responded to the call.

And whatever testimonies we give about the Bible, we give about history, have to come through that personal experience that we've had with Christ.

I had a deeper conversion experience probably about the age of 17 where I was at an Adventist school, but I came to realize that not everything everyone around me did was necessarily consistent with being a Christian.

I needed to put everything that I wanted on the altar for God for Him to take away or give back to me.

And at the age of 17, I had a deeper conversion in this way and felt that I gave my all, had a total commitment to Christ.

And I want to testify to you young people, 1 of the hardest things I think as a young person in doing this is that you have your own dreams and ambitions, things that you want to become and to do.

And you feel like, if I give everything to Christ, I'm going to be doing a bunch of other things that are going to be much less interesting and much more boring.

I'm not going to have this cool career of being a CPA accountant for 1 of the big 7 firms in the country.

The Great Controversy: Antique or Heirloom?

And it's good to see so many out of bed on a Sunday morning and up and at them.

I'm Nicholas Miller in charge of this seminar on what would the reformers say?

Today we're talking about the great controversy theme.

I'm going to try to start pretty much on time.

We'll probably have a few more coming in, but I do try to give a short brief summary of the previous presentation, because while these are standalone to some degree, there's also a connectedness between the topics that I give, that having an understanding of what's gone on before will help you with today's presentation.

And I also like answering a question or 2 that is either being emailed or texted to me, or perhaps I've seen someone in a corridor and I know that every question that's asked, there's a lot of others who are wondering about it.

So I'm going to go ahead and start with that now.

But let's begin by bowing our heads for a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this new morning and this new day.

We're excited to be here in Seattle with so many young people, young adults, and young at heart who are anxious to study your word more deeply and have our lives more fully open to the influences of your spirit.

I pray that the lessons we draw from history today will shed light on our path, both today and for the future, and that we'll be better Christians for the time that we've spent together here.

So, some of you were here yesterday, others of you weren't.

Let me introduce myself again a little bit, Nicholas Miller.

I'm a professor of church history from Andrews University.

I teach in the seminary, the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary in the Church History Department.

And I have a PhD in Church History, from the Reformation to the present, with an emphasis on church state studies, because before that life I was a lawyer and practiced law for about a dozen years with a specialty in the area of church and state.

And a couple of my presentations are going to be specifically on issues of religious liberty, Sunday laws, last day events, those kinds of things.

But I'm also looking more broadly at questions of theology and the church today.

Today is the great controversy theme, antique or heirloom, and it's connected with the question of how can a loving God punish.

But just to give you a quick sense of where we are then, we have these 6 presentations happening.

And the first 1 yesterday was about scriptural authority.

How do we understand the authority of scripture, what does sola scriptura mean, and how is that different from solo scriptura, which is a practice that we find in some parts of our church.

Tomorrow or this afternoon rather, or the next presentation, I suppose it's still this morning, Seminar 2 is still this morning, we're going to talk about origins and creation versus theistic evolution.

A brief reminder that you can send questions to me by email at nicolas.andrews.edu or even during the presentation, send a text to this number 574-274-5207.

And at the end of the presentation, I'll try to leave a few minutes.

We'll have questions from the floor, and if you've texted me questions, I'll try to address those then.

Hebrews 12.1, for the week, for my seminars, anyway, over the next couple of days.

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

So I'm focusing on this question of the great cloud of witnesses.

Of course, this is just after the chapter of faith from Hebrews 11, and the witnesses in this case are the faithful from the past.

Because we're not surrounded, we understand the state of the dead.

We're not surrounded by people, saints in heaven looking on.

We're meant to draw courage and inspiration from their lives.

But as I posited yesterday, we can also be in dialogue with these witnesses, not through seances, but through their writings and through their teachings.

And this would include the great martyrs and men and women of faith from Christian history.

And it's not that we become Catholics and we decide that the church fathers our authorities in our lives and our church teaching, but we open our circle of Bible study to those in the church who just don't happen to be alive today.

And we engage with their writings as witnesses so it can provide us a perspective on our own biases and prejudices.

Because people living in another time and another age aren't subject to the same social forces and don't have the same blind spots that we have.

And I think that this is 1 of the purposes of church history, to share in a dialogue about what the Bible means so that we can perhaps see where we're not understanding, where we can gain a broader and a richer perspective.

So we did some of this yesterday and in just a brief summary I proposed that there's a difference between solo and sola scriptura.

We made a first point, it was sort of an introductory point, about the importance of this studying together.

While we each have to be personally convicted of Bible truth, we often come to that conviction in conversation with others as we study the Bible.

It's not that their words are authoritative, but their words can show us where we're not understanding, where we're misunderstanding.

And there's many examples in the Bible, Christ on the road to Emmaus, Priscilla and Aquila teaching Apollos, that God almost always uses other people to help individuals understand Bible truth.

The main point that I brought out was that sola scriptura is something different from solo scriptura.

That sola scriptura means by scripture alone, whereas some people understand it as solo scripture, only scripture.

We can only learn about God, about truths, religious truths, by scripture.

Whereas The reformers, and I gave some examples of Luther and Calvin and others, and Wesley, held scripture as the primary authority and as the only basis of church teaching and doctrine, but that we can learn about that doctrine further.

You can't get to the date 1844 without using history books to find out when certain kings lived and when the decree to go forth and rebuild Jerusalem was given.

We know about the events from biblical history, but the timing of those events, we have to go outside the Bible.

So a healthy, balanced view is that there are 2 books.

God has the book of scripture and the book of nature.

And we need to learn and be able to talk about right and wrong and moral reasoning from a study of human nature.

And I shared an Ellen White quote about the importance of studying what she called moral philosophy.

Now she says some other bad things about philosophy, that we shouldn't use philosophy to replace the Bible or to undercut the Bible.

Lewis or other Christian apologists who draw on human experience and reason to build a bridge to the Bible.

It's a very important part of our understanding of the scriptures.

We talked about the importance of this history because the Adventist church has been impacted by currents in 20th and 21st century Christianity, most notably liberalism on the 1 hand and fundamentalism on the other hand.

In the controversies we have in some parts of North America over creation and evolution and homosexuality, we see the influences of liberalism.

But we've also been impacted by fundamentalism, which is seen most clearly in a embrace of something called verbal inspiration, or dictation theory of inspiration, where some very conservative Christians believe that God dictated the scripture and the prophets just wrote down the words that God gave them.

And Ellen White was very clear that no, the Bible was a combination of human and divine, and God inspired the people and inspired their thoughts, but there was some latitude and freedom that the people had to choose the words they used.

And so there's a couple of texts of Ellen White quotes here that talk about this.

The Bible is not given to us in grand superhuman language.

Jesus, in order to reach man where he is, took humanity.

The Bible must be given in the language of men.

Different meanings are expressed by the same word.

There is not 1 word for each distinct idea.

The Bible was given for practical purposes.

This is a key idea that sets us apart from the fundamentalists who are trying to set the Bible up as a sort of perfectly inerrant, absolutely discrepancy-free book that can survive the test of the most exacting scientific scrutiny, None of us live our lives those ways.

Do we know our mates perfectly before we marry them?

And Ellen White talks about evidence that we have that We can't actually absolutely prove the existence of God, the truths of the Bible.

But this objective evidence combined with our experiences can give us a certainty about life.

And then here's another quote about the writers of the Bible were God's penman, not his pen.

And this affects then how she looks at versions of the Bible.

In the fundamentalist movement, you have a King James version only movement, And some of that's crept into the Adventist church.

And I can assure you it didn't come from the pioneers.

Origins: Creation or Theistic Evolution?

I'm a professor at Andrews University in the seminary in the Church History Department.

I have a strong interest in church and state, as well as the development of Adventist theology.

And I also have a strong interest in creation and evolution.

I did some pre-med studies in my undergraduate days, so I have some basic grasp of biology and chemistry and done some reading in geology and other things.

But as a lawyer, I was involved in discussions and in writing over origins under the American Constitution.

In other words, we're not supposed to teach the Bible in public school classrooms.

Does that mean we have to teach atheistic evolution?

And I've published some articles and done some writing on those questions.

And today, I want to talk about this question more in terms of our church.

And challenges to our church's understanding about the question of creation.

Could God have created in ways other than 6 or 7 literal days?

What do we say to other Christians who believe in theistic evolution?

What do we say to Adventists who are starting to believe in theistic evolution?

Unfortunately, in some of our own schools, the controversy over the last 2 or 3 years with evolution being taught, not just taught about, because I don't think most people have a problem with that.

If you're going to be an intelligent adult in today's world, you need to know about evolution, what its claims are, what the scientific evidence seems to be to support it.

We should be teaching that in our schools, but we shouldn't be teaching that it's true and it's the way it really happened.

At least that's my conviction because of my understanding of the Bible.

And yet this is happening in some places.

Is this something there can be compromise on?

Is this something that lines need to be drawn on.

And if we're going to draw lines, how should those lines be drawn?

And I'm going to suggest that there's 2 ditches on this.

This is an ongoing theme of this study that I'm doing on the reformers in church history, is that our church has been impacted by larger influences in the Christian community, especially in the 20th century.

The influence of liberalism on 1 hand, but also the influence of fundamentalism on the other hand.

Fundamentalism is taking the Bible too strictly, trying to hold it to a too perfect a standard, and in many ways, both extremes can get you into trouble.

And understanding the kind of middle ground that Adventism holds.

Adventism at its roots and its heritage is neither liberal or fundamentalistic.

It occupies a biblical balanced middle ground.

But before we start the next lecture, won't you bow your heads with me for a word of prayer?

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this special time we have in Seattle, with these many faithful believers and followers of you who are wanting to learn more about your word and about the history of our church more deeply.

Bless our time together, may your Holy Spirit be among us.

May we learn to appreciate more fully your creation as well as your new creation and recreation in our lives.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.

But this topic of creation offers risks on both sides.

There's a risk of being too liberal and open, but there's a risk of becoming fundamentalistic and creed-like.

Setting down thought tests in ways that God wouldn't have us do.

And navigating carefully through the middle ground on this will be helped by looking at some history.

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GYC 2012 Seminar: The Reformers Speak to Today's Church

Liberty & Morality: What is Today’s Protest?

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