Questions help us to kind of understand where we're going. So here's really the question for the night. Where do we go for truth? Where do we get it from? Another way of asking that is what are the different sources Or another way of asking that, which really will frame tonight's discussion, how do traditions, the various Christian traditions which we were introduced to last week in our study of church history, how do they vary regarding the sources that we have for truth? Okay, so that's a lot of different ways to ask the same thing. And here's where we're going to start. We're going to start, if you remember the church history from last week, we're going to start with the Protestant Reformation. Because until you have the Protestant Reformation, you don't have that tradition at all. You don't have Protestantism. And also, and don't forget this, until you have the Protestant Reformation, you also don't have Roman Catholicism. So both of those traditions are birthed out of the Protestant Reformation. Prior to that, you had the Universal Little C Catholic Church. It was already suffering some division East and West. But when we talk about the major traditions, and we'll see them again tonight as we go through this discourse, they didn't happen until They weren't evident, I should say, until the Protestant Reformation. So if we go back in time there, it's a good place to start and talk about what marked the Protestant Reformation, and then we're going to drill down only on one aspect of that. And you're familiar with these, the five solas, they're called, the five alones of the Protestant Reformation. And here they are. Number one is sola scriptura, which simply means scripture alone. And then number two, solus Christus, Christ alone. What's next? I mean, you know, you've got to use Latin, you can't just say grace. Grace. What is it? Yeah, sola gratia. Grace alone. Now what's next? We need a class on Latin. Where's Bill Bourneau when you need him? Sola. You're leaving the sola out of it. Sola fide. Faith alone. What's the next one? See, now you want to say sola and soli. All for the glory of God alone. I like to always kind of put those together. This this would serve you well. You've heard me say it. And if you've been in this church for any time, a hundred different times, probably we believe. Right. That salvation comes. Or our understanding of God comes through scripture alone. Which reveals, excuse me, through grace alone. Man. Faith alone through grace alone. Does anybody know it? There you go. So there's a way to order that together and it just makes a logical, reasonable understanding of what we believe. But for tonight, when we talk about sources of truth, we're talking about sola scriptura. That's the Protestant perspective of where do we get our truth from? What is the source? And the Protestants, if you study the Reformation, and oftentimes don't study it carefully, you walk away and saying, the Protestants had one source of truth. The Reformers had one source of truth. What's the source of truth? Scripture. Scripture alone. But this quote I put in your notebook by Alistair McGrath will help you to get that into a better perspective. He writes, although it is often suggested that the Reformers had no place for tradition, in their theological deliberations, this judgment is clearly incorrect. While the notion of tradition as an extra-scriptural source of revelation is excluded, the classic concept of tradition as a particular way of reading and interpreting scripture is retained. Scripture, tradition, and the kerygma are regarded as essentially co-inherent and as being transmitted, propagated, and safeguarded by the community of faith. What he's talking about is, if you look at the Reformers, they were saying Scripture alone, but they weren't saying Scripture only. Scripture exists with and will require an understanding of church tradition, as well as, he says, the kerygma, the proclamation of the gospel, the good news. And those things together, the reformers would say, those together working in a right-ordered unison is where we get our truth. And although Martin Luther himself certainly made a simple appeal to the authority of Scripture alone. He did not believe Scripture to be the only source of truth or confidence. In fact, when Luther was finally put on trial at the famous Diet of Worms and made one of his most often quoted statements, notice more clearly what he really understood and believed as it regards truth. Here's what he said. Since then, your serene majesty and your lordship seek a simple answer. I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason. I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen. Now there's some more words in there where you see the dots. But what was Luther standing on in his conviction? Certainly he says what? You're going to have to convince me by God's Word. He certainly is honoring the authority of God's Word as the source of his theological conviction. But is that the only thing he's talking about? Look what he says besides Scripture. What's the other thing? Reason. Reason is a convincing force alongside scripture for the convictions upon which Martin Luther was making his stand. So there we have at least two sources of his conviction. I think it's fair to say two sources, Martin Luther would say, of truth. They're not equal. But there are two different sources of truth. My ability to reason and think through logical conclusions that may not be quoted in Scripture, and of course, Scripture itself. But there's more there. What else does he appeal to? Scripture, reason, what else? Conscience. And when he puts his foot down, he puts his foot down on what? Conscience. The most dangerous thing I could do, he doesn't say the most dangerous thing I could do would be to go against the Word of God. He doesn't say the most dangerous thing I could do would be to act unreasonably. No, the dangerous thing in the summation of his argument would be to go against my conscience. Now, what is that? Well, tonight you'll learn that your conscience is one of the ways that we talk about a source of truth more commonly related to either your experience or really, and we'll get there tonight, your emotions, your feelings. And Martin Luther says, truth to me is where I stand. And that means I stand on the Word of God, but I also stand on reason, and I also stand on my experience and my feelings, my convictions. My conscience is variously telling me yes or no. And you might think to yourself, how does your conscience work? When you say, well, I shouldn't do that. I don't know what God's Word says about that. My conscience is telling me yes or no. And we know from Scripture, unbelievers have that same conscience. They know right from wrong. How do they know it? Is it an intellectual, reasonable thing? Well, you all know the answer. It's a feeling. There's an emotional element that's saying, stop. Don't do that. Now, we'll pick that up a little later tonight. The point here is simply to say, Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone does not mean Scripture only. And it does not disregard other sources of truth. In fact, I gave you this little summary of what Sola Scriptura is not in your notebook. First and foremost, Sola Scriptura is not a claim that the Bible contains all knowledge. It's not a scientific textbook. It's not a manual on governmental procedures. It's not a catalog of automobile engine parts. The Bible does not claim to give us every bit of knowledge that we could ever obtain And so there must be other sources of knowledge, other sources of truth, other than the Bible. Secondly, sola scriptura is not a denial that the Word of God has, at times, been spoken. In fact, any first century Christian who was building and shaping their theological conviction post the resurrection of Christ was doing that on the spoken word of the apostles. And that doesn't mean they ever heard Paul preach. They heard others who had heard Paul preach. And so they were shaping firm convictions in what we would now say is the Word of God, but it wasn't the Word of God, at least not written to them. Paul would say, I'm glad when I preached, you heard me, not as the words of men, but as the Word of God. But understand, sola scriptura doesn't mean these words on this page. It hasn't at least always meant that, because sometimes it's spoken. Rather, the what it's not goes on to say it refers to the scriptures as serving the church as God's final and full revelation. Now this is God's Word. But in the first century, the only written text they would have had would have been the Old Testament, and almost nobody had that written text. It was far too expensive to have a copy because of the price to reproduce. Sola Scriptura does not entail the rejection of every kind or form of church tradition. There are some traditions that are God-honoring and useful in the church. Sola Scriptura simply means that a higher authority must test any tradition, no matter how ancient or venerable it might seem to us, and the authority that we test it with is Scripture. All right? So we don't mean Scripture only. when we say sola scriptura or scripture alone. What we are saying is no higher authority. And let's say it that way. I didn't advance these, but let's say it that way. What sola scriptura is. The doctrine of sola scriptura simply stated is that the scriptures alone are sufficient to function as the regulae fide, the infallible rule of faith for the church. It's the norm that norms all norms. Everything must be balanced, called into account by the final authority of the Word of God. All that one must believe to be a Christian is found in Scripture, and it is not found in any other source. Scripture is the only source for how a man or a woman can be saved. Scripture is the only power upon which that salvation will be carried forward by the Spirit of God. This is not to say that the necessary beliefs of the faith couldn't be summarized in a shorter form. We have doctrinal statements, of course. However, there's no necessary belief, doctrine, or dogma absolutely required of a person for entrance into the kingdom of heaven that is not found in the pages of Scripture. So Scripture alone also means only source of salvation. All things pertaining to life and godliness are found in the Scriptures. Lastly, what Sola Scriptura is, that which is not found in the Scripture, either directly or by necessary implication, is not binding upon the Christian, meaning only the Scripture is binding upon the Christian. Nothing else is. Other things are valuable, but they don't bind the Christian's conscience. There is liberty outside of any aspect that Scripture speaks to concerning our faith. Now, if you were to take Martin Luther's position, And he wrote of this, Martin Luther would be said to have had a trilateral perspective regarding sources of truth. Three primary sources, Luther would say, of himself. This is where Christians should get their truth. Scripture, tradition, and reason." And he wrote of that. He spoke that way. He articulated that way. And he would say, you need all three, but Scripture at the top of my trilateral, Martin Luther would say, is the supreme authority. But you need all three in order to arrive at the truth. Now, shortly after the Protestant Reformation, there began to be a deviation away, not just from Martin Luther, not just from the Reformers, but from sources of truth. And I threw into your notebook what is called John Wesley's quadrilateral view concerning sources of truth. Like Martin Luther, he would say scripture, reason, and tradition But he added experience, the things we learn about God through our experience. I also put a very important note from a biographer of John Wesley in your notebook. Here's what it says. The great Protestant watchwords of sola fide and sola scriptura were, in fact, fundamentals in Wesley's formulation of a doctrine of biblical authority. But early, he wrote about it early, and again later in his career, Wesley interpreted solus to mean primarily rather than solely or exclusively. There began to be a nuance, almost an apology in Wesley's theology of this word alone. And he much preferred to use scripture primarily, reason primarily. He was much more apt to open up the human development and understanding of God to varieties of sources. And the one that stuck, and by the way, this is Wesley's quadrilateral, not somebody applying it to him, but this is his quadrilateral. He was very comfortable and insisted on adding experience. And we would recognize that today in the Wesleyan tradition. It's a very experiential expression of Protestant faith. Camp meetings and the likes all find their roots in the Wesleyan tradition, and of course, Methodism itself. What are, if we advance through Christian history, what have come to be the recognized possible sources of truth and, in various traditions, the accepted sources of truth? Well, there are five of them. So we went from three to four to five. And here are the five, and this is where we'll spend our time through the evening. Number one, tradition. Tradition as a source of truth. Number two, reason. Reason as a source of truth. Number three, experience. Your experiences are a source of truth. Number four, nature, or we might call it general revelation. Nature is a source of truth. We can look at nature and learn things about God. And when I'm saying source of truth, I'm contexting that source of truth concerning God. because this is, after all, a biblical doctrine or theology course. Number five, emotions, one that we'll struggle with a little bit, but I hope tonight's discussion will help you there. And number six is scripture. Obviously, those aren't in any particular order. That's the order we're going to take them. So five sources of truth that you will find embraced to various degrees and in different ways among the Christian traditions throughout church history. Got it? That's kind of our introduction, so let's break into this. Let's take those one at a time. What is tradition? You have these written down. You can look up here and see them. Tradition, when we say tradition, we're talking about religious information, truth about God, that has been handed down to us from various sources. Now, I think you know what we're talking about, but let's test it. Give me some examples of tradition. It falls into the category of tradition. Was there not any coffee out there tonight? Singing the doxology. That's a musical tradition, but it's also a long-standing tradition in the Christian church, and it expounds truth, right? What does the doxology say? Praise God from whom Okay, truth about God handed down through tradition. Can you find that in scripture? Those exact words together? No. Not a quote from scripture, but it's expressing the truth of scripture. I'm going to always resort back to the final authority, but understand that's an example. You learn that in your tradition. Some traditions would know it better than others. the Apostles' Creed. If you're raised in a Reformed church, classically Reformed, Presbyterian church, Christian Reformed church, you recite the Apostles' Creed every single Sunday. along with the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer happens to be in the Bible, except the one that's most often recited week after week is not in the Bible, because they add a phrase to the end. And that phrase was added because even when the Bible was being transcribed, scribe after scribe after scribe, already the tradition had been to add that last phrase, and the scribes just started writing it into the Bible. But it's not in any valid old Greek copies or manuscripts that we have. What is that phrase I'm talking about? For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Jesus didn't say that, and the Bible doesn't say that. Tradition says that, and it's good. It's a good truth. So we understand what we mean? Creeds, any creed, not just the apostles' creed, confessions, Westminster Confession of Faith, Heidelberg Catechism, Heidelberg Confession of Faith, London Baptist Confession, 1689, right? All of those are tradition. But think of something else. What shaped in your life, early on in your Christian life, what shaped your understanding of God most? Was it the Bible? Maybe. You're fortunate if it was. It wasn't in my life. It was what I heard from that pulpit every Sunday. Every sermon, week after week after week. That's tradition. Except or when he was quoting the Bible, he was building, passing on truth, right? Week after week after week after week after week. How many of you would say, comfortably with me, that's what shaped my Christian thinking most? was the guy behind that pulpit. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. That's church tradition. That's tradition that you're learning from. More than this. Because I happen to also be in a tradition where I was getting good truth, but it really fell into the category of folk theology because I didn't know why it was good and I didn't know where the source was. I thought he was the source. And he was typically right. And the whole crowd thought he was right. So he must be right. Is that your experience, any of you? That's tradition. Now, what are the benefits of that? What are the benefits of truth handed down through tradition? Tested through time. Great example. We like to say we stand on the shoulders of 2,000 years of church history. What are we saying? Church tradition. In fact, any time you invoke church history as a means of understanding or maybe seeing more clearly any truth about God, you're talking about tradition. All of church history falls into the category of tradition. What's the other benefit? She said it's been tested. What's another benefit to tradition? I mentioned it in the introduction. It's not truth in isolation. It's truth in a greater context. A Baptist tradition of truth. A Presbyterian tradition of truth. A Methodist tradition of truth. Right? That's valuable. So it's not Kevin Swanson's tradition of truth. Or Michael Thurman's tradition of truth. That's dangerous. But there's great benefit to traditions passed down through the ages and through the community of faith. What's a deficiency of that sort of truth? It can become deluded with man's thinking. It can become confused. It's not always clear. It might be what we believe, but has no context for why we believe it. So there's deficiency in church tradition. What else? Here's the one I think is most significant as I ponder this. Church tradition tends to make Christians passive. You don't think for yourself. Well, we've always believed that way. We've always sung those songs. We've always stood up on the third verse. or whatever the case might be. We don't think about what we're doing. It can make you passive. All right, so that's tradition. Now, we won't spend that much time on all of them, but here's something that's important. Tradition is the living faith of those now dead. It's not the same as traditionalism, which is the dead faith of those now living. And I've lived in both those camps at various times in my life. Tradition is good. Traditionalism is not good. And that's that passive embrace of nothing. Even though I might be alive, I'm trapped by my traditionalism. All right? That's not a good thing. Let's talk about reason real quick. Reason is information or truth that comes through the human mind's capacity for logic, rational, and analytic thought. Give me an example of reason, truth through reason. Michael Thurman sitting right here, what example would he give me? Mathematics. We can arrive at truth through logic and reason. Right? It's a good example. You with me? Using my brain to arrive at a conclusion. What's another example? Any scientific method. Biblical interpretation is taking reason and applying it to Scripture. And we would say, you can have Scripture, and you can understand the words of Scripture, but if you don't apply reason, you'll miss the truth of Scripture. So reason has to come into it, comparing Scripture with Scripture, letting Scripture interpret Scripture. That requires the human mind. So understand, God gives us His Word, but His Word cannot save us and at the same time bypass our mind. It passes through our mind. And that's where we pick up the necessity of reason. Reason has to be attached to it in order for us to arrive at any benefit from it. So what are the benefits of reason? I just gave you one of them. We can't rightly understand the Bible without using reason. What's another benefit of reason? How about this? It makes a case more compelling, right? It builds a defense for what you believe. We use our mind and our reason to take scriptures like this morning, which is not, I was just sharing with Dennis earlier, not where you'd usually turn if you were having a discussion with another believer and you were wrangling about the deep things of God, including God's sovereign election. How many of you would turn to 1 Corinthians 2? You just wouldn't. But reason now will take you there. And it's certainly there in the text. I hope you found that it's there in the text. And now, instead of just going to Romans 8, 9, and 10, which is, I would still say, the best place to go, 1 Corinthians 2 moved way up my list in my studies of where I would go to see that unity in the church can only be ground in truth, Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, and the principal apex of the truth that produces the unity that we need in the church is the reality of the sovereignty of God. That's the truth he keeps pointing to in chapter 1 and in chapter 2. Well, reason takes us there. And we find it there, and now it knits in with a compelling argument about that particular truth. Does that make sense? One of the other great benefits of reason, listen to this, it's available to all people in all places at all times. short, limited capacity, which some suffer from, everybody has been given the imago Dei. And what that is in large measure is the ability to reason. Every human being has access to that as a means of garnering truth. Now, I think that's hugely significant and an often overlooked benefit to the human brain and the image of God is that all people everywhere at all times have access to that as a means of truth. Now guess what they don't all have access to. Look at that. So this the sole authority we would say. For all things regarding faith. And practice. Is not universally available to everywhere. To everyone at all places at all times, but their mind is. Now you take a mind able to reason. And realize it's fallen. and place it in a community where for generations they have had no exposure to that, what will that community look like? Not pretty, is it? And you're tracking with me, and a part of that, part of the reason of your mind ought to take you somewhere when you just hear those two things. This is not available to everybody in every place at all times. This is, and this has fallen. And this is constantly being influenced and constantly reaching conclusions about a creator or no creator all the time. And they have nothing to guard their thinking. Why isn't every Christian sitting in this room in some measure actively involved and engaged in making sure that everybody everywhere has access to one of these? Right. I'm not making a pitch for anything. I'm just telling you, my mind takes me there. Because they got access to this. and they don't have access to this, that's a huge problem. And if I care about them at all, right, I want them to have another source of truth. I want them to have the primary, ultimate, sola source of truth. Many people don't still today. They do not have access to that. All right. Deficiencies. It cannot take you to salvation. That's one. Reason will take you to the necessity of a first cause. Remember a few classes ago? Your mind will take you there. There has to be a beginner. But it cannot introduce you to him and cannot establish a relationship with him. You just know that he is, but you can't get to him. Reason can't take you there. It's deficient in that way. Jonathan Edwards wrote, all truth is given by revelation, either general or special. He would say nature or the Bible. And it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or in his word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the mind. I agree with Jonathan Edwards completely, and the Bible teaches that. God could communicate directly to the, if I could say it, the heart, the soul of man, but he doesn't. He goes through the mind. Faith comes by hearing. That's it. Sorry, not sorry. That's the way God works. I think that's a song. Is that a song? Young people, is that a song? Did I just quote a song? Sorry, not sorry. Oh, it's just a phrase. I thought it was a song. Experience. Experience is information that comes through direct encounter, participation, or observation. Give me an example of the provision of truth about God that you gain through experience. See, these Reformed audiences, they struggle when you get to this part. What? Divine providences, right? Remarkable. What about how about it with just a flat out miracle? Does God still do miracles? So if you encountered such. And understood in the right context of who God is and why he would do such a thing. Did you just learn something about God that maybe the other person who didn't have that encounter doesn't understand like you understand it, right? Sure. Those experiences have a profound effect on how the human mind and the believer thinks about God. How many of you pray? Always get 100%, right? What do you ask for? God's will, is that it? It's a pretty short prayer. No, we ask for things. Anybody got a friend who's suffering right now and you've prayed for healing? Ever? How many of you have prayed for healing for people again and again and again and it didn't happen? Had that experience? What about if you had the opposite experience? Every time I pray for somebody, they're healed. Put those two people in the room and ask them what their understanding of God is. Is it going to be the same? It's not going to be the same. Now, we can go to the source and we can apply reason and we can arrive at the same God, but experience shapes their understanding. If every time you pray for healing, and yes, in accord with God's will and He grants it, you'll begin to think that God's will is to grant it always. But that's not true. But it would be true to you, and it would certainly impact how you viewed God and how you viewed prayer. It would have a profound impact. So experiences matter. What about the experience of worship? Have you ever been changed altered in your thinking about God that you couldn't point directly maybe to the sermon or to the scripture or to a particular song, but just the experience of being together with God's people. Has a profound effect on how we think and how we feel and what we know about God. That's ordinary and we can't resist or reject completely that as a source of truth. So miracles, God's remarkable providences, things that are common and things that are uncommon that happen all the time. And then God in his providence might surround John and his wife with certain experiences and surround you with completely different experiences. And he's shaping an understanding of himself in the Thurman's and he's shaping an understanding of himself in the McDonald's. And that's why we need the Thurman's and the McDonald's to come together so that we get a fuller picture of God. born out of their experiences of God and their experiences of God, right? Yeah, you need that. You need that fuller expression of who God is. As a source of truth, then, about God, we would include experience. And we'll come back to that, perhaps, or maybe you have something you want to say about that. What's a deficiency of experience? Where does it fall short? It can be wrong. You could shape wrong opinions about God born out of real experiences that you rightly understood, but you got God wrong in it, right? Has that ever happened in the Bible among God's people? Yeah. Yes. Yes, best viewed in the rearview mirror, oftentimes. Let me tell you something. We just we just pass over here. And again, I think that's our tradition that causes us to pass over and maybe even get uncomfortable in this discussion. When God goes and rebukes Israel again and again for their disobedience and their failures, what does he always say to them? Almost always or let me say it this way. Regularly, he says, you forgot what I said to you. No, no, he doesn't. He says, you forgot what I did. You forgot the experience. You forgot it. And if experience isn't a valid source of truth, why didn't he just send down a codex from heaven? He didn't. He sent his son to experience and for us to be able to reflect on the experience of God alive in human flesh. Experience is a very vital part of how we know and appreciate and understand God. And he uses it. and oftentimes refers to it above other things. Every time he says remember, not every time, most of the time when he says remember, he's not pointing back to what he said in Scripture. He's pointing back to what he did. And you experienced it and he would say, you ought to know better. Because you experienced this in your Christian life. Let's move quickly forward. Emotions. If experiences are uncomfortable, this one's really uncomfortable, right? This is information that comes through subjectively experienced psychological feelings. And we would tend to say, ain't getting no good information that way. But that's not fair. It isn't fair, and you know it isn't fair. And we've said this many times, we said it back in our class on reason. Most of you, every day, in all the thousands of conscious and unconscious decisions you'll make, that you would reflect on and call them good and sound decisions, are made based on how you feel. That's just how we move as human beings. And our thinking and our actions cannot be disconnected from our feelings. It's not possible. And if we remove emotions completely from our stage of truth, I would just submit you're removing one of the vital sources by which God communicates Himself to you and to me. Now, it's not as trustworthy as some of the other sources, and therefore, when we organize our stage of truth in a minute, we want to be sure we put it in the right place. But I would just submit to you, I don't want to throw it off my table, because I'm going to be bad confused if you take my emotions out of my ability to think and to reason and to make decisions. Would most of you agree with that? No? You're not making any emotional decisions? I think you are. I could be wrong. Give me an example. Give me an example. Can you illuminate that? Let me give you an example that will just, this will tighten your screws down on this one. Somebody find Philippians 4, 7 in your Bible. Oh, I've got one here. You can probably get there faster than I can. Philippians 4 7. How many of you'd like to have your hearts and your minds guarded in Christ Jesus? Was that was that text tell you will guard it? In a way your reason won't. Listen to it again. Say it again, Pam. An unreasonable. An unreasonable peace. An incomprehensible peace guards your mind, what is he talking about? In emotion. An overwhelming comfort from God himself in the spirit of God himself. Now you can work that out yourself. But I'm telling you, that's a powerful testimony to the value of your emotional being as a means of doing what? What does it say it's going to do? Guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. So if you ever said, you know, I made that decision because I just had a piece about it. Now, you thought, no, since I've been in this church, I don't say that anymore. Shame on us. Because we do and we should. not as a sole source of truth, not as a primary source of truth, but I'm not going to discount the incomprehensible peace that God can give you or me as a means of guarding our minds and our thoughts toward Him. Right? All right, we have to hurry because we're not even, we haven't got to the class yet. Yeah, we have. This is something that the church articulated when all we spoke in was Latin. So it's taking you back a few centuries, right? The sensus divinitatis. I have a hard time with my Latin. It simply means the sense of the divine. It is the inward persuasion of all people have that directs them to a belief in God and a propensity to worship. While the senses, divinitatis, can contribute to and shape our theology, the information is insufficient to bring a person into a right relationship with God. What is he describing, Michael Patton, what is he describing? You heard it this way probably if you're raising the Bible belt. Every human being has a God-shaped vacuum that yearns to have a relationship with their creator. which was just a modern way of reading you through Romans chapter one. Everybody knows there's a God, and we're drawn toward him in worship, and sin confounds that. Well, what is that? That's an emotional attraction, sense of the divine, and we know we need it. We know we need it. It is sensus divinitatis that the reformers would use to argue against the possibility of a true atheist. They would say, no, all humans, all places, all times have a sense of the divine. And they're talking about an emotional thing, not necessarily a reasonable thing. Of course, we have nature. We've already covered that exhaustively back a few weeks ago. You go back and review that. That's revelation about God given through the created order. rightly understood, we've just now arrived at perfect truth. Because we're talking about things we can learn from God. the Creator where He says, let me show you me here in nature. The heavens declare, right? That's what we're talking about. Perfectly declare. We have a hard time perfectly understanding it, but it declares it perfectly. You're not going to get wrong about God if you examine nature under a microscope or through a telescope. You're going to walk away with an ever-increasing comprehension of a God. It also will not show you the God who can save you. But it will convince you of His divine attributes, Romans 1 says, and you can be absolutely certain that He is through natural revelation. What are its deficiencies? Can't save you. Can't save you. In fact, we've often said it this way, natural revelation is only adequate to condemn you. That's what sends you to hell, because you knew Him and you rejected Him. That's what natural revelation can do. You need divine revelation to find a way back to God. A couple examples, the heavens are telling of the glory of God. Their expanse, look, is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day it pours forth speech, and night to night it reveals knowledge. What does? Nature does. That's what Scripture says. Romans 118, I've already talked about, but you notice it says in verse 20, since the creation of the world, invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature, clearly seen, clearly understood. Through what? Through reason, through emotion, through experience, yes, all those things working together to look at the world as it is, and it reveals God. Romans 2, when Gentiles don't have a law, do things, look, instinctively. They instinctively have a law. It's written on their hearts, and again, we're back to emotions. And their conscience pricks them, right? You've said that? My conscience pricked me. What is that? What are you talking about? You're talking about a feeling. And you need scripture to identify and articulate and point you out of that toward the Savior and toward grace. But notice what it says, their conscience bears witness and their thoughts alternately accuse or defend them. Yes, that's good. No, that's not good. Yes, that's right. No, that's not right. And all of that is just natural revelation through the human conscience that God created and gave to all of us. Finally, we get to Scripture, which we're most familiar with as the revelation of God. But notice this definition, revelation given by God's supernatural intervention in history through Scripture, through miraculous events, through divine speech, through visible manifestations. Why doesn't it just say Scripture? We answered that already. These children of God, these Christians we read about in this book, didn't have this book. They were not lacking in God's special revelation, however, but they were getting it through prophets, the divine, the experiences. And all of those accumulate to produce, inspired by God, what we now call special revelation. But it hasn't always been limited to this, right? Yeah, that's what we understand. OK. Now in your books, you have this, a stage of truth. You've got a little space to write in and around your stage of truth. And here's the goal for the next 8 or 10 minutes, to introduce you to these sources of truth and to challenge you to think, where do I put all these sources? I've tried to build just a small case that they're all valid sources. in different ways, but they're all valid. Where do I put them on my stage of truth? What comes up front and center? Because that's the guy in the spotlight. What's a little farther back? And what's a little farther back? And then you get back in the trombone section, right? Who gets in the very back? The French horn's always in the back. So, you know how important he is. So that's the idea. So I want you to be thinking, first of all, what church history has taught us, what traditions, how they view their stage of truth. But all of this is just not a lesson in history. It's to help you, at the end of the day, to take that blank one, which is in your book and at home by yourself. You build your stage of truth. Because, listen, just this, if experience and emotion has any bearing on how we understand God, everybody's stage of truth is going to be somewhat different because your experiences are different and your emotional makeup is different. So I'm not going to, at the end, give you the dogmatic stage of truth. That's not my goal. My goal is for you to think about how is it you come to understand things about God. All right, so let's put some things on the side before we put them on the stage. And it's just these five or, what is it, six things. Tradition, reason, experience, nature, emotions, and Scripture. Those are our six sources of truth that we're going to build onto our stage and we're going to let ourselves think through history to see how this works. So what does the Roman Catholic stage of truth look like? Just very quickly, and this is borne out later, much later in our other classes, but just for the reference point so you understand, the Roman Catholic Church has a dual source theory of authority. Two sources of final authority regarding truth or the things we know about God. So they are dual source. What goes at the very front of the stage of Roman Catholic stage of truth is tradition and scripture. They would hold them as equal authorities. Scripture wouldn't be at the front and tradition behind it. We'll see that in the reformed perspective. Tradition and scripture are co-equals and in fact with any fair treatment of church history and understanding even of present-day Roman Catholicism, tradition trumps scripture. When we say tradition, in one way we're saying the history of the church, the voice of the church, the authority of the church. And the Roman Catholic dogma is going to consistently repeat, without tradition you cannot know the truth of Scripture. You cannot understand the gospel unless the church tells it to you. So they're going to, if anything, bump tradition a little bit ahead of Scripture. But that's on their stage of truth, close to the front. Behind that, moving back a little bit, is reason. Augustine would have been a good Catholic, and Augustine articulated much in the fourth century about the value of reason. And you would find Augustinian thought shared both by Protestants and Catholics alike. And what you're really arguing for is a reasonable perspective and a logical way to approach an understanding of God. So the Catholics will have reason on their stage of truth. Close behind that is nature. you won't find a distinction between a Protestant Christian scientist and a Catholic Christian scientist. They're approaching science the same way and they're applying reason in their pursuit of understanding. However, I would say that reason and natural revelation and those things coming together I would say scoot a little farther back in Roman Catholicism because really what owns the day is tradition. So while I've got those on the stage of truth, they're probably not that close to the front. They're probably farther back. Last would be experience. The Catholics don't undervalue experience. And if you've ever been to a Catholic worship, it's kind of all about the experience. But really, that's all about tradition. that there's not really imagined anything you gain personally by the experience. What you're gaining is the privilege of being proffered the grace of God through the tradition of the Catholic Church. But what you will not find on the Roman Catholic historical stage of truth is emotions. You're not going to find that as a primary source of truth in Roman Catholic tradition. So now you're thinking through this. The main thing to get out of that is they have a dual source theory of authority. The final authority, the ultimate authority, is not Sola Scriptura. It would be church, tradition, and scripture. Then you get to the Eastern Orthodox stage of truth. They've got all these same sources they can draw from. How does it look? Well, this is what they would say. Tradition in Scripture, much like Roman Catholicism, but experience would be way up front, and really crowding out the other two, because that's the Greek Orthodox means of worship. You go to worship in an Orthodox church to experience God, and from that to know God. They're not so much bound in creeds and confessions and tradition and not a lot of scriptural defense for their convictions. They stand on the experience. And as I mentioned to you a few weeks ago, they're iconic. You'll see art and depictions so that you can experience God. They'll use incense. All of that is an emphasis on knowing God through your experience. You're encountering God is a way that you'll hear Orthodox Theologians, if you call them that, write about the Orthodox faith. It's an encounter with God. One of the challenges to modern day Christianity that you might find yourself tempted toward or lured toward, that word will oftentimes be a yellow flag you should watch for. When people are offering an encounter with God, it may not be bad, it might be a valid experience, which we'll get to, but most of the time they're talking about knowing something about God that you can only learn in this encounter. One of those things that's enjoyed favor and not favor in our community. It's now at an apex. They're advertising heavily on Christian radio, and I actually heard them on a country station is the Emmaus walk the Emmaus community. That's an encounter with God, and there's a lot of aspects of that that are really dangerous. But you'll find that that's a very eastern way of thinking about how we come to know. Natural revelation, sure, not so relevant. What you have with Eastern Orthodoxy is really a rejection of anything dogmatic, and that would include dogmatism and all other areas. They will not have reason on their stage of truth. They will not have emotion on their stage of truth. It doesn't mean they're unreasonable people. I'm just saying when they come to pursue the knowledge of God, it will not be through logic and reason. It will always be through experience, always be through encounter, all right? Protestant Reformation stage of truth. Now, I say that that way because that's the stage of truth, not of Protestantism, but of the period of the Protestant Reformation. This is the stage that Martin Luther would have built. Let me say it that way, or John Calvin. Front and center in the spotlight, Scripture. Sola Scriptura. Not Scripture only, but Scripture as the ultimate authority. We are not, Protestants are not dual theory Dual-source theory of truth, people. We are single-source theory of truth, or single-source theory of authority, and it's Scripture alone. Then you would have tradition and reason. Not crowding the front. And that's what Protestantism, that's what Reformed faith would always do. Don't crowd Scripture with your tradition. Don't crowd Scripture with your reason. You need those, and they support it, but just be sure you keep Scripture in the spotlight. If there's a bright light on the stage, you keep it on Scripture. Let these be in a different light. That's the idea. Nature, what we can learn about God in nature. You'd say, well, why wouldn't it be right up there with tradition and reason? Primarily because we're talking about knowledge about God, and the only knowledge about God that really matters at the end of the day for any of us as sinners is how we can be rightly related with Him, and you can't learn that in nature. But it's an excellent source of truth. It's a dependable source of truth to the degree that it can rightly be interpreted. But as you've learned in your own physical makeup, if you're 50 or older, Right? Science told you how to eat when you were 20. They told you you messed up for 10 years. You got to eat different when you're 30, and then messed that up for 20 years. Now you're 50, and you got to change the way you eat again. So natural revelation can be a little bit, all right, not so dependable because we're failed in our ability to interpret it. We get much more insight into Scripture. Experience would be on the stage of truth, but it's sitting back there with the French horns. All right? Martin Luther would not resist the notion that experience is a source of truth, but be really, really careful. And he would say, test it by natural revelation, test it against church history, test it against reason, and ultimately test it against Scripture. If you've still got anything left, then hold on to it. But you don't have much left, that's what he would say. And that's another way to think of your stage of truth. If I put experience on there, what does experience have to pass through to be validated? And those are the things that are coming in front of it. It's a good way for you to shape your own stage of truth. The liberal stage of truth, by the way, emotion would not be on there, and we'll bring that back on to the stage. I already did that in the definition, but not a lot of value in the Reformers to emotion. You won't really see that until Wesleyanism. Wesley begins to gain some broader appeal. And then the First Great Awakening in the United States, suddenly the Christian church was impacted with the reality of the power of emotion. And then Martin Luther would write his long treatise considering the emotion of the First Great Awakening, what we learned, what we didn't learn, and what was dependable and what isn't dependable. But we're in the 18th century by then. Before that, emotions really isn't considered to be a source of truth. The liberal stage of truth, we talked about liberalism. Reason took front and center. This is the Enlightenment. We can find our way to God just by our reason, by scientific method, by proof. anything else, you're not going to learn anything about God from. Second would be experience, how we are experiencing life, the experiences of our life, our history, the history of science, the history of reason, the history of education. All of these things can shape whatever understanding we might have of God, but really their pursuit wasn't of God, so it didn't really matter. Then you would have emotion. How do you feel about a thing? Always checked by what? By valid experiences. And the broader the experiences, the more valid. And then, of course, apply reason to it. But yes, absolutely, our emotions come to play here. In fact, it was a very emotional thing for the liberals to intentionally walk away from what had before that time been the primary sources of truth defended by the church. Natural revelation is there, but again, it kind of falls away. You're talking about the rise of liberalism coincides with kind of the modernity and into post-modernity, and what we were losing was objective truth. It was reason and thought, but it wasn't looking for an outside source of truth, and that's why tradition and scripture were pushed off the stage. They don't care what the Bible says, and they don't care what the church says. So you push those off, what you pushed off were the most objective sources of truth about God that we have, and they pushed them off the stage. As a reaction to liberalism, Well, let me add charismatic first and then we'll see the fundamentalism. So the charismatic stage of truth, that's a really recent phenomenon. Now, note this in your notebook. You might want to make a circle around it or whatever. Notice what's up front. Present revelation. That's not one of the six. It's not even a part of the ordinary sources of truth that the Christian church has ever defended. Because until the charismatic upheaval, no one was talking about ongoing present revelation from God. Now, they would embrace Scripture, but notice in my stage of truth, I've got present revelation taking priority over Scripture in the charismatic tradition. And that's just a fact. It's a fact in their writings. It's a fact in their worship experiences. They're going to open the same Bible you open, and they're going to believe the same things you believe out of that Bible. But more important than that is what God is saying right now. What God is saying right now in present revelation is more important than Scripture. Why? Because it's relevant. It's happening right now. We heard it. Thus saith the Lord, the prophet stood and said. In the charismatic tradition. Emotion is way up front. Experience is way up front. All these things are crowding the front. They're all trying to share the spotlight. And yes, the Bible's always going to be there. But it's so crowded up there, it's hard to see who's really in the spotlight. Tradition really has fallen off. Reason has fallen off. If you have any charismatic Christian friends, one of the most frustrating things is you can't have a reasonable discussion because they're saying you'd understand if you experienced it. You would understand if you experienced it. You didn't experience it, so we can't talk about it. So there is no reasoning. Natural revelation, that's not really relevant as far as finding anything out about God. And then as a reaction to really liberalism but also charismatic comes the fundamentalist stage of truth. Scripture, Scripture, Scripture. And yes, God's revelation in nature. There is no place for anything else in the stage of truth. All those other things are distractions. They always get us into trouble. We don't need church tradition. We don't need to be reasonable. I'm not interested in your experience, and I sure don't want to care how you feel about it. Scripture, scripture, scripture. Thus says the Lord. Does that make sense? Now, in all of that, that's just kind of a a view of the history of the Christian church and how their stage of truth has looked in various traditions with very little deviance now, in some cases, for many hundreds of years. But we live in a postmodern era, right? We talked about that some weeks ago. What does the postmodern stage of truth look like? It looks like that. There is no source of truth because truth isn't. Pardon? So what's on your stage of truth? How do you come to know and understand what you know and understand about God? You can look at those traditions now and you can learn from them. You can think about your tradition. You might be curious how your elders build their stage of truth. Are they all the same? I'll tell you, your elders aren't all the same as it regards how close to the front or how far to the back they might put emotion, for instance. or they might put their experiences. What you will find unanimously in this church is that Scripture and Scripture alone is the sole source of all things pertaining to life and godliness. That does not mean Scripture only, but you should never be confused about what's in the spotlight when it comes to how we come to know what we know about God. Any questions? Eric? Primarily, yes. Coptic Christian is another way, by the way, just to help you. You hear that term, there's persecution over there. It's another way of saying simply Egyptian Christians. It's Christianity born out of the Alexandrian bishopric. We saw that on your map. and right away was overtaken early on by Islam. So right away it lost its roots and became that area, Alexandria. Egypt became predominantly Muslim and there was no remaining bastion or defender of Christian truth. And you'll remember then the Crusades come in, and we need Antioch, we need to preserve Constantinople, we certainly want to preserve Jerusalem. There was never a crusade to try to regain Alexandria. It was kind of surrendered. But there has always been, we would argue, a legitimate Christian faith there. But if you study anything, you can Google it, it's pretty simple. The history of Coptic Christianity, i.e. Egyptian Christianity, lacks an awful lot of articulation of the essentials of the Christian faith. By any measure, they would be much more Eastern Orthodox than Roman Catholic and much more of both of those than they would be Protestant. Be very difficult if you're just asking me, you know, as a tradition, are Coptic Christians Christian? I would say no, they aren't. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tradition that suffers under the lack of a strong church, essentially, a strong defense of an articulation of the gospel in its midst. By the way, this will help you. Maybe, maybe it doesn't, but understand when you think about Christian persecution, and I want to mention that because I meant to earlier. I'll come back to that, but so remind me. I'll let you go. It's 10 after, but I want to mention persecution. But back to this. You read about Christian persecution, voice of the martyrs, those kind of things, trying to be aware of so much Christian persecution, so many Christians dying, more Christians dying in the 20th century than in all the other 19th centuries combined. These are facts that you hear propagated. I would not argue against those, but you do have to ask, what kind of Christian is it that's being persecuted? because the vast majority of them are not, by our standards of Protestant gospel faith, Christian. Now that's one statement, but another statement has to be made. The ones persecuting them don't know that. So they are suffering persecution as Christians, albeit maybe they're not even Christians. And that's a unique anomaly. So I still think there's great benefit for us to be aware of Christian persecution as it regards the persecutor. They think they're persecuting Christ, but oftentimes it's not Christians actually that are being persecuted. It's because they call themselves Christians or they're identified as Christians. If Christian persecution reaches into America, you think they'll attack Utah? They will because Mormons say they're Christians. They're not going to exclude Mormons, but we wouldn't say Mormons are Christians. So that's what's happening in persecution. But let's end here because this will help you with experience and emotions. Open your Bibles real quickly. To Romans Chapter 5. And I'll dismiss you right after this. I'm picking on these things because I think we tend to diminish it. Look at verse three. But let's look at verse two. Through Christ, we've obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Right. That's faith through Scripture, confident, rebel and confident in the divine revelation. Now, look, not only that, Not only that, not the only source. Look what he says. But we rejoice in our sufferings. Now what are we talking about? Experience. What else are we talking about? Emotions. If you don't feel suffering, you're not. With me? All right, so that's experience and emotions. So not only The divine revelation of the truth of the gospel by which we stand and in which we hope. Not only that, you see it? We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering, emotional experiences produces endurance. And endurance produces character. And character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Everything after verse 3, not only that, is experience and emotion. Every bit of it is. And what is it shaping in the believer? Character, confidence, hope. All right? So, great defense for those of you thinking through this, that honors Scripture alone, but understands not Scripture only, not Scripture only, not only that. Do you hear him say that? Not only that. Go over to James real quick, and I said I'll end there. I'm ending in this thought, but I need another text, just in case you think that's an isolated thing. Find James chapter 1 and look at verse 2. You know this. Some of you can count it, I mean, can quote it. What does it say? Count it all joy." What is that? Emotions. Emotions born out of what? When you meet trials of various kinds. Feel the experience. You say, Steve, man, you're in the wrong church. No, James is saying what? Feel the experience. And feel it this way. Feel this emotion. when you experience this trial. What does he want you to feel? Joy. I want you to feel this way about this trial. Look what he says. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. John MacArthur is fond of saying you do not know what you believe until it's been tested. So here we are as Christians and we say I'll stand or fall on what I believe. Well, has it been tested? James says, That faith needs to be tested. How? Through the emotional experiences of life. That's how he tests it. It's not finished. Look what he says. And the testing will produce steadfastness. Where does a Christian stand? We say we stand on scripture alone. We stand on the gospel. We stand on the validated, undeniable truth of Jesus Christ. Yes, you stand there. Be careful lest you fall. How do I keep from falling? You need to feel life. You need to experience God's providence in sometimes painful ways, and you'll stand more firm. Do you see that? It produces steadfastness. And then let steadfastness have its full effect. Well, what might that be? Sanctification. Perfect, complete, and lacking in nothing. So let me in there, because I think that's the area that challenges our thinking most as you build your stage of truth. Please, please, please do not kick emotion and experiences off of it. You need it. We all need it. You have been listening to Pastor and Bible Teacher Steve Wilson of Grace Community Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We trust you have been encouraged and challenged by this message. If you would like to listen to more of Pastor Wilson's messages or obtain more information on the ministry of Grace Community Church, you can go to our website at gccbg.com. That's gccbg.com or call 270-781-2595. Yeah.