The Human Rights Philosophy and the Word of God⤒🔗

Throughout the ages the church has again and again defended and held on to the truth of God's Word by way of writing down her faith in a creed or confession. The aim of the church with such a confession or creed is also to abide by the truth of God's Word. For that purpose the church binds itself to its creeds. The history of the church shows that in a reformation movement the church always goes back to God's Word as well as to the abandoned or discarded confessions, saying: this is the truth.

It is good to remember this in our present time. Our time is marked by the modern notion that there is no absolute truth. To state that there is such a truth is considered a social sin, in conflict with our human rights. It is everybody's right to have his or her own opinion and to determine his or her own truth. What is true for one person is not automatically true for the other. And what is true for me today might no longer be true for me tomorrow. Therefore, one must not say about anything: this is the truth.

This philosophy of our individualistic human rights holds a threat for the church. The temptation becomes intense to think and say in the church too: it is my right to have my own opinion and to determine for myself what is true, or, what is the truth of the Bible. You can hear people say: everybody reads the Bible in his or her own way, with his or her own background. Or, to use a modern expression: everyone reads the Bible in one's own context. And we must leave each other free in this respect. A Roman Catholic has the right to read the Bible in the context of his Roman Catholic upbringing, a Reformed person with a Reformed background, in its different varieties, has the same right.

This reading of God's Word with an individualistic human rights approach, does not reckon with but denies God's right. Scripture says clearly that it is God's Word. Therefore, since God is the author, it is God's right to tell us how we should read and understand His Word.

The New Hermeneutic←⤒🔗

The temptation to read God's Word from an individualistic human rights point of view becomes even stronger with the so-called new hermeneutic. The old hermeneutic has as basis that the Bible is God's inerrant and infallible Word in all that it says. God is the primary author. In His Word the only true God gives us the absolute truth.

The new hermeneutic views the Bible more as the book with the faith experiences of Israel and of the early church. Scripture is not first of all God's revelation, His Word that He speaks through inspired human instruments. No, the Old Testament shows us how and what Abraham and David and the prophets believed. And the New Testament tells us what Peter and Paul and the other authors believed. In the different Bible books we have the theology of their human authors.

This new hermeneutic reasons further that within the wrappings of the description of the experiences and theologies of the human authors we have to seek for the Word of God and what it has to say to us in the twentieth century. For our culture, our world views differ so much from the culture and the world views of the Bible times, some two or three thousand years ago. We, so it is said, know so much more and we know things so much better than Moses, David and Paul.

This new hermeneutic says “no” to the question whether we, almost in the twenty-first century, can still be bound to the faith experience and theology of believers who lived some twenty or thirty centuries ago. Those people had views on the world and on God that fitted in their culture, so it says, while we, in our modern day and age, with our culture, have our modern world view. Therefore, according to the new hermeneutic, the message of the Bible must be re-interpreted for us, so that it fits our modern world view.

It is obvious that the divine authority of the Scripture is undermined with this philosophy. Scripture is no longer really the Word of God and no longer gives us God's revelation of His absolute truth. Moreover, not only the human Bible authors had their own faith experiences, it is the same with us. We too have our own faith experiences. Each reads the Bible in his own way, to find his own truth there, or what he sees (or wants to see) as being true for him.

It is clear that the spirit of our modern philosophy of individualistic human rights holds a great danger for the church. In the midst of this danger it is good to see what, at other times, the church did when contemporary philosophies or theologies attack its faith, that is, what it confessed to be the truth of God's Word.

God's Word←⤒🔗

In this respect, first of all, the Church received her guidance from God Himself in His Word. The Lord Himself, through the service of the apostles, guided His church. He charged us to preserve and guard the truth and to pass it on to the next generation just as it was received. We are not to add or to take away from God's Word (Deuteronomy 4:2, Revelation 22:18-19). Paul charged Timothy, “what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). Everyone who comes with a gospel that differs from what Paul preached hears Paul's “let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8, 9). And through Peter, the Lord warns that we “must understand this that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own understanding, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:20-21). I repeat: the Bible tells us that it is God's Word; therefore it is God's right to tell us how we have to interpret and understand it.

In accordance with this charge, the church has, time and again, confessed what it as the community of believers received as God's Word, God's truth. I shall take two examples. The first one, from the early church, is the Athanasian Creed. The second one, from the days of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, is our Heidelberg Catechism.

The Athanasian Creed¹←⤒🔗

The first two articles of this third ecumenical creed state (Book of Praise, p. 439):

1. Whoever desires to be saved must above all things hold to the catholic faith;

2. Unless a man keeps it in its entirety inviolate, he will assuredly perish eternally.

The beginning of Art. 3 reads, “Now this is the catholic faith, that we worship one God in trinity and trinity in unity:” Then the contents of this “catholic faith” is confessed. First, the articles 3-28 formulate the church's confession about God as her triune God. Art. 28 ends this first part with the words, “So he who desires to be saved should think thus of the Trinity.”

The second part begins with an elaborate confession about the Person of our Saviour, His incarnation and His two natures, the divine and the human nature. After this, this second part concludes with confessing the same truth as stated in the Apostles' Creed. The closing Art. 42 repeats what is said in Art. 2:

This is the catholic faith. Unless a man believes it faithfully and steadfastly, he cannot be saved.

The point is here: what did the church do by making its statements in the Articles 1-3, 28 and 42 of this Athanasian Creed?

• In the first place, it said that this creed contains the “catholic faith.” “Catholic” means that this faith is the faith of the universal church as it is gathered and spread over the whole world. The whole church believes it, as the community, the fellowship of the true believers.

• In the second place, the church declares that in this creed it confesses the true faith, that is, the apostolic teaching or the truth revealed by God in His Word. And because this faith is God's truth, the church declares, we bind ourselves and everyone to it for salvation. The binding to this creed as to the “catholic faith” is a binding to the truth God revealed and gave to His church. Not individualistic human rights but God's right is maintained here.

When in the sixteenth century the churches of the Reformation adopted confessions, they did the same. They said: this is what we believe and confess to be the true faith, that is, the truth of God's Word. By binding each other as community of believers, in mutual agreement, to the adopted confessions, the churches bound each other in fact to the truth of God's Word.

When we, as Reformed Churches today adhere to the confessions, we do the same, we hold on to God's Word as His revealed truth. And we do so because God's Word says that we have to preserve and keep His Word as we received it through His prophets and apostles. God's Word still is the absolute truth today, to be believed and confessed by the community of His church, and in fact by all.

The Heidelberg Catechism←⤒🔗

In L.D. 7, the Heidelberg Catechism, speaking about the true faith by which we are grafted into Christ, deals with faith in a twofold way. In Q. & A. 20-21 it deals with the faith with which we believe (our act of believing), and in Q.& A. 22-23 it deals with the faith that we believe (the contents of our faith). This twofold way of speaking about faith occurs first of all in the Scripture. In Romans 10:10 Paul writes,

For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses (the contents of what he believes) with his lips and so is saved.

Here faith is the faith with which we believe. However, in Jude verse 3 the church is charged to “contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints,” while in verse 20 Jude admonishes us, “… build yourselves up in your most holy faith.” Jude speaks here about the faith that we believe.

In Q. & A. 21 the true faith with which we believe is defined as “a sure knowledge whereby I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in His Word.” This “sure knowledge” or holding for true all that God has revealed for true is at the same time, as the other side of the same coin, “a firm confidence,” a trusting that all this revelation of God, with its message of salvation in Christ, is not only true for others but also for me. Thus, a true faith is knowing and trusting that all what God revealed in His Word is true also for me personally in the communion of the church.

The point I like to make here is that, though dealing with the faith with which we believe, the Catechism immediately links it with the contents of faith: “all that God has revealed in His Word.” In other words, the Heidelberg Catechism, or rather, we who have adopted and continue to adhere to this confession of our “catholic undoubted faith,” say that our believing, our faith with which we believe, can be distinguished but never separated from the true faith that we believe.

This faith that we believe is God's revealed truth. It is delivered to the saints. This faith as contents of what we believe is spoken about in the second part of L.D. 7 (Q. & A. 22-23). Here the question is asked, “What must a Christian believe? The answer is, “All that is promised us in the gospel.”

Of this promising Word of God, this contents of our faith for which we are called to contend, the Catechism continues to say that “the articles of our catholic and undoubted Christian faith teach (it) us in a summary.”

This summary of God's truth, our “undoubted Christian faith,” is stated in the Apostles' Creed, and, then worked out in Lord's Days 8-22, themselves summary of this truth of God's Word and contents of our faith. In other words, the early church said in its creeds: this is the truth of God; this is what the church is called by God to believe and does believe and confess. And the church in the sixteenth century held on to this earlier confessed truth, and worked it out from God's Word in order to maintain it against the attacks in its own days. It repeated: this is our undoubted catholic faith; this is in summary the truth of God's Word. The church bound itself and its members to her confession of the faith, and so to God's revelation, to the absolute truth.

We will act wisely if we oppose the spirit of our time and abide by the truth, as the church confesses it, its humble repeating of what God has revealed in His Word. He who truly wants to live by the Scriptures as God's errant and infallible Word, will recognize the need of adhering to the truth of God's Word of promise in the community of God's people.