The Character of God

With respect to “Apostolic Succession,” one Roman Catholic provided this chain of events:

God the Father passed His authority on to Jesus (cf. Matthew 28:18), Who passed it on to the apostles (cf. Luke 10:16 and Matthew 28:19), who passed it on to their successors.

Before we begin to believe assertions like that one, we need to begin at the beginning, and work to understand “what we’ve known (as humans) and when we’ve known it.”

John Frame, in his two works, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing ©2002) and The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing ©1987), is very helpful in understanding both “God the Father” and “His authority” from a biblical perspective.

Knowing God
There is a very pious-sounding thread that runs through Christian theology known as apophatic theology, which, in simple terms, may be defined:

(from Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι - apophēmi, "to deny")—also known as Negative theology or Via Negativa (Latin for "Negative Way")—is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.

Further, “In Orthodox theology, apophatic theology is taught as superior to cataphatic [positive] theology. While Aquinas felt positive and negative theology should be seen as dialetical correctives to each other [that is, “logically reasoned through the exchange of opposing ideas”], like thesis and antithesis producing a synthesis, Lossky argues, based on his reading of Dionysius and Maximus Confessor, that positive theology is always inferior to negative theology, a step along the way to the superior knowledge attained by negation. This is expressed in the idea that mysticism is the expression of dogmatic theology par excellence.”

There’s that faker, Pseudo-Dionysius, informing leading Orthodox theologians of what’s the right way to understand things.

Frame puts this into perspective. He says, “Scripture does teach that God is incomprehensible in a sense…. But it never denies God’s knowability. Scripture never suggests that the human mind is incapable of knowing God or that human language is incapable of speaking truly about him. Nor does it distinguish one aspect of God (his inner essence) from other aspects (his attributes and acts) and deny us knowledge of the former. Indeed, the covenant presence of God implies we cannot escape knowing him, for we cannot know anything else apart from him” (Doctrine of God, 110).

Scripture teaches that God has made himself known to man. This revelation is universal and clear. As we have seen, man’s ignorance of God is a culpable ignorance. As Paul says,

what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)

And, beyond this revelation through nature, God has revealed himself through prophets, apostles, and biblical writers, creating a definitive written revelation, the covenant constitution of the people of God….(Doctrine of God, 200).

Frame here begins a section discussing what is “knowable and known” about God, and yet is “mysterious, wondrous, and incomprehensible.”

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law. (Deut 29:29)

He concludes from this and other passages that “the biblical writers never see the incomprehensibility of God as detracting from the reliability or authority of his revelation. The mysteriousness of God is never the basis of a general agnosticism. God’s revelation is mysterious, but it is a genuine revelation.”

My approach rejects the broad assertions of agnosticism that are often found in theological works.\... We should not press the way of remotion (via negativa), as did pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Erigena (but not Aquinas), to say that we can know only what God is not, not what he is. Negative statements by themselves are useless: for example, one can know a thousand things what a Siberian husky is not, without having any useful knowledge of what he is.

Nor should we accept the claims of more recent thinkers who have described God as “wholly hidden” or “wholly other.” This kind of general agnosticism is foreign to Scripture. The Lord of Scripture is not wholly hidden. He is knowable and known to all through nature, and his revelation in Scripture is perfectly adequate to its purpose. (Doctrine of God, 205-6).

The Authority of God
This is where God’s authority comes in. We can know God’s authority, and as Frame immediately follows, “As we have seen, Scripture tells us that God is the ultimate controller, and that we are his possession, not the other way around. The more we meditate on this clear revelation, the more it rebukes our pride, our claims to self-sufficiency. It is those who deny this revelation, preferring to think of God autonomously, who seek dominance over their Creator. Nor is clear revelation opposed to grace. Rather, it is itself a gift of grace, and it sets forth consistently the message that we have nothing and are nothing, except for God’s grace” (Doctrine of God, 206).

Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God begins by describing “God, the Covenant Lord.” The Old Testament in fact is extraordinarily clear that God Himself stresses that He is in charge, that he is jealous of His own authority, and He actively works to assert it.

What follows is thick with Scripture references, but thanks to Reftagger, it should be easy just to mouse-over and see what these references say about God and the authority which Roman Catholics wrongly assert ended up in the hands of the popes:

Who is this God that we seek to know? Scripture describes Him in many ways, and it is dangerous to seize on any of them as being more basic or more important than others. In seeking to summarize Scripture’s teachings, however, we can certainly do worse than to use the concept of divine “lordship” as our point of departure.

“Lord”(Yahweh in Hebrew) is the name by which God identified himself at the beginning of His covenant with Israel (Exodus 3:13-15; 6:1-8; 20:1f.). It is the name (Kurios in Greek) that has been given to Jesus Christ as head of the New Covenant, as head of His redeemed body (John 8:58; Acts 2:36; Romans 14:9). The fundamental confession of faith of both testaments confess God—Christ—as Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4ff; Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Philippians 2:11). God performs His mighty acts “that you may know that I am the Lord” (cf. Exodus 7:5, 17; 8:10, 22; 9:14, 29f.; 10:2; 14:4, 18; 16:12; Isaiah 49:23, 26; 60:16); Psalms 83:18, 91:14; Isaiah 43:3, 52:6; Jeremiah 16:21, 33:2, Amos 5:8).

At critical points in redemptive history, God announces “I am the Lord, I am he” (Isaiah 41:3, 43:10-13, 25, 44:6, 48:12; cf. Isaiah 26:4-8, 46:3f.; Deuteronomy 32:39f, 43; Psalm 135:13; Hosea 12:4-9, 13:4ff, Malachi 3:6, which allude to Exodus 3:13-15). In such passages, not only “Lord” but also the emphasis on the verb “to be” recall the name-revelation of Exodus 3:14. Jesus also frequently alludes to the “I am” in presenting His own character and office (John 4:6, 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19, 18:5ff; cf. John 6:48, 8:12, 9:5, 10:7, 14; 11:25, 12:46, 15:1, 5). One of the most remarkable testimonies to Jesus’ deity is the way in which He and His disciples identified Him with Yahweh of Exodus 3—a name so closely associated with God that at one point the Jews became afraid even to pronounce it.

To summarize those points, throughout redemptive history, God seeks to identify himself to men as Lord and to teach and to demonstrate to them the meaning of that concept. “God is Lord”—that is the message of the Old Testament; Jesus Christ is Lord”—that is the message of the New (Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 11-12).

“As controller and authority, God is “absolute,” that is, His power and wisdom are beyond any possibility of successful challenge,” Frame says. When a Roman Catholic says “God the Father passed His authority on to Jesus (cf. Matthew 28:18), Who passed it on to the apostles (cf. Luke 10:16 and Matthew 28:19), who passed it on to their successors,” what is he truly saying?

Sola Scriptura As Against Division

We're often told that sola Scriptura is a "blueprint for anarchy." Yet here John Frame utilizes the sola Scriptura principle to produce something of an opposite result:

Remarkably, Scripture itself never says that believers should leave a church organization and form a new one because of false teaching. Israel in the Old Testament was often guilty of idolatry. Revivals of true worship occurred from time to time, but the nation, including the religious establishment, relapsed. After the exile, the Scribes and Pharisees represented movements toward religious purity; but Jesus said they "shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces" (Matt. 23:13) and made each proselyte "twice as much a child of hell as yourselves" (verse 15). They are "full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (verse 28). Jesus says that God will judge these religious leaders (verses 32-36), a threat fulfilled in the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.

But nowhere in the Old Testament, nor in Jesus' teaching, does God command believers to abandon Israel and to form a new nation, church, or denomination. God himself brings a separation between the followers of Christ and Judaism, when the synagogues expel Christians from their fellowship, and when the temple is destroyed. But there is no exhortation in the New Testament for Jewish Christians voluntarily to leave the synagogues. Rather, it is assumed that believers, like the apostles, will bear witness within the synagogues to God’s grace in Christ, as long as they are able to do so. This was the practice of the apostle Paul, who preached the gospel in the synagogues wherever he traveled.

As we have seen, there is doctrinal and practical corruption in the New Testament church as well. But again, the apostles do not call on believers to leave their churches and form new ones because of corruption. Rather, the churches themselves are to take action against it (as 1 Cor. 5:1-13). Even the church at Laodicaea, which Jesus threatens to spit out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16), is still a church (verse 14), and Jesus does not counsel true believers to leave it. Rather, he tells the whole church to repent.

The apostolic church of the New Testament is not a voluntary association. Every believer is joined to it in the body of Christ. That church is both organism and organization: it is a body, held together by the Spirit, and it is an organization, ruled by apostles, prophets, elders, and deacons. Where disputes exist, there is an orderly pattern for resolving them (Matt. 18:15-20) including provision for excommunication (verse 17, 1 Cor. 5) in extreme cases. Rightly appointed leaders are to be obeyed (Heb. 13:17). So in the first century nobody had the right to leave the apostolic church and start a new denomination (The Doctrine of the Christian Life [P & R Publishing, 2008], 399-400).

Frame has much more to say on this issue, but this suffices for the point at hand.

(Interested readers can request a larger excerpt from this chapter by e-mail. The address is located on my blogger profile.)

Defining Perspicuity

In light of a recent discussion with Matthew Bellisario, here is Frame on the perspicuity of Scripture:

29. The Clarity of Scripture

Discussions of Scripture in Reformed theology have often included reflection on certain "attributes" of Scripture, particularly necessity, authority, clarity (or "perspicuity"), and sufficiency....

It is therefore the doctrine of biblical clarity that will occupy our attention in this chapter. The Westminster Confession of Faith formulates this doctrine as follows at 1.7:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

This is a carefully nuanced statement, with important qualifications. It is directed against the attempts in the Roman Catholic Church of the time to keep the laity from studying Scripture on their own. The Roman Church feared that if laymen were to interpret Scripture for themselves, they would come up with unorthodox, even bizarre interpretations of it. That fear, as we can now observe, was not groundless.

However, Scripture itself (as in Deut. 8:3; Ps. 19:7; 119; Matt. 4:4) says that God’s written word is for everybody. We live by it. The Confession, of course, agrees. Nevertheless, the Confession’s statement does not encourage autonomous or lawless Bible study. It does not make every layman an expert in Scripture. It recognizes that not every part of Scripture is equally clear to everybody. Laymen, indeed all Christians, need to watch their step in studying the Bible. There are mysteries in Scripture beyond anyone’s understanding, and there are many things in Scripture that we cannot understand without more knowledge of the languages of Scripture and its cultural background.

So, the Confession also says that those who would study Scripture should be humble enough to seek help. The kind of Bible study it recommends is not individualistic. One should make "due use of the ordinary means." Those ordinary means include the church’s preaching and teaching. That teaching is not, however, as in the Roman church, an inflexible set of conclusions with which all Bible students must agree. Rather, it seeks to guide believers into paths by which we can progress in our knowledge of God, even beyond the levels attained by our teachers.

Prayer and the Holy Spirit are also means available to every Christian in Bible study. Involvement with God himself, the author of Scripture, draws us toward a greater understanding of the truth. So our understanding of Scripture is not directly proportional to the amount of education we have. It is for "not only the learned, but the unlearned."

A further qualification is that this level of clarity does not apply to everything in Scripture. It pertains to "those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation." Now in this book, I have opposed distinctions between "matters of salvation" and "matters of cosmology, history, and science" in several contexts. In Chapter 24, 25, and 27 I have opposed the idea that Scripture’s purpose is redemptive in a narrow sense, so that it is not authoritative on other matters, and I will make similar points in regard to the Comprehensiveness and Sufficiency of Scripture. I do not think that Scripture’s purpose can be defined that narrowly, and, given the nature of salvation in Scripture, I don’t think it is possible to draw a sharp line in Scripture between "matters of salvation" and other matters.

Nevertheless, there is a legitimate distinction to be drawn within Scripture between what a person is required to know for salvation and what he is not. Nobody would claim, for example, that a person will go to Hell if he does not understand the difference between guilt offerings and trespass offerings in Leviticus. These are certainly "matters of salvation," but they are not matters one must know in order to be saved. So the Confession is not making the sort of distinction I have been opposing. I would say that everything in Scripture is a "matter of salvation," i.e. significantly related to salvation. But a person can be saved even if he does not know or understand some things in the Bible. The clarity of Scripture pertains to those fundamentals that constitute a credible profession of Christ.

(Source.)