What Scripture Says — Volume 2

Submitting the Church to Biblical Authority

What Scripture Says, Volume 2

Seventeen chapters on the questions Christians dispute — and how the text settles them.

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A different kind of argument

The harder test

Volume 1 addressed the world’s open disagreement with Scripture. This volume addresses something harder: disagreements between Christians who all claim to submit to Scripture and who have drawn different conclusions from it on questions that are not peripheral.

These are not disputes about style, tradition, or denominational preference. They are disputes about what Scripture actually requires. And because both sides of each dispute appeal to the same text, the only way through is to go back to that text with more care than the dispute has so far required.

It is one thing to reject the world’s rebellion against Scripture. It is another thing to ask whether a position held within the church — perhaps one you inherited, defended, taught, or built other conclusions upon — can actually stand before the Word of God.

What’s inside

Seventeen chapters. The questions Christians actually argue about.

The book opens with the doctrinal and moral foundation — salvation, law, ethics — then turns to the household: four chapters on what Scripture says about husbands, wives, manhood, and womanhood.

From there the book turns inward: treasure, prayer, the tongue, faithfulness. These chapters are less polemical than the others, but they are not softer in their demands. Each one takes up a question that is easy to think you have already settled — and presses on it.

The final third addresses the theological disputes that have divided the Reformed and broadly evangelical world most sharply: dispensationalism, Israel and the church, the end times, the proper subjects of baptism, church order, and the role of philosophy in the doing of theology.

Selected chapters

A sample of what’s covered

What Scripture Says About Salvation

The dispute over salvation is ultimately a dispute over what kind of men we are by nature — and what it therefore takes to save us.

What Scripture Says About Manhood

Headship, responsibility, courage, and the recovery of biblical masculinity in an age that calls it a defect.

What Scripture Says About Anxiety

Real fears, real bodily weakness, and the trust that does not pretend the turbulence is not there but answers it from a different premise.

What Scripture Says About Prayer

Why a sovereign God commands prayer — and why the means He has appointed are not made unnecessary by the decree He has made.

What Scripture Says About Baptism

A careful Reformed Baptist case for credobaptism, engaging the Reformed paedobaptist tradition on its own terms.

What Scripture Says About Philosophy

On the boundaries between revealed theology and inherited philosophical systems, and what happens when the latter quietly replaces the former.

From the introduction

These are the kinds of questions this book takes up. Seventeen chapters, each asking what Scripture actually says about a topic the church is actively arguing about — among itself.

The Bereans were called noble because they examined the Scriptures daily to see whether the things they were being told were true. That commendation did not expire with the first century. It is the posture this book assumes, and the one it demands of the reader. A belief is not an identity. The reader who has confidently held a position for decades — defended it, taught it, built other conclusions upon it — has the most reason to bring it carefully back to the text, not the least. Defensiveness is not faithfulness.

— From the introduction to Submitting the Church to Biblical Authority

Who this book is for

Believers willing to be corrected by the text

This book is not addressed to outsiders. It is addressed to Christians — to readers who already affirm the authority of Scripture and who are willing to test, against that authority, the conclusions they have inherited and the conclusions they have drawn. The reader who insists on emerging from this book holding every position he held entering it has not used it as intended.