Truth Is Wine

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Green Baggins liked my chapter on blessings and curses (in the main), but wanted me to clarify something, which I am happy to do. Incidentally, I was blessed by Lane’s last paragraph, where he summarized my position in a way I would be happy to own. May the Lord hasten the day where we see a lot more of that kind of thing. And yes, I would be willing to say that essence of a covenant of salvation is for actual salvation to actually occur.

Here is the clarification: I began the chapter by saying, “We must learn how to speak with scriptural language, rather than with the misleading language that comes from our feeble efforts at reasoning.” Lane has a number of reasonable questions about this, as he should. I think I can reassure him at the general level, although we probably would differ over some examples of this principle that I would give.

Systematic theology is necessary, and is not a necessary evil either. Uninspired interpretations of Scripture are also necessary, and this is how God obviously wants it. And that means that we will always have to deal with “misleading language that comes from our feeble efforts at reasoning.” I am a preacher and a writer of Christian books — I had better not be attacking uninspired use of words. But the problem of “misleading language and accurate language” is on a dimmer switch, not a simple on/off switch. Turn it all the way to the left and you have the darkness of heresy. All the way to the right and you have the Lord Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount. When we talk about the Scriptures, we must do so in our own language, and sort things out according to our own categories. We want to avoid darkness and confusion, and we want to shed light in ways imitative of the prophets and apostles. But that language and those categories are themselves in the process of being sanctified by Scripture, and as time passes we should be increasingly conformed to that Word.

So I was not objecting to the use of systematic categories, or uninspired attempts to use feeble words to get at what God has given to us. That is what God wants us to do. What I was objecting to was our tendency to get attached to our own explanations, and to get so attached to them that we place ourselves beyond the reach of Scripture’s corrective. This was the error of the Pharisees — they searched the Scriptures and missed the Christ. In was the error of the medieval Schoolmen, who had an answer for every question that might be posed from Scripture. To this we always say that. So the problem is not systematics or uninspired exegesis — as Lane points out, this is inescapable. The problem is stubbornness, an unwillingness to be corrected from Scripture. This is not a function of our finitude, but rather of our sinful willfulness. Furthermore, if conservative preachers and theologians have a besetting sin, this is it.

So used to being “the answer man,” we come to believe that a glib ability to bob and weave in a Q & A session is a reasonable substitute for honesty. But at the end of the process, the Lord says something to us like, “Fools and blind! Which sanctifies which, the gold or the altar?” Stuck in the well-worn groove, we do very well until God sends someone who teaches with authority, and not as the scribes, earning thereby the standing enmity of the scribes.

Truth is absolute, but it does not “keep” in the way some people assume. The truth as God knows it is obviously timeless, but the truth as it is entrusted to us is affected by the attitudes and faith of the trustees. Truth is wine, and certain keepers of the cellars do what they do in such a way that it makes them guardians of vinegar.

So I agree with Lane that wineskins are necessary, and I don’t object to keeping wine in them. But I also want to point out that wineskins get old over time, and when they get old, they get rigid and inflexible in ways that make them incapable of dealing with the kind of thing that God loves to do, like giving His people new wine.

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