Oops! Calvinist pastor Ken Temple appears to say Bible contains mistakes.

Note: He did not mean it the way it came out, but so long as it seemed that way I was will­ing to have the fol­low­ing fun with Pas­tor (Pr.) Ken Tem­ple’s poor­ly-word­ed claim that the New Tes­ta­ment con­tains a “big mis­take.” (In fact he does believe, and right­ly, in the inerran­cy of Scrip­ture.) What fol­lows is what I orig­i­nal­ly wrote, with an adden­dum at the end regard­ing Pr.’s cor­rec­tion of the record.

sel­dom both­er to read the com­box­es of oth­er peo­ple’s blogs. My life is worth more to me than that. It is enough to keep up with the blogs I enjoy read­ing (and those I spy on) with­out con­gest­ing my brain still more with a pletho­ra of pon­tif­i­ca­tors. But a read­er direct­ed my atten­tion to Pr. Ken Tem­ple’s mus­ings on this arti­cle at Called to Com­mu­nion; and for­give me, I am only human, but I could not resist. If the name is unfa­mil­iar to you, Pr. writes occa­sion­al­ly for both Mr. Bugay’s Tri­ablogue and Luther’s Inter­preter Mr. Swan’s Beg­gars All. (If you go to Beg­gars, you’ll find Pr. argu­ing that St. Augus­tine was a Calvin­ist. Thus his mind works.) He even has his own blog, Apolo­get­ics and Agape, which at least is use­ful as an exam­ple of allit­er­a­tion.

Any­way, on Dr. Anders’ post, Pr. replies (in com­ment 10) to the obser­va­tion that all ear­ly Chris­tians accept­ed the author­i­ty of priests and bish­ops. It does not take long for him to get all tied up into com­i­cal knots:

These are the ear­li­est non-Bib­li­cal and man-made tra­di­tions, along with bap­tismal regen­er­a­tion and lat­er, infant bap­tism; that were allowed in, unfor­tu­nate­ly. [Now pay atten­tion here, dear read­er.] A big mis­take was the wor­ship and sac­ri­fice lan­guage from the OT and priest­hood was car­ried over into the New Tes­ta­ment, but all Chris­tians were priests – 1 Peter 2:4–10; Rev­e­la­tion 1:5–6; 5:10; and it seems Latin espe­cial­ly devel­oped the word “priest” from pres­byter, but com­bined ideas of sac­er­do­tal (oth­er word for one who makes sac­ri­fices) aspects.

I don’t know; do Reformed folks no longer believe in the ple­nary inspi­ra­tion of Scrip­ture? Can Pr. inform me? I mean, as grey an anti-Catholic emi­nence as Loraine Boet­tner him­self was very clear on this point—that to deny the ple­nary inspi­ra­tion of Scrip­ture is a Mod­ernist heresy. Once deny ple­nary inspi­ra­tion, Boet­tner says, and there is “no con­sis­tent stop­ping place.” The very words of Scrip­ture them­selves are God-breathed! (I can hear Dr.* White, who still will not exegete Eph­esians 4, say­ing “θεόπνευστος!” yea even as I type these very words you now read.) So what does Pr. mean (please, sir, delay not in answer­ing) when he says that the “lan­guage” of the New Tes­ta­ment, car­ried over from the Old, in ref­er­ence to the sac­ri­fi­cial priest­hood, was a “big mis­take”? Tell us, Pr.: Was Paul a covert Judaiz­er? Yes or no? Do you deny the ple­nary inspi­ra­tion of Scrip­ture? Yes or no? Did the Holy Spir­it goof in per­mit­ting all that sac­er­do­tal lan­guage to enter into the New Tes­ta­ment? Yes or no? Don’t wait for the trans­la­tion: Yes or no?

And how is it that you can refer to the priest­hood as “non-bib­li­cal” and “man-made” and then turn right around and con­cede that it’s in the New Tes­ta­ment? It’s not in the Bible, but gol­ly gee, there it is in the Bible! And believe you me, it was a big mis­take too, and I’m just here to cor­rect it, in order to show all you papists that you’ve gone far afield in not rec­og­niz­ing when there are mis­takes in Scrip­ture. The Holy Scrip­tures self-authen­ti­cate their own errors, accord­ing to the East­min­ster Regres­sion of Fates! Is that not clear to you by now? How much longer must I labor under the sun?

Pr., I think, means to say that the priest­hood of the New Tes­ta­ment is not a sac­ri­fi­cial priest­hood but instead the priest­hood of all believ­ers. The lan­guage was bor­rowed from the Old Tes­ta­ment, but the sense is dif­fer­ent. Albeit, he does not explain why this is not just a false dichoto­my. Catholic doc­trine affirms both the priest­hood of pres­byters and the priest­hood of believ­ers. Pr. does not need to come along in 2014 and say, You know, you real­ly made a mis­take there, Mr. Third Per­son of the Trin­i­ty, and it’s just for­tu­nate for you that I’m here to set things aright in David Anders’ com­box.

Now, at this point the nor­mal, every­day, gar­den-vari­ety fool would grow embar­rassed and slink away, hop­ing that no one else took notice. But not Pr. Among fools, he has all of the fol­ly and none of the wis­dom. He typed on, adding yet one more para­graph to his mad­ness:

Apos­tolic suc­ces­sion could be right, when the suc­ces­sors stick to the Scrip­tures and the “rule of faith” which was an out­line of cor­rect doc­trine, that func­tioned as doc­tri­nal points in even­ge­lism for bap­tismal can­di­dates. … But it was no guar­an­tee of infal­li­bil­i­ty. The elders/overseers/pastors still had to cling to the Scrip­tures, which gave all the doc­trines nec­es­sary for “the faith that was once for all deliv­ered to the saints.

This is more than com­mon­ly mud­dled. Either apos­tolic suc­ces­sion is true or it is not. It is not maybe right, if. That’s the kind of thing you say when you’ve had too much grape juice after com­mu­nion. Does Pr. mean to say that God “could” have set up a sys­tem of apos­tolic suc­ces­sion, but lat­er yanked it back when priests went mad? Where’s the proof of that? And what does it mean to say that suc­ces­sion could be true if the apos­tles stick to Scrip­ture alone, but that Scrip­ture alone is no guar­an­tee of infal­li­bil­i­ty? I guess it’s not—not if Pr. says that the New Tes­ta­ment con­tains “big mis­takes.” (And no, these are not just tiny mis­takes; they are big, glar­ing, cause-your-local-Calvin­ist-fits-on-blogs kind of mis­takes too!)

When he hath done, he hath not done: Pr. says that the Church Fathers are all well and good when they just stick to Scrip­ture alone (big mis­takes and all); but, when they veer off into man-made tra­di­tions, they go awry. Thus when Ire­naeus, Ter­tul­lian, and oth­ers speak of Mary as the New Eve, it is “not with­in the con­text of the rule of faith” (i.e., the Bible); there­fore, we know it is wrong.

Of course, for Pr. to make that kind of argu­ment, he has to start with the a pri­ori assump­tion that sola scrip­tura is a true doc­trine. He begs the ques­tion: He assumes what is to be proven.

More than that, he abus­es what the doc­trine of apos­tolic suc­ces­sion says in the first place. If apos­tolic suc­ces­sion is true, then the apos­tles’ suc­ces­sors nec­es­sar­i­ly have teach­ing author­i­ty, and sola scrip­tura is false. Pr. tries to have it both ways:

(1) The apos­tles have teach­ing author­i­ty, but only because Scrip­ture is the only author­i­ty.

(2) The sac­er­do­tal priest­hood is false because it is not bib­li­cal. Even though it’s right there in the New Tes­ta­ment, it’s still not bib­li­cal, because it was a car­ry­over from the Old Tes­ta­ment, and the Holy Spir­it made a big mis­take.

These are not the kind of argu­ments that sug­gest that Calvin­ists have sense or rea­son to offer.

Post­script: Pr. Tem­ple was kind enough to offer some cor­rec­tions to my post.

It was my own dumb error to claim that Pr. writes for Tri­ablogue. I must have been con­fus­ing him with Steve “Pur­ple” Hays, and I sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize to Mr. Hays and Mr. Bugay for any dis­tress this unfor­tu­nate asso­ci­a­tion must have caused them.

On a more seri­ous note (since Calvin­ists seem pre­des­tined to lack of humor), Pr. Tem­ple points out that he chose his words poor­ly at Called to Com­mu­nion and did not mean to sug­gest that the New Tes­ta­ment con­tains mis­takes. Know­ing that Reformed Chris­tians hold to a very high doc­trine of bib­li­cal inerran­cy, I take him at his word.

But Pr.’s clar­i­fi­ca­tion that the “big mis­take” belonged to the Church Fathers rais­es impor­tant ques­tions of its own. Is it not true that the Fathers are an impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion for how the ear­li­est Chris­tians under­stood the inten­tion of Christ for His Church? Being the ear­li­est sources we have—the clos­est to the apostles—it is not as easy as one thinks to dis­miss what they have to say as just a “big mis­take.” The bur­den is on Pr. to point us to a sin­gle Church Father who does not under­stand the priest­hood sac­er­do­tal­ly. It is also on him to show how the Catholic priest­hood is incon­sis­tent with the New Tes­ta­ment, not mere­ly that it con­flicts with his own inter­pre­ta­tion of it.

As just one exam­ple, in John 20:21, ff., Christ gives to the apos­tles the pow­er to for­give sins. This is a sacra­men­tal author­i­ty, in con­trast to the dif­fer­ent priest­hood which belongs to the laity.