Week 18 (2025): A Sampling of What I Read & Listened To
May 4, 2025 by Shane Becker

To read: books

• A Biblical Counseling Process: Guidance for the Beginning, Middle, and End by Lauren Whitman

• Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity by Carl Trueman

  • “In subscribing to a confession and in reciting a creed in corporate worship, we acknowledge that our age does not have all the answers and that we as churches stand upon foundations laid down by our ancestors in the faith. That is important in promoting humility, in reminding us that we are merely the latest stewards in a line of witnesses charged with passing on the apostolic faith to the next generation.”

  • “I do want to make the point here that Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique, and those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation, and, crucially and ironically, not therefore subject to testing by Scripture to see whether they are true.”

  • This is one of the reasons why theology cannot simply be done by reading the Bible: the fine-tuning of concepts and vocabulary is a cumulative and traditionary exercise. This does not mean the results are not biblical, in the sense of being consistent with what the Bible teaches or useful as explanatory devices for understanding the Bible; but it does mean that one will search in vain in the Bible for the terms “Trinity,” “substance,” or “hypostasis,” for example—or, for that matter, “conversion experience,” “personal relationship with Jesus,” “missional,” “relational,” and “No creed but the Bible!”

  • Creeds solve one set of problems, but by doing so generate new vocabulary and raise novel questions for the biblical text that then need to be resolved. This is not to say that truth changes over time; but it is to say that the manner and terms in which truth is expressed, along with some of the questions asked, do change. Historical theology, the genealogy of doctrinal discussion and formulation, is thus an important part of Christian education and should be part of every pastor’s and elder’s background. It should also be a central part of the teaching ministry in all churches.

• Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken by David Powlison

• “Our culture earnestly tells us that the desires we discover within ourselves define us. Scripture is more realistic. By impulse, orientation, inclination, tendency, habit, and instinct, our desires mislead us.” 

• “The ‘Who cares, what’s the use?’ attitude is a powerful behavior-altering drug.”

To read: essays, articles, and newsletters

• Redemptive History & the Attributes of Scripture by Nathan Shannon 

• “There is no court of authentication in which God may be required to vindicate or explain himself, since the Lord is the judge of judges and the king of kings. There is no measure of veridicality by which the trustworthiness of Scripture ought to be evaluated. Notice that to appeal to an external authority even in positive defense of the trustworthiness of Scripture is to subject Scripture to that external authority; this is to treat Scripture as less than divine. This subjugation—again, even in defense of Scripture—re-arranges the structure of Christian epistemology at ground level, and it violates the most basic fact of Christian religion: the unqualified ontological supremacy of God a se.”

• Common Grace, Knowing People, and the Biblical Counselor by Ed Welch

• Common Grace in Debate: A Response to Edward T. Welch’s “Common Grace, Knowing People, and the Biblical Counselor” by Francine Tan

• The Tenderness Trap by Jim Newheiser

To watch, listen to:

• What Every Woman Should Know About Her Body by Katie Vidmar

  • “51% of abortion patients of the United States reported that they used a contraceptive method in the month that they became pregnant… they studied and found that 14-19 year olds if they had a prescription for hormonal contraception, they were ten times as more likely to have an abortion than their non-contracepting peers… By the time they turn 20, 40% of American women have been pregnant at least once."

• https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/what-god-has-joined-together-let-not-man-separate-part-1 by John Piper

  • “Marriage among Christians is mainly meant to tell the truth about the gospel. Does your marriage tell the truth about the way Christ loves, keeps, perseveres, is patient, endures, dies?”

• https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/what-god-has-joined-together-let-not-man-separate-part-2 by John Piper

Quotes from: "Redemptive History & the Attributes of Scripture" by Nathan Shannon
March 10, 2025 by Shane Becker

https://reformedforum.org/redemptive-history-attributes-scripture/

Nate Shannon employs a Vosian view to the coordination of nature and Scripture. He argues that the four attributes of Scripture–Authority, Necessity, Perspicuity, and Sufficiency–overlap and are inseperable. Here are a few quotes worth turning back to:
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I. Authority of Scripture

“The authority of Scripture is Scripture’s self-authentication, self-attestation, or self-attested trustworthiness (Bavinck’s term). To affirm the authority of Scripture is to affirm that Scripture bears authority because it is the word of God, and additionally to affirm its uniqueness on this count. Scripture alone is self-authenticating or self-attesting—because no one bestows authority upon God, nor is divine authority subject to authentication by a third party… Scripture has divine authority because it is the Word of God, because its primary author is God… Self-attestation means that the authority of Scripture is of a distinct category, not an exceptional degree—not more but another kind of authority. The implication of Scripture’s uniqueness as the very speech of God is that it is self-attesting… When God speaks, no one asks for his ID. There is no need. There is no court of authentication in which God may be required to vindicate or explain himself, since the Lord is the judge of judges and the king of kings. There is no measure of veridicality by which the trustworthiness of Scripture ought to be evaluated. Notice that to appeal to an external authority even in positive defense of the trustworthiness of Scripture is to subject Scripture to that external authority; this is to treat Scripture as less than divine. This subjugation—again, even in defense of Scripture—re-arranges the structure of Christian epistemology at ground level, and it violates the most basic fact of Christian religion: the unqualified ontological supremacy of God a se… we affirm that if God says it, it is true; and by the nature of the case, that is, according to Christian-theistic principia (versus subjective, univocal, empiricist principia), God’s speech is not subject to external authentication of any kind. Scripture attests to its own authority. Thus maintaining consistently the coordination of our ontology with our method leads to a sound notion of the self-attestation of Scripture.”

I. a. Self-attestation and the church

On the ecclesial side, it is important to affirm a proper church-Scripture prioritization: the self-authenticating Scripture precedes and gives existence to the church… We might say that Rome treats its recognition as bestowal; the Reformed, by contrast, as ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘confession’. But however we nuance the terminology, the Roman church holds that the ‘community’, or the church, is endowed with revelatory authority, and that this communal endowment precedes the authority of the Scriptures… 

I. b. Self-authentication and the individual believer

The individual dimension of self-authentication also deserves attention. How do you know that the Bible is the word of God? … there is a difference between a motive for believing and the final ground for faith… Objectively speaking, Scripture bears unique, intrinsic authority, reflecting the authority and even the ontological uniqueness of God himself. On account of this authority, the Bible ought to be believed. But subjectively, the individual Christian is often led by the Spirit to recognize the authority of Scripture by means of various kinds—ordinary means, in most cases, such as the testimony of the church… Bavinck puts it this way:

“The church with its dignity, power, hierarchy, and so forth always made a profound impression on Augustine. It continually moved him toward faith, supported and strengthened him in times of doubt and struggle; it was the church’s firm hand that always again guided him to Scripture. But Augustine does not thereby mean to say that the authority of Scripture depends on the church, that the church is the final and most basic ground of faith. Elsewhere he clearly states that Scripture has authority of itself and must be believed for its own sake.”

‘How do you know that the Bible is the word of God?’ is an ambiguous question. It means either (or both), how did you come to believe that? and on what grounds should it be believed? I might answer: “I was indeed moved by the testimony of the church, the power of preaching, and by the efficacy of the Scripture’s teaching—that is, by the real change that I saw in people and experienced in myself, wrought by the teaching of the Bible. But ultimately God changed my heart so that I see in the Bible the very words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

II. Necessity

II.b. Soteric necessity

"The Lord’s response to sin, by his uncompelled, de-merited favor, is the crushing of the incarnate Son on our behalf. We see on the cross both grace and judgment, or grace through judgment. In the same way, Scripture itself as redemptive word represents the soterically necessary judging and redeeming interruption of the sinner’s interpretive self-worship."

III. Perspicuity

"So the Reformed insist that Scripture is perspicuous, or clear, and this much is implied by the necessity of Scripture, as we have understood it. We affirmed above that Scripture is necessary for the faithful preservation of the apostolic teaching, and even for salvation itself. How ‘necessary’ for such purposes could a text be if it were opaque and impenetrable? If the Bible were unclear, it could not possibly be necessary, much less the ordained means for the faithful preservation and propagation of the gospel. So in one sense to say that Scripture is intelligible is simply to affirm an implication of its necessity.

Notice also that there is named nowhere in Scripture an authoritative interpreter of created nature. The final section of WCF chapter 1 affirms what is an implication of this generally accessibility, that the Bible neither names nor needs a designated, authoritative interpreter. So WCF 1.10 subjugates all competing voices, “all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits,” to Scripture, and to the pious interpretation of Scripture by individual regenerate Christians, interpreting Scripture with the aid of the regenerating Holy Spirit, or more cautiously, “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”

… So in light of perspicuity, theologico-epistemological priority falls to the plain, self-interpreted meaning of Scripture. God reveals himself in fisherman’s Greek, without the need of an erudite interpreter—indeed, despite the erudite interpreter (1 Cor 1:18–31)."

IV. Sufficiency

"Sufficient does not mean comprehensive; it is not the case that everything the church will ever need—articles of government or organization, for example—can be found in the Bible… Nor is Scripture an encyclopedia of apostolic or prophetic deeds and utterances. Much is left unrecorded (Jn 20:30, 21:25). Nor does it mean that the Bible an the exhaustive collection of inspired writings. We know that apostolic writings have been lost, and there is no reason to deny the possibility that some of this may have been inspired. But all that is needed for salvation is contained in Scripture; all truth necessary for eschatological peace with God and consummate covenant communion with our Creator and judge is given in Scripture.

…Notice the implication of sufficiency for confessionalism: the stark distinction between authoritative, divinely inspired revelation and ‘authoritative’ human tradition, between the ‘norming norm’ and the ‘normed norm’, is affirmed in our confession. The Westminster Confession is self-limiting. The confession includes a list of the books of the Bible (1.2) as the closed (1.6) canon of inspired and authoritative biblical texts, and specifically excludes the apocrypha (1.3). The confession affirms the authority of Scripture over all traditions of men (1.10) and relegates those things not addressed in or by Scripture to “Christian prudence and the light of nature” (1.6). So the confession itself gives us a clear philosophy of confessionalism, in which secondary literature is subordinated to the canonical Scriptures; and it offers even this very notion of tradition as part of its summary of the teaching of Scripture. In this sense the confession is aware of its own secondary status and of that status as established by the Bible."