Monday, July 5, 2021

Hal Hougey on Important Moral Issues that the Bible is Silent On

While a defender in the formal sufficiency of the Bible, Hal Hougey wrote the following which shows how Sola Scriptura is, to be blunt, useless:

  

The Silence of Consensus

 

The OT contains the Law of Moses, a legal code which attempted to regulate almost every problem which might ever arise in the nation of Israel. The NT is quite different. IT is the dynamic word for a living church. Most of it was written in response to particular needs, problems, or questions as they arose in the early church.

 

Therefore, if a matter was not a problem or need in the early church, we should not expect that it would ever come under consideration in the NT. This could be called a “Silence of Consensus,” meaning that agreement on, and support for, a given position was so nearly universal that no request was ever made to one of the NT writers for clarification.

 

On the other hand, if someone questioned a practice it would become the subject of instruction, and appear in the NT record. The Corinthian church, for example, had some questions about marriage, and they wrote to Paul for some guidance (1 Co 7). If they had not raised the question, Paul would not have penned the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. But they did, and he did.

 

Some other problem areas that probably faced the NT church:

 

·       Infanticide (common in the Roman world)

·       Using addictive drugs (documented among pagans before Christ)

·       Gambling

·       Instrumental music in worship

·       Military service

·       Plurality of elders in local church

·       Polygamy

·       Slave trading: buying, selling, owning.

 

Apparently the early church had reached a consensus on most of these. Therefore, there was no need for the NT writers to deal with them. But some of these topics have moral or theological implications. Yet none of them is a subject explicitly dealt with in the NT. The early church must have applied broad general principles to these problems in seeking their solutions.

 

To use the absence of instruction as a justification for doing something other than what the first century church did, might be a dangerous presumption. Can we really justify dumping a universal practice of the early church simply because there was no specific reference to it?

 

We live in a very different world from that in which the early church lived, and we face problems they did not. It is reasonable to expect, then, that we might have some problems or questions for which we would like some answers, but with which the NT does not deal specifically or directly.

 

Below are some contemporary problems with which we must deal.

 

·       Surrogate motherhood

·       Sperm banks

·       Artificial insemination

·       Genetic engineering

·       Contraception

·       Heroic measures to prolong life

·       “Pulling the plug” on brain-dead persons

·       Voting; holding political office

·       Military service

·       Nuclear war

 

Instead of consensus, there is much debate on them. (Today’s church has even lost the consensus the early church enjoyed on the items on the first list, and some of them are also controversial today.) We, also, must apply broad general biblical principles to all of these subjects, using care as we seek to “handle correctly the word of truth” (2Tm 2:15). (Hal Hougey, The Quest for Understandable Hermeneutics [Concord, Calif.: Manna, 1997], 160-61)

 

 For a biblical refutation of Sola Scriptura, see:


Not By Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura