The Problem With Sola Scriptura

This post is gonna be straight talk for Christians. If you don’t identify as such, you may want to take this time to check out my new favorite song by AJR/Rivers Cuomo or this video of a pig trying to get cookies, a Stallings family favorite.

I dominated Sunday School as a kid. I knew and loved all the familiar Bible stories by the time I was five. When I was ten, I remember a pair of teenage substitute Sunday school teachers, who were clearly unprepared, ask us if we had any Bible stories we wanted to learn more about. I began flipping through the gospels looking for a subtitle I didn’t recognize, and found one.

“What’s ‘The Parable of the Ten Virgins’?” I piped up.

The teachers snickered and redirected us to the Feeding of the 5,000. No mention of virgins whatsoever.

Around age twelve or thirteen, those parts of the Bible that were deemed too abstract for kids, that I didn’t understand and adults didn’t want to explain to me, began to come alive. This was partly due to my cognitive development and partly due to my family joining a church with a heavy emphasis on Bible study.

It was a beautiful thing. God became real to me in ways He never had before. He began speaking directly to me through the words on the page. I made choices, good choices, about how to act based on principles I learned from the Bible. I finished high school with good friends, good grades, and a true relationship with God. I know much of that is because the Word of God played an active role in my life and I am incredibly grateful for it.

Still, through the course of all that Bible study, there were many times I was taught that a particular passage meant something that didn’t seem right.

Sometimes a big question was left unanswered. Sometimes the suggested application felt wrong. Most commonly, what didn’t feel right is that the teaching was given with an air of derision: “This passage obviously means ______, and anyone who thinks otherwise is silly, foolish, or downright sinful.”

Being the people pleaser that I am, I quickly adapted. I ingested everything I was taught. I literally remember thinking, “It’s kind of strange that we are the only ones who have been able to figure out what God really meant in the Bible...oh well! Lucky us, I guess!” and went on my merry way, feeling sorry for all the other Christians and hoping they’d be able to make it to my church one Sunday so they could learn the truth.

I believed the only guidance I had in understanding the Bible was the way my Christian authorities understood it. The ruling mentality was that God has left us alone on Earth with the Bible as our only guide, like some sort of treasure map to decipher—and some people (my people) happened to be better at deciphering it than others.

A well-studied Bible.

When I look carefully at what the Bible says about itself, I don’t see that being God’s intention for it at all. God never meant for His Word to work alone.

Sola scriptura is not scriptural.

Like Peas and Carrots

God has always intended for His written or spoken word to work in full partnership with His Spirit.

When Paul is describing the armor of God in Ephesians 6, he inextricably links the Spirit with the word: “And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). When Jesus is preparing His disciples to go out and preach the gospel to all the nations, He instructs them to rely solely on the Spirit: “When they arrest you and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but it is the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13:11).

At the inception of the Christian church, the Holy Spirit is what causes people to speak the word of God: “And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

When Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica, he emphasizes that the gospel he and his partners preached to them was not only words, but was accompanied by power and God’s Spirit: “…for our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake” (1 Thessalonians 1:5).

On Jesus’s last night before He died, in His most intimate moment with His disciples, He tells them what to expect after He is gone. Who will take care of them? How will they know what to believe or what to do?

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you…” (John 14:26)

and again,

“But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come” (John 16:13).

God did not leave us alone with the Bible. He left us with Himself! When God the Man left, God the Spirit came. His purpose is to continually comfort us, teach us, convict us, and guide us.

God Himself, through His Spirit, guides us into truth.

If God’s Spirit is absent, then what we are hearing, understanding, or teaching from the Bible is not His word. From Scripture, we see that to accomplish God’s work, God’s Word must be accompanied by God’s Spirit.

Plain Reason

To the Western mind, the truest things are the things that can be defined, contained, clearly communicated.

Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, in his defense before the imperial assembly of the Holy Roman Empire in 1521, said, “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason...I do not accept the authority of popes or councils, for they have contradicted each other...my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen” (Sawyer).

Luther’s statement is compelling. It’s simple and humble and tastefully rebellious. It was exactly what the church needed at the time.

Some authorities in the Roman Catholic Church were promoting the lie that God only speaks to the special few—the special few who also happened to be those with the most power. They had abused that power, turning the temple of God into a marketplace for their own gain and the free gift of God into something that must be earned.

Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V on horseback under a canopy, by Jacopo Ligozzi, c.1580.

The beauty of Protestantism is the way it wrests the ability to know God away from the proud and the powerful and places it in the hands of the regular person. But as Protestantism has evolved, it has unintentionally recreated some of the problems present in the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Church.

Typically we all tend to fall into the ditch on one side of the road or the other, right? That middle place, that healthy, realistic place where we should be, doesn’t have the pull of the extremes. The ditch that modern evangelical American Protestantism has fallen into is making the Bible its God and plain reason its Holy Spirit.

There’s this idea that if we just think about it harder, if we cross-reference enough, if we write it all down and chart it all out, then most of us—the true believers—will come to the same conclusions and then we can disseminate those conclusions to Christians everywhere and then we’ll all know what to do.

Whose Objectivity is the Best Objectivity?

In a 2017 article for The Gospel Coalition entitled “Sola Scriptura Then and Now,” Don Carson argues that plain reason, when employed responsibly, is perfectly capable of correctly understanding any Biblical text:

“The questions are from me to it; the text, as it were, answers back. If my hermeneutics, considered to be a set of sophisticated rules that enable me to understand texts in all the complexity of their diverse genres, are mature and responsible, the questions I ask of the text cannot fail to produce straight answers that warrant my claim that I know what the text means.”

Carson uses the phrase “old-fashioned hermeneutics” tongue-in-cheek to contrast with a “new hermeneutic” that argues that each reader of Scripture will be influenced in his understanding of it by his own situation, experience, prior knowledge, and so on.

In Carson’s mind, recognizing the “situatedness” of each reader undermines the reliability of Scripture. In my mind, it is the only honest way to approach Scripture without simply legitimizing the “plain reason” conclusions of one group over another.

Brendan Wenzel’s They All Saw A Cat, a brilliant exposé on how perspective influences understanding.

Martin Luther believed that by relying solely on the authority of Scripture as interpreted by plain reason, the contradictions present among the popes and councils would disappear. He couldn’t have known that in the centuries following him, those whose consciences were captive to the Word of God, who used plain reason to interpret it, would, like the popes and councils of his day, contradict each other.

The Hard Parts

Were the animals created before Adam and Eve, as Genesis 1:24-27 says? Or were they created between Adam and Eve, as Genesis 2 says?

Does a person’s eternity depend on her deeds, as Revelation 20:12-15 says? Or does it depend on her faith in Christ, as Ephesians 2:8-9 says?

Does God desire women to be workers at home, as Titus 2:5 says? Or should they be shrewd women of business, as Proverbs 31:16 says?

Angolan business woman.

I am familiar with the explanations for all these apparent contradictions, and for the most part, I buy them. But the fact is, it takes LOTS of studying, explaining, qualifying, hedging, paradoxes, downplaying, and emphasizing to make sense of it all. If you don’t believe me, check out a contemporary study Bible, where commentators will use up two pages in 6-point font pontificating on one problematic verse.

It’s dishonest for Christians to use all this studying, explaining, qualifying, hedging, paradoxes, downplaying, and emphasizing to deal with the hard parts of the Bible, then act like believing what the Bible says is a simple matter of accepting its authority.

1 Peter 3:18-22 apparently requires four pages of commentary to be understood correctly.

For skeptics, recognizing the existence of contradictions means we must throw out the whole Bible. For Christians like me, it cannot mean that. But it has to mean recognizing that God did not make His Word cut-and-dry. I struggle deeply with this, but I’m coming to believe that He made it messy on purpose. If everything God wants us to know can be deduced from Scripture and plain reason, then we don’t actually need God.

Sure, we need Him in an eschatological sense, to be saved. We needed Him to write the Bible so we could learn about Him. But we don’t actually need to rely on Him day in and day out.

And if there is one thing the Bible teaches, it’s that we desperately need God. We need Him not only to avoid eternal disaster, but we need Him right now, the same way we need air. Drawing close to Him always means life and keeping our distance from Him always means death (2 Cor. 2:5-6; John 15).

Here’s the sticky part for many of us: this relationship with, this constant reliance on God, happens largely between our spirit and God’s Spirit.

But the Spirit Is So…Slippery

I know. Trust me, I know. It feels scary, doesn’t it, to rely on something that we can’t pin down?

The Greek word translated “spirit” is pneuma, which is quite distinct from the word for mind (noos). Pneuma is the word used for both the spirit of a human and the “Spirit” in Holy Spirit. It literally means spirit, wind, or breath. By nature, it suggests something mysterious. It has to do with sensing and feeling, with the unseen and unexplainable. This isn’t New Age nonsense. It’s always been part of the nature of God and God’s work.

"The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).

“And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know” (Mark 4:26-27).

Embracing this element of pneuma does not mean departing from reality. God is as real and present now as He was when the holiness of the Father resided in the ancient Hebrew temple or when Jesus walked upon the earth or when the apostles cast out demons and healed the sick in Jesus's name.

We tend to believe that using the Bible as our basis for truth allows us to be objective, whereas relying on God’s Spirit as our basis for truth opens the door to error. J. Oliver Buswell, an American pastor and theologian in the first part of the twentieth century, said, “. . . it is not strange to observe that an individual personal testimony may be subject to hallucination to which the prophetic word is not subject” (Sawyer).

With all due respect, I’d like to push back on Mr. Buswell’s assertion a little bit. Christians need to re-learn that invisible and unexplainable does not mean untrue or unreliable.

Spirit. Wind. Breath.

Wind-sculpted trees on the Pembrokeshire coast.

Sometimes, something feels wrong because it is wrong.

Sometimes, Satan deceives us through reason.

Sometimes, God speaks truth to us through feelings.

Sometimes, Satan lies to us through Scripture.

“The Absolute Rectitude of Slave-Holding”

In his 1980 article, “The Religious Defense of American Slavery Before 1830,” Larry Morrison provides a stunning compilation of primary source materials that reveal how deeply Southern slaveholders believed their ownership of African slaves was God’s holy and perfect will.

“In 1820, for example, in the midst of the debates over Missouri statehood, the Richmond Enquirer went to elaborate lengths in a long editorial to emphasize the literal truth of the Bible and its sanction of slavery. After a long section giving various scriptural sanctions, the article concluded by giving ‘a plain concise statement of certain propositions that we presume few faithful believers will controvert.’ There were five propositions:

I That the volume of sacred writings commonly called the bible, comprehending the old and new Testaments, contains the unerring decisions of the word of God. II That these decisions are of equal authority in both testaments, and that this authority is the essential veracity of God, who is truth itself. III That since there can be no prescription against the authority of God, whatever is declared in any part of the holy bible to be lawful or illicit, must be essentially so in its own nature, however repugnant such declaration may be to the current opinions of men during any period of time. IV That as the supreme lawgiver and judge of man, God is infinitely just and wise in all decisions, and is essentially irresponsible for the reasons of his conduct in the moral government of the world—so it is culpably audacious in us to question the rectitude of any of those decisions—merely because we do not apprehend the inscrutable principles of such wisdom and justice. V That if one, or more decisions of the written word of God, sanction the rectitude of any human acquisitions, for instance, the acquisition of a servant by inheritance or purchase, whoever believes that the written word of God is verity itself, must consequently believe in the absolute rectitude of slave-holding.

To these propositions most Southerners could only say, ‘Amen.’” (Morrison, 16-17).

Morrison goes on to show how defenders of slavery based their argument primarily on three passages from the Bible: the curse on Ham, Noah’s son, from whom Africans were presumably descended (Gen. 9:20-27); the Mosaic laws that related to slavery but did not condemn it (Leviticus 25:44-46); and the story from the book of Philemon in which Paul sends Philemon’s runaway servant (slave) Onesimus back to him.

What is truly devastating about the quotes Morrison shares is how heavily defenders of slavery called upon the authority of the Bible. We saw this in the five propositions above, and we see it again and again throughout the paper. “As ‘An Inquisitive Slaveholder’ wrote in a Virginia newspaper: ‘By this decisive, explicit, irrefragable authority of the written work of God, it is evident that servants .. . are commanded under the Mosaic law to be bought; and that when so bought of alien sojourners, that they and their issue become inheritable property.’” (Morrison, 19).

“Another newspaper correspondent referred to this passage [Leviticus 25:44-46] and then insisted that the law of Moses was written ‘by the finger of the Almighty.’ This had to be believed or else ‘flatly deny the whole of the Bible.’” (Morrison, 19).

“For how it is possible for a sincere believer to imagine, that consistently with the ideas that faithful Christians cherish concerning the essential rectitude of God in whom abides the plenitude of justice, that he would specially style himself the God of Abraham—dignify him with the appelation [sic] of friend—deign to declare that in his seed he would bless all nations; affirm that Abraham had obeyed his voice—kept his charge, his commandments, his statues, and his laws—without exception—or that the blessed Redeemer would have commended the works of Abraham without any restriction—if Abraham's moral conduct in becoming a slave holder had been deemed repugnant to any precept or clause in the code of the Supreme Lawgiver?” (Morrison, 20-21).

If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend reading the entire paper. If you’re like me, you may find phrases that have come out of your own mouth before.

I am going to take it on good faith that none of my readers holds the belief that American chattel slavery was God’s holy and perfect will.

But rather than dismiss Morrison’s paper by saying, “Yeah, those Christians were wrong. Silly them,” we need to recognize the parallels between 1836 and today.

The quotes Morrison includes are not from fringe pro-slavery extremists. They are from Congressional sessions, mainline newspapers and journals, and court petitions. These are dangerous, hateful, harmful beliefs held and taught, forcefully, by the bulwark of the Christian church in the antebellum American South.

View of crowd in front of the White House during President Jackson's first inaugural reception in 1829.

Much has been made of Christians defending slavery. People talk about how these Christians were a product of their time and can’t be held responsible. People talk about how God’s provisions regarding slavery have always been more humane than the surrounding culture. People talk about how we aren’t supposed to take everything in the Bible literally.

All of these assertions are worth discussing, but here I want to focus on how we, as the Christian church of 2018, can be careful not to use the Bible as a weapon of destruction. My history teachers used to go on and on about how we need to know history so we can learn from our mistakes. I was so bored. I fell asleep. Why is history class always right after lunch?

They were right, of course. When we know a holistic picture of what happened in the past, we are better able to see how the course of our own life would have played out in a different time, place, and culture. In 1836, would I have been a slave? A runaway slave? A slave trader? Slave holder? Abolitionist? Silent bystander?

Are there any attitudes, actions, or beliefs that are protected and celebrated within your church—using the Bible—that Christians outside of your church, perhaps Christians 200 years from now, might look at and say, “That is clearly not God’s will! What were those people thinking?”

Honestly, I don’t know whether or not the Holy Spirit was convicting Christian slaveholders that they were living in sin. What I do know is that there was no place in their theology for the Holy Spirit to convict them of something that contradicted the accepted “Biblical” understanding of any issue.

In fact, to claim a sense of spiritual conviction about the institution of slavery would be “culpably audacious.” In the teaching and lives of these Christians, God’s Word was given the very highest place of authority while the working of God’s Spirit was banished to the realm of heresy.

Making Space for the Spirit

A Christian in the antebellum South did not have the blessing of the church to seek out an alternative Biblical perspective—even though plenty were available.

Christians played as large a role in abolishing slavery as they did in instituting, preserving, and defending slavery. In her 1836 article “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” Angelina Emily Grimke makes a passionate, Biblical plea to pro-slavery, Southern, Christian women to do everything in their power to end slavery. She deals with the passages typically used to defend slavery and then points to some subtle anti-slavery passages like—I’m just pulling something out of my hat here—treat others the same way you want them to treat you.

“But did not Jesus condemn slavery? Let us examine some of his precepts. ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,’ Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart; Am I willing to be a slave—Am I willing to see my wife the slave of another—Am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my sister or my brother? If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this golden rule which was given me to walk by” (Grimke, p. 13).

Angelina Emily Grimke, 1805-1879.

But here is the problem: before pro-slavery Christians could even soften their hearts to listen to Grimke’s appeal, they would have first had to accept the contemptible label “DENIES THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE” from Christians in their circle.

Have you ever called upon the absolute authority of the Bible as a way of trying to force someone to submit to your understanding of a particular passage?

If so, please consider going before God with a humble spirit, asking Him to show you times when you were wrong to do so. If He reveals any particular occasions or people to you, consider going to those people, apologizing, and repenting.

We must make room for the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. If there is a chance that we have become too accustomed to our ways to be convicted by the Spirit about them, we must be willing to seek out teachers of God’s Word who might be able to show us something we’re not seeing.

Modern-Day Moses

Scripture and history show us a pattern:

1. God tells a person or group what He wants them to do

2. They get so good at doing what they think God wants that they stop relying on God

3. They start condemning others who aren’t doing what they’re doing*

4. God rebukes them, usually for their pride and lack of faith in Him

5. God reiterates the heart of what it means to follow Him: faith in Him, love for others.

*optional step

Moses followed this pattern when he hit the rock to make the water come out. Abraham followed it when he had sex with his wife’s maid because God had promised him a baby. The Israelites followed it when they kept up animal sacrifices but stopped caring about the vulnerable and oppressed. Many Jews followed it when they kept the old laws and invented new laws but refused to accept the One by whom and for whom the laws were made.

We should study God’s Word. He wants us to study it. But it’s quite possible for us to be saturated in Bible study while functioning wholly independently from the Spirit of God. That imbalance leads to pride and condemnation of others, and the name of God is tarnished. I have seen this happen in individuals (myself included), churches, and communities.

By poking at the way we understand the Bible, I realize I may be perceived as (or may even be!) a brainwashed millennial floating in the fog of relativism. It’s a road I have to walk down, though, because I see embedded in this topic some of God’s most dire warnings, repeated throughout Scripture:

Do not mistake my works for Me.

Do not base your rightness before Me on adherence to My precepts.

Do not use Me as an excuse to elevate yourself and put down someone else.

When the sword of the Spirit is divorced from the Spirit, it is no longer the Word of God. It becomes a weapon of destruction, used to accomplish the work of Satan rather than the work of God.

So here’s a fair question: what on earth does it mean to divorce the Spirit from the Word? Didn’t the Holy Spirit inspire the writers of the Bible and don’t all believers have the Holy Spirit?

Yes and yes. But so often we stop there. Rather than recognizing the Holy Spirit as a force of its own, we make it into something that must bend and flex to fit the elements of our theology that we view as more foundational. We consider the work of the Holy Spirit as something so automatic that it essentially becomes meaningless.

Time after time in the Bible, there seems to be a sort of “X-factor” Holy Spirit involvement that is not automatic. That is, the Spirit is particularly active or inactive, experienced or not experienced by believers, at various times. Words utterly fail to communicate the weight of this truth. God’s presence on earth, in human life, actively guiding hearts, minds, and hands toward His will and His way, is incredible. It defies commentary, analysis, reduction, and prescription, yet we cannot follow Him without it.

This involvement of the Spirit is nothing esoteric, by the way. The key ingredient seems to be a heart that desires the Spirit. Really all God is looking for is a simple willingness, an openness, an invitation to the party.

Are people capable of recognizing when the Holy Spirit is active and when He is not? If so, how?

If the idea of listening to the Spirit sounds too amorphous for you to swallow, I highly recommend Alan Kraft’s book, More: When a Little Bit of the Spirit Is Not Enough. He understands how uncomfortable most of us non-Pentecostals feel when people start to talk about the Holy Spirit, but he is deeply convicted (by both Scripture and the Holy Spirit) that experiencing the Holy Spirit is an essential and wonderful part of the normal Christian life. The book is extremely practical, approachable, truthful, and helpful.

Shifting Sea and Solid Ground

I understand that all this feels like it’s opening the door to something dangerous. It feels like if we make the concession that an unseen spiritual force is necessary for understanding God’s truth, all hell will break loose.

The reality is that the dangerous thing has already happened. Right smack in the middle of absolute dedication to the authority and infallibility of God’s Word, something deeply poisonous to the church was taking place. Even alongside the powerful Biblical teaching of the Great Awakening, human beings were systematically being deprived of their humanity, denied access to the whole of Scripture, and abused in the name of God.

Jonathan Edwards, theologian and slave owner.

So there are no new dangers. Dangers, yes. The human imagination is certainly wayward, capable of believing something false, of mistaking the voice of Satan for the voice of God, of wishing away the hard truths of God’s Word. But history shows us that these errors are as possible in the absence of the Spirit as they are in the absence of the Word.

Giving the Spirit as much credence as we give Scripture is only problematic if He’s not real. If He is, if He is here on Earth and inhabits the hearts of believers, if He’s doing everything He said He would, we don’t have to be afraid of relying on the Spirit for truth as heavily as we rely on Scripture. We are free to recognize that what we call reliance on God’s absolute truth as revealed in the written Scriptures is often just a thinly veiled reliance on the method of revelation that seems most trustworthy to us because of our particular Western culture.

Has anyone ever used the Bible to try to convince you of something you felt in your spirit to be wrong? Alternatively, has anyone ever used the Bible to draw you back in line when your spirit had wandered away from God? If you’ve experienced both, how could you tell the difference?

This question is incredibly important, and no one else can answer it for you.

Followers of Jesus must have safeguards in place for determining whether a message is from God. We have been given many, but there are two I see in Scripture that are least susceptible to the corruption of whatever-side-I’m-already-on-is-the-right-side mindset.

The fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Where you see a message that does not produce this fruit, or that produces fruit opposite of this, take a big pause before accepting that message as from God. (Ephesians 5:16-25)

The edification of Jesus. When you hear a message that belittles, throws mud at, or brushes aside Jesus Christ, or that attempts to make Him anything other than what He presented Himself as, take a big pause before accepting that message as from God. (1 John 4:2-3)

Walking in God’s truth is only possible in complete reliance on God. If you are without Jesus on solid ground, even that solid ground is not safe. If you are with Jesus on the water, the water is the very safest place to be.

“You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life” (John 5:39).

End Note (Please Read)

I could feel it even as I wrote this article, the temptation to pile verse after verse about the Holy Spirit upon you in an attempt to crush objections to my argument. But that’s dishonest and counterproductive to my whole point. I’d like to take the other side for a moment.

The Bible contains many verses about God’s Word and God’s law, about studying and learning. If you, or your community or culture, have elevated the Spirit of God unbalanced by the Word of God, or have in fact abandoned both altogether, then this particular article may not be what you need right now. You may need to spend more time reading, studying, and meditating on the written words of the Bible. You may need to lovingly lead those around you to do the same.

But that is not the problem I see right now in my own community. I see the Word of God elevated to a place of equality with actual God and the Spirit of God vilified to a place of nearly utter unreliability, so that’s what I’m speaking to. Preach to your people, ya know?

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Sources

“A History of Slavery in the United States.” NationalGeographic.org. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/interactive/slavery-united-states/.

AJR/Rivers Cuomo. “Sober Up”. The Click, AJR Productions, 2017, Track 4.

Carson, Don. “Sola Scriptura Then and Now.” The Gospel Coalition. Oct. 31, 2017. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sola-scriptura-then-and-now/.

Elysia. “Perspectives of Slavery in the First Great Awakening.” Words, words, words. Sept. 30, 2013. https://et4xy.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/perspectives-of-slavery-in-the-first-great-awakening/.

Grimke, Angelina Emily. “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.” New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abesaegat.html.

Jam Filled. “Ormie the Pig.” Online video clip. YouTube. Oct 31, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUm-vAOmV1o.

Kraft, Alan. More: When a Little Bit of the Spirit is Not Enough. Joshua Luke Press, 2014.

Morrison, Larry R. “The Religious Defense of American Slavery Before 1830.” Journal of Religious Thought. Howard University, 1980. http://www.kingscollege.net/gbrodie/The%20religious%20justification%20of%20slavery%20before%201830.pdf.

New American Standard Bible. Biblegateway.com.

Sawyer, M. James. “The History of the Doctrine of Inspiration From the Ancient Church Through the Reformation.” Bible.org. https://bible.org/article/history-doctrine-inspiration-ancient-church-through-reformation.