Reaffirming Faith: Scripture, Creeds, and Evangelism

GODFREY: Well, I think there's a loss of confidence in the Word of God. I think that's at the root of the problems the church faces today. But in a sense, that's nothing new; the church has always faced that struggle. Does it listen to the Word of God or does it seek to listen to other voices or to itself, even more dangerously perhaps? [00:01:54]

GODFREY: A pastor's authority, we've always said, is ministerial. That is, it is not original. He doesn't have authority in himself; he has authority only insofar as he is ministering the Word of God. So, he is free to have opinions. By and large, I think, ministers ought to keep their opinions out of the pulpit, but he has authority only when he can speak for God in the place of God; and he can only do that when he can establish what he says by the Word of God. [00:04:23]

GODFREY: Well, I think that's a simplistic and, really, in the end of the day, unhelpful approach to the sufficiency of the Bible. The Bible is a big book and none of us are sufficient for it, and, therefore, to have help from the church to summarize the Bible, to condense the important teachings of the Bible in the way that confessions and creeds do is a way of linking ourselves with the wisdom of the church's understanding of the Bible and linking us with the Bible itself. [00:05:07]

GODFREY: I think that the key issue with the Sabbath is that Genesis 1 and 2 teach us that the Sabbath is established in creation. God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy, and, therefore, it's not part of the Mosaic legislation. It's not a uniquely Jewish institution. It had Jewish forms under Moses from Sinai, but before Sinai, the Sabbath was an institution that God had established at creation and He establishes it for the well-being of mankind in general. [00:12:31]

GODFREY: Well, I hope all of our listeners know who J. Gresham Machen was. He was one of the greatest scholars and champions of the faith that the American church has seen. He taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decades of the twentieth century and was one of the leaders in the battle at that time against the rising tide of what in those days was called "modernism" that we know as "liberalism" as well. [00:14:24]

GODFREY: Well, Christian confidence at its heart is a response to the Word of God. It is a confidence that what God has said He will do, that what God has said is true, that we can have assurance that the promises of Jesus Christ will be fulfilled. And the world takes confidence in all sorts of things. It takes confidence in its own accomplishments. It takes confidence in its various ways of avoiding having to think about reality. [00:21:15]

GODFREY: It is certainly the role of the church to evangelize. When we talk about evangelizing, what we mean is declaring the good news. And the good news is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners and we want to make that known as far and wide as possible. And the church does that in all sorts of ways. The gospel, the good news, certainly, should be heard in worship services. The good news should be heard in various teaching ministries of the church. [00:28:10]

GODFREY: The church service is designed for the believer and for the covenant community to meet with God. The worship service is a meeting- that's the best way to talk about it- between God and His people, and, therefore, it is a place where God speaks to His people and His people speak to Him. He speaks to His people in the reading of the Word and in the preaching of the Word, and we speak to Him in prayer and in song and in confession. [00:30:36]

GODFREY: I would say that you are busy with unimportant things. Now, I wouldn't do this most of the time quite like that. I would try to be nicer most of the time. But since it's just you, Nathan, there's no great pressure to be nice. And I would say as a historian in particular, we in America have more time than any other people in the history of mankind. [00:39:57]

GODFREY: Sunday, I believe, is the Lord's Day. That's what the Scripture says; Revelation 1:10. And because the day belongs to God, we should not think that we have fulfilled our relationship to God on His day by an hour with Him. And so, that has resulted in Protestant churches historically having two services on the Lord's Day that were usually in the morning and afternoon or morning and evening, and it just provides twice as much time for fellowship with God and with His people. [00:43:02]

GODFREY: I think some Protestants get tired of all the responsibility of being a Protestant. A Protestant has to constantly ask himself or herself, "What does the Bible say? What does the Bible teach?" And, I think, there are a certain number of people who just find comfort in saying, "The pope or the patriarch has the responsibility of figuring out what truth is, and I don't have that responsibility anymore and I can just experience the faith as a liturgical matter and I can appreciate the sort of mystery of the liturgy." [00:49:58]

GODFREY: Well, I would say whatever people are wrestling with, and that's a very serious issue, it's a very real problem for some people, but I would say if that's the problem or whatever else the problem might be, the first thing to say is, start going to church, start listening to the Word of God being preached, start getting to know the people of God and the life of the people of God. [01:00:56]