Sermon from July 25, 2004

The Da Vinci Code makes many inflammatory allegations against the Roman Catholic Church. Here is a particularly egregious example. “‘Of course, the Vatican, in keeping with their tradition of misinformation, tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls (the Gnostic Gospels). And why wouldn’t they? The scrolls highlight glaring historical discrepancies and fabrications, clearly confirming that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda – to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.’” (The Da Vinci Code, 234).

These allegations have been deeply troublesome to many Roman Catholics. The recent sexual scandals and attempted cover-up of those scandals has made the allegations in the novel of past cover-ups seem much more credible. The Roman Catholic Church experiences this challenge to its authority in a way that Evangelicals may find it hard to comprehend.

We Evangelicals have had our own share of sexual scandals and attempted cover-ups, but with a huge difference. When Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert made headlines with their behavior, they did not implicate an entire denominational structure. The very nature of the Roman Catholic Church is that the bishops of the church act in solidarity with each other. A cover-up by the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is a systemic failure. It is the difference between an infection in your hand and an infection that gets in your bloodstream and threatens your life.

I take no pleasure in what has happened to the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. I don’t like to see any Christian leaders fail publicly. I don’t think we Evangelicals realize how much we benefit from the ability of the Roman Catholic Church to speak to social issues like abortion, same sex marriage and poverty; if their public troubles hamper their ability to do that, all other Christians suffer. And there is something else at stake here. It’s going to take me the rest of this sermon to explain it.

It goes back to the sermon last Sunday. The durability and wisdom of the Bible and its ability to give us a vantage point outside our sometimes suffocating place in time are realities millions of us Christians have experienced. Our first-hand experience verifies the power of the Bible. But where does the power come from? That requires an explanation that has two parts.

The first part, which we considered last Sunday, focused on the authority of scripture. The conviction of the Church is that God has communicated with His human creation through the prophets and by his Son. God has spoken so that man could hear.

But if God spoke through them, then it became imperative to preserve a record of what they said and did. Fortunately, the prophets not only preached, they also wrote what they preached. The apostles not only taught, they also wrote what they taught. The apostles not only heard and saw Jesus, they also wrote what they heard and saw. And so, the written scriptures came into existence. Scripture and scripture alone provides us with access to what God said through the prophets and in Jesus.

So, the power of the Bible comes first from its unique position of being the carrier of the mind of God to the mind of man. It is a human document. Man did produce it under pressure of tumultuous events in Jewish history. The book that we know came into existence over a period of 1500 years, so there were countless additions and revisions. The Church has nothing to lose by acknowledging and even delighting in these and other human characteristics of the Bible. The Bible is the word of man.

But, preeminently, it is the word of God. Most Christians would agree with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, when it says “that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 37).

The Apostle Paul captured what is at stake when he wrote this in 1 Thessalonians 2:13. And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.

So far, so good, but now we have to step out of our comfort zone. The inherent authority of the Bible is only one part of the explanation for the Bible’s power. This second part focuses on the authority of the Church. This part of the explanation requires most Protestants to step into unfamiliar territory. If go there we must, then go there we shall. Buckle up! There may be some turbulence up ahead.

The Work of the Holy Spirit
Of course, I’m not going to take you anywhere without scriptural guidance. So let’s begin with John 16:13. Jesus said, “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.” The authority of the Church is rooted in the work of the Holy Spirit.

The work of the Spirit that establishes the authority of the Church finds expression in Jesus’ words, “he will guide you into all truth.” It is possible that when Jesus said, “all truth,” He was referring to the composition and collection of those writings that make up the Bible.

I have heard people I respect say that. I certainly believe that is part of what Jesus meant. I, and many other people holier and wiser than me, believe that it goes beyond that. We believe that the Holy Spirit guides the Church into a growing understanding of how that word of God speaks to ever-changing human circumstances. What God said through the prophets and by his Son has an abiding significance for the people of God.

If we are right about that, then for 2000 years the Spirit has been guiding the Church in how the word of God speaks in dramatically different circumstances. The Church has written down a record of that guidance. You can read it in the theologians of the Church from Polycarp in the second century to C. S. Lewis in the twentieth. You can read it in the decisions of many Church councils and creeds from the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Unrecorded but unmistakable has been the Holy Spirit’s guidance of local bodies of Christian communities and individual Christians down through the centuries.

The theological and moral dilemmas facing humanity in our day seem daunting. We need to face them with great humility, but they need not daunt us into silence. The ancient promise of Jesus still holds: “the Spirit of truth . . . will guide you into all truth . . . and he will tell you what is yet to come.”

The Pillar and Foundation of Truth
Now, we have to make a decisive move. I said that the Church has written down a record of the Spirit’s guidance. We call that written record the Christian tradition. Alister McGrath of Oxford University is perhaps the most articulate spokesman for evangelical theology in the world. Listen to how he describes the Christian tradition.

“The Christian tradition is contained in both scripture and the pattern of ethical and theological reflection which is grounded upon Scripture, and mediated through the Christian community” (McGrath, Reality, 72).

I don’t want you to miss two points. First, the Church’s record of the Holy Spirit’s guidance, in McGrath’s words, “is grounded upon Scripture.” The Holy Spirit does not guide the Church contrary to the Bible. Second, the Church’s record of the Holy Spirit’s guidance is, in McGrath’s words, “mediated through the Christian community.” The Holy Spirit does not guide us into all truth outside the Church.

You can’t have an oak tree without an acorn. You can’t have human beings without a womb. You can’t have the truth of God without the Church. I don’t mean an idealized Church. I mean the actual Church, composed of particular, sinful human beings, who look to the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth, grounded upon Scripture.

This idea too has apostolic authority. Look with me at 1 Timothy 3:14-15. Paul wrote to his protégé, Timothy: although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.

That last clause is a throw-away line. He did not anticipate before he said it, and he didn’t explain it afterwards. He dropped it into the letter without warning. He left it to subsequent ages of the Church to wrestle with its implications. Let’s download several ideas from that line for closer inspection.

First, he spoke of God’s household, which is the church of the living God. There is one Church. God has one household. If we look at the Church sociologically, it would seem that we have turned the Bride of Christ into a harem with our heart-rending divisions and multiple denominations. It is not so. There is one Bride, one household, one Church. The problem is not with the unifying substance of the Church but with our fractious refusal or inability to recognize and maintain its unity in the bond of peace.

Second, when the apostle calls the Church the pillar and foundation of the truth, he does not mean there is no truth outside the Church. God, who makes rain to fall on just and unjust alike, reveals truth to just and unjust alike. The Church has no corner on truth. The Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth, because God has entrusted her with the truth that is necessary for the salvation of mankind from sin and the effects of sin.

Third, we like to say, and we rightly say that scripture and scripture alone provides us with access to what God said through the prophets and in Jesus. The hard reality is that the Church and the Church alone has identified, preserved and transmitted to us the scripture.

The Church doesn’t invest the scripture with authority. God does that. But the Church recognizes, receives and transmits scripture as authoritative for the faith and life of the Church for as long as the world shall stand. In my judgment evangelical Protestants need to revisit the doctrine of the Church. We may have an inadequate doctrine of the Church. And that brings us to one last hill we need to climb. The saying of our Lord that we are about to read is one that evangelicals seldom preach on. It simply flies below our radar screen. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, we can do something about that.

Binding and Loosing
On several occasions in the gospels Jesus made a dramatic statement to His disciples. Let’s look at the one in Matthew 18:18. “I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The context in Matthew 18 is important, because it is the context of the Church in action. It is a principle that has many applications. One of them concerns us today. Look with me at Acts 15:28.

The Jerusalem apostles, according to this chapter, had declared in favor of a Christianity unencumbered by ancient Jewish rituals. Paul set out on his second missionary journey with a free hand to evangelize both Jew and Gentile and to incorporate Gentiles into the Church solely on the basis of their faith in Jesus and their baptism into His name.

Verse 28 summarizes the human circumstances in which that momentous decision was made. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements of personal courtesy to Christian Jews. Don’t miss the power of those first nine words: it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. That’s what binding and loosing by the Church looks like. It is always the improbable mix of the divine and human. That’s how God has chosen to work.

That’s how the authority of the New Testament was recognized and received as authoritative. That’s how the deity of Christ was recognized and received as authoritative. That’s how the triune nature of the one, true God was recognized and received as authoritative. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Does that mean the Church never makes a mistake in her collective judgment? No, and when she errs, she can be reformed. It has happened several times in her life. The Church collectively learns the ways of the Lord, just as the original disciples learned the ways of Jesus – in fits and starts, three steps forward and two steps back. Welcome to the humility of God, who takes a flawed Church and uses it for the salvation of the nations.

And now, I’d like to end where I began. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code writes that “the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda – to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.”

That is not a challenge to the Roman Catholic Church. It is a challenge to the self-understanding of the whole Church, including BVBC. The Vatican didn’t establish the New Testament. The unified Church of the first four centuries recognized and received it as authoritative after 300 years of open debate with divergent views. Dan Brown’s unsubstantiated slander affects Protestants, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox alike.

Of course, the Gnostic writings deserve close study, and they have received it for half a century, and with few exceptions scholars have found them deficient in comparison with the New Testament. In our own small way our Sunday night academy study is participating in that study of Gnostic ideas and of Dan Brown’s ideas of Gnostic ideas.

The Holy Spirit will guide the Church of the 21st century into all truth as surely as He guided the Church of the first four centuries. The Church today is the pillar and foundation of the truth as surely as it was in century one. And when the Church today binds and looses, it will be because it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.