I recently had the privilege of interviewing one of my heroes. Dr. John D. Woodbridge of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is a world-renown church historian and my former professor.
It’s hard to come across a more humble, kind, or encouraging man than Dr. Woodbridge. Instead of a typical introduction, I will share a list of bullet-points of why I consider Dr. Woodbridge, “The Most Interesting Man in the World” (or at least one of them):
- Woodbridge has published several books, including Biblical Authority (which will be rereleased at the end of this month), Church History, Volume Two, Renewing Your Mind in a Secular World, A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir (coauthored with Collin Hansen), Scripture and Truth (coedited with D.A. Carson), and Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon (also coedited with D.A. Carson), and others.
- Dr. Woodbridge was a personal friend of Chuck Colson and spoke in his honor at the Evangelical Theological Society (read his remarks).
- Dr. Woodbridge’s father, Charles Woodbridge, was a pastor and seminary professor at Fuller who was mentored by J. Gresham Machen.
- Woodbridge’s father ministered to a World War II hero named Teen Palm. Palm gave Woodbridge’s father Hitler’s personal pistol which he stole from Hitler’s apartment while on an assignment to assassinate Hitler. John Woodbridge shared the story of the gun and Palm’s life in Hitler in the Crosshairs: A G.I.’s Story of Faith and Courage (co-written with Maurice Possley).
- He is a descendant of Jonathan Edwards and his grandmother was President Woodrow Wilson’s first cousin.
- Woodbridge served as the chief editor of Christianity Today, the visiting professor of American History at France’s University of Toulouse, and the visiting professor of history at Northwestern University.
- In addition to being a world-class church historian, Woodbridge has composed music. As a graduate student at Michigan State, Woodbridge wrote a score titled “Sans Vous (Without You).” The score was used illegally by Paramount Pictures in a TV mini-series called, “The Winds of War”. After a long legal battle, Woodbridge won a settlement against Paramount for plagiarism.
Interview with Dr. John Woodbridge on Biblical Authority
Most Christians claim that the Bible is their number-one authority but may not understand the rich history behind their claim, let alone the powerful implications it has for evangelism and pastoral ministry.
To help us all understand implications of biblical authority for mission and church life, I sat down with my former professor church historian Dr. John D. Woodbridge of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
Woodbridge is the author or editor of dozens of books including Biblical Authority (which will be re-released in March 2015), Scripture and Truth (co-edited with D.A. Carson), Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon (edited with D.A. Carson), and Church History, Volume Two (coauthored with Frank A. James III).
What follows is a transcript of an interview I did with Dr. Woodbridge in 2015.
What is biblical authority and where does the idea come from?
Dr. John Woodbridge: Biblical authority is related to the idea that the Bible has authority over all of our life and faith and practice because the Bible comes from God. In other words, biblical authority is related to God’s authority.
Consequently, in the presentation [at the EFCA Theology Conference], we cited statements by Protestants and Catholics that biblical authority stems from the fact that God is the author of Scripture and that the Scriptures are to be obeyed and that they contain what we need to know about our salvation. The distinctive difference between what some Catholics and Protestants think about biblical authority stems from what happened at the Council of Trent in 1545-1563, when the fathers of Trent said that the Bible does not have all we need to know about our salvation. And so at the council of Trent in 1545-1563, the fathers of Trent argued that tradition is of equal authority with the Bible. Catholics would say that the Bible is authoritative, but doesn’t have all we need to know about our salvation. So, from the Protestant point of view, not only is the Bible authoritative because God is its author, but the Bible is an infallible rule for faith and practice. All we need to know about our salvation, and all we need to know about how we are to live our lives is in Scripture.
Kevin Halloran: It seems like the “Scripture plus Tradition” position undercuts 2 Timothy 3:15-17, which says the Scriptures are able to make us wise for salvation and are completely sufficient. Those who hold that position say, “The Scriptures help—but they aren’t complete.”
Dr. John Woodbridge: Yes. There was a famous Counter-Reformation Catholic named Robert Bellarmine who specifically said that the Bible is not sufficient. And so Protestants argued, “No, the pope is not infallible, councils are not infallible, nor is tradition—it’s the Bible.”
The first followers of Luther were called evangelicals. But after 1529, the second Council of Speyer, some Lutheran nobles protested against the Council of Speyer, and said, “You’re going after Luther.” And this is where Protestantism comes from, since the evangelicals protested against the attack on evangelicalism. They chose “the word of God abideth forever” [from 1 Peter 1:25] as their biblical line.
The Protestants have really been people of the Book for the reasons we indicated: it’s authoritative with God as it’s author; secondly, salvation is found there—we don’t need tradition. The issue that comes up in terms of debates on the issue of biblical authority is that later on people would take the expression “in matters of faith and practice” and say, “Well, that means the early Protestants thought that only the material that regarded faith and practice in the Bible that was infallible.” But the purpose of the statement about “faith and practice” was in discussion with Catholics. The same Protestants believed the Bible is totally infallible.
The early Protestants believed that the Bible is authoritative on more than matters of faith and practice because from it they got their views of politics, economics, art, science, and so forth, just as Protestants today do.
The authority of the Bible from an evangelical point of view is related to biblical inerrancy, which means that the Bible is infallible for faith and practice, but also includes history and science as well. When we talk about science, though, the claim is not that the Bible is a scientific textbook. The Bible speaks in ordinary language. If the Bible actually had God’s physics in it, we would be totally frustrated. While God’s physics is not there, the Bible, in passing, does tell us the truth about the natural world and the truth about history. Often people who move away from biblical inerrancy have often been impacted by belief in naturalism of the Darwinian sort or have been caught up in higher criticism. For that reason sometimes people put a limitation on what infallibility is, but that was not what the expression originally meant in the 16th century.
What implications does Biblical authority have for missions and evangelism?
Dr. John Woodbridge: There’s a wonderful article that Billy Graham wrote in Christianity Today‘s October 1956 edition called “Biblical Authority and Evangelism” that answers this question. [The article is available here.] In that article, Graham deals with this specific issue.
By 1949, Graham was going out to Los Angeles, but had doubts about the authority of Scripture – particularly inerrancy. Chuck Templeton, who was at Princeton, had raised questions for Graham about Scripture’s authority. Graham then wondered whether he could continue in ministry, because he began to doubt Scripture’s authority. Just before the Los Angeles crusade, he went up in the mountains around LA, to a forest home, a camp, and one evening he walked into the woods and put the Bible on a stump.
Graham acknowledged that he didn’t know all of the answers to Templeton’s psychological and philosophical questions but said, “Lord, many things in this Book I do not understand. But Thou hast said, ‘The just shall live by faith.’ All I have received from Thee, I have taken by faith. Here and now, by faith, I accept the Bible as Thy word. I take it all. I take it without reservations.”
And Graham says in the article and in his autobiography, Just As I Am, that he felt a tremendous release in terms of being an evangelist and going forward in ministry. He is very explicit in the article,
I discovered the secret that changed my ministry. I stopped trying to prove that the Bible was true. I had settled in my own mind that it was, and this faith was conveyed to the audience. Over and over again I found myself saying, “The Bible says.’ I felt as though I were merely a voice through which the Holy Spirit was speaking. . . .The people were not coming [to the crusades] to hear great oratory, nor were they interested merely in my ideas. I found they were desperately hungry to hear what God had to say through His Holy Word.
I talked about this at Trinity’s conference (see link above). He emphasizes the passage in Hebrews where Paul says the Bible is sharper than any two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). That was a verse that Tyndale used 400 years beforehand. The Bible has that power and is able to discern the thoughts of people. The Bible is a sword. He goes on and says it is a fire, a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces.
If one wants empirical verification of the effectiveness of this belief, Graham spoke unto more people than any one else in history face-to-face, let alone on television, and the results of his powerful preaching have meant countless people have come to know the Lord. Dana Harris, who teaches here [at Trinity], came to know the Lord through the witness of Graham. The father of Scott Manetsch [another Trinity professor] was impacted by Billy Graham. So many people have been.
Does biblical authority impact missions and evangelism? YES! It’s the ballgame in some regards.
Kevin Halloran: It is the ball game. The book turned movie Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption tells the story of World War II hero Louis Zamperini who was stranded at sea in the Pacific for 47 days, captured, put in a prisoner of war camp and was beaten to a pulp almost daily. When the war ended, he emerged as a hero. But his post-war life quickly spiraled downward with alcohol and marital problems. The thing that really broke him was his sin. He came to know Christ through Billy Graham at the 1949 Los Angeles crusade. It’s an amazing story. [See Zamperini’s testimony at a 1958 Billy Graham Crusade at about 5:00 into this video.]
Dr. John Woodbridge: What I do know about the story is that he remained faithful until his death. The true authority of the Bible is not make believe. The power of the gospel, the power of the Word of God, the power of the Holy Spirit does change people’s lives. For missions and evangelism, this is very important.
How should the Bible’s authority affect the pulpit and pastoral ministry?
Dr. Woodbridge: One has to be careful how biblical authority is applied in the pulpit and other places, because people can ask the Bible questions that it doesn’t answer. I’m thinking about it in the area of counseling. The Bible gives very helpful comments about counseling. But this should not mean in the pastoral ministry that we don’t turn to psychologists and doctors and others to give help. God’s creation is open to understanding by people who may not be believers, but they do know something about our bodies and minds. So as we use the Bible, we have to be careful to apply it in a way that doesn’t backtrack us into cul-de-sacs by asking the Bible to speak to things it doesn’t speak to specifically. Nor is the Bible, as Charles Hodge and others have said, a scientific textbook. It talks about the world in a way that is truthful, but we have to be careful about juxtaposing it with things that people do in science. I don’t believe in evolution, and I think the Bible is pretty clear about creation, Adam and Eve and so forth. There are realms where the Bible is applicable, but we don’t want to push it beyond what it claims for itself.
What I’d also say though is that individuals who are in the pulpit—and those who have been to seminary—they have to watch out for seeing the Bible as an object they dissect. The danger is that they might know Hebrew and they might know Greek and bring a lot of knowledge to the Scriptures, and in some respects tame the Bible by their knowledge. Calvin and others make it very plain—and they’re right—that to open Scripture and preach it is a great privilege, but we shouldn’t run over it with our knowledge. If you start to do that, you become the arbiter of Scripture.
The Bible’s authority doesn’t depend on us. We don’t make Scripture the Word of God. Scripture has its own authority. So, one problem that pastors confront is that they can domesticate the Bible. The other point is that we can get caught up in fancy-dancy programs for renewing church life. We are very good at having all kinds of programs, but in the history of Christian thought, people like Spener are absolutely right: the way the churches are renewed is through the preaching of the Bible; and the way people are renewed is to love the Bible.
Now how does that occur? In the history of Christian thought, one of the keys is Scripture meditation—Psalm 1. If, in point of fact, we have people who come in and out of our church services who are not meditating on Scripture and having their lives changed, then, in one sense, they are just going from one week to another week. The real transformation in a person’s life comes when Scripture seeps into the very pores of a person’s thinking. Paul Meier, who taught here [at Trinity] a while ago, is a psychiatrist who did a study seeking to learn about the psychological and spiritual lives of students at Dallas Theological Seminary and Trinity. Meier was surprised when he noticed the factor that made the greatest difference between the healthy and unhealthy students was the practice of daily Scripture meditation. The students who studied Scripture but didn’t meditate on it didn’t have changed lives.
[You can read more about this study in the book Dr. Woodbridge edited: Renewing Your Mind in a Secular World.]
We had a fella who was in my formation group a couple of years ago. He had been in the Navy. I asked him, “How did you survive all of the temptations of the Navy?” He said that fortunately he had been led to the Lord by somebody in the Navigators and that he memorized Scripture. It flowed through his mind. He said that is what kept him out of difficulty with all of the temptations of Navy life. [Transformation through meditation on Scripture] is not play-stuff.
Sometimes in ministry we can domesticate Scripture by the way we study it. We can forget about its power. We can forget that Scripture distribution is good in of itself. And we can forget that the very reading of Scripture is very important. The killer issue is that we don’t have our people understand that if they don’t meditate on Scripture, their lives will not be transformed. When we say we don’t want to have our devotions, it’s not just an issue of a personal decision, the evil one doesn’t want us to read Scripture. Luther says when you read Scripture, you shouldn’t read it necessarily straight through in the sequence of a year, you should read Scripture until the Lord stops you. Then when the Lord stops you, you think about that passage. And then after you think about that passage, you meditate on it. That’s when you will have to ask for the Lord’s protection, because the evil one will go after you when Scripture really starts to transform your life.
Kevin Halloran: You said that preachers can sometimes “domesticate” God’s Word. Would you agree that sometimes that can be done when we put our own terms on the Bible instead of taking it at its own terms?
Dr. Woodbridge: That’s exactly right. Or not having a humble spirit in approaching Scripture. My colleague Scott Manetsch gave a presentation on Calvin’s view of Scripture and said that Calvin had a sense of awe and saw the privilege it was to open Scripture. The routine of a pastorate—where you have to come up with a sermon—and the routine of the Christian life can even, with well intentioned people, overwhelm them.
This is why we have to pray and we have to have the Holy Spirit’s help, because the evil one wants us to domesticate [the Scriptures]. When Scripture is elevated, a church is healthy. When Scripture is not key, you have it imprisoned. Scripture really is the key for the advance of the gospel. Graham knew that, all of the great evangelists knew that, and often we forget it.
Kevin Halloran: Thank you Dr. Woodbridge for sharing with us, and may we all faithfully and wisely proclaim God’s powerful Word—first in our own hearts, and then to a world in need.