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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Karl Tsatalbasidis

Emergent Theology:  Overturning Sola Scriptura - Part 2

As I mentioned last night, you guys are kind of my guinea pigs.

As Esther has said, I'm finishing off a PhD at Andrews in Systematic Theology, where I'm studying the interpretation of God's presence in corporate worship.

And so I take a look at the sacramental version of receiving the presence of God, which comes through the mass when the priest pronounces the words, this is my body and the substance of the bread, which is the part that you can't see, which is the part that has been interpreted on the basis of Aristotle and on the basis of Plato and Parmenides, which is timeless and immaterial.

The substance of the bread and the wine changes into the substance of the divine son of God.

And so, then you have the Reformation where the presence of God comes through preaching.

But unfortunately, The Reformation hasn't been completed because even 50 to 100 years after the Reformation, you get into Lutheran Orthodoxy and Protestant scholasticism, and I know those are big words, but basically they continued to understand preaching in the presence of God very similar to how the Catholics did, and they began to systematize doctrine in the same way that the Roman Catholics had done.

When you get to the 20th century, you have the Charismatic Movement, and music is synonymous with the presence of God in the charismatic movement in much the same way that the wafer was synonymous with the presence of God in the sacramental church and churches.

The only thing that changed is the mechanism whereby people received the presence of God.

The understanding and theological philosophical interpretation of the presence of God has never changed.

And we'll get more into that as we look at this.

So I'm kind of critiquing all that and then setting up the scriptures, thank you, setting up the scriptures where I can look at a biblical framework or a biblical foundation or a biblical matrix for understanding at least how we should think about some of these issues.

And so last night we took a look at the story of Jeroboam found in 1 Kings chapter 12 and realized that his major sin was not necessarily in new worship forms, not necessarily in setting up worship leaders whose qualifications didn't match scripture, not necessarily in setting up a counterfeit system of salvation, those were symptomatic of a much more fundamental problem.

And that fundamental problem was found in 1 Kings 12, verse 28, where the Bible says that Jeroboam took counsel and made 2 calves of gold.

The prominent mistake he made was that his counsel didn't come from the Word of God.

Because nowhere in the Word of God is God confused with nature or limited to nature.

But if the calves are equated with nature and he took his counsel from philosophy and culture, then that's the doctrine of God that you get.

And so his real fundamental error was the fact that he ditched the authority of the Bible.

And last night we talked about several worship components that I'm going to mention here as a test case to see how, when you use philosophy and culture, that your definitions, or I should say your interpretations of God's presence, the worship leaders, the ritual actions, the encounter, and the response to the encounter are interpreted in a way that's completely unbiblical.

And then we contrasted that with the Bible in the Great Controversy, or the Bible in the sanctuary, I should say.

So we began to ask 1 fundamental question.

Is emergent theology, as expressed through emergent worship, compatible with fundamental belief, number 1, that we have as Seventh-day Adventists on the authority of Scripture?

Stated differently, can we as Seventh-day Adventists continue to uphold fundamental belief number 1 if we choose to incorporate emergent practices into our worship services?

That's interesting, you know, this whole scenario is kind of interesting.

It's almost the reverse of the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, you know, the preacher was up there and he was just staring, you know, or even in the Reformation churches, staring down at the congregation.

And I'm here, you know, down here just trying to look up to you guys.

So I think the whole way that this has been arranged is very interesting and is contrary to the way things were in the past.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but anyway, just 1 of those offhand observations I suppose.

But okay, so can we hold on to fundamental belief number 1 if we choose to incorporate emergent practices into our worship services?

And I'll begin to explain this a little bit in more detail, but if you're wondering, So I'm talking about corporate worship here.

Well, in contrast with the charismatic movement, or I should say in agreement with the charismatic movement, there's all kinds of music.

And emergence have taken that way beyond the charismatic movement, beginning with Vatican II in the 1960s, where the Catholic Church, after 400 years of having a completely uniform worship, all of a sudden now, all the indigenous forms of music that you find in every single culture under the Sun are now permissible, which never used to be the case before.

And so in emergent worship practices you not only get all kinds of music, But contra to the charismatic movement, you have sacraments, images, paintings, drawings, video clips, all this type of stuff.

And that's because emergents are kind of fed up with the mega church movement, which grew out of the charismatic movement in which worship practices and the doctrine of worship was basically arranged in such a way that they took a survey and if some of you guys like this, then they include that.

If you didn't like this, then they didn't include that, and so forth and so on, and that was church.

And so they were kind of fed up with that, and they were looking for something a little more meaningful in their worship, and so they went back to the early church, and by the early church I don't mean Peter, James, and John, and Jesus.

I mean after the death of the disciples in, you know, in the second century up to the fifth century, that's what I mean by the early church.

And unfortunately, Greek philosophical ideas had really interpenetrated there, And so you have, you know, sacraments, signs, symbols, as ways to connect with God.

So the emerging church blends all of the music possible in all of the cultures that exist with sacraments and signs and symbols.

So that's a little bit about emergent worship practices, and we'll get more there.

So how are we going to answer that fundamental question?

Well, last night we dealt with Jeroboam's violation of the Sola Scriptura principle and its inevitable results.

Again, it says he took counsel and made 2 calves of gold.

Well, automatically he didn't get his counsel from the Bible.

So he must have got it from philosophy and culture.

Philosophy is included because Philosophy interprets the broadest possible categories that exist, and God is 1 of those categories, so to speak.

And then, so philosophy, maybe I should wait, I guess.

The recording's still going, so I can talk.

And so philosophy interprets the nature of God.

And so when you come up with an idea that God is restricted to the calves, well you've used human philosophy as a source.

You've used it as an authoritative sorts.

So we began to talk about that and some of the implications of that.

And so when you remove the Bible, you automatically remove something else.

And if you look at the passage closely in 1st Kings chapter 12 verse 28, he made 2 calves of gold, he took counsel, made 2 calves of gold, and then he set them up in Dan and Bethel, which means that they weren't going to Jerusalem.

So automatically, when the Bible was taken away, the sanctuary ceased to be the system through which they interpreted the divine presence, the worship leaders, the ritual actions, the encounter, and the response to the encounter.

So in this second presentation, we're going to outline how emergent theology relates with the sola scriptura principle.

That's something that we received from the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation did not take it far enough, and if you're paying attention there's supposed to be an agreement between the Lutherans and the Catholics on this coming up very soon as it's the 5, you know, the 500th year.

Now if you're reading the Great Controversy you're like shocked and puzzled, How could this ever happen?

But if you're a student of historical and systematic theology, it's not very difficult to figure out.

Because they have never left some of their interpretations of the doctrine of God.

They've never been critically analyzed, accepted, and reformulated according to the Sola Scriptura principle.

But we spend all this time proving that the sanctuary exists, analyzing it to death, proof texting it to death, and then at the end of the day, we don't use it.

Well, how is the sanctuary related to the presence of God?

How is the sanctuary related to the atonement?

How is the sanctuary related to justification?

How is the sanctuary related to spirituality?

And so by default what's happened to us is that, now I'm Greek, anybody else here?

When I became an Adventist I knew I was the only 1.

So, not very many of us, you know, become Adventists that are Greek.

I was raised Greek Orthodox, which is some very similar to Catholic, but I was very nominal.

Now, so if you reject the sanctuary, you are rejecting the eyeglasses through which you interpret the rest of the Bible.

And by default, you're moving back to the Greeks.

You're moving, I mean, you may not know anything about Plato.

You may not know anything about Aristotle.

Emergent Theology: Overturning Sola Scriptura - Part 2

Transcript

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