The Holy Spirit says in Ephesians 4 that Christ has given to the church teachers as a powerful and necessary means to building up the body of Christ into 'a perfect or complete man'. Obviously, these teachers do not have the gift of inspiration, and yet the Spirit didn't view this as a challenge to the sufficiency of Scripture, but rather as a necessary outgrowth of it. This is because He desires that we know the meaning of the Bible, not just the bare words. As R.L. Dabney said, 'He who would consistently banish creeds must silence all preaching and reduce the teaching of the church to the recital of the exact words of Holy Scripture without note or comment.'
And, just because these men lived in the past doesn't mean that they're not a gift from God to us today. The Bible everywhere speaks of the church as one body throughout all history (Gal. 3:23-24; 4:1-3; Ps. 66:6; Hos. 12:4; Deut. 5:2-3). Therefore, the astute teachers of the past are our teachers as well, thanks to God's gracious preservation of their writings. Actually, because these men were on the crest of the waves of reformation, and not in the trough of apostasy as we are today, we ought to pay more attention to them than to contemporary teachers. This is because all of us -- including our teachers -- have been blinded by our culture's wretched and extreme departure from the Lord Jesus Christ.
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For more information about Biblical creeds, please visit SWRB's home page at the 'Outside Web Link' below.
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