The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum The Bible

And I'm trying to keep this on track too. The OP is about the Bible and how easily some who proclaim it the loudest can so easily deviate from it. That deviation then becomes a tradition and takes on a life of its own, defending its own interests against any attack and against, oddly enough, refutation by the very Bible from where it supposedly sprang.

It pains me to compare this thinking with the error of the LDS church, but there is an unmistakable parallel. Having found itself in disagreement with the Catholic Church that has reigned supreme as the sole representative of Christianity from the apostolic age to the Reformation, some Protestants have adopted the belief that God's revelation and involvement was either absent or utterly ignored for all those centuries. Mormons call this an apostacy prevalent until Joseph Smith restored the "true" church. Whether it be the advent of Joseph Smith or Martin Luther, there exists this belief that true Christianity was lost and needed to be restored. I could write a whole book on the problems with this belief.

I don't wholly disagree with Pilgrim, but many Protestants agree that misinterpretation is an abuse of the Bible and a deviation from Sola Scriptura. Perhaps to make it clearer, Tota Scriptura, Sola Scriptura should be used to emphasize the exegetical method of fine tuning every part of scripture with the entirety of scripture. Put another way, no verse of scripture is complete without the rest of the Bible to aid in correct interpretation. R.C. Sproul warned against the errors resulting from a deviation of Tota Scriptura saying, "Once we remove ourselves from a view of tota Scriptura, we are free then to pick and choose what portions of Scripture are normative for Christian faith and life, just like picking cherries from a tree." Recent events have only served to highlight this truth.




One of my principle disagreements with Sola Scriptura is that the most compelling evidence of the correct interpretation as expressed by the practices and beliefs of the early church, is disregarded. The gospels did not contain all the teachings of Christ, but we see those missing parts played out in the later teachings of the apostles who taught those things they heard from Jesus. By the same token, all the teachings of the apostles were certainly not spelled out by the written epistles either. In fact, the epistles were largely written to follow up on teachings that were given orally. The proximity of the first few centuries of Christiany to the apostolic age should be far more credible a source of interpretation than our feeble guesses lo these 2000 years later.

For instance, Jesus said to call no man on earth your father, on that we are agreed. But then some Christians will lecture Catholics about how they are in violation of Christ's teaching. Had they had a greater familiarity of the use of the word "father" in the early church to refer to those of spiritual authority, they might understand that those removed from the life of Christ by mere decades had a very different understanding of His commandment.

I know a pastor who often preached, "stay in your assigned seat" and decried the fact that when God heats up that seat a little, we're prone to get up and find another. There's a certain humility, precious in God's sight, by which someone accepts injustice within their immediate fellowship, yet does not leave but works through it. Such a person can reap a great reward by sticking around long enough to receive it.


Another grave concern was printing copies of the Bible without the imprimatur of the bishop. Luther attempted to make his changes not only in the wording (like adding "alone") but by removing books he disagreed with from the canon itself. The reason we can have good faith that the Bible today is accurate, true, and free from corruption is because the Church faithfully preserved it through the centuries. What may seem like heavy-handedness in using even the penalty of death to deter unauthorized copies of the Bible was the method used by the Church to protect the Bible throughout the centuries. We ought not second guess it.