In Reality: The Biblical Teaching Office

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) I actually think the role of creeds and confessions needs to become more prominent. It's got to be one of the primary ways the church really begins to preserve sound doctrine amid changing cultural context. We do that through the creeds and the confessions that summarize core Christian beliefs and provide guardrails for interpretation. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:54 - James Spencer (Host) Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode. You know, in a world where anyone with a social media account can become a Christian teacher overnight, how do we know who to trust with our spiritual formation, with our understanding of the Bible? You know what if I told you that God's design is really for a specific office or set of people within the church to guide believers in understanding the scripture, and that the breakdown of this office and of this role is really, I think, at the root of much of the confusion that we have within Christianity today? And today we are going to discuss the role of teachers and the idea of the teaching office in the church, and the goal is really to rethink the biblical foundation for the teaching office, recognize how its breakdown has led to theological problems and, most importantly, discover how the historic creeds and confessions of the church provide some essential guardrails for our faith in these confusing times. This isn't about returning to some rigid religious hierarchy or surrendering your personal study of scripture. It's really about recovering God's design for how believers are meant to learn and grow together under qualified teaching that is accountable to the church and faithful to the scriptures. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by conflicting Christian voices online, wondered why there seems to be no agreement on even basic doctrines sometimes, or simply desire greater confidence that your understanding of faith is grounded in historic Christian tradition rather than, you know, sort of recent innovations or cultural movements. That's what I'm going to talk about a little bit today. That's what we're going to be addressing in this episode, and so let's go ahead and get started. I think the first place to start is really is there a biblical foundation for teachers or a teaching office? And in previous videos we explored how faith becomes untethered from biblical foundations and how cultural narratives hijack biblical interpretation. So today, what we're going to do is examine God's solution to those problems, or the way that God addresses some of these issues within the church, and that is through teachers and a teaching office that he establishes within the church. 03:04 So let's take a look at scripture and specifically let's look at Ephesians 4, 11 through 12, where Paul writes that Christ quote gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building out the body of Christ. End quote. Notice that teachers are specifically mentioned as a gift from Christ to the church, and this isn't an optional extra or a human invention. It's part of God's design for how the church function and grows. In James 3.1, we read, quote not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness, end quote. This verse really does highlight both the importance of the weightiness of the teaching office, but it's not a role that everyone should aspire to, and those who take it on will be held to a higher standard of accountability. We see something in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Paul outlines specific qualifications for church leaders, including the ability to teach and to quote, hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. End quote. That was Titus 1.9. 04:24 You know these passages and others make it pretty clear that God established a specific teaching office within the church. He gave the church, in other words, specific teachers who were entrusted with the word of God. These are qualified individuals who would guide believers in understanding and applying the text. And this doesn't mean that only teachers can read or understand the Bible. In Acts 17, 11, the Bereans are commended for examining the scriptures daily to verify what Paul was teaching them. But it does mean that God designated and designed the church to include teachers who would help believers navigate the complexities of scripture and protect them from error. So think of it this way the teaching office functions as a constraint within the complex system of the church. 05:13 In our second video we discussed how constraints in complex systems don't primarily restrict but enable. The teaching office is meant to be an enabling constraint, providing boundaries that allow for healthy growth and development rather than chaos and confusion. And I think without those constraints, interpretation becomes untethered, leading to the proliferation of false teaching and terrible simplification and a variety of other problems that we see today. With proper constraints, believers can grow in their understanding of Scripture within a framework that preserves the core truths of the faith while allowing for appropriate diversity on secondary matters. So that's why I think Paul emphasizes sound doctrine throughout his letters to Timothy and Titus. Sound doctrine functions as a constraint that enables genuine spiritual growth rather than restricting it. As Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1, 10, and 11, sound doctrine is quote in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted, end quote. The teaching office, then, isn't primarily about control or restriction of freedom. It's about preserving the gospel and creating the conditions in which genuine spiritual formation can occur. It's about helping us grow to conform to the image of Christ. 06:31 So if we think about what happened to this teaching office, what happened to the teachers overall, I think there's a lot of different factors that have influenced biblical teaching over the years. And so how do we get from where the first century church had teachers embedded within the community and they were recognized, and probably not recognized perfectly? I mean, we do have evidence even in the New Testament that places like Corinth was going off the rails. We have the seven churches in the book of Revelation that exhibit a number of different false teachings, a number of different false teachings. And so it isn't as if the teaching office is a silver bullet, that it solves every problem and that if we just brought the teaching office back, everything would be okay. But at the same time, if these things have been given to us by God, we should understand where they went and maybe even how we could get them back. So when I think about the breakdown of the teaching office and how it's occurred through history, I could see several different potential components for this. 07:27 First, I would say there is a gradual erosion of qualifications for teachers. In many contexts, academic credentials came to be valued over character and spiritual maturity, and in others, charisma and communication skills became more important than theological depth and faithfulness in scripture. And so we have these teachers who are being set up, in other words, based on very specific characteristics. But those characteristics, the sets of characteristics that we're looking for in a teacher, maybe aren't robust enough for us to identify someone as a real teacher, someone who isn't given, for instance, to a love of money, which is something that Jesus addresses at various points in the gospels. Maybe they are less informed about the biblical text, they don't have the technical skills to get in and dig around and really understand what's going on. Maybe they haven't had I'm not going to say formal theological training, but maybe they don't have a good sense of doctrine, and so they're very good speakers and communicators, but they're losing their anchoring within the biblical text. And so these are people who don't really fully understand how to sit under the authority of Christ, and I would say that the result of all that is that we have now teachers who might be knowledgeable or engaging, but occasionally lack the character and spiritual discernment that scripture requires. And so we have sort of this potential either or or, a spectrum of different types of teachers who may be good at one thing but not so good at another. 08:58 Second, there was a loss of accountability structure. I think the biblical teaching office was meant to function within a community of accountability, where teachers are responsible to other leaders and to the congregation, and as church structures became more individualistic or consumer-driven, many teachers became accountable only to their audiences and their donors rather than to other leaders who could correct error. Now we see this even beginning in the Reformation period I won't say at the Reformation, because there were problems even within late Catholicism, where you know, you're starting to see these sort of monks and lay preachers. The pastors who are serving these rural communities were starting to develop their own sort of style and their own sort of trajectory for what was going on. And so the church yes, it had a stronger hierarchy under Catholicism. There was a little bit more control and constraint there, but the reality was that there was still slippage. 09:58 But I think in the Reformation period what we really see is we start to see that the everyday Christian is becoming a bit more literate. The everyday Christian is then starting to look at some of the pastors and say, well, I don't know why this person should be able to tell me what the Bible says. I know more than he does. And so you start to see this beginning of people pulling away and saying we can be educated lay people, we don't need the clergy in the same way that we did before, and that created this sort of moment where, yes, maybe people were still under the authority of the biblical text, maybe they were still under the authority even of a church community, but you start to begin to see that drift away from that. So there was that aspect. But then, after the Reformation, we also see a number of different sects within Christianity forming within Protestantism, and they're not necessarily accountable one to another, and so, as that bifurcates, you essentially have a situation where there isn't a central warehouse of understanding of these Christian ideas. There are certainly things that are called heresies and those kind of ideas, but the reality is that on a day-to-day level, the accountability structures have been sort of fragmented and folks can either be accountable or not, and I think that's amplified even in our day, beyond what it was back then. And that brings me to sort of. 11:29 My third point is that there's this democratization of information through technology the printing press, later the internet, and you know, made it possible for anyone to disseminate teaching widely, really without going through traditional accountability structures. And while that democratization has many positive aspects to it, it's also important that we understand that some of the guardrails, at the very least, have been removed. There isn't a need to go through, let's say, a traditional publisher who has built in theological editors to look at different work that's coming out. When I write, for instance, I don't run it through a publisher. I can publish it on a blog, I can put it on a website, and so I have to be very careful, as I believe many Christian authors are who are writing without those traditional accountability structures. You have to be careful, but that also means the people reading it need to be careful, because no one has really checked my work before it's been put out. 12:34 Fourth, there was the rise of celebrity culture within Christianity. I think teachers became brands, you know, building platforms around their personalities rather than really serving within specific communities, and that celebrity status often insulates them from meaningful accountability and it creates incentives to teach what would grow their platform rather than maybe what would be faithfully representative of scripture. And finally, I'd say that there is this aspect where we've had a fragmentation of Christian communities along ideological lines. So this is a little different than what we were talking about with the Reformation and the development of these various sects and denominations. But as believers increasingly sorted themselves into ideological or homogenous communities, teachers lost the benefit of diverse perspectives that might challenge their blind spots or correct their theological errors. 13:31 And I would say the cumulative effect of these developments, and probably a whole host of others, have been the functional collapse of a teaching office as scripture envisions it. Functional collapse of a teaching office as scripture envisions it. Instead of qualified teachers serving within accountability communities or accountable communities to preserve sound doctrine, we now have a marketplace of competing voices, many of which lack the qualification, accountability or commitment to sound doctrine that scripture really does require. And that doesn't mean that there are no faithful teachers today there certainly are. But it does mean that the structures that once supported and constrained the teaching office have largely broken down. And I would say they've largely broken down, not necessarily within certain denominations, but certainly within Christian culture as a whole, leaving individual believers to navigate a confusing landscape of competing voices without clear guidance on who to trust. You sort of have to ferret that out for yourself now, and that's a rough situation for many believers to be in. 14:34 It opens us up, if we're not careful, to being led astray by false teaching because that sounds good to us, as opposed to really understanding that this is what the Bible is talking about, and I think one of the consequences of this breakdown is exactly what we'd expect when an enabling constraint is removed from a complex system. We get a certain degree of chaos, we get a certain degree of confusion and we get the proliferation of error. We see Christians embracing teachings that directly contradict scripture, falling prey to charismatic but unqualified teachers. And when I say charismatic, I'm not talking about the charismatic movement. What I'm saying is charismatic teachers who have an ability to really lather up a crowd. They have a certain stage presence we might say so it's not a comment on that sort of part of Christianity that believes in sign gifts or anything like that. It's really meant to be. This person has charisma, and so I think what we see is that we see people begin to become increasingly polarized along these ideological lines, and I think that's why the restoration of the biblical teaching office is crucial for the health of the church today, because without it, individual believers are really left vulnerable to the untethering and cultural captivity that we discussed in our previous videos. So I think that, with that, how do we bring back that teaching office? 16:10 I actually think the role of creeds and confessions needs to become more prominent. It's gotta be one of the primary ways the church really begins to preserve sound doctrine amid changing cultural context. We do that through the creeds and the confessions, formal statements of faith that summarize core Christian beliefs and provide guardrails for interpretation. These are things not necessarily, you know, limited to something like the Nicene Creed, but it could also be, you know, something like the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession, the, you know, even Luther's Small Catechism is pretty good. You could point to the Barman Declaration. This was a declaration written by a group of pastors and theologians prior to World War II. 16:58 All of these different confessions are really well thought out. They didn't come, they didn't just write them down in five minutes, they didn't ask ChatGPT to produce them. These are people who were really struggling through times. Various, you know, different heresies were being advanced and they needed to figure out okay, what is this? What do we really believe? How do we state that? What does this look like and how can we set this forth as a litmus test for Christianity moving forward? 17:29 And so I think these creeds and confessions really do serve several important functions in relation to the teaching office. First, they provide a summary of essential Christian doctrine that has been tested and affirmed across different cultural contexts and historical periods. They represent not just one teacher's understanding, but it really is the consensus of faithful believers through church history. Now, can consensus be bad? Of course it can be bad. You can have a lot of people together being wrong. But the reality is that these confessions have been looked at and re-evaluated and considered and they've really been found to be true to the biblical text, and so they're relatively trustworthy. They aren't scripture, they're not inspired, but they are relatively trustworthy frameworks for us to come at the biblical text and to understand what it's teaching us. 18:23 Second, they create boundaries that distinguish Orthodox Christianity from heresy, as well as certain, you know, sects of Christianity from other sects of Christianity, and I think there's room for diversity within those boundaries, especially on secondary matters, but the creeds really do identify core doctrines that can't be compromised without departing from historic Christianity. Third, they provide a framework for interpreting scripture that helps prevent individual passages from being taken out of context or misused. By articulating the overall narrative and doctrinal structure of the Bible, creeds and confessions really do help believers understand how individual teachings fit into the whole. Fourth, they create continuity between generations of believers, ensuring that the faith once for all delivered to the saints is preserved intact rather than reinvented by each generation according to its cultural preferences. And I would say the last thing is they provide accountability for teachers. They establish the standards by which an individual's teaching can be evaluated. A teacher who contradicts core doctrines articulated in historic creeds has departed from the faith of the church universal, regardless of how persuasive or popular that argument might be. So I think it's important to understand that creeds and confessions don't replace scripture or stand above it. Rather, they summarize what the church has understood scripture to teach on many essential matters. They are always subject to scripture and can be revised if shown to contradict it, but they represent the church's best collective understandings of scripture's teaching on core doctrines. 20:00 Some Christians are suspicious of creeds and confessions, fearing they restrict freedom or elevate tradition above scripture. But I think, properly understood, creeds function as enabling constraints. They create the boundaries within which genuine theological exploration and growth can occur without drifting into error. So think of it this way A river needs banks to flow properly. Without banks, water spreads out into a stagnant swamp. The banks don't restrict the river's flow. They enable it by providing direction and momentum. And similarly, creeds and confessions don't restrict genuine theological inquiry. They enable it by providing the doctrinal banks within which it can flow productively. Providing the doctrinal banks within which it can flow productively. And this is why I think we need to think through some of those creeds and confessions again. We need to revisit them, we need to understand how they function, we need to understand what they say so that now, as we're looking at various Christian teaching, we can have some sense of when a specific teacher goes outside the boundaries of those creeds. So let's talk about how we can potentially restore the church office now. 21:14 First, I think we need to recover the biblical qualifications for teachers. This means prioritizing character and spiritual maturity along knowledge and communication skills. It means looking for teachers who demonstrate humility, who are open to correction and who live out the truths that they teach. Maybe we do that already. In a lot of cases, it seems like we're not. We're seeing a lot of different pastors and preachers get caught up in scandals, and I just think we need to continually look at this and say are the people who are allowing to teach us? Are they really qualified to teach? Second, I think we need to rebuild accountability structures for teachers. Mutual accountability among teachers means creating cultures where teachers regularly submit their work to peer review and where constructive criticism is welcomed rather than rejected as divisive. 22:10 Third, we need to reconnect teaching to local communities. While there's a place for teachers with broader influence I'm obviously teaching online I'm not teaching specific to a community. I think the primary context for the teaching office in scripture is still the local church we need teachers who are known personally by those they teach, who are accountable to local leadership and who are invested in specific communities rather than abstract audiences. I would say part of the reason that I'm comfortable doing what I'm doing on YouTube and in podcasting and various other places is that I'm also rooted within a local community where I do actually teach on occasion, and so I have that sort of local accountability structure where people can listen to what I'm saying, ask questions, help refine what I'm saying, and it just gives me a little bit more confidence that, okay, I'm on the right track, I'm not nobody's sort of flagging me for being a heretic and I can kind of move this forward. I also have a group of folks that I talk to on a pretty regular basis and sort of pitch some of these ideas with, really talk through some of the issues that I write or speak about, and so hopefully, as that happens, the sort of group of peers, of knowledgeable people that I interact with, we're also refining one another's ideas, I think. 23:26 Fourth, we need to reclaim the historic creeds and confessions as guardrails for teachings, and that doesn't mean rigid conformity on every point, but it does mean recognizing that teachers who contradict core doctrines articulated in the creeds have placed themselves outside the historic Christian tradition. Fifth, we need to develop some skin-in-the-game accountability for teachers. This is one of the things I've written about in Thinking Christian. You can get that book on Amazon sort of shameless plug there but what it means is that it creates systems where teachers bear the consequences of their teaching rather than being insulated from them. It means rejecting the sort of celebrity culture that elevates teachers above criticism and holding even the most popular teachers accountable to biblical standards. And finally, and I think most importantly, we need to cultivate discernment among all believers. 24:17 While the teaching office is crucial, scripture also calls every believer to test everything, hold fast to what is good. That's 1 Thessalonians 5.21. We need Christians who can elevate or evaluate teaching based on its faithfulness in Scripture and its alignment with the historical faith of the church, and so I think that restoration of the teaching office isn't about returning to some idealized past or creating rigid hierarchies. It's about recovering God's design for how believers learn and grow together under qualified teaching that is accountable to the church and faithful to scripture. And I think the good news is that that restoration is already beginning in many contexts. There are churches reclaiming catechesis as a means for forming believers in sound doctrine. There are seminaries renewing their emphasis on spiritual formation alongside academic training. There are networks of teachers committed to mutual accountability and faithfulness to scripture, and there are resources like you know, the ones that we offer through Useful to God that are also encouraging this. We have a class out through Verum Seminary you can check it out at verumseminary.ai. It's called Creeds and Declarations of the Church where you can actually explore the creeds and declarations of the church and become more familiar not just with something like the Nicene Creed or even the Apostles' Creed, but also the various other confessions and declarations if you'd like to. 25:39 So, as we conclude today, I just want to emphasize that the restoration of the biblical teaching office isn't just an institutional concern. It's essential for your spiritual formation. Jesus established the office as a gift to the church to equip the saints. It was a means by which believers would be built up until all reach unity in the faith and the knowledge of the son of God and become mature, attaining the whole measure of the fullness of God, and become mature, attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. It's what we see in Ephesians 4.13. Without qualified teachers functioning with proper accountability structures, individual believers are vulnerable to being tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftingness of people in their deceitful scheming. That's Ephesians 4.14. 26:27 So in our next video, titled In Reality, reading Scripture as God Intended, we'll explore some practical principles for interpreting scripture faithfully within the framework provided by the teaching office and the historic creeds, and I just encourage you to watch that video to gain a fuller understanding of how to read the Bible as God intended. 26:46 Until then, I just invite you to reflect on the teachers who have been influencing your faith journey. Ask yourself whether they demonstrate the qualifications scripture outlines and whether they teach within the boundaries of historic Christian faith. Consider joining me and maybe even taking the class of Creeds and declarations of the church that's available there at verumseminary.ai. It'll help you deepen your understanding of the doctrinal foundations that have guided faithful believers for centuries. At the end of the day, just ask you that, if this has been helpful to you also, please share the video, share the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel. It really helps us out. But ultimately, I just want to thank you for joining me today, and may God bless you as you ask, as you seek to grow under teaching that is faithful to his word and accountable to his church. Take care everybody. 27:34 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.