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ust as we can describe the characteristics or attributes of God—our triune God is self-existent, omnipotent, eternal, holy, omnipresent, truthful, and so forth— so we can rehearse the characteristics or attributes of Scripture: canonical Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, wholly true in all that it affirms (inerrant), authoritative, necessary, powerful to save fallen people and transform lives, sufficient, and clear. While some of these attributes are familiar to us, others are not so, and for this reason in this article I will concentrate on the sufficiency and clarity of the Word of God The Sufficiency of Scripture According to Wayne Grudem, “The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God which he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains everything we need God to tell us for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly.”1 When Moses composed the Pentateuch, his divinely inspired writing was sufficient for the people of Israel at his time, directing them to be justified by God’s grace appropriated by faith (e.g., Gen. 15:6; cf. Rom 4), encouraging belief in God and his provision (e.g., Exod 14), detailing how to please God (e.g., Exod 20:1-21), and teaching the fear of the Lord (e.g., Deut 31:9-13). As God raised up the prophets and added to the Pentateuch, the expanded canon of the Hebrew Bible—now with the historical books, the writings, and the prophets—became the sufficient Word of God for the later people of Israel. Following the incarnation of the Son of God, the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles to write four Gospels, a narrative of the church’s expansion, numerous letters, and an apocalypse, so we now have the completed canon consisting of both the Old and New Testaments, which is God’s sufficient Word for the church. It contains everything unbelievers need in order to be saved, and everything Christ followers need in order to be “complete, equipped for
every good work” (2 Tim 3:17), or entirely prepared to be, act, think, feel, reason, purpose, and serve so as to please God fully. To be more specific, the sufficiency of Scripture is not absolute: it does not contain all theological truth, as Moses affirms: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut 29:29). Much truth about God and his ways remains secret because God in his wisdom and mercy does not reveal it; Scripture is not sufficient for those matters because it does not treat them—and we should not speculate about them. But whatever God does reveal, he reveals to his people so as to provide all they need to know—Scripture is sufficient for the purposes God intended for it to accomplish. Its sufficiency, therefore, is limited according to the divine intention. Evangelicals, as heirs to the Reformation, champion this characteristic of Scripture over against the Catholic Church’s denial of its sufficiency.2 For the Catholic Church, the one source of divine revelation has two aspects: written Scripture and sacred Tradition, or the teachings of Jesus Christ that he orally communicated to his apostles, who in turn orally communicated them to their successors, the bishops, who maintain this sacred Tradition in the church. Accordingly, Scripture is not sufficient; for people to be saved and live lives that are fully pleasing to God, they need Scripture plus Tradition, which together constitute divine revelation.3 Catholics, then, must believe that when their priest or bishop consecrates the bread and the wine mixed with water during the Eucharistic celebration, they become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, they must look forward to their souls being purged of the taint of sin through suffering in purgatory before they will go to be with the Lord in heaven (there are exceptions to this future in purgatory both in the case of www.credomag.com | 41