Week of 07/26/26

• Sufficiency of Scripture
  • The Bible contains everything needed for salvation and sanctification.
  • God has graciously given us exactly enough to belive and grow.
  • We can use systematic theology to find out what God intended us to know in many areas.
    • “Simply stated, the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture tells us that it is possible to study systematic theology and ethics and find answers to our questions.” - Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology
    • This is a major difference in theology from Catholics.
• The Attributes of God, and their catagories
  • Attributes we don’t share with God.
  • Attributes we do share with God.
  • Attributes we partially share with God.
  • These are more of a spectrum than hard catagories.
• The Trinity
  • https://youtu.be/KQLfgaUoQCw
  • The afore mentioned attributes of God don’t simply apply to God the Father, but to the Trinity.
  • The differences between the three persons of the Trinity are more of differences in function than person.

Week of 7/5/26

• Knowledge about God apart from the Bible
  • we can have a thriving spiritual life through the Bible, but the Bible is not needed to know God is real, or to know some about his attributes
  • many passages suggest that salvation comes through belief, which comes through hearing the gospel, but what about people who lived before Jesus?
    • they relied on the future promise of the gospel
  • without the Bible it is impossible to accurately know the will of God
    • one can use logic and our consciouses, but that will not be fully accurate.
    • this can follow not just to knowledge about God, but about all.
      • all Truth needs an anchor.
      • we either are to discover all science has to offer, (like ALL, with perfect accuracy) or we trust the One who made it all (with zero risk to science, as science will always match what was made)
  • moral laws can also be deduced without the Bible
    • this will be imperfect, as mentioned above, but is a good guide.

Week of 06/28/26

• The Clarity of the Bible
  • The Bible has parts that are very clear, and parts less-so
  • We are commanded multiple times to study the Bible, and understand it
  • The Bible itself verifies its own clarity, in agreeing with itself
  • For those not willing to hear and “recieve” the Bible’s teachings, the Bible will be difficult, if not impossible to understand
  • Why do we misunderstand then?
    • Scope: often, lacking scope, or perspective, leads to misunderstanding
    • The Bible doesn’t specifically address the topic, so we draw conclutions from elsewhere, and try to fill in gaps left intentionally by God
  • No matter what, All Scripture is able to be understood
  • Just because people have been arguing about things for centuries, doesn’t mean we don’t have the answer in front of us
  • Don’t just hand the hard searching for answers to scholars, do it ourselves

Week of 06/21/26

• Authority
  • The OT is most easily verified to be God’s Word by the NT.
  • The NT is verified by itself, in defining all scripture as from God.
    • This isn’t just book A verifing itself, but book A verifing book B and vise versa. (e.g. 2 Peter 3:16 and 1 Timothy 5:18)
    • These books cite Jesus’ words, which obviously fall into the catagory of from God.
    • We also have cultural references and signs that the Church of the time recognized the NT writers as that times authority from God.
    • Paul has some parts where he specifically calls out that what he is saying is NOT from God. (see 1 Cor. 7:12)
  • This is generally a difficult thing to argue at all, as proving absolute authority is inheriently hard. This applies to last week too.
    • This is the basis for setting the Bible as the “Ultimate Standard of Truth” - Wayne Grudem
  • All of this means that the written word of the Bible are the the Final Authority.

Week of 06/14/26

• “The Word of God”:
  • A Person - see John 1:1
  • Literal words from God. - often in four flavors:
    • decrees - words that cause things to happen
    • addresses - words for us humans
    • from prophets
    • written - the Bible, even written by human hands
  • The modern-day focus is on the last one - the written word in the Bible
    • We can study the effects of decrees
    • addresses are uncommon and difficult to reliably study
    • similarly, prophets have ceased
• What is Canon, and why?
  • OT:
    • Basically we trust that the Old Testement we have is accurate, because the people at the time of the NT believed it.
      • Not just this though, early historians and teachers also validated it.
    • The things not quoted or referenced are not included, as they are not provably the Word of God.
  • NT:
    • Most of the New Testement is written by primary sources; the apostles.
    • The apostles verify each other
      • 2 Peter 3:16 - Peter verifies Paul
      • 1 Timothy 5:17–18 - Paul references Luke
    • The rest, and these, were methodically reviewed.
      • “In A.D. 367 the Thirty-ninth Paschal Letter of Athanasius contained an exact list of the twenty-seven New Testament books we have today.” - Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology