Is Preaching the Word of God? Further Comments

"There is no ambiguity in the Calvinistic position.  The Word of God is the sixty-six books of the Bible."  Dr. Gordon H. Clark.

Back in May I posted a short response to Mark Beach, who contends that preaching is the Word of God.  I remembered reading something that Dr. Gordon H. Clark said in response to this.  Clark's remarks appear in his book on the Westminster Confession of Faith, titled, What Do Presbyterians Believe?  The book is only available through the Trinity Foundation website.  I do not endorse everything the Trinity Foundation posts or promotes, but the Trinity Foundation is the only place where Dr. Clark's books are still in print.

Clark contends that the Word of God must be defined, and the definition matters very much.  According to Clark, the Romanists or Roman Catholics tried to add the apocryphal books to the Jewish canon of Scripture, being only thirty-nine books.  His short remarks in the book clearly disagree with Mark Beach:

As it was then, so for us now, it is necessary to define the Word of God.  Not only are the Romanists still with us, but other views are offered as substitutes for the Biblical position.  Karl Barth, previously mentioned, has a chapter on The Word of God in Its Three-fold Form.

For him the first form of the Word of God is the Sunday sermon.  And it must be admitted that we do speak of a good sermon as the preaching of the Word of God.  The second form for Barth is the Bible.  This is a higher form because the Apostles, in spite of their mistakes, knew more than we do.  Then there is a third and higher form.  But if anyone wants to puzzle out what it is, he will have to read Church Dogmatics for himself.  At any rate, we today, as well as the Reformers, need to know what various writers and various religions mean by the phrase the Word of God.  There is no ambiguity in the Calvinist position.  The Word of God is the sixty-six books of the Bible.  

Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  What Do Presbyterians Believe?  The Westminster Confession Yesterday and Today.   1965.  Second edition.  (Unicoi:  Trinity Foundation, 2001).  P. 13.

Unfortunately, Mark Beach is not the only neo-Calvinist who is pushing certain neo-orthodox views.  Michael Horton advocates the speech act theory of preaching as his version of the neo-orthodox doctrine of preaching.  The Gospel Coalition is also pushing this neo-orthodox view of preaching as if the Bible is not propositional revelation.  Instead they assert that preaching is literally a re-illocution of what God said to and through the original prophets and apostles.  This is not just a minor departure from the Reformed and confessional view of the Bible.  This is an in your face and direct contradiction of the view that the Bible is a propositional revelation from God and that the very words of Scripture are breathed out by God.  (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19-21).  

It is true that the Second Helvetic Confession, written by Heinrich Bullinger, says that preaching the Word of God is the Word of God:

THE PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD IS THE WORD OF GOD. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library:  The Second Helvetic Confession.

However, if you open the link and read what the actual confession says, clearly Bullinger defines the Bible as the Word of God and that preaching is an expository explanation of the text, not itself a divinely inspired and inerrant re-elocution of another revelation from God:

CHAPTER I

Of The Holy Scripture Being The True

Word of God

CANONICAL SCRIPTURE. We believe and confess the canonical Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles of both Testaments to be the true Word of God, and to have sufficient authority of themselves, not of men. For God himself spoke to the fathers, prophets, apostles, and still speaks to us through the Holy Scriptures.

And in this Holy Scripture, the universal Church of Christ has the most complete exposition of all that pertains to a saving faith, and also to the framing of a life acceptable to God; and in this respect it is expressly commanded by God that nothing be either added to or taken from the same.  

(Ibid.). 

Bullinger is also rejecting what is normally called the Donatist controversy.  Under persecution in the early centuries of the church, many Christians and ministers denied the faith outwardly to avoid being martyred or persecuted.  He was not advocating a Barthian view of preaching whatsoever.

Postmodernism has infiltrated just about every area of modern life, including journalism.  One has to ask, what is truth?  Journalism itself used to be about making the attempt to report only the facts and to leave opinions and the formation of opinions to the reader.  Now in so-called Reformed churches we are told that preaching is the Word of God.  But do they mean the same thing that Bullinger meant in his day?  Or are they somehow moving the goal posts?  Clearly, Bullinger was upholding the preaching of the Bible itself as a non-negotiable necessity for the outward and general call of the Gospel.  The papists or Romanists of his day apparently denied this because for them the center of the worship and liturgy was the mass, not the preaching of the Gospel.

Another symptom of this move away from the Bible as the sole authority in all matters of faith and practice is the advocation of so-called post-reformation dogmatics as espoused by the magisterium of neo-Calvinist theologians, the chief of whom is allegedly Dr. Robert Muller.  But is this not an appeal to an outside authority or secondary authority in addition to the Bible?  Worse, is it not a fallacy of appealing to authority as an interpretative grid through which the Bible is read and the Reformed confessions are to be understood?

We are told by these experts in ivory towers that we should listen to them instead of reading and studying the Bible for ourselves.  But Scripture tells us that the Jewish Bereans searched the Scriptures to see if the things Paul was saying were true according to the Old Testament canon:  

“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11 KJV)

Another problem with the modern neo-Calvinist Evangelicals is that they have rejected the former Evangelical views of Old Princeton and instead have modified them; they reject what they call fundamentalism.  This is another subtle equivocation because the fundamentalists of the early part of the twentieth century were the Evangelicals of their day.  It looks like definitions matter once again.  

Ironically, they claim to be Calvinists, yet claim that Muller's liberal views on post-reformation dogmatics are the interpretative grid through which we are to read Scripture.  According to Muller, the post-reformation Reformers were way more generous to opposing views, and the post-reformation dogmatics were much more broad.  Muller does lots of name dropping with prolific opinion pieces written as if his opinion of the various schools of thought at the time is actually the case.  He appeals not only to the most well known post-reformation scholars of the period, but also to many obscure figures.  Unfortunately, the writings of the more obscure post-reformation scholars are unavailable to the general public or to the laity or even independent scholars; most of what Muller says is to be taken at his word unless you happen to have a library of the classical scholastics at hand.  

Moreover, Muller openly disagrees with the Westminster Standards and even the Three Forms of Unity at several points, claiming that the post-reformation traditions were much more latitudinarian, etc.  But how does admitting that there could have been a downgrading of the original Reformers' initial theological positions prove that we should also depart from the later Reformed confessions and accept Amyraldianism and other heresies?

I, for one, prefer to stay with a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible and the Reformed confessions.  You will often hear the neo-Calvinists advocate for covenantal theology and the central place of Christ in Reformed theology and the Bible.  Of course, no one would object to this, right?  The problem, once again, is that they have redefined the Reformed confessions and the Bible to fit with their modern sensibilities.  After all, double predestination does not fit well with their views on common grace and their implicit and tacit approval of Amyraldianism.  The fact of the matter is that they assert that they approve of the Reformed confessions, while actually disagreeing with what the confessions plainly deduce from the Bible by good and necessary consequence.  

Any plowboy can read the Bible and understand that God is sovereign, yet they wish to emphasize justification by faith alone as the central doctrine of the Bible.  It is not.  While the doctrine of justification is indeed one of the main issues between the Reformers and the Romanists or Papists, it is not the only issue.  Without predestination and providence, the doctrine of the eternal covenant of God with the elect is nonsense.  These purveyors of modern pragmatism claim to oppose the church growth movement and pragmatism, while doing the same thing themselves.  They will appeal to the over-arching metanarrative of the Bible instead of affirming the propositions in Scripture; these propositions can be harmonized into a system of propositional truth and a systematic theology which is deduced from the Bible.   They give lip service to doctrine while making emotional appeals to "Christ the center" and "covenantal" theology; at the same time they attack conservative and fundamentalist Reformed believers as "biblicists" who quote the Bible out of context, while quoting the Bible out of context themselves.  I suppose that the Westminster divines and the Dutch reformers were biblicists as well, since they gave proof texts from the Bible to substantiate what they were saying?

Another problem is that they reject the doctrines of sanctification and assurance as if they were mere afterthoughts.  (WCF chapters 13 and 18). The neo-Calvinists claim that they do not ignore those doctrines while almost never mentioning them.  The purpose of justification does involve assurance since without it we could never attain assurance in the first place.  However, that is not always apparent at conversion, and often the new believer will struggle with habitual sin until he or she attains assurance.  In fact, it is possible to have saving faith without having attained assurance of salvation.  But if the purpose of justification is not to make us good, is it to make us comfortable in habitual sin, giving us a license to sin all that we please?  I think not. The purpose of justification is the consequential other graces.  Justification is not a stand-alone doctrine which is not part of the golden chain of salvation; justification is not necessarily the center of the system of theology taught in the Scriptures.  

All of the words of God in the Bible are profitable for doctrine, not just pet doctrines designed to draw more people to church; this would be just another form of the church growth pragmatism that they claim to oppose, while doing it themselves.  (2 Timothy 3:16 KJV; Acts 20:26-28 KJV).  The point of the Bible is truth, not pragmatism.  Thy Word is truth.  (John 17:17 KJV).