The Sufficiency of Scripture: A Critical and Constructive Account

The specter of biblicism

Christian Smith, a sociologist and convert to Roman Catholicism, argues that one particular understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture—“biblicism”—proves to be a dead end. Smith (2011) defines biblicism as “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes . . . its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability” (p. viii). Like other -isms, biblicism is for Smith an ideology, a system of beliefs and values that focus on the Bible as a comprehensive and exclusive authority. Smith critiques this ideology by attempting to show that Scripture’s alleged self-sufficiency ultimately proves self-contradictory. How so?

What Smith calls biblicism resembles 2 Peter 1:3 on steroids: God “has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” In context, Peter is referring to the saints’ ability to escape worldly corruption through faith in and union with Christ. Taken out of context, however, 2 Peter 1:3 can be read as saying that we need not consult any source outside the Bible to flourish as a Christian. Smith cites a number of examples of Christians treating the Bible as a handbook that provides everything you need to know about everything from dating and politics to science and economics—including psychology. Biblicists insist that individuals can discover, on their own, the biblical truth about any given topic simply by using a concordance and reading the plain meaning of the relevant biblical passages:

The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. (Smith, 2011, p. 4) ⁸

Smith’s book offers a critique of biblicism and its key presuppositions, the omni-competence and self-sufficiency of Scripture. The coup de grâce by which Smith slays the dragon is the incontestable phenomenon of pervasive interpretive pluralism. How, he wonders, can the Bible function authoritatively if people cannot agree on what it says and is directing them to believe and do? In Smith’s (2011) words: “On important matters the Bible apparently is not clear, consistent, and univocal enough to enable the best-intentioned, most highly skilled, believing readers to come to agreement as to what it teaches” [emphasis original] (p. 25). The biblicist doctrine of scriptural self-sufficiency is contradicted by the biblicist practice of disagreeing with other biblicist interpreters.

Not everyone agrees with Smith’s analysis of the situation, but I think he has correctly described what we may call “naive biblicism.” However, this was never the Reformers’ position: Smith confuses the self-sufficiency of Scripture (“solo” scriptura) with the supreme authority of Scripture (sola Scriptura). We need not accept the former to affirm the latter. Smith’s account nevertheless serves as a wake-up call not to forget the important distinction between material and formal sufficiency.

Material vs. formal sufficiency

Scripture is materially sufficient when it says everything one needs to know about a particular subject matter. The risen Christ addresses John the Seer and says, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true” (Rev 21:5). To interpret well, we need to read these words in context: Christ is not encouraging people to use the Bible as a textual talisman that provides insights into, say, molecular biology or the stock market. The Bible is sufficient, yes, but for the purposes for which it was given. The material sufficiency of Scripture means that the Bible tells us everything we need to know to be saved, not necessarily everything we want to know. We need to know that Jesus loves us; we don’t need to know the date of his return. Moreover, the Bible tells us all we need to know to believe the gospel and live a godly life. This is the thrust of passages like Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32 and Revelation 22:18–19 that warn readers neither to add anything to nor take anything away from God’s word.

The formal sufficiency of Scripture pertains, as the term suggests, to its form rather than content. It is the claim (arguably one of the decisive claims that divide Protestants and Roman Catholics) that Scripture functions as its own authoritative interpreter thanks to its intrinsic clarity. ⁹ To say that Scripture is formally sufficient is thus to suggest that it is self-explanatory or, as the Reformers put it: “Scripture is its own interpreter.” It is this aspect in particular that Smith claims to have disproved by calling attention to the phenomenon of pervasive interpretive pluralism. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Vanhoozer, 2016a), I believe that Smith confuses the formal sufficiency of Scripture with an abbreviated Scripture principle, namely, nuda rather than sola Scriptura (Manetsch, 2011). ¹⁰ By “Scripture interprets Scripture,” the Reformers never meant that the Bible issues commentaries on itself apart from the Holy Spirit, interpreters, and church traditions. Rather, they meant that the canon is the most important context for interpreting Scripture, because the parts interpret the whole and the whole interprets the parts, and because what needs to be known is clearly taught in some places even if not in others. ¹¹

Sources, resources, and norms: Variations on a quadrilateral theme

Another way of understanding the sufficiency of Scripture, and its relation to sola Scriptura, is to distinguish sources, resources, and norms of knowledge. A source provides the material with which theology works. A resource is a tool for working the material. A norm is a standard to which one’s work must measure up. In doing theology—speaking of God and the gospel—does the sufficiency of Scripture mean that it is the sole source, the sole resource, the sole norm, or some combination of the three? Everyone agrees that Scripture is the primary source for learning about what God was doing in Jesus Christ. But there are secondary sources for learning about God: “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). Other possible sources for learning about God include reason and experience (remember: all truth is God’s truth). Church tradition can serve as a helpful resource for understanding the Bible. For example, the Council of Nicaea helps us identify Jesus Christ as the Son of God by saying he is of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father.

Albert Outler coined the term “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” (Outler, 1985) to describe Wesley’s conviction that the core of Christian faith “was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason” (Wesley, 2016, p. 103). ¹² This fourfold appeal has generated considerable turmoil within the United Methodist Church as concerns theological method, with some people arguing that, in a scientific age, reason and experience deserve greater weight than tradition (and sometimes Scripture itself) (Thorsen, 1990). As any juggler knows, it is much harder to keep four balls in the air than three. What is confusing, however, is not simply the number of possible configurations between the four—who’s on first (and second, and third): Scripture, tradition, reason, experience?—but also knowing what kind of role each is playing. For the Deist, reason plays the role of primary source and norm: it is not simply the well from which one draws one’s idea of God, but also the yardstick to which one’s idea of God must ultimately measure up. ¹³ For conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, reason by itself is insufficient, and therefore plays the more modest role of resource, the means by which the human mind receives and processes biblical revelation. It is one thing to use reason to discover truth, quite another to use reason to understand a truth made known by some other means. Minimally, we need a modicum of reason to understand what Scripture is saying. Reason cannot produce saving faith, so it is not sufficient, but it can help to process its content.

More work remains to be done sorting out these categories, but for present purposes let me stipulate that a source is a supply from which one derives information, a resource an aid to processing that information, and a norm, a standard to which the information must measure up to be deemed acceptable or true. Cruden’s Complete Concordance often serves as a valuable resource for the theologian, but strictly speaking, it is not a source or norm. Reason, tradition, and experience are best viewed as resources for biblical interpretation, aids that help minister understanding. Or rather: reason, tradition, and experience are resources through which the Holy Spirit—an essential resource—ministers understanding. This was John Owen’s (1826) thesis in his “The Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Mind of God as Revealed in his Word.” Owen had no problem affirming both the (material) sufficiency of Scripture and the need for humans to make use of scholarly and spiritual means of grace to understand it. Some later Methodists eventually came to a similar position, suggesting that the Wesleyan quadrilateral “could be more adequately described as a unilateral rule of Scripture within a trilateral hermeneutic of reason, tradition, and experience” [emphasis original] (Maddox, 1998, p. 46). According to Scott Jones (1997), Scripture is for Wesley both the primary source and primary norm.

Graham McFarlane (2020) adds “community” to Wesley’s quadrilateral and dubs the ensuing model the “evangelical quintilateral.” Community is arguably already a part of the Wesleyan quadrilateral, however, inasmuch as tradition is always corporate and experience may often be. Still others wonder about the place of culture. Minimally, culture functions as a source of information and a resource in contextualization; maximally, culture functions as a norm when the church feels it must revise its beliefs to make them compatible with the intellectual or moral norms of contemporary society.

If one were to add further factors alongside the traditional four, the strongest candidates in my view are scientific knowledge about the physical world (including ourselves as entities in it) and contextual knowledge about the ancient world. ¹⁴ In light of these two factors, it would be difficult to make a case that the biblical authors explicitly taught either geocentrism or heliocentrism. Calvin accepted the “modern scientific” picture of the universe in his day, yet Scripture itself leaves many matters (e.g., does the earth revolve around the sun or vice versa?) underdetermined. The crucial principle, which we would do well to follow, is to recognize that Scripture is a sufficient source of information in some domains of knowledge, but not necessarily others. The sources, resources, and norms in the domain of astronomy—or molecular biology, architecture, and electrical engineering—are different than those in the domain of theology. ¹⁵ The challenge in our post-Christian age, of course, is that “the Christian Bible has lost its long-held position in Western culture at the center of higher education, as the fundamental avenue to knowledge of ultimate reality and of what is good and right” (Willard, 2007, p. 18). In fact, the situation is even worse: many believe that modern learning has discredited the Bible altogether as concerns science (the natural world) and morality (the human world) alike. ¹⁶

Knowledge about ancient Near Eastern backgrounds also raises questions about the sufficiency of Scripture. The Old Testament scholar John Walton has written a series of books about the “lost world” of the biblical texts and the tendency of contemporary readers to misinterpret the Bible by reading it out of original context. A text without a context is simply a pretext for someone’s subtext: “When we press the Bible into tasks that are not within its purview, we are violating its authority by trying to extract a word from God and presenting our conclusions as God’s Word” (Walton & Sandy, 2013, p. 290). Something important is being affirmed here: competent readers need to be sensitive to which domains a particular biblical text or set of texts is authoritatively addressing. The more delicate issue is whether readers have to be experts in ancient Near Eastern literature to read the Bible rightly. To insist too stridently at this point is to risk ordaining biblical scholars as a new breed of priests with their own brand of magisterial authority. ¹⁷ Scott Swain (2011) offers wise counsel when he observes that scholarly helps (e.g., linguistic aids, background materials, literary parallels) “may truly benefit us so long as they function as interpretive assistants and not as interpretive lords” (p. 86).

The provisional moral: careless use of the term “sufficiency” can cover up a multitude of conceptual sins. By way of contrast, distinguishing sources, resources, and norms may afford greater conceptual precision. For example, scientific and contextual knowledge may provide resources for understanding Scripture without becoming norms that lord it over Scripture and its interpretation. Science and ancient history may be sources of truth, but Scripture alone is the source of special revelation and the supreme norm of Christian doctrine (Lane, 1994). Difficult questions still await: Do Newton’s laws of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity or, for that matter, Maslow’s motivational theory of the Hierarchy of Needs, contradict or correct Scripture’s teaching, thereby compromising its material sufficiency? Similarly, do we need archeological evidences and ANE literary parallels to interpret Scripture rightly, thereby compromising its formal sufficiency? Is Scripture alone ever enough? To avoid misunderstanding, we need to think carefully, and define our terms: What does it mean for Scripture to be “alone”? Is it ever “enough” for what? Before I respond to these key questions, we would do well to retrieve the original Protestant understanding.

The Fathers

The Church Fathers consistently affirmed the material sufficiency of Scripture. Clement of Alexandria entitled one of his chapters “Scripture the Criterion by Which Truth and Heresy are Distinguished” (Coxe, 1994, p. 551). In the words of the Eastern Orthodox theologian John Behr (2001): “For Christian faith, according to Clement, it is the Scriptures, and in particular, the Lord who speaks in them, that is the first principle of all knowledge” (p. 33). Athanasius, likewise, rebutted heresy by constantly referring back to Scripture: “the sacred and inspired Scriptures are sufficient to declare the truth” (Schaff, 2007, p. 4). The Fathers found themselves stymied by two problems, however. Vincent of Lérins expresses a frustration about the pervasive interpretive pluralism of his own day:

Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and is abundantly sufficiency for every purpose, what need is there to add to it the authority of the church’s interpretation? The reason is, of course, that by its very depth the Holy Scripture is not received by all in one and the same sense, but its declarations are subject to interpretation, now in one way, now in another, so that, it would appear, we can find almost as many interpretations as there are men. (McCraken, 1957, p. 38)

In addition, some heretics, like the Gnostics, appealed to secret apostolic traditions known only to themselves.

These two challenges in refuting heretics helps explain why Church Fathers like Irenaeus appealed to “tradition” and the “Rule of Faith.” The key point, not to be missed, is that these appeals were perfectly compatible with the material sufficiency of Scripture. In the first place, as Anthony Lane (1994) explains, “the role of tradition was to convey the same apostolic teaching as Scripture, not to add to it” (p. 314). The Rule of Faith was not an alternative to or correction of Scripture, but simply a distillation of its message: “For Irenaeus, the canon of truth is the embodiment or crystallization of the coherence of Scripture” (Behr, 2001, p. 36). The Rule of Faith was not an independent standard over against Scripture. It was rather a brief summary of Scripture’s overall message—the basic truths concerning God and the gospel—and could therefore serve as the standard of truth itself. ¹⁸ One might even say that the Rule of Faith was an early formulation of the principle of Scripture’s sufficiency.

The reformers

Many medieval theologians continued to affirm the material sufficiency of Scripture. Thomas Aquinas states: “The truth of faith is sufficiently explicit in the teaching of Christ and the Apostles” (Summa theologiae, part II-II, question I, article X). To be sure, doctrinal elaboration is sometimes needed because of false teachers and their errors. No Protestant argument there. However, Aquinas goes on to say that certain of the more important and difficult questions that arise in the church are referred to “the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff.” Interestingly, similarly difficult questions—about the mode of worship or church governance—eventually led Protestants too to differ over the implications of material sufficiency. There was widespread agreement over the material sufficiency of Scripture in the domain of soteriology, but not in ecclesiology.

As papal authority in ecclesiological matters expanded, the church began to add material content that was not found in Scripture to traditional teaching and practice. This was a departure from the patristic period in which tradition was a means of preserving and passing down biblical faith—what Heiko Oberman calls “Tradition I,” where Scripture and church tradition convey the same apostolic message (Oberman, 1967). What the Reformers protested was not Tradition I but Tradition II, namely, the idea that the church had access to apostolic teachings not found in Scripture, teaching that pertained both to the church’s practice (e.g., indulgences) and beliefs (e.g., various Marian doctrines). Martin Luther viewed these Roman Catholic supplements as an affront to the Bible’s material sufficiency: “Those things that have been delivered to us by God in the holy Scriptures must be sharply distinguished from those that have been invented by men in the Church” (Luther, 1970, p. 223).

The Confessions of the Protestant Reformation uniformly affirm the sufficiency of Scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith (Westminster Assembly, 1647) offers the classic formulation:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. (Chapter I, 6)

Similarly, Article 6 of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles states:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. ¹⁹

Protestants nevertheless differ over how many things can rightly be deduced from Scripture, and thus over the scope of one’s freedom of conscience, particularly as concerns matters of church order and governance. Puritans and Anglicans debated church worship and polity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Anglicans claimed that the church is free to devise new forms of worship, such as those in the Book of Common Prayer. They championed the so-called “Normative Principle” of worship, that anything not explicitly forbidden in Scripture (e.g., organ music) is permitted. By way of contrast, Puritans adopted the “Regulative Principle,” arguing that only what is explicitly commanded (or necessarily inferred from what is commanded) is permitted. The latter principle so alarmed the Anglican Richard Hooker that he wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity as a rebuttal. Hooker viewed the Regulative Principle as a hyper-extended distortion of the principle of the sufficiency of Scripture: “no one should feel bound to deduce all his actions from Scripture, as if he would be sinning unless he knew a prooftext for his action and had it in mind when he acted” (Hooker, 2018, p. 5). ²⁰

For Hooker, Scripture sets the broad parameters for church order, government, and worship; it does not provide a specific blueprint for these things, contra the Puritan position. Interestingly, this 16th-century debate presages 21st century debates about Scripture’s sufficiency, extended now beyond ecclesiology to the natural, social, and human sciences. For example, some Christian counselors appear to operate with something like a Regulative principle, limiting their counsel to explicit biblical principles and practices only, while others invoke something like a Normative principle, freely employing what Scripture does not explicitly forbid, including insights from secular psychology. As we discuss the meaning of the sufficiency of Scripture vis-à-vis domains other than soteriology, it will be important to keep in mind Hooker’s central insight: “the absolute perfection of Scripture must be understood in relation to the purpose for which it was written” (Hooker, 2018, p. 41).

Moderns and postmoderns

Evangelical Protestants who know their church history understand that sola scriptura never meant “solo” scriptura. The Reformers themselves valued tradition (Tradition I) when it made explicit certain doctrines, like the Trinity, that were genuinely, but only implicitly, biblical. Nor did the Reformers ever deny the importance of the teaching ministry of the church (e.g., Confessions and Catechisms), though they insisted that this too stands under Scripture’s supreme authority. According to Turretin, that some persons will not understand the Bible apart from the Holy Spirit’s illumination and the pastor’s proclamation does not detract from Scripture’s sufficiency: “A rule is not therefore imperfect because it requires the hand of the architect for its application” (Turretin, 1992, p. 141). Sola scriptura states that Scripture is norma normans non normata—the norm that norms but cannot be normed by something else—and this means not that Scripture is our sole authority, only that “the church can err” (Lane, 1994, p. 324).

The church can err, not least, in interpreting and applying the Scriptures. The modern challenge to the sufficiency of Scripture—and particularly to the biblicism discussed in the introduction—is the plethora of extrabiblical sources, resources, and norms that appear to supplement or correct what the Bible says about the world and human beings, if not God. How should we now understand the sufficiency of Scripture if modern learning calls traditional interpretations of the Bible into question, as it has been doing ever since Galileo proved that the earth revolves around the sun? For example, under pressure from neuroscience, some Christian thinkers have abandoned substance dualism and advocate instead for a non-reductive physicalist approach to the soul (Crisp et al., 2016). By way of contrast, the postmodern challenge to the sufficiency of Scripture tends to focus not on material content (knowledge claims) but on meaning (truth claims). Postmodern critics contend that the text on its own is powerless to resist the ideological interests of biblical interpreters and interpretive communities. ²¹

In a nutshell: modernity calls the material sufficiency of Scripture into question, especially as concerns questions about the nature of humanity, while postmodernity calls the formal sufficiency of Scripture into question, especially as concerns the possibility of objective exegesis. We are inclined to ask, with Paul (2 Cor 2:16), who indeed is sufficient for these things (i.e., the sufficiency of Scripture)? ²²

Sources: The sufficiency of Scripture as a medium of divine discourse

The naive biblicist subscribes to what we might call maximal or over-developed sufficiency: the mistaken expectation that the Bible alone is a sufficient source to answer any question we care to put to it. At the other extreme are critical revisionists who believe we must rethink traditional biblical interpretations and doctrines in light of modern learning. Neither has correctly grasped the Reformers’ position. Scripture is neither a trump card theologians can play to lord it over the academic disciplines or a wax nose that can be turned this way or that by every new scientific discovery.

On the one hand, then, the sufficiency of Scripture never meant that the Bible ought to be the exclusive source in every domain of knowledge. There are some matters, like jet propulsion, which seem to fall outside the parameters of Scripture’s authority, in the sense that Scripture does not explicitly address the domain of rocket science. On the other hand, Scripture is clearly the primary source in domains like theology and soteriology, where the topic is God and the gospel. Still other fields, however, like anthropology broadly conceived—the study of human nature and behavior—are “mixed” domains: both Genesis and the Human Genome Project have something to contribute. The Bible is not a handbook of science, to be sure, but “that does not mean it will have nothing to say which touches on the realm of the scientist” (Blocher, 1984, p. 24). It may not be able to instruct us in the finer points of nuclear physics or addictive behaviors, but it does not follow that it has nothing to teach us about metaphysics, ethics, and psychology. For example, Scripture is sufficient to rebut reductionism, the idea that only the material world is truly real.

To confess the Bible as the word of God is to claim more than that the Bible contains divinely revealed information, however. The biblical texts are God’s personal address, via the medium of human language. Furthermore, God does more, but not less, with the human words that constitute the prophetic and apostolic testimony than reveal true information. Scripture is the means by which God performs a variety of speech acts (e.g., promising, commanding, warning, consoling). To understand the adjective “sufficient,” we need to make sure we understand what it is qualifying: the intended speech act. Everything depends on getting the ontology (nature) and teleology (purpose) of Scripture right.

Scripture is not a Magic 8-Ball that answers our every question. On the contrary, as God’s personal address, Scripture often poses searching questions to us (e.g., “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” —Job 38:4). And not questions only. The Bible is a text made up of ordinary language and literature that God has inspired and appointed to say and do extraordinary things—like recounting the origins of the universe, making covenants, testifying to Christ, and making wise unto salvation. The human words and discourse that make up Scripture are sufficient to serve as the medium for God’s words and discourse: “Scripture is sufficient for the performance of the divine illocutionary act” (Ward, 2002, p. 201). ²⁴

While there is nothing magical about the words and genres that comprise Scripture, there is something holy, and authoritative: just these texts have been set apart by God and deemed sufficient for the purpose for which they were given. Scripture is the ordinary, sanctified creaturely means that God uses to say and do extraordinary things. The overarching purpose of Scripture is to serve as objective testimony to God’s plan to make all things new in Christ, a means of revelation and redemption. However, more than objective testimony to God’s plan and its execution is needed to form a holy nation, and this leads us to our second point.

Resources: The sufficiency of Scripture in the economy of light

Scripture alone supremely authorizes, yet the Scripture that supremely authorizes is not alone. This is not some Zen paradox but an acknowledgment that Scripture belongs to a larger pattern of authority. Call it the economy of light: the pattern by which God distributes the light of his knowledge, primarily through the biblical words that the Psalmist calls “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105) and, secondarily, through the lesser lights of church tradition, scholarly helps, and Bible teachers (Vanhoozer & Treier, 2015). In Keith Mathison’s (2001) words: “Tradition I recognizes that Scripture is sufficient as the one source of divine revelation, as the one final supreme and infallible norm for the Church. But no one asserts that a Bible can enter a pulpit and preach itself” (p. 259). Ultimate authority belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ (Matt 28:18), yet Christ commissions and appoints secondary authorities. Scripture alone has magisterial authority, but this does not mean that there are no ministerial authorities—including, perhaps, modern science.

One of the perennial challenges to theology is the charge that human language is inadequate to speak of God. While it is true that we will never know God the way God knows himself (Isa 55:8), God has chosen to reveal himself in various ways, including human words. The sufficiency of Scripture therefore means that the Bible fulfills this appointed purpose too, namely, to serve as the sole textual medium of divine discourse and the supreme (but not sole) authority for Christian life and thought. Sola scriptura is, accordingly, best understood as an exclamatory, not exclusionary, word: Scripture first! Scripture above all other earthly powers and authorities! Scripture’s appointed purpose is not the same as the Holy Spirit’s. For example, it is the Spirit’s role, not that of the biblical text, to illumine the reader. Yes, the Bible is sufficiently clear—“The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple” (Ps 119:130)—but this clarity pertains to illocutions (i.e., the communicative acts it successfully performs), not perlocutions (i.e., the communicative effects it may or may not bring about). After all, God’s word does not occasion faith in every reader, nor does it make every reader wise unto salvation.

Divine inspiration accounts for Scripture’s sufficiency as concerns the Bible’s locutions and illocutions (the objective aspect of biblical revelation), but we need divine illumination to account for Scripture’s right reception (the subjective aspect of biblical revelation). Inspiration and illumination are two sides of a single divine communicative process. In inspiring, the Spirit renders the human locutions adequate to serve as vehicles of divine illocutions; in illumining, the Spirit renders human readers able to understand the illocutions and feel the perlocutions (see 1 Cor 2:14).

Does it do the church any good to say that everything God wants us to know is in Scripture if, in the final analysis, Scripture cannot guarantee its own correct interpretation? This is a formidable, and humbling, question, especially in a postmodern age pockmarked by pervasive interpretive pluralism. The way forward is to insist that Scripture is clear enough (sufficiently perspicuous) to fulfill its purpose as vehicle of divine discourse, while simultaneously admitting that Scripture needs the internal testimony of the Spirit, together with the Spirit-directed tradition of the church, to ensure that readers read it rightly. This is precisely what the Westminster Confession does. Immediately after affirming material sufficiency, it states:

Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding . . . and there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church . . . which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence. (Westminster Assembly, 1647, chapter I, section VI)

Norms: Extrabiblical knowledge and the Christian social imaginary

We have at last reached the “application” portion of my expository sermon. How can we bring to bear what I have said about the sufficiency of Scripture on the way Christians in other academic disciplines pursue their work? Does the sufficiency of Scripture give biblical scholars and theologians warrant to lord it over their colleagues in other domains? Is it even possible to speak of the sufficiency of Scripture in a scientific age?

Let me make three points, the first of which should be relatively uncontroversial. Naive biblicism creates false expectations: the Bible does not provide us with enough knowledge to cure cancer, plot the orbit of the moon, or get rid of crabgrass from your lawn. In Dallas Willard’s words: “Most fields of human knowledge and inquiry have little to learn from the Bible in terms of detailed matters of fact” (Willard, 2007, p. 20) Herman Bavinck agrees, adding that the Bible no more teaches a scientific psychology than it does a scientific account of astronomy: “Holy Scripture never makes use of abstract, philosophical concepts, but always speak the rich language of everyday life” (Hoekema, 1986, p. 204). The Bible is therefore not a substitute for scientific observation and experimentation, but this does not mean that it is good for nothing in the academy, as the next point makes clear.

Second: the Bible’s contribution to the academy lies not in providing bits of data but rather, and more importantly, in providing the overarching framework that enables us to interpret the data rightly, which is to say, in line with central Christian truth. Extra-biblical data

– information obtained from elsewhere than Scripture—may add to our stockpile of knowledge, but it will fail to yield wisdom unless integrated into this biblical framework:

the Bible does not legislate but instead shapes our minds that we may discover the God-given design, order, and laws that exist within the relevant spheres of creation in order that we might in turn subdue the earth to the glory of God. (Swain, 2011, p. 84)

This is a call for retrieving, and retooling, the sufficiency of Scripture. We need such retrieval and retooling, for in our secular age the Bible exercises what authority it still has over ever-shrinking domains, a “word of the gaps”: “In the wider culture, the Bible over time went from being the lens for seeing the world (and oneself) to being only an interesting object within it” (Moberly, 2018, p. 23). The point I am making here, however, is that Scripture is sufficient not only for making wise to salvation (its “home” domain) but also for furnishing the “control beliefs” with which to think about, and flourish in, created reality (all other domains). ²⁵ Stated differently: the Bible itself is a means of cognitive therapy and formative agency inasmuch as it provides everything we need to know for the Holy Spirit to work to cultivate wisdom by integrating us into the reality that is in Christ Jesus. (De Wall Dryden, 2018)

The third point follows from the second: Scripture is sufficient to fund our control beliefs because it is sufficiently comprehensive to serve as the Christian academic’s “control story.” For example, as control story, Scripture acts as a guard against all forms of reductionism that tend to reduce reality (including human reality) to some form of materialistic naturalism not least by reminding us, as Hamlet reminds Horatio, that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy (n.p.)” (Shakespeare, 1599/1992, Act I, Scene V)

Another term for control story is “social imaginary,” Charles Taylor’s (2007) designation for the picture that frames and makes sense of our everyday beliefs and practices, including the beliefs and practices that comprise our respective academic disciplines. A social imaginary is a storied way of thinking, a taken-for-granted account of the world passed on by the metaphors and narratives people intuitively live and see by. Of course, broad swaths of society and the academy (and, sadly, the church as well) have imbibed the prevailing secular social imaginary, a story in which only matter—physical particles that can be observed, measured, and manipulated—is truly real. Interestingly enough, the early church’s Rule of Faith functioned like a control story: “at bottom, the Rule of Faith (which was always associated with Scripture itself) served the primitive Christian hope of articulating and authenticating a world-encompassing story or metanarrative of creation, incarnation, redemption, and consummation” (Blowers, 1997, p. 202). Scripture is sufficient for “emplotting” even extra-biblical knowledge into this narrative frame of reference and thus relating them to the biblical story of creation and redemption. ²⁶

The proposal, then, is that Scripture is authoritative and sufficient for the Christian academic not because it yields all the data we need (it does not), but because it provides metaphors and an overarching story that is enough to form, inform, and transform our social or disciplinary imaginations, thereby enabling every academic discipline to respond to the cultural mandate (Gen 1:28) in a Christian way. To take but one example: cognitive and natural scientists alike acknowledge the role of certain metaphors to become models that structure our thinking and experience. Surely it is significant that Jesus taught about the reality of the kingdom of God in extended metaphors: parables. To call Jesus’ teaching sufficient is to say that his stories communicated enough about the kingdom of God to accomplish their purpose, which was to subvert worldly ways of thinking about the reign of God (e.g., in terms of human political power). Something similar can be said for the biblical metaphor of humans as being in the “image” of God. While the meaning of the image continues to be the subject of a lively discussion, it is absolutely clear that human beings are in God’s image and thus hold a special place in what we may call the scriptural imaginary. ²⁷ Indeed, the dignity and destiny of humanity derives from its peculiar emplotment into the biblical story of the creation, fall, redemption, and consummation of the image of God. This same story should control the disciplinary imaginary of every Christian academic, including the psychologist, at its deepest levels.

We can generalize the point. Sola scriptura means (among other things) that the Bible alone should rule on the level of one’s most basic presuppositions (what I am here calling the social imaginary). The sufficiency of Scripture makes the further point that it provides enough of a control story to perform this normative function. The Bible’s story is sufficient for enabling us to perceive reality differently—not as a closed spatio-temporal material nexus, but as created, sustained, and directed by the triune God. Again, the Bible does not do the hard work of observation, experimentation, and deliberation for us. There is a significant place for reason and experience to fill in the story’s gaps, where such blanks pertain to matters other than salvation. And yet, Scripture’s story ultimately controls all domains because “it uses every possible mode of projection and presentation to draw us into the reality of which it speaks” (Willard, 2007, p. 36). Being biblical in a secular academy means understanding the natural world and human experience in light of the all-encompassing drama of creation, salvation, and consummation—a drama that depicts Jesus Christ as the ground, grammar, and goal of creation. ²⁸ Scripture is sufficient to enable academics (and everyone else) to emplot their disciplinary discoveries into the grand story of the Bible, and thus to imagine the world that Scripture imagines—the world as it truly is, created through and for Christ (Col 1:16).