Humility and the Dunkers

The following quotes are from Jerry Bridges, The Practice of Godliness, chapter 6, Humility, and Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, chaper 3, Typographic America.

The person who is truly humble before God is also humble before God’s Word. God says He esteems the person who is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at His Word. When King Josiah heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes, saying, “Great is the LORD ’s anger that burns against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book” (2 Kings 22:13)…. Because Josiah trembled at the Word of God, his heart was responsive, he humbled himself, he acknowledged the sin of his people, and God heard him. He did not dispute the Word of God; he simply obeyed it.

We also must develop this kind of humility toward the Bible. As we search the Scriptures, we must allow them to search us, to sit in judgment upon our character and conduct. We must treat the Scriptures not only as a source of knowledge about God but also as the expression of His will for our daily lives….

Not only must we develop a spirit of humility toward the Bible in regard to our conduct , we must also develop such a spirit in regard to our doctrines. We evangelicals are not noted for our humility about our doctrines—our beliefs about what the Bible teaches in various areas of theology. Whatever position we take in a specific area of theology, we tend to feel that our position is airtight and that anyone holding a different view is altogether wrong. We tend to be quite impatient with anyone who differs from us. Ironically, the more our views come from the teachings of someone else instead of from the Bible itself, the more rigidly we tend to hold those views.

It is one thing to be persuaded that what we believe is correct as we understand the Scriptures; it is quite another to believe that our views are always correct. Twice in my life I have had to make significant changes in my doctrines as a result of additional understanding of the Scriptures. This is not to suggest that we are to be wishy-washy in our beliefs so that we are “blown here and there by every wind of teaching” but that we are to hold our beliefs in a spirit of true humility. We must remind ourselves that God has not seen fit to make our minds, or even a particular church, the depository of the sum total of His teaching.

At one time in His ministry, Jesus prayed, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure” (Luke 10:21). Commenting on this passage, Norvel Geldenhuys has aptly remarked,

The contrast pointed by the Savior is not that between “educated” and “non-educated” but between those who imagine themselves to be wise and sensible—and those who live under the profound impression that by their own insight and their own reasonings they are utterly powerless to understand the truths of God and to accept them.

May God help us to be humble enough toward the Scriptures to be found in that group that Jesus called “little children.”

(From Jerry Bridges, The Practice of Godliness, chapter 6, Humility)

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In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a religious sect known as the Dunkers and a long-time acquaintance of Franklin. The statement had its origins in Welfare’s complaint to Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following words:

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

Franklin describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history of mankind of modesty in a sect.

(From Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Chaper 3, Typographic America)