Monday, November 8, 2021

John Frame (Reformed) on the Necessity of the Testimony of the Spirit

  

I strongly defend the Reformed doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. But the Reformers saw no difficulty in affirming both the sufficiency of Scripture and the necessity of the Spirit’s testimony. They made it clear (for even in their time there were misunderstandings in this area) that the Spirit’s testimony was not a new revelation; rather, the Spirit’s work was to illumine and confirm the revelation already given. In Scripture, the Spirit’s testimony is to Christ (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:9f., 13ff.) and to the Word of God (1 Cor. 2:4; 1 Thess. 1:5). The Spirit witnesses that the Word is true, but the Word already has told us that!

 

Still, Scripture is not reluctant to describe this work as a work of revelation (Matt. 11:25f.; Eph. 1:17). It is revelation in the sense that through the Spirit’s ministry, we are learning something to which we would otherwise be ignorant; we are learning the Word of God. Or, put differently, we are being “persuaded,” “noetically regenerated and sanctified,” “brought to cognitive rest.” We are being given a “godly sense of satisfaction.”

 

The Spirit’s work also helps us to use and to apply the Word. Obviously, the Spirit cannot assure us of the truth of Scripture unless He also teaches us its meaning. And the meaning, as we have seen, includes the applications. We can see this in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 where David sinned against God by committing adultery with Bathsheba and by sending her husband, Uriah, to death. Here, David, the “man after God’s own heart,” seemed trapped in a peculiar spiritual blindness. What happened to David? In one sense, he knew Scripture perfectly well; he mediated on God’s law day and night. And he was not ignorant about the facts of the case. Yet he was not convicted of sin. But Nathan the prophet came to him and spoke God’s Word. He did not immediately rebuke David directly; he told a parable—a story that made David angry at someone else. Then Nathan told David, “You are the man>” At that point, David repented of his sin.

 

What had David learned at that point? He already knew God’s law, and, in a sense, he already knew the facts. What he learned was an application—what the law said about him. Previously, he may have rationalized something like this: “Kings of the earth have a right to take whatever women they want; and the commander-in-chief has the right to decide who fights on the front line. Therefore my relation with Bathsheba was not really adultery, and my order to Uriah was not really murder.” We all know how that works; we’ve done it ourselves. But what the Spirit did, through Nathan, was to take that rationalization away.

 

Thus David came to call his actions by their right names: sin, adultery, murder. He came to read his own life in terms of the biblical concepts. He came to see his “relationship” as adultery and his ”executive order” as murder. He learned to “see as.” . . . Much of the Spirit’s work in our lives is of this nature—assuring us that Scripture applies to our lives in particular ways. The Spirit does not add to the canon, but His work is really a work of teaching, of revelation. Without that revelation, we could make no use of Scripture at all; it would be a dead letter to us.

 

Thus in one sense, the Spirit adds nothing; in another sense, He adds everything. When we are asked to justify our Christian beliefs, we point not to the Spirit but to the Word, for it is the Word that states the justification. But apart from the Spirit, we would have no knowledge of that justification. And it often becomes important, in justifying beliefs, (1) to give evidence of our own spiritual maturity and thus to indicate our spiritual qualifications for making the statements we make, and (2) to state our justification in a properly artful way to help the other person to see the truth as we do. (John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God [A Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987], 156-57, 158)