Word for the Day- Sufficientist

Well it is actually a word I may have made up as I have not heard it before. In the past there was a fight over the inerrancy of the bible and many have felt that battle was won but even that may be questioned. However, I think there is just as big a battle today and that concerns the sufficiency of scripture. It is not enough to simply claim the word of God is inerrant and then live as if the word of God has nothing to say about every aspect of life.

The issue of sufficiency affects every part of life; from how we raise our children, to how we worship as a church, to how we evangelize and every other aspect of life we encounter. What professing believers, many who claim the inerrancy of scripture, tend to do is rely on everything but scripture for directing all of life. Oh, many will give lip service to the word of God but in the end worldly principles are Christianized and used rather than living by the very word of God as revealed in the Bible.

The principle of the sufficiency of scripture does not rule out reading and studying other writings by men and women of God but it simply says that at the end of the day scripture is to dictate and direct all of life. We need to make sure that our final filter for all we see, hear and read needs to be the word of God.

Thus a biblical sufficientist is one that sees the word of God, Old and New Testament, as being the final and deciding place to seek direction for all of life. A sufficientist would be one that seeks to live life by the revealed word of God. This is the battlefield for today and the battle starts in our churches that have taken the wisdom of man repackaged in Christian garb and live by that standard. The sufficientist is to live by the only inerrant, unchanging standard and that standard is the entire corpus of scripture; both the New Testament and as Greg Bahnsen has called it the Older Testament.

Let us seek to be biblical sufficientists.