The first one is dealing with the subject. Do we really need the early church? And this is what the listener wrote in. They said, " I understand that you argue for the value of using the consensus of the early church understanding of Scripture to double-check our reading. I also understand your point that many people read the Bible with biases about what it teaches. " I agree.
Some may hear what you are saying, however, and think that you're arguing that it's necessary to consult the early church to arrive at truth. They would argue that God is ready and willing to lead all people who sincerely seek Him for the truth, and that He primarily does so by the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. The question continues, how would you respond to this reasoning?
How would you advise people to discuss doctrinal matters with Christians who are uninterested with the beliefs of figures in church history and want any doctrine to be established on the Bible alone? If the early church writings disappeared tomorrow, how would you seek the truth and guide others to it? Okay, this was an excellent question.
In fact, this is something I have been hearing from, I would say, like the first year when I read the early Christians and began sharing what I was learning with my friends, that was the very argument I first heard. And then I've heard it thousands of times since then. So it's a very valid question, and it's a good question for someone to ask. So since it was rather long, I'm going to break it down into a couple parts. So the first part I'm going to address is what was written.
Some may hear what you're saying, however, and think that you're arguing that it's necessary to consult the early church to arrive at truth. If the early church writings disappeared tomorrow, how would you seek the truth and guide others to it? Well, my answer would be that the Scriptures were given to us as our primary and essential guide. In fact, they are our only infallible guide.
If a person reads the scriptures with a blank slate and he reads them at face value, he or she will arrive at the essential spiritual truths, even if they've never read a single word of the early Christian writings. So that would be where I stand that no, we don't have to have the early Christian writings to arrive at truth. If we read the Scriptures with a blank slate and we take what it says at face value. Now, the key phrase there is blank slate. Are we reading them with a blank slate?
I'm going to give you just some examples. The first one is Acts 2: 38. It says, " Then Peter said to them, ' Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. " Now, it was that verse that opened my eyes to my own biases, to the fact that I had not been reading Scripture with a blank slate. I had, oh, I don't know. I've been reading the early Christians for perhaps three months, and I've related this before.
And I finally one night just sat down and read the whole New Testament through to see what it was saying and to see, is any of this stuff in the New Testament or the early Christians just making stuff up? And there were probably other verses that jumped out at me. But this is the verse that really caught my attention was Acts 2:38 to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. Now, the early church talked a lot about being baptized for the forgiveness or remission of sins.
And I kept thinking, where are you getting this? Where does baptism have to do with forgiveness of sins? And then I read this verse and it's like, well, it's right there in front of me. I have read that verse probably 500 times, maybe 1,000. And I've never noticed it. I'd never once in my whole life noticed what it had said. And I realized it's because it had always been explained to me what it meant. And the explanation had nothing to do with the remission of sins.
And so I had read the words and literally they just went right right past me. They went through my eyes, but didn't stay in my brain. And so that was the big turnaround for me and made me aware. You know, I've been reading the scriptures my whole life with glasses on and not seeing the actual words of so many verses. Then, of course, that evening, I saw more and more and more verses. And as time went on, I discovered even more beyond that. So that would be an illustration.
Can you read Acts 2:38 and actually believe what it says? Or are you going to sit there and argue? Well, no, it's not really saying that it means such and such. I mean, that is so black and white. Plus, there are a lot of other verses. I'm not going to go into a discussion of baptism this afternoon, but there's a lot of other verses that back that up. It's not just some isolated verse by itself. I'll give you another illustration. 1 Corinthians 11. I had read that my whole life again.
Certainly hundreds of times, maybe as many as a thousand times. And you know what it says, if a woman prays without her head covered and all that, did I read that and think, huh? My wife should have her head covered when she prays or any of the sisters in the congregation. No, I didn't think that at all. Jehovah's Witnesses that I grew up in, they had their explanation of that verse. They did actually apply it to a few situations where they would have a sister cover her head.
But then when I was evangelical, they said, oh, no, that's just cultural. That doesn't have any application today. Now, nothing in there that Paul says has anything to do with culture. He never refers to culture. He refers to creation. He refers to the order of headship. He refers to the angels. He never says a word about culture, but that had always been explained away to me. And so when I read it, yeah, none of it sunk in my mind. So I would ask the same question to somebody else.
Can you read that and say, huh, I am going to apply that? Or are you going to read it and come up with a jillion excuses of why that doesn't apply? If you're going to explain it away, then you're not reading the Scriptures with a blank slate. Another one, James 2:24, where James says, " You see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. " Now, can you accept that as being infallible truth, or do you explain that verse away?
And this isn't a situation where it's an isolated verse and reading it by itself is taking it out of context. If you read the whole paragraph that that verse is in, the whole paragraph is discussing works of Abraham, of Rahab, and showing that it was their works by which they were justified or declared righteous. It was not by their faith alone. And then Paul says very similar words in Romans chapter 2. Jesus says it all throughout his gospels. You'll look at the whole of Matthew 25, for example.
So it's all throughout Scripture. Now, if you can read those verses and say, yes, they mean what they say, and I believe them, okay, fine. But if you're going to dismiss every single one of them, you're not reading Scripture with a blank slate. And of course, the same would be true, all the verses that do talk about being saved by faith. Now, it never says we're saved by faith alone, but there are many verses that say we are saved by faith, and we have to give full credits to them as well.
We have to have an explanation that gives full faith and credit to both sets of scriptures. Okay, so that's those are just three examples. But in other words, sure, you don't need the early Christian writings if you'll just take the New Testament and read it for what it says. But the early Christian writings are what opened my eyes to my biases. It made me realize I'm reading the Scriptures through glasses. I am not listening to the actual words of Scripture.
I'm listening to the explanations given by my pastors, given by the Christian literature that I read, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the big caveat. Sure, if you're just reading the Scriptures, you're going to come to the truth. You don't need the early Christian writings. But most of us have been prejudiced against the actual words of Scripture. And something else to remember is that the New Testament wasn't given to the church in a vacuum. A body of teachings were handed down to the New Testament church.
The apostles were there to teach them. They didn't just give them the New Testament and say, " Here, read it and try to understand it for yourself. " No, they were teaching and explaining the whole time they were living, which through the entire first century, you had at least one apostle there who was alive and teaching. And most of the time, you had several apostles teaching throughout the entire ancient world. And so they handed down a body of teachings, not just the writings.
And so the next generation, after the apostles, they had received this body of teaching, which gave light to the meaning of the New Testament. And the nice thing is the light that it gives is the New Testament means exactly what it says. If there's a commandment there, then it means we're supposed to obey that commandment. If it says we're justified by works, then we're justified by works. If it says we're justified by faith, then we're also justified by faith. Every bit of it is true. That's what we learn. Okay.
The second part of that question was, how would you advise people to discuss doctrinal matters with Christians who are uninterested with the beliefs of figures in church history and want any doctrine to be established on the Bible alone? Well, you know I have no issue with people like that. I mean, I would say, yes, it has to be established by the Bible alone. If it's resting purely on the testimony of the early Christians, then we don't have very strong basis for the truth. It has to rest on Scripture.
So yeah, I don't have a big argument with that. In fact, I'd say most Christians would take that position. We have to find the truth in the Bible. But there's a very big but there. Again, back to what I was saying before. Are they willing to read the Bible with a blank slate? Are they willing to set aside their preconceived beliefs?
Are they willing to look at all the verses that pertain to a given topic and then to read them all at face value, like I was talking about, the ones that talk about justification by faith and the ones that talk about justification by works. We have to give full faith and credit to all of those. And then we have to come up with an understanding that gives weight to all those verses. We don't explain any of them away.
And if our method of dealing with Scripture is to explain away a whole lot of verses, which people do who say, " Oh, you're saved by faith alone. Obedience plays no role. " Well, what do you do with this verse and this verse and this verse and this verse? Oh, well, that means this. And then that one means this. And well, that one doesn't really mean this. And that one, you're playing games when you do that.
Now, if nine verses say one thing and there's a tenth that says something else, well, yeah, you might say that tenth one, we can explain that away because it's totally out of step with you know these other nine. But when it's 50/50, 60/40 or something like that, no, we can't do that. We have to look at what they all say and give full faith to all of them. And that's what's exciting about the early Christian understanding, that you don't have to hide any verses.
Their understandings give full faith to everything that's written in the New Testament. And that's one of the things that impressed me so much about their writings. Again, it's not their writings that have the truth. It's the New Testament. But it opened my eyes to these facts. Okay, now after taking those steps, if we still can't agree on the meaning of Scripture, in other words, we look at them in a blank slate. We give them serious attention. We read them at face value.
We look at all the verses dealing with a particular subject. And yet you and I still can't agree on what the Scriptures mean. Well, why wouldn't we want to go back and look at the historic faith? What did they believe in the beginning? You and I are looking at the same scriptures and we can't find a way to harmonize them between us. I mean, isn't that just common sense to say, hey, let's go back and see how they understood this when they lived just a generation after the apostles?
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