Radicalism (again)

I was watching an interview on YouTube recently with Douglas Wilson about baptism. He makes some interesting comments in passing about systemic theology with respect to his father's personal hermeneutics starting around 1:11 and going until 2:05 or so.

Now, I don't know Douglas Wilson. I've never met him, but I know several people in Reformed circles who know him and think highly of him. He is postmilennialist, I am not. He has said and done many things I wouldn't say or do. But there have been several times –  especially in the craziness of 2020 and 2021 – that I have looked back and realized he was right, even though I thought at the time he was wrong. 

But this isn't about Douglas Wilson. It's about some comments he made in that one-minute digression: those have made me do some really hard thinking.

Wilson describes his father's perspective on scripture like this :

He's the kind of person who believes whatever the verse in front of him is saying, and he doesn't care at all about making systematic sense of it. You know his enemy is systematic theology, because he thinks that systemize... he thinks that systematic theology puts the verse on a Procrustean bed and then cuts the verse to fit the theology... He places a much higher priority on taking the verse in front of you at face value and let it do whatever damage to your systematics that it will. (1:23–2:03)

If you listen to his comments in context, they're quite respectful. It's very clear that he's not attacking his father, but it's also clear that he doesn't [entirely] agree.

The thing is, I can't decide what I think about these comments. I've tried to articulate my thoughts about this clearly, but I keep going around in circles. I finally realized it's OK to put some wild and only-slightly-coherent thoughts onto my blog and let people comment and/or judge me as they will.

So here are my scattered and perhaps contradictory thoughts:

It seems to me that the Protestant Reformation is the result of exactly what he says his father would do: "[take] the verse in front of you at face value and let it do whatever damage to your systematics that it will."  Isn't that just what Martin Luther did with Romans 1:17ff ? He threw away the entire Roman Catholic doctrine of justification because of that one verse. That's a pretty good description of Luther's concept of "one little word," right?

So on the one hand, it seems to me Sola Scriptura entails treating each verse of Scripture as having more weight than all our theological tomes combined. The words that God has spoken must outweigh everything else.

On the other hand, we need to respect the whole counsel of God. If by "systematic theology" we mean our vast libraries of books, then we certainly should be willing to throw them away in the face of just one verse. But if we take "systematic theology" to mean the overarching teachings and themes of the whole of Scripture, then we need to recognize all those other verses are God's words too. 

When Martin Luther read Romans 1:17ff, he wasn't reading just one verse in isolation. Justification by faith alone is spread through all of the New Testament, from the words of the Lord Himself (John 5:24), through Acts (Acts 13:38–39), then through all the epistles (Romans 4:5ff), and all the way into Revelation (Revelation 14:6–7). Martin Luther didn't pick out one "problem verse" and build a contrarian theology on it: he was struck by a single verse that clarified in one sentence a central theme of the New Testament.

The fact is that we're able to build all sorts of crazy ideas on a single verse in isolation. Every cult does exactly that. Regardless of what position you take on any number of questions, you're going to be able to find a "problem verse." And they're not always ripped from context, either. There are any number of difficult verses for every single person who sincerely tries to understand the Word of God.

So on the one hand, each verse is God's own words, and it outweighs all our own thoughts. On other hand, each verse is part of the whole counsel of God, and wasn't ever meant to stand all alone.

OK, that's a reasonably coherent thought.

One of my concerns with the Reformed crowd (of which Douglas Wilson is certainly part) is that when they use the term "systematic theology" they don't mean only "all of Scripture." In my experience, they have in view things like the Westminster Confession, the Creeds, and their vast libraries of theological books. (And don't let's think for a minute that "we" don't do exactly the same thing. We might not have as long a history, but we certainly seem to elevate our books and libraries.  J. N. Darby's writings aren't as universally accepted as they once were, but plenty of others' have taken their place.)

So if we warm up our old metaphor of "a ditch on both sides of the road," we might see on the one side the error of snatching a verse from its context, with no regard to the whole counsel of God, and using it to prop up some error or another. Cults seem really good at doing that, but pretty much every Christian I've ever met has fallen into some sort of error along those lines at one point or another.

The ditch on the other side of the road might be mistaking our theologies for the whole counsel of God. We might not be as formal about it as our Reformed friends, but we all have some sort of systemic theology, even if it's just a rough outline in the backs of our minds about what Scripture teaches. The question is, do we mistake that for the whole counsel of God?

I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but at some point I became very surprised by what Scripture doesn't say. There were all sorts of things I had believed to be "absolutely true" that proved to be not Scripture, but someone's understanding of it. Those things might not have been "traditions" in as formal a sense as the Roman Catholic church has "traditions," but they were traditions nevertheless.

The Lord Jesus told the Sadducees, "Ye err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29). He told the Pharisees, "ye have made void the commandment of God on account of your traditional teaching" (Matthew 15:6).

So maybe the ditch on the other side of the road is something like allowing our traditions as much weight as the words God has spoken. Do we do that? Have we made void the words of God on account of our traditions? Those aren't Scripture – we know that, right?

Many years ago I was reading an article from a "brethren" teacher of some renown, rebutting some particular teaching. I was struck as I read it that his argument had basically nothing to do with the verses he cited. I mean, they sounded good at first glance, but when I actually looked up the references, they didn't at all say what he had been making them out to say. As far as I could tell, this man was so invested in his tradition, he was looking for any verse sounding more-or-less similar and calling it scriptural support. Only... it wasn't. 

So those are my only slightly coherent thoughts triggered by Douglas Wilson's interview. The interview itself is probably worth a listen, I honestly can't remember a lot of it. I was so absorbed in his tangential comments about "the verse right in front of you" that I remember basically nothing else.