Beeson podcast, Episode 407 Dr. David Allan Hubbard August 28, 2018 Timothy George: Well, today we're going back in history to the very first sermon ever played on the Beeson podcast. This was way back on November the 16th, 2010, and the preacher was Dr. David Allan Hubbard. He had been the president of Fuller Theological Seminary and actually spoke at the dedication of Hodges Chapel, a wonderful sermon called “Word and Spirit: Inseparable, Infallible." You'll notice that the opening is a little different. We are using a great hymn, "Holy, Holy, Holy" played with the organ, and the voiceover is not our usual wonderful Dr. Frank Thielman, but Burch Barger, who was a great helper and administrator at Beeson in those days. We're gonna go back to 2010 and listen to this sermon the Beeson podcast, “Word and Spirit: Inseparable, Infallible," Dr. David Allan Hubbard. Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Well, today on the Beeson podcast, we have a very special treat. We're going back in time to 1995 and the dedication of Hodges Chapel here at Beeson. The mission of Beeson Divinity School is to prepare God-called men and women for the service of the church of Jesus Christ. One of the major ways we seek to accomplish that goal is through the worship of the Triune God and the encouragement of the practices of Christian spirituality. In 1995, we dedicated this beautiful chapel decorated with Christian art and symbols of the Christian faith, and pictures of Christian leaders throughout the history of the church. We asked Dr. Hubbard to come and reflect with us on the meaning of this chapel in the context of the mission of our school. He talks about the importance of the chapel and the library working together in the formation of ministers. He says that the lectern in the classroom and the pulpit in the chapel are made of one piece of wood to remind us that we are worshippers who happen to be scholars and not the other way around. This is a wonderful message in which Dr. Hubbard stresses the coinherence of Spirit in the life of faith and the life of worship. David Hubbard was, for many years, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California. He also served as the president of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. He was a wonderful Christian leader, and he gave this message shortly before his death the following year. Let's listen now to Dr. David Hubbard as he speaks on “Word and Spirit: Inseparable, Infallible." David Hubbard: What an honor to be here on this great occasion on this wonderful campus and to feel like the Queen of Sheba. The half has not been told. He began every class with the same prayer. He was a Hungarian theologian, a son of the Reformation, one who had suffered under assaults from both Hitler's and Stalin's army in Hungary, and he came to Fuller just for one year 45 years ago or so. I was a student. He began every class with that same prayer. "Bless us and guide us, O Lord, with your Word and with your Spirit. Amen." Simple. That I recognized at once. Profound. It took me a while longer to grasp the depth of that simple sentence. Simple profundity, profound simplicity, made Béla Vassady, the Hungarian theologian, one of my heroes. Hero one, who shapes the form of these thoughts. Word and Spirit, inseparable, infallible. Hero two is a preacher-poet that all of you know, John Donne. If Béla Vassady officiates the form, John Donne shapes the purpose of these remarks. You may want to go back and read John Donne's "Litany," a dozen or so prayers addressed on behalf of certain groups. He reaches into the depth of what's gone on in the history of God's people and lifts prayers concerning them and prayers about lessons that he has learned from them to the Lord. The ninth litany is about the apostles. Listen to Donne. He says to God: "And thy illustrious zodiac Of twelve apostles, which engirt this All, —From whom whomsoever do not take Their light, to dark deep pits throw down and fall ;— As through their prayers Thou hast let me know That their books are divine, May they pray still, and be heard, that I go Th' old broad way in applying; O decline Me, when my comment would make Thy Word mine." The apostles taught him the reverence for the sacred text and he prays desperately before God that he will not confuse the text of the Holy Word with his own words or compromise the truth and power of the Holy Word by something that he says about it. This is a dangerous place to be. The Apostle James said, "Let not many of you become teachers, and we who teach bear the greater judgment," he said. The dangers of scholarship and the hazards of preaching, those risky enterprises meet face to face, head-on, in this particular setting on this campus. We have the need for the Spirit and the need for the Word. The Word and Spirit, inseparable and infallible. We don't have to be reminded that the premier role in the program of God goes to the Spirit. The Spirit did not come from the Word, the Word came from the Spirit. God's Spirit at work in redemptive history long before any parts of the Bible were written. God's Spirit at work in the Holy Trinity, each member involved in whatever the other two persons do. The Spirit at work in creation. The Spirit at work in revelation. The Spirit at work in redemption. The Spirit in the creeds of the church. We use the Apostles' Creed, and the third article features the work of the Spirit and everything the Spirit does in fulfilling the program of God, forming the church where then which the experience of the forgiveness of sins takes place, looking forward to the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. If you take the Nicene Creed, you add clauses about the Holy Spirit like, "The Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with them is worshiped and glorified, the Spirit who spoke by the prophets." The Scriptures have the supportive role while the Spirit has the premier role. The Spirit prompts the Scriptures and the Scriptures preserve the revelation, record the events and interpret them and the acts of God. The Scriptures bear testimony to Christ's lordship in anticipation in the Old Testament, in fulfillment in the New. Our ministry is the result of the joint efforts of the Word and the Spirit. Neither without the other will accomplish what we are called to accomplish and what we celebrate in the gift and dedication of this chapel in this wonderful season in the life of the seminary. We are ministers of the Word and of the Spirit, inseparable and infallible. The Word and the Spirit work together in authority. Our spiritual forebears said the ultimate authority does not rest in the church nor the teachers of the church nor the traditions of the church. The ultimate authority rests in the Word of God as energized by the Spirit of God. It's an exclusive authority. It's God's self-revelation. No other place will we find out about God what God in the power of the Spirit has revealed to us in the word. No other place will we encounter the person of God in the fullness of the Holy Trinity. God's concrete activity is there as well as God's self-revelation, His activity in creation, in the nations, in Israel's history, among individuals, in Christ, the word made flesh, conceived by the Holy Ghost, we said. God's unique mystery is part of this exclusive authority. There is always more to God than we can discern. We see through a cracked mirror, a darkened glass, the apostle says. Heaven will show us more. We will all have our theology corrected in Heaven when we know as we are known. That's why we need this chapel. We need the experience of worship here which becomes a foretaste of that ultimate activity of the people of God, which is worship. We sing praise here and doing so, we identify with that great crowd before the throne who sing praise to the one who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb forever. There's no reading of Scripture in Heaven. We shall know God face to face. My friends talk about questions they're going to ask Christ or the apostles when they get there. I got that whole list of questions, but I also have a theology that tells me those questions will be irrelevant when I stand in the presence of the throne. Who's gonna ask questions in that setting? An exclusive authority in the Word and the Spirit. A normative authority. The Spirit is the author. The indispensable root of the word "authority" is "author." The Spirit is inspiring, selecting, arranging, setting the priorities, choosing the forms and style of the word, preserving it from human apathy and satanic assault. Scripture has suffered as much almost from its friends as from its enemies. The Holy Spirit has been there in preservation and protection and the Spirit is the enabler, encouraging us to hear, to believe, to obey. This marvelous dome reminds me of an experience I had some years ago in Pasadena. I went to the jet propulsion laboratory where the satellites that explore space and so forth are made and tested. One of the things that they did was to build a dome-like silo. They had lights and mirrors with all of the high-tech that that Caltech-run establishment could produce. Their aim was to test the effect of the Sun's rays in space on the satellites that were sent up. Will they continue to work? Would the batteries work? Would the cameras work, and so forth? They built a silo that was probably 30 feet in diameter with all the lights and mirrors. The problem in space, light is perfectly parallel and it's even in temperature. The light that we make to simulate that is always full of hotspots and converges and deflects and so forth. It isn't parallel. They built they silo 30, 40 feet in diameter and they said they had a six-foot shaft of light. It was all they could generate that would be anything like the replica of light in space. It had hotspots and cool spots and it had light that bumped together and then diverged. I thought to myself as I went out of that silo and saw the sun lathing the hills of Pasadena, "That's about it." My attempts to understand the light of God's word were about six feet in a diameter of 40, fractions that we understand. We have to understand that we need the work of the Spirit to help us understand our ignorance, to help us cope with the mysteries of God's ways. The chapel is the prime locus of our celebration of God's divine authority. Other places we study and analyze the word, and we should. Its authoritative character warrants every ounce of scholarship that we can bring to it, every tool, every method, every erg of energy, every drop of midnight oil the Scripture deserves. But then in chapel, here we sit under the word. We bow and bend to its authority. We gain fresh appreciation of its role in the church, the world, and our lives, and we gain renewed motivation to return to our studies. We affirm that chapel and library on this campus and in our lives belong together. We hear them sing, "Blessed be the tie that binds chapel and library." They work together in authority through the word and the Spirit. They're inseparable and they're infallible. The word and the Spirit work together in clarity as well as authority. Our forebears said that the Bible needed to belong more to the people, that it should no longer be the private estate of priests, professors, and monks. It was no more an elite prerogative of the learned and initiated who had handled it while the common folk heard its story and music as we have tonight, saw its cast and plot in sculpture, in architecture. The cruciform shape of this chapel reminds us that the building itself is a message shaped like the cross. The stories that we're told in stained glass, I like what has happened, what's going to happen here. That's gonna fill a lot of boring moments. When it gets dull and dry, look at the pictures. People in medieval days had some method in their building of those great cathedrals, not only to show their adoration for the Living God, but also to try to connect art and the Gospel, art and the truth of God's word. This clarity the Reformers called "perspicuity." The Bible had the capacity of being looked through and understood. There was a clarity to its essential message. The Spirit gives the word its unity, hovering over the whole process. That picture of the Spirit in Genesis 1 hovering over the deep is a picture of the way the Spirit works throughout Scripture and throughout redemptive history. God in Christ is the theme. At heart, at bottom, the Bible is about Christ. All things in Scripture are not equally clear, our forebears said, that the things that pertain to salvation are lucidly clear. The Scripture brings unity out of variety. Variety enriches and enhances the unity. We know that. Leaf through the Bible and see the stories and the songs and the genealogies and the parables and the visions and the sermons and the proverbs, yet tied together into one by the Spirit's power and the Spirit's plan. They write large God's saving love, God's ultimate victory, God's high expectations of us, His people. The Spirit applies the word as part of the clarity of the Spirit's word in connection with the word, highlights our needs. You know, the descriptions of us in the Bible are not very flattering. I remember once going with an old missionary friend of mine who was in his 90s and we went to the doctor's office. He had to be examined. On the doctor's wall, there was one of those charts that shows all the organs and intestines and so forth of the human body exposed. My friend looked at that and he said very simply, "Doesn't give us much to be proud of, does it?" When you see what the Bible says about it, I mean, the Bible uses terrible words about us. Hardness. Blindness. Deafness. Perversity. It's not new information that we need so much as new openness to the word as the Spirit drives it home. The Spirit applies the word, summoning our responses. The Spirit says, "Wake up!" The Spirit says, "Pay attention." The Spirit says, "Have faith." The Spirit says, "Do what you're told in the Scripture." The Spirit uses the whole church to increase our understanding. That's what's so wonderful about this experience tonight for us, the whole church. Did you ever look at that shelf full of new translations that you have and thank the Lord for the people who did all that work? The interpretations of history and the background of the Bible, the bevy of scholars from Origen and Irenaeus to F.F. Bruce and Carl F.H. Henry, studying their works is an encounter with the communion of saints. It's part of the ministry of the church to open the truth of God's word for the rest of us, and we learn it and apply it in the context of the holy catholic church, the communion of saints. Nowhere do we catch the clarity of Scripture as brightly as we do in worship. We welcome, all of us do, we welcome this chapel as an instrument of clarity. We work as students and teachers often in the details of our disciplines. I look back over my ill-spent past, graduate studies in Semitics and literature, years spent in studying books like Proverbs, shedding tears literally over the enigmas in Ecclesiastes. Try sometime to interpret the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes. Try just to know what the keyword "vanity" means. I sat with a translation team with three of us who had all written books on Ecclesiastes. There wasn't any agreement among the three of us as to what the word meant. The translation came out with a [chairman's 00:24:22] word in it. He pulled rank, but that doesn't mean he was right. Here I am now in those books that lie ahead. I'm re-experiencing the tragic suffering of the Jews in those five chapters of Lamentations. What a refreshing, what a renewing, what a centering thing, what an enlarging feast for me to gather in worship with God's people and celebrate not just that little piece of the revelation that I may spend months or years on, but the fullness of God and the wholeness of the Gospel as the Spirit lifts my heart in worship. Somebody's gotta do that dirty work of the little texts. That's like scrubbing floors. That's like chipping paint and then repainting. Some of us are called to do that kind of work. What a glorious thing it is to gather in the clarity of Scripture and hear the fullness of the Gospel and rejoice in that, in the midst of the puzzles of grammar and history and culture that I face daily in the technical study of the word. I need to sing the doxology as the choir slipped in a line of it in their beautiful first number. I need to recite the creed as we were led in tonight. I need to rejoice in the Gospel. I need to hear the triune benediction and say amen to that. I need to see the message whole. This setting does it for me in a way that my daily setting does not. We wanna hear the study desk, important, and the prayer bench saying we are one in the Spirit. The word and the Spirit work together in clarity as well as authority. The word and the Spirit, inseparable and infallible. The word and the Spirit also work together in effectiveness. Our spiritual heritage talks about a doctrine of sin which has so affected our thinking and so affected our ability to love and so affected our ability to choose and so fouled us up in our sense of worship and morality and so forth that the theologians called that total depravity. They didn't mean we were as bad as we could be, and they didn't mean that every one of us is equally bad, but they meant that within us we did not have the power ourselves to bring that necessary change and to live on God's terms without the power of the word and the Spirit. This term "effectiveness," they called it efficacy at times. They also spoke of the effectual call of God, this effectiveness, this validity of the word, is not dependent on us. Preaching is more God's word than it is the preacher's. We are saved, we are blessed, we are convicted by the word that is preached, Peter says at the end of 1 Peter, chapter one. Preaching carries the divine power of the word of God. Now, think about the power of that word. Put yourself there on the horizons of creation and see all of that chaos, and then hear God speak and read that it was and that it was good. The power of the word, the word by which God prophesied through the men and women of old, sparked fire in the prophets' bellies, He did with the power of that word. Burned in Jeremiah's bones, called by the word. Miracles, water from the rock, the dead called from the grave. It was the Reformer Zwingli who gave us what I think is the clearest and most powerful definition of the infallibility of Scripture. It has two parts to it. One is the Scripture never leads us astray. If we understand it rightly, we will always be led toward the truth of God. The other aspect of infallibility we often overlook because we treat Scripture so flatly we see it as a set of propositions, we fight over the best way to describe the nature of its authority, and Zwingli said the infallibility of Scripture also means the power of Scripture in the Spirit to accomplish all of the purposes of God. It not only never leads us astray, it never lets us down. Isaiah said it never returns void, accomplishes the purpose for which it was said. The validity of the word is to be trusted more than all of our human techniques and communication. We need those techniques. We wanna work on our voice. We wanna work on our enunciation. We wanna work on our outlines and our illustrations, all of those things that the speech and communications and homiletics people are saying have significance. Though we trust the Spirit for the results, God alone can reveal the triune God. We don't even know how to get good illustrations of the Trinity. God alone could break through our human blindness and rebellion. We can barely reach for the switch, let alone turn on the light. Choosing God is not a choice among choices like whom to marry or where to go to seminary. We are geared not to choose or to choose wrongly as human beings. Idolatry, not true worship, is our natural way of life. If you wanna ask any one thing that human beings are good at, we are specialists in idolatry. We can worship any old thing that hangs around. Immorality, not righteousness, is our endemic style of life. The chapel for us, then, is an eye clinic in which we face and remove the cataracts of sin. It's a cardiology lab that unclogs our selfish arteries. We need this chapel, need it badly, to see ourselves as God sees us, to repent of our blindness and our stubbornness. Here the Spirit of God faces us with the truths of God's word and our failure to line up our lives with them. Let the great hymns of the faith that we sang together tonight and the Gospel songs that we heard presented so beautifully, let those great hymns of the faith be raise here. They are, next to the Bible, the greatest ecumenical textbook that we have, the hymns of the church. If we're going to be one, the hymnbook will be part of the source of that, an expression of that unity. Through those hymns, the Spirit will probe our needs, get to our emotions, open us to God's healing. On this campus and in this school, let the hymnal and the lexicon meet with holy kiss and sanctified embrace. The word and the Spirit work together in effectiveness, inseparable, infallible. What wealth has been bestowed upon us as God's people in this campus! I talked about the Queen of Sheba and there's one strand in me that's tempted to be envious when I think of our little downtown parking lot in Pasadena and see this marvelous campus. On the other hand, one of my teachers taught me a long time ago, one of my faculty members, that we're all in this together in the body of Christ. When you see somebody succeeding at something, you say to yourself, "How well we're all doing!" I say that as a member of the body of Christ, we are doing well here tonight in this particular situation. What wealth has been bestowed up on us, this campus, this sanctuary! But I mean more than the wealth of the Beeson family, as important as that is in the work of God, and bless them for what they have done. I mean the wealth of opportunity to study and worship in the presence of the Spirit and the word. How do you measure that? Tevye the milkman, "Fiddler on the Roof," he knew about it. In the bleakness of his poverty, pulling his cart because his horse had gone lame, Tevye knew about it. He fantasized a life of wealth, all that would happen "if I were a rich man." Dresses for gold for his wife. Two staircases in a big house, one to go up and down, and the other just for show. The respect that he would gain in Anatevka. "Good morning, Reb Tevye. Good Sabbath, Reb Tevye." But closest to his heart, the center of that fantasy about what he would do if he were wealthy, was the combination of the synagogue seat by the Eastern Wall and seven hours a day to read the Holy Books. -tay how wealthy you are? -that the synagogue? You've got seven hours a day to read the Holy Books. Wealth indeed. Chapel and library, library and chapel, the rhythm of discipleship on this campus available to us all, riches beyond measure. The chapel pulpit and the lecture podium in the classroom on this campus are made of one piece of wood. We are worshipers who happen to be scholars, not the other way around. In this chapel, competition ceases. Rank becomes irrelevant. The caste system which is so much a part of academia, trustees, administration, faculty, staff, students, etc., the caste system so much a part of academia is suspended here. We are one in the Spirit. Here our drive to get, to achieve, to advance, to succeed, is transcended by our duty and desire to give, to give glory to God's holy name. Worship keeps us humble. Worship keeps us focused. Worship keeps us grateful. Worship keeps us expectant. Worship keeps us dependent. Worship fixes us on God. That's the mission of this setting. I am grateful for that illustration. It's not everywhere I go where [inaudible 00:38:54] illustration for the conclusion of a presentation is decorating the dome of the building. That has never happened to me before. But then Dr. George, the marvelous planner, is able to look ahead and I thank him for seeing that that was there because I wanna go back to my second hero, John Donne. I wanna read his "Litany" when he prays for the doctors and prays for himself in light of the doctors. He says: "Thy sacred academy above Of Doctors," he says to God, "whose pains have unclasp'd, and taught Both books of life to us—for love To know Thy scriptures tells us, we are wrote In Thy other book—," the Lamb's book of life. "Pray for us there, That what they have misdone Or missaid," now that they've got their theology right before the throne of God," "We to that may not adhere. Lord, let us run mean ways," the middle path, "and call them stars, but not the sun." The stars look down on us. It is the Son whom we worship. Let us pray. Bless us and guide us, O Lord, by your word and by your Spirit. Amen. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.