Protestant
Christians take the view, stated plainly by R.C. Sproul: "'The only source
and norm of all Christian knowledge is the Holy Scripture.' This thematic
statement introduces De Scriptura Sacra of Heinrich Heppe's classic work in
Reformed dogmatics and provides a succinct expression of the Reformation
slogan: Sola Scriptura. The two keywords that are used to crystallize the sola
character of Scripture are source and norm." (Paul Nurnberg apparently not believing Sola Scriptura is an important presupposition for him . . . )
In an attempt to respond to something I wrote, Paul Nurnberg would admit (contrary to many of his fellow Protestants, to some credit to him on that) that 2 Tim 3:16 does not teach Sola Scriptura. At about the 1:03:03 mark of Book of Abraham Debate Recap (Ep 56a), he said he would never use 2 Tim 3:16 to teach Sola Scriptura as
At the time that 2 Timothy 3:16 was written the New Testament canon was not complete. So, I don't believe that is, that passage is a case for Sola Scriptura
Of course this would mean that the Bible does not, and cannot, teach sola Scriptura, as none of the texts produced in favor of such were written at a time that, when applying the historical/grammatical method of exegesis, one can deduce formal sufficiency of the 66 books of the Protestant canon. I discuss this and other topics in detail in Not By Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura.
BTW, I did not say he was arguing "Sola Scriptura, therefore, the Book of Abraham is false." I said it formed an important presupposition (i.e., the Bible [read: 39 OT and 27 NT books] being exhaustive of theopneustos, inscripturated revelation) to his arguments and why he rejects the Book of Abraham. Just as I would say that papal infallibility would be an important presupposition for a Roman Catholic if they were to debate and defend the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption.
As for the R.C. Sproul quote and how Protestants reason what (true) Scripture is, Protestants (contrary to the impression Nurnberg wants you to think) are very "Mormon" about such. Consider the following:
We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. (Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1: "Of the Holy Scripture" [emphasis added])
In the Second Helvetic Confession, from 1566, under chapter 1, “Of the Holy Scripture Being the True Word of God,” we read the following in section 5:
Neither do we think that therefore the outward reaching is to be thought as fruitless because the instruction in true religion depends on the inward illumination of the Spirit, or because it is written ‘No man shall teach his neighbor; for all men shall know me’ (Jer. xxxi. 34), and ‘he that watereth, or he that planteth, is nothing, but God that giveth the increase’ (1 Cor. iii. 7). For albeit ‘no man can come to Christ, unless he be drawn by the Heavenly Father’ (John vi. 44), and be inwardly lightened by the Holy Spirit, yet we know undoubtedly that it is the will of God that his word should be preached even outwardly. God could indeed, by his Holy Spirit, or by the ministry of an angel, without the ministry of St. Peter, have taught Cornelius in the Acts; but, nevertheless, he refers him to Peter, of whom the angel speaking says, ‘He shall tell thee what thou oughtest to do’ (Acts x. 6) (Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. III: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds [revised by David S. Schaff; New York: Harper and Row, 1931; repr., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2007], 832; emphasis added)
Norman Geisler, a leading Protestant apologist and philosopher, and his co-author Ralph MacKenzie, wrote the following on how they, as Protestants, "know" the Bible to be true:
Reformed theologians also believe that the Spirit of God brings divine assurance that the Bible is the Word of God. This is known as the witness of the Spirit. Only the God of the word can bring full assurance that the Bible is the Word of God.. Further, Reformed theologians acknowledge that aid of the Holy Spirit in understanding and applying the Scriptures to our lives. But he does not do this contrary to the Bible or contrary to good rules of biblical interpretation. (Norman Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995], 179 n. 6)
Calvin was clear that the Scripture’s credibility does not depend on man’s reason but on the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Calvin explains that we will never be persuaded of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture’s doctrine until we are “persuaded beyond doubt that God is its Author.” Therefore, the “highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks to it.” In that light, we must look to a “higher place than human reasons, judgments, or conjectures” and turn instead to the “secret testimony of the Spirit.” The “Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.” The same Spirit who spoke through the prophets will penetrate “into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded” (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.7.4). (p. 67)
Many of the “contradictions” that scholars found problematic a century ago have now been resolved with time and study. Nor can we neglect the role of the Spirit. What at first appears to be an unsurmountable hurdle later becomes a small speed bump when the Spirit illuminates the Word so that we can better understand its meaning. (p. 266)
[I]nternal clarity is quite different [to external clarify]. Because the unbeliever is spiritually blind, he cannot see the truth of Scripture in a saving way unless his eyes are opened by the Holy Spirit (Luther, Bondage of the Will, in LW 33.28 [cf. 98-99]). So while a person may read and memorize the Scriptures backward and forward, exegete its words, diagram its sentences in the original languages, and masterfully describe the historical and cultural background of an individual text, this is not to say that the person has truly understood Scripture’s message. There is knowing Scripture, and then there is knowing Scripture. The latter is work of the Holy Spirit. (p. 320)
Sufficiency does not preclude the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit. While we should not be seeking revelation from the Spirit in addition to Scripture, we must not go to the other extreme (as some evangelical rationalists have done) and eliminate the Spirit entirely. Rather, Word and Spirit go together. God gives us his sufficient Word, but he intends the Spirit to come alongside us to help us understand his Word. Therefore, must like Calvin (see chapter 1), the Westminster Confession advocates the illuminating work of the Spirit: “The Spirit . . . [is] necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word (John 6:45; 1 Cor. 2:9-12).” (p. 337)
Scripture reassures us that should we come to God’s Word with the Spirit as our counselor, the Lord will reward our hungry soul with sweet and satisfying food (1 John 2:20, 26-27). (p. 344)
I cannot prove the Bible is true. Only the Spirit can do that. And until he does, you will never see Scripture as God’s Word . . . The Bible testifies to its own identity. But this isn’t enough. We must then pray that the Spirit would irresistibly persuade sinners that the Bible is what it says it is. (p. 374)
In the first place, it is the Holy Spirit who seals the Word.
This has reference to the “testimonium Spiritus Sancti,” of which our fathers
used to speak and by which they understood the operation whereby He creates in
the hearts of believers the firm and lasting conviction concerning the divine
and absolute authority of the Word of God . . . Of all clericalism, that of the
intellectual stamp if the most unbearable; for one is always silenced with the
remark, “You don’t know Greek,” or, “You don’t read Hebrews”; while the child
of God feels irresistibly that in the matters that concern eternity,
Greek and Hebrew can not have the last word. And this apart from the fact that
to a number of these scholars Professor Cobet might say in turn: “Dear sir, do
you still know Greek yourself?” Of the shallow knowledge of Hebrew in the
largest number of cases, it is better not to speak.
No, in that way we never get there. To make the divine authority of the
Holy Scripture real to us, we need not a human but a divine testimony,
equally convincing to the simplest and to the most learned—a testimony that
must not be cast as pearls before swine, but be limited to those who can gather
from its noblest fruit viz., to them that are born again.
And this testimony is not derived from the Pope and his priests, nor
from the theological faculty with its ministers, but comes with the sealing from
the Holy Spirit alone. Hence it is a divine testimony, and as such stops
all contradiction, and silences all doubt. It is a testimony the same to all,
belonging to the peasant in the field and to the theologian in his study. Finally,
it is a testimony which they alone receive who have open eyes, so that they can
see spiritually.
However, this testimony does not work by magic. It does not cause the
confused mind of unbelief suddenly to cry out: “Surely the Scripture is the
Word of God!” if this were the case, the way enthusiasts would be open, and our
salvation would depend again upon a pretended spiritual insight. No, the
testimony of the Holy Spirit works in an entirely different way. He begins to
bring us into contact with the Word, either by our own reading or by the
communication of others. Then He shows us the picture of the sinner according
to the Scripture, and the salvation which mercifully saved him; and lastly, He
makes us hear the song of praise upon his lips. And after we have seen this
objectively, with the eye of the understanding, He then so works upon
our feeling that we begin to see ourselves in that sinner, and to feel
that the truth of the Scripture directly concerns us. Finally, He takes
hold of the will, causing the very power seen in the Scripture to work in us.
And when thus the whole man, mind, heart, and will, has experienced the power
of the Word, then He adds to this the comprehensive operation of assurance,
whereby the Holy Scripture in divine splendor commences to scintillate before our
eyes. (Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit [trans. Henry De Vries;
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975], 190, 192-3, italics in original)
In 2005, a book was released featuring essays by a series of well-respected Evangelical theologians and scholars:
Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation of the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today, eds. Daniel B. Wallace and M. James Sawyer (Dallas: Biblical Studies Press, 2005)
After discussing his family’s battle with a son’s serious illness, Wallace wrote the following in an essay entitled, “The Uneasy Conscience of a Non-Charismatic Evangelical”:
Through this experience I found that the Bible was not adequate. I needed God in a personal way—not as an object of my study, but as friend, guide, comforter. I needed an existential experience of the Holy One. Quite frankly, I found that the Bible was not the answer. I found the scriptures to be helpful—even authoritatively helpful—as a guide. But without feeling God, the Bible gave me little solace. In the midst of this “summer from hell,” I began to examine what had become of my faith. I found a longing to get closer to God, but found myself unable to do so through my normal means: exegesis, scripture reading, more exegesis. I believe that I had depersonalized God so much that when I really needed him I didn’t know how to relate. I longed for him, but found many community-wide restrictions in my cessationist environment. I looked for God, but all I found was a suffocation of the Spirit in my evangelical tradition as well as in my own heart. (p. 7)
Elsewhere, in an essay entitled, “The Witness of the Spirit in Romans 8:16,” Wallace wrote:
3. How does the Spirit bear witness to our spirits? Certainly, he works on our hearts to convince us of the truth of scripture. But there is more. His inner witness is both immediate and intuitive. It involves a non-discursive presence that is recognized in the soul. This at least is the position of Calvin and the Reformers . . . Thus, the inner witness of the Spirit is supra-logical, not sub-logical—like the peace from God that surpasses all understanding. There are elements of the Christian faith that are not verifiable on an empirical plane. This makes them no less true.
4. For conflict in the academic realm: If the witness of the Spirit that I am a child of God is intuitive, then it is outside the realm of what is objectively verifiable. This does not make it any less true. We are too much sons of the Enlightenment when we deny intuition and internal apprehensions any value. When you fell in love, what scientific means did you use to verify the state of your heart? None. As every mother tells her child, “You just know.” It’s an apt analogy because it is one of the last vestiges of the pre-Enlightenment era that we still affirm. No one challenges it because there are no scientific means to determine whether a person is in love. Yet, we send bright young students armed with an M.Div. or Th.M. from an evangelical seminary into battle at secular schools, telling them only, “Trust your exegesis.” Too many have become spiritual casualties because they suppressed the inner witness of the Spirit . . . (p. 50)
In his essay, “The Witness of the Spirit in the Protestant Tradition,” M. James Sawyer discusses the various confessions (e.g., Westminster [1647]) that appealed to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, as well as various theologians in the Protestant traditions. Commenting on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), Sawyer wrote:
[H]e had a keen interest and fervent awareness of the necessity and reality of the witness of the Spirit in the life of the believer as an immediate experiential presence. He at various times makes mention of the work of the Spirit. A couple of examples will suffice to show his essential agreements with Wesley as to the nature of the witness, and his continuity with the Reformers in linking the witness of the Spirit to confirming the truth of the word of God. Edward notes:
And it seems to be necessary to suppose that there is an immediate influence of the Spirit of God, oftentimes, in bringing texts of Scripture to the mind. Not that I suppose it is done in a way of immediate revelation, without any use of the memory; but yet there seem plainly to be an immediate and extraordinary influence, in leading their thoughts to such and such passages of Scripture, and exciting them in the memory. Indeed, in some, God seems to bring texts of Scripture to their minds no otherwise than by leading them into such frames and meditations as harmonize with those Scriptures; but in many persons there seems to be something more like this . . . (Jonathan Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2.1084-85)
In speaking of one of his parishioner’s experiences of the Spirit, Edwards testifies again to the immediate nature of the witness of the Spirit in confirming the truth and divinity of scripture.
She had sometimes the powerful breathings of the Spirit of God on her soul, while reading the Scripture; and would express her sense of the certain truth and divinity thereof. She sometimes would appear with a pleasant smile on her countenance; and once, when her sister took notice of it, and asked why she smiled, she replied, I am rim-full of a sweet feeling within. (ibid., 1100-1101)
Thus, with both Edwards and Wesley there is an insistence on the immediate nature of the witness of the Spirit. Neither one follows the Puritan lead of insisting on the practical syllogism in gaining assurance of salvation. For both, the evidence of the Spirit is an immediate supra-rational experience in the soul, not unrelated to the word, and not to be conceived as mysticism. (pp. 84-85)
David Eckman, in “The Holy Spirit and Our Emotions,” wrote the following in a section entitled, “The Spirit and Our Emotions”:
Since the presence of the Spirit is internal, the work of the Spirit of God is emotional. One example will illustrate the point. As the believer is involved in the exercise of faith, the Spirit of God, for example, will supply joy and peace. In the details of a particular text, Rom 15:13, the Spirit is not the only member of the Trinity relating to the Christian. Paul related the believer’s emotional life to two members of the Trinity, the Father and the Spirit. The God of hope is supposed to fill (the same word as used in Eph 5:18) the believer with every variety of joy and peace in the process of believing. All of this is to be done by the inherent power of the Holy Spirit. The process of generating these emotions is completely dependent upon the Holy Spirit’s work. (p. 212)
With respect to Gal 5:22-23 (“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” [NASB]), Sawyer writes that:
Spirituality is a life normally dominated by primary emotions—primary in the sense that these are what Christian existence is founded upon. Note how each term of the fruit of the Spirit carries an emotional connotation. (p. 213)
In a section on how to minister to our emotions, Sawyer offered the following tips to the reader which is reminiscent of how LDS missionaries teach people how to tell the difference between superficial emotions and the experience of the Holy Spirit:
What we have to do to gain and maintain spiritual health is as follows:
We have to recognize or differentiated what is going on within our emotional life and in the management of our appetites (Gal 5:16-24). This gives us information as to where we are starting from, either with spirituality or carnality . . . We have to set our minds on our relationships above; we control our thinking (Rom 8:1-6; Col 3:1-3). The terms used in both Rom 8 and Col 3 refer to perspective. By reckoning we relate to God personally instead of to our appetites (Rom 6:11-12). The focus of a person’s inner life can either be the God on the outside of the appetites on the inside. Sadly our appetites many times have far more impact on many of us than God does. The focus on our inner person has to be on God the Father, and our identity before him as found in Christ, and not in our appetites. So no matter the level of pressure from our inward desires, we must freely approach and share ourselves with God. (p. 214)
Finally, in his essay, “The Holy Spirit in Missions,” Donald K. Smith wrote the following under the heading of “Rationalism Largely Excludes the Holy Spirit,” which, if it came from a Latter-day Saint, would be branded by Evangelicals as “cultic” due to its “anti-intellectual” nature:
Why, then, does it appear that the Holy Spirit is more active in Asia, Africa, or Latin America than in Europe and North America? . . . I suggest that the real point is not a difference in the working of the Holy Spirit, but in a difference in the working of our human perceptions. Just as our unaided ear cannot detect radio signals nor can our eyes pick up television signals, the untransformed heart is unable and/or unwilling to perceive the Holy Spirit except in ways consistent with our existing understanding. Our ability to perceive anything rests not only on our physical senses but on our previous experience and on our heart belief—our world view.
In Western cultures, reason is considered supreme. The cultural mainstream says that feelings are not to be trusted, and emotion should always be controlled. The Enlightenment paradigm infuses nearly every part of Western life, even our systematic theologies. It leads us to believe that Truth must be found and proved by careful logic, and that logic rests on empirical observations. If “it” cannot be weighed, counted, or measures in some way, “it” does not exist . . . This core/heart belief in Western cultures has made it nearly impossible to perceive the genuine working of the Holy Spirit.
Thus, the fundamental reason the ministry of the Holy Spirit seems more visible outside the North Atlantic nations is a matter of perception. We experience what we are conditioned to perceive. Since the dominant paradigm in North Atlantic nations is rationalistic, humanistic, and materialistic, we do not expect to see reality outside the boundaries established by our minds. (pp. 243, 244)
