Links mentioned in this episode:

Anxiety Detox Webinar
West Coast Christian Writers Masterclass

Reformation and Scripture
When Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenburg Door, he threw the first punch in a doctrinal fight. It was not Luther’s objective to split the church. He only wanted to correct the ship’s doctrinal course, and to return the Church to her most fundamental truths such as justification by faith and the authority of Scripture. 

This triggered an epic brawl scholars call the Protestant Reformation. 

It is Protestant because it flowed out of Luther’s protest against the false teaching and excesses of the church. 

It is a Reformation because it unburied important theological structures from an avalanche of ecclesiastical, political, and theological debris. 

Reformation has to do mainly with theology and doctrine. The Protestant Reformation also happened to trigger a Revival, but let’s save that for the final chapters. 

The first urgent requirement to deliver the church from her chaotic condition is a thoroughgoing theological Reformation. We stand in desperate need of a penitent return to the Bible and our first principles 

Chief among these principles would be: a) the authority of Scripture, and b) justification by faith. Ironic, isn’t it. I would like to devote this chapter to the first principle and the next to the second. 
The Authority of Scripture
For Luther, the tug of war was between the Authority of Scripture vs. the Teaching Magisterium of the Catholic Church. “A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.”1 Fighting words. 

Today’s tug of war is different. On one side stands the Authority of Scripture. On the other stand all the forces that would topple Scripture from its epistemological throne. These would include empiricism, rationalism, irrationalism, nihilism, emotionalism, subjectivism, hedonism, pragmatism, and a diabolical host of other -isms. 

These boil down to a ceaseless tug of war between two possible sources of ultimate truth. Source one: ME. Source two: NOT ME. 

When we take our stand on the authority of Scripture, we are saying that the source of Ultimate Truth is found, not by looking within, but by looking to an external authority, i.e., the pages of Scripture. 

When we take our stand on any other source, we are saying that we find truth by looking within and deciding what structure of reality best comports with our subjective opinion. This, in effect, makes us our own gods. “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).

That must have been a very weird time to be alive. 

So it is today. It’s a very weird time to be alive.

Post-modernism has made truth into a choose-your-own buffet. Look within for what resonates. Put that on your plate. Enjoy. 

The first reformation must be epistemological. 

Where do we get our truth? I know I am only echoing a thousand other voices, but for some reason the echo keeps fading. 

How can we shout this to a church caught in a maelstrom of conflicting ideologies? 

• In a culture built on Reason, the church could make the case for Scripture based on reason. Logic. Presuppositions. Apologetics. 

• In a culture built on Emotion, the church might make its case based on emotion — that there has never been a more life-giving, emotionally healthy worldview than biblical Christianity. Jesus Christ and his message radiate a beauty and social goodness unparalleled in the annals of human thought. 

• In a culture built on Empiricism, we might argue that the five senses had to come from somewhere,...