I've asked many traditionalist Christians over the years, "Why Sola Scriptura? It's not in the Bible, so isn't it a self-defeating human theory?"
Some of my posts on the topic...
https://throughthesewoods.blogspot.com/2013/08/listen.html
https://throughthesewoods.blogspot.com/2015/10/i-can-do-no-other.html
https://throughthesewoods.blogspot.com/2016/03/answering-question.html
Stan at his blog yesterday once again says he's answering this question. He isn't. He doesn't answer the question. I think he's missing the point, because this line of "answers" are what I always hear from traditionalist Christians who believe in this human tradition.
Just a reminder: Sola Scriptura is the theory that "The Bible the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice."
The problem? It's not in the Bible. And here, I don't mean the words, "Sola Scriptura" or the concept, "The 66 books of the Bible are the sole infallible source of authority for faith and practice," or even, "Scripture is the sole infallible source of authority for faith and practice."
There is no ONE (or multiple) biblical source that says anything like that. There just isn't. Jesus certainly never says anything like this. At all.
One problem with this? IF Sola Scriptura were a real thing, then the tradition of Sola Scriptura would undermine the teaching of Sola Scriptura, because it's simply not in the Bible.
And just for what it's worth, it's not like I'm a wild loner alone, making this self-evident claim that Sola Scriptura is not biblical and thus, is a self-defeating theory. There are folks like this guy and many other Catholics (and others) who recognize the obvious...
https://douglasbeaumont.com/2015/04/20/does-1-corinthians-46-teach-sola-scriptura/
Ultimately, when challenged on it, traditionalists who affirm this human tradition drop back to saying something like, "Well, there IS that one passage that says that 'all scripture is God-breathed...'" It's what Stan did yesterday. The passage in question says...
All Scripture is breathed out by God and
profitable for teaching,
for reproof,
for correction,
and for training in righteousness,
that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
That's it. It literally says nothing like "all Scripture is the sole authority for understanding morality and matters of theology/Christian belief."
Is Scripture profitable for teaching? Sure, I think so.
Is it good for reproof and correcting people? Sure, why not?
Is it good for training people about righteousness? Yes, sure.
But, does any of that say it is the sole, or final or ultimate authority on deciding what is and isn't moral? What is and isn't right Christian thinking? It literally just doesn't say that.
What the traditionalists are doing are, in essence, saying, "To ME/US, it makes sense if it's 'God-breathed," and is useful for teaching, etc, then the pages of the Bible MUST be the SOLE authority to decide such matters." But no matter how much it might make sense to them to think that, it literally doesn't say that. THEY are reading into the text something that isn't there.
And I'm totally fine with them thinking that makes sense to them. But it's different to say that GOD HATH SAID sola scriptura, because God hasn't. It's their human interpretation and tradition, not what the Bible says.
I've never seen one traditionalist admit that distinction. Or even to seem to recognize that what they're doing is inserting their interpretation in place of what the text actually says.
And, as I note in one of my posts above, the Bible is plenty clear that we can understand about morality and God through multiple means. If we're believers, we can see that God might teach us through God's Spirit. God is an almighty God (as described in the Bible) and there are many examples of God telling people in the Bible what the right and moral thing to do is. There is nothing in the Bible that says God won't do this any more.
Further, the Bible makes it clear that God's will or God's word or God's thinking is written upon the human heart/psyche. We might refer to that as just our good God-given common sense. I don't need the Bible to tell me how evil it is to enslave another human, it's just obvious.
The Bible makes it clear that the Golden Rule (do unto others...) is a reasonable way of understanding right and wrong.
The Bible even says that all of creation, including human nature, is telling us of God.
And in none of that is there one suggestion of, "and THIS way is the ultimate, sole, authoritative way of determining what is right and good Christian thinking." It's not there, not in the Bible. Anywhere.
We can see that it's not there by the way traditionalists defend this human tradition by trotting out one, maybe two verses that don't say Sola Scriptura, and they have nothing else. Stan does that again in his post yesterday.
Here's how he put it (referring to this passage in Timothy)...
This statement gives us the two most important claims regarding
Scripture.
First, we have its origin.
Second, we have its efficacy.
Okay, for believers who value the Bible, we might concede that "all Scripture" (and here we may include the Bible, but it isn't in the text) is originated from God. But what do we mean by that?
Well, some of us Bible believers say we affirm that passage that says "every good thing comes from God." Because, of course, if you believe in a good and perfect God, then all good things are OF God, if not FROM God. But that might be a minor distinction. But let's set that aside for now. The second conclusion Stan (and others) reach is that this passage teaches that "scripture" is effective for teaching morality and Christian belief.
But that is not what's in question. The question they need to prove if they want to is, but is the Bible the SOLE AUTHORITY for deciding morality and Christian belief. This text does not say that, and that it does affirm that Scripture is effective for teaching morality and faith, that's not the same as saying it is the SOLE authority.
Stan continues with some about "God-breathed" and what Stan thinks that means (note: NOT what the text says, but what Stan, et al, theorize about what it means...) and then Stan opines...
And how effective is this Scripture? The text says that it is "profitable"
Yes, indeed. That's LITERALLY what it says. But does profitable mean It is the SOLE AUTHORITY? That's just not what the text says. Stan, et al, overreach when they read into the text this meaning. As much as the traditionalists complain about eisegesis (reading into the text something that isn't there), that's precisely what they're doing.
Stan sort of concludes...
The logic is irrefutable. The source of Scripture is God, giving it
God's authority, and the purpose of Scripture is to give us all we need
to be what we're supposed to be.
But the logic IS refutable. I've just refuted it. And by acknowledging he's using his "logic" to reach that conclusion, it's all the more clear that it IS Stan's logic.
I know, I used to believe in these human traditions that were taught to me and it can be hard to overcome. But if the text doesn't say what they interpret it to mean, well, it just doesn't say it. And it doesn't say it. It's an interpretation. A human opinion. And as such, it is not biblical and as such, according to the sola scriptura traditionalists, it's not authoritative. Period.
32 comments:
In response to this post, Craig, on his blog, along with Stan and Craig, on Stan's blog reacted this way...
If the Christian canon of scripture is NOT the sole source of authority for Christian faith and practice, then what is? What better source of authority for Christian faith and practice is there? Is there NO authoritative source for Christian faith and practice? If the canon of Christian scripture is NOT the sole source of authority for Christian faith and practice, is it a source at all? What are the other sources?
For one thing, I've answered these questions before. There is a link to answers to these questions within this post (the second link to an earlier post).
But what I'm wondering is, are all these questions (which, again, have all been answered before in a post Craig was part of) a sign of desperation on their part? Are they clinging to the notion of Sola Scriptura because the idea of NOT having a "sole authoritative source" just so terrifying to them that they can't even consider an alternative, so, for that reason, SS "must" be true?
And the most obvious problem with your objections to the concept...simply a name applied to that which is true and thus isn't required to be spelled out in any particular way to satisfy lesser intellects....is that you cite Scripture to do so. Talk about a self-defeating argument:
"
And, as I note in one of my posts above, the Bible is plenty clear that we can understand about morality and God through multiple means. If we're believers, we can see that God might teach us through God's Spirit. God is an almighty God (as described in the Bible) and there are many examples of God telling people in the Bible what the right and moral thing to do is. There is nothing in the Bible that says God won't do this any more.
Further, the Bible makes it clear that God's will or God's word or God's thinking is written upon the human heart/psyche. We might refer to that as just our good God-given common sense. I don't need the Bible to tell me how evil it is to enslave another human, it's just obvious.
The Bible makes it clear that the Golden Rule (do unto others...) is a reasonable way of understanding right and wrong.
The Bible even says that all of creation, including human nature, is telling us of God."
You NEED the Bible to tell you all of this to even suggest it refutes the notion of Sola Scriptura. You wouldn't know or recognize any of it to inform you of the God of the Bible. Everything you think you might know, learn or understand without the existence of the Bible to teach it to you would be no more than mere opinion of right/wrong or morality...no more than a fashion choice...which would be in conflict with opposing opinions of others, such as the still ongoing issue of slavery throughout the world. CLEARLY, others don't see it as a moral problem.
You fail yet again.
Marshal...
simply a name applied to that which is true and thus isn't required to be spelled out in any particular way to satisfy lesser intellects....is that you cite Scripture to do so.
Did you read my post? I didn't cite Scripture to "prove" that Sola Scriptura is not in the Bible. I pointed to the entire Bible and noted, "Um... it's not there. Anywhere."
It's like saying, "Look, there just are NO purple unicorns flying around the moon" and point to the reality of a unicorn-less moon. I'm not "citing the moon" to prove that the moon "teaches" there are no unicorns. I'm just noting reality.
Seeing as you didn't try to prove SS with, you know, data and stuff, is it safe to assume you are not saying you can prove SS by pointing to verses that teach it?
without the existence of the Bible to teach it to you would be no more than mere opinion of right/wrong or morality
You have nothing but your opinion. If you had provable data, you could provide it. Or, as you yourself said in a previous post:
"Again, that's an assertion. It is NOT "data"."
Marshal...
simply a name applied to that which is true
I know YOU PERSONALLY may think that, but you can't prove it. No one can and no one has and what's more, no one has really even tried to deal with the complete absence of this teaching in the Bible. This is an example of me having once believed in SS, as a young conservative evangelical, who eventually had to abandon the concept NOT because I was a liberal, but because it was just not biblical nor rational.
Save yourself some time. Don't try to defend what you no doubt can't defend. Just look at ALL those smart evangelicals out there and point to one that you think is the best argument for SS.
In each and every case, you'll people saying things like, "The Bible has a line that says "god-breathed," and I THINK that this MUST be considered to mean it's infallible. It's an INTERPRETATION, an eisegesis, a reading INTO the text that which isn't there. It's people REASONING their way to a conclusion that isn't in the text.
You can't find anything else.
Again, merely asserting "Of course, it must mean that" is not proof. It's an empty claim. An actual empty claim.
Christianity was born when an extremely small group disagreed with scripture. The experience of Jesus that bore witness of God’s will and plan changed the mission trajectory of Israel as once mapped out in Hebrew scripture. Jesus himself argued among interpreters of Israel’s scripture.
Paul further argued with the small band of Christians understanding of Christ’s message itself. Jesus did not prepare them to accept Gentiles as a whole as headers of the faith.
Each of these steps were extra-textual revelations taken because of a community’s experience of God and reflections in that experience.
That is how faith shapes understanding of scripture. Just as much as scripture shapes faith. But both steps were taken as an acknowledgment that God is above text. In Cornelius house, Peter came face to face with the grace of God that rules no one out. And his faith in that experience changed how Jerusalem’s Christian’s read scripture.
Lastly, Jesus himself, as the last chapters of John present it, promised that we would far more in the community’s life with Spirit than those did who actually knew Jesus.
Again, but this time, it was the Spirit of God who rules over scripture. Because God in God’s creative wisdom fashioned is to learn to be perfect. It has never been delivered all at once in any historical time. Noah changed God’s plan. The text even comments on its own changing tale.
I cannot worship a book.
I worship a living god, not a god weak enough to be contained by leather and red ink. A god who provides us with all kinds of material - nature, relationships, education, science, arts - and chiefly holy scripture not to dictate to us but to guide our preeminent, glorious, life changing proximity to the God the Spirit. And where one is, God as cosmic love is present, in our own flesh, too, as a body of people. Though never perfectly.
This is the word of god: always pointing to the Word of God, not itself.
The fetish of radical Protestantism which Stan and Craig and Marshall and the fake Scotsman is blasphemy. They are the Pharisees and Sadducess and Judaizers of our time. Be use the go not know the Paraclete whom Jesus sends.
In other words, scripture ALWAYS tells us god is in control. Sola Deus. Not a book.
The irrational raging rightward thugs are too fragile for faith. They bring god down from heaven and clap him in their image. They con only take scripture - sola scripture blocks the living god - and then only scripture as they read it: scripturam suam solam.
No one is surprised, Marshal. It’s what is expected of you. You have no stomach for truth. You have no capacity to read scripture as it is. You have to put in your fragile goggles of mythic White Supremacy so that you won’t lose all the you’ve anxiously dug up in order to ward off the complex glory of god’s creation.
The thugs ( Stan, Craig, Marshal, and the fake Scot, et al) do not believe Jesus. Not the one presented here in their idol god, The Bible. They lie when they say sola scripture because here in John they are replacing what Jesus says - he is going to send the Spirit - with what Calvin says: God sent the Bible and then shut himself far away in heaven.
The writer of John takes no such power to overwrite the Son of God, but they do. In fact, the writer of John confessed that not everything the Son of God did could be contained in a book or in any number of books.
“This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
Are we to say that things done and said by the godhead here in earth are not all true important? That the only things done by a god that can be winnowed down into a book of readable proportions is worth anything?
What an incredible, mad estimation of our powers to winnow. There has always and remains still a debate about what is included in Holy Scripture and what is not. When the thugs say sola scripture they do not mean Tobit or the books of Maccabees, The Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, Psalm 151, etc, etc, etc.
And they cannot tell us why unless they look up the reasoning of long dead Protestants. Because the Bible did not tell them to cut out these things.
Sola scriptura is a house built on sand… and in violent blood.
Marshal...
Getting back to my initial point, you reject the concept while citing Scripture to do so. Why is that not contradictory?
I repeat my answer I've already given:
I didn't cite Scripture to "prove" that Sola Scriptura is not in the Bible.
I pointed to the entire Bible and noted, "Um... it's not there. Anywhere."
Noting the absence of something is not the same as using that source to prove something... OTHER than just its absence.
Last time: Do you recognize that SS is literally NOT in the Bible, that it's a human interpretation and reading into the Bible what SOME people think the Bible MEANS, as opposed to directly says?
You have two reasonable options if you want to answer that question.
1. Say, yes, I recognize it's a human interpretation and that SS is literally not spelled out in the Bible
OR
2. Show me, "here, these verses directly teach SS in a manner that no reasonable reading can disagree..." and provide the support.
BUT, merely pointing to "all scripture is God-inspired" is NOT proof of a direct teaching of SS.
Also, I've already said this, but you don't even need to write this out yourself. Just point to the website that provides proof of what's never been proven thus far (that I've seen).
Well, Stan thinks he has answered your question with John 17:17, Dan. And he has responded the same way to me - though of course he cannot be honest with the fact that he has responded to what I wrote yesterday - fragile man, fragile faith. To you he writes in his post, "we say that the Scriptures are our sole authority on matters of faith and practice. It is based on Scripture, supported by Jesus (John 17:17)." To me he reiterates this citing, "I believe that the Bible, as a message from God, carries God's authority and, as such, is the ultimate authority in the matters it addresses. I believe that Jesus agreed (John 17:17).
Here, Stan does the radical thing that radical protestants do when confronted with the word of God being referred to before there was a written word of God: he's being stupid. And he's being stupid in order to deceive the rest of us.
He wants to - without confrontation - claim that Jesus is putting his stamp of approval on "The Bible." Stan uses that phrase.
But there was no Christian writing to which Jesus could have referred. The early church had no Bible for more than two centuries. However could they have been any true church! Or true Christians! Or have a true faith! Having no Bible?! No Christian scripture. No Christian "word" of God written on any material. So what is Stan saying? Either he is saying that the OT is enough of the Bible that is necessary (the only handleable "word" of God available to Jesus) and therefore that the NT is not necessary at all to the Christian faith. But Stan cannot say that. When Stan claims sola scripture he really means the reverse: the NT part of the Bible is all that is truly necessary and the OT is secondary. After all, he wears two shirts made from two different plants and he eats pork and has, probably, handled a football in his lifetime and touched his menstruating wife.
The only other thing he could intend is to willfully ignore the fact that Jesus cannot be referring to the Bible as the book of Christians. This letter bound, ink printed book that contains Stan's faith, contains/restrains Stan's god. Which is why he and all radical Protestants need to be willful blind in this matter: everyone else sees the logical problem, the senselessness.
So, what DOES Jesus say in John 17:17? "Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth." This is the end of the Farewell Discourse as Jesus prays to God concerning his disciples.
What is "your word" if, as sense dictates, it cannot be the 1611 King James, the 1926 Moffatt, the 1958 Phillips, or the 1978 NIV translations of the Bible? (None of them agree altogether on what the "word of God" says. In fact, no translation, NOR EVEN THE OLDEST GREEK PAPYRI can agree: surely a blow to the thugs "faith" in sola scripture.)
Well, just earlier in John 17: 7, 8, Jesus says, "Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. "
Stan willfully ignores this because he needs a book in hand. Not the Son of God.
Earlier in John, 15: 3, 4, Jesus clearly is referring to himself when he speaks of "the word,": You have already been cleansed[b] by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you." And in 15:7, "If you abide in me and my words abide in you..." And verses 9, 10, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
Stan needs to cut out the fact that Jesus is talking in the 1st century to people he knows and who know him. Stan needs better assurances than just knowing Jesus. And claiming that the Bible is one authoritative source of getting to know Jesus, of entering relationship with the living Christ, is not enough for Stan. That's too loosey goosey. Because of living Christ might say new things to the church, his body. Better to have it written down once for all. Safe and locked up.
In this he repeats the sins that of the Pharisees and Sadducees and the Judaizers that Paul fought concerning the faith of the Gentiles: he claps god in a text. Jesus has a word for that too, 15: 24, 25, in which we see him claim greater glory than the "word of God" available to Jews at the time, the Hebrew scriptures (and which radical Protestants, too, put above the living Christ when they want): "If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have sin. But now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. It was to fulfill the word that is written in THEIR law, ‘They hated me without a cause.’"
And again, Jesus repeats that as he is going away, the disciples will not be left alone. The Bible is coming?! Nope. God the Spirit is coming, 15:26: "When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf."
Stan erases this passage from his sola sciptura.
Not only that regarding what Jesus meant by "your word" in Stans' beloved 17:17, even earlier still, in John, 14: 22, the writer has St. Jude asking the question that radical protestants still seem anxious about: "Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us and not to the world?”
Does Jesus answer: The Bible? Nope. 14:23, 24: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine but is from the Father who sent me."
The "word" is clearly not the Bible. Not what Jesus is referring to in John 17:17 as Stan claims.
So, if as Christians, Holy Scriptures are authoritative as scripture, but not original to Christian faith, nor even primary, still, we need something after Jesus is gone. Jesus answers with someone, not something. This is what Stan has to hide and hide from. 14: 25, 26: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you."
Stan infers that this is what we call The Bible. Radical protestants, following Calvin ever since, lock up the Holy Spirit, the godhead, in a book in order to feel assured. They do this because the great spinning word of God's creative spirit is too much for them, change is too much, growth is too threatening to their fragile, brittle, anachronistic 15th century faith. The Bible is sacrosanct. Not even the Holy Spirit can go beyond it.
Except, the Word of God explicitly tells us - reveals to us - what the word is that is new to God's relationship to us and the substance of our relationship to every one else (as we no longer in judgment to the OT or enslaved to manufactured texts). Jesus is recorded as breaking forth a new commandment, which the written text has continued to deliver to generation after generation of Christians. John 13: 33 - 35: "Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
As you point out, Dan, zero sola scriptura. So what is there?
Where is the authority of god on earth? In God still. In God the Holy Spirit in us, among us, binding us together and ever moving us toward a more perfect love for each other and for god's creation. Not in a book. The Bible tells us so. And that is it's glory.
btw, Marshal confessed years ago that he cannot live by sola scriptura. He gets his scriptural directions from helicopter engineers.
Re comments on Stan’s post:
Stan: “What's interesting is the lengths that people will go to in order to deny the authority of YHWH revealed through scripture. It seems pretty clear that acknowledging any sole authority is the problem, it wouldn't matter what that authority was.”
David: "Who's to say what's real?" I want to say, "God, as He has revealed through His Word and creation."
What’s interesting is that neither of you say God is real as God. I assume you believe that God acts in the world. Anytime God chooses.
But neither of you start there. You both bizarrely to need a more tangible witness. Scripture for Stan, scripture and creation for David.
And yet what scripture and the cosmos proclaim - as witnesses, not as gods - is that God revealed godself by actually taking in the materiality of a human body. But you two write as if that cannot be the principal thing. EVEN THOUGH IT IS THE PRIMARY SUBSTANCE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH!
You prefer something else. Perhaps because you don’t yet know what it is to relate to a living Christ who became like us.
Do not cheapen your faith by turning away from the incarnation. Scripture and the cosmos serve that truth alone. They are witnesses. Not replacements. And Jesus said he had a new commandment that his scripture did not proclaim: love for all. And Jesus said that when he went away he would send what we need. It wasn’t the Bible and it wasn’t creation, which we already had. It was God the Spirit. But again, that’s not top of you guy’s mind: God in godself!
Christ! What does it take to comfort and strengthen you? A book? Stars?
You’re the ones who only trust what you believe by your own wits. Not liberals who keep thinking, imperfectly, FROM our experience of love and living in the Spirit, letting the Spirit counsel us just as Jesus says.
Stan and his proud boy followers treat god like a dead author.
This is the summation of radical protestant anxiety and its answer for its anxiety.
Where is the living Christ who took on our materiality and lives in perfect communion with Father and the Spirit, the Spirit who was sent by the Father after the Som to dwell in us and we in him?
Nowhere for the thuggish in faith. The raise a book over the living god. Even the book tells the story of how evil and destructive that is and points, scripture points to the god who loves us and gives himself to us and for us. That is why scripture is holy and authoritative: because it tells us to look beyond our language, our culture, our political state, and enter into a relationship with the living Christ who commands us to love.
Too much for the fragile inheritors of white supremacy, steeped as a people in our centuries’ practice of dispossessing Others of their land, their labor, their limbs, and their life. Christ is on their side. To join him is to join them. Samaritans and Gentiles, Jews and Muslims, Black folks and Brown, Asian and indigenous everywhere.
Marshal said (in a now deleted comment because he isn't answering questions put to him) (which, in itself, says a lot)...
The fact is, you don't even understand the concept of Sola Scriptura.
By all means, explain it.
Does SS mean that the 66 books of the Bible are the sole authority in matters of Christian faith and practice? Because that's how it's typically explained.
From wikipedia:
"that posits the Bible as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice."
The conservatives at Ligonier say...
"[SS] only means that everything necessary,
everything binding on our consciences, and
everything God requires of us is given to us in Scripture"
!
Some claim!
The Gospel Coalition theorizes it more vaguely...
"Sola scriptura is a simple phrase. But contained in it, are three critical truths:
the Bible is the supreme authority,
sufficient, and
clear."
At Christianity.com, they say...
"This is why men like Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that
Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura)
should be the ultimate authority in
all matters of faith and practice."
And the conservatives at Zondervan say...
"Sola Scriptura declares that
only Scripture is our
inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church..."
So, what am I misunderstanding?
Marshal says things like...
The fact is, you don't even understand the concept of Sola Scriptura.
and...
You're not a conservative
But never supports it. The words are empty unsupported words that are contradicted by reality. Just stop it. If you want to make some outrageous, stupidly false claim like...
"Dan was never a conservative... in spite of the reality of his being raised in a conservative church and having believed entirely conservative beliefs..."
or...
"Dan doesn't understand SS..."
or...
the holocaust was fake...
or...
here are space monkeys out on the moon riding around on purple unicorns
Or ANY other ridiculous, on-the-face-of-it stupidly false claims and do so without even trying to support it, just stop. Save your words. You're only embarrassing yourself and truly, physically subtracting from intelligence in the world and in your own life. Just stop.
Luther believed that scripture alone contains all that is minimally necessary for salvation: namely, it preaches Christ crucified. But Luther did not equate the Bible with word of God. He cut four books of the New Testament.
“Luther didn't read the Bible like proponents of Biblical Inerrancy today, because Luther believed that there were a significant differences between the revealed Word of God, and the Biblical witness to the revealed Word of God; Luther described this dialectic as follows:
"There are two entities: God and the Scripture of God, which are no less than two entities, creator and creature of God." —Martin Luther
Luther believed that the Word of God had to be differentiated from the Biblical text, such that scriptures that preached Christ needed to be affirmed, and the other scriptures that didn't preach Christ needed to be set aside. Luther's hermeneutical method led him to reject several books of the New Testament because they didn't meet this standard. Luther famously described his hermeneutical method as follows:
“The true touchstone for testing every book is to discover whether it emphasizes the prominence of Christ or not. All Scripture sets forth Christ, Romans 3:24f. and Paul will know nothing but Christ, 1 Corinthians 2:2. What does not teach Christ is not apostolic, not even if taught by Peter or Paul. On the other hand, what does preach Christ is apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, or Herod does it.” ― Martin Luther
Luther's statement that the Biblical text must be tested is baffling to anyone who affirms Biblical Inerrancy, because Biblical Inerrancy is a tautology that is above testing. Luther is not merely saying that Biblical difficulties must be harmonized, or that clever explanations must be devised to explain scriptures that prima facie do not preach Christ—these are clever schemes to diminish Luther's strong words. Luther believed that Christians should use Scripture to criticize Scripture, and that the New Testament should be tested, to determine whether it truly preaches Christ. Luther believed that even when a Biblical text written by Peter or Paul in the New Testament didn't preach Christ, then it should be set aside. Luther's method is not an hypothetical task, and may not be diminished to merely "Scripture interpreting Scripture", because Luther set aside four books of the New Testament...
Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation”
Re Stan’s secret thrill to criminalize people’s sexuality:
Perhaps, Stan, you can nail down your point by telling us where in the gospels or even the NT Jesus, Peter Paul, who never, criminalized sin. I’ll suggest two behaviors that seem criminalized: Jesus whipped the temple sellers with cords; and Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for holding back profits from the community.
Both having to de with economically fleecing believers.
Oops. Sola scriptura biting your American Way in the ass.
Dan, Craig says you’re wrong. Not because he knows you’re wrong. Not because he can prove you wrong. And not because he knows much about sola scriptura. After all, even Craig admits that even he is not acerbically (sic/Freudian) literate.
“The reality is that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura has been written about extensively by people who are much more educated, Acerbically literate, and intelligent than any of us.”
Apparently you’re wrong, Dan, simply because there are people in this world who went to Bible college and say sola scriptura is the way go. Why? Craig admits to not knowing why. Just trusts them apparently.
Yet of all of us I am the only one theologically, biblically, and historically trained in Christianity. But Craig cannot engage with me. He’s so fragile he cannot stand to be wrong and get correction. I think the scriptures have something to say about the hearts of people who will not be corrected. Craig needs to protect his ignorance.
Yet again, the sola scriptura people don’t pay attention to all scripture.
“After I go I will send a Bible! so that you can grow further in making Sharia law.”
Nope. Sending the Spirit to abide in us and further develop us in love past where Jesus brings us. John’s gospel.
1. For sola scriptura to suffice, we need at a minimum the faculty of reasoning. Putting letters into words and having visual words signify sounds of a language and using language to make sense to each other… is all dependent upon the human mind to reason. Irrationality cannot read a written text well.
Where does the human mind’s capacity to reason come from? Being created in the us age of god. Nothing in the rest of creation that we know can reason like human beings. It is how we are made. Millennia before written texts or any written scripture.
Theology of the human person requires being made image of god as a more primary foundation to the authority if a relationship with god than the biblical text.
2. Sola scriptura as radical as the thugs make it belongs to a significant minority of Christians. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic and Syriac Orthodoxy, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, the UCC, etc, include all or some of these sources of God speaking to us: councils, creeds, kerygma (core gospel theology not all of scripture), reason (see #1), and experience both personal and corporate.
3. There is no absolute agreement on every word and phrase of scripture. Nor is there any agreement whatsoever on which books are in and which out? Protestants disagree among themselves. We have no sole scripture to accept whole or in part. Translations don’t quite get all the Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Koine Greek, and Latin languages right because no two languages have explicit agreement in vocabulary in all the multi-valently layered connotations that words and phrases have.
There is no sole scripture. How can there then be a faith in sola scriptura without it being a faith that incorporates heterogeneity, something that radical Protestants cannot abide?
Do the sola scriptura crowd pay respect to the other times God breathes on something? Waters? Mankind? Ruach. Breath. In Genesis 6 all living things have the breath of God’s life.
Why then are humans and nature not an authoritative source with the capacity to mediate God? Isn’t that what the Bible says? The Psalms. Paul? Jesus?
Jesus breathes in the disciples - not just the apostles - but the disciples gathered in fear of the authorities when he reappears to them after the resurrection: “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
We, too, Dan, you and I have the Holy Spirit with us. And together we can reason with scripture and the testimony of the great round spinning world of God’s creation… and perfect our love for it all.
Because "God-breathed" is clearly figurative. And they know it. They just want to use that phrase to project meaning that just isn't there.
Great point.
No, Dan, it’s not figurative at all. It’s sacramental. It’s true that we meet god in our experience with nature, our own just as much as the vast cosmos. We meet god in our relationships with each other. We meet God in our study of Holy Scripture with contemplative, reasoning reflection.
If we believe - as Christian’s must - that God comes to us in the fullness of our lives, including the material reality in which we are made, then everything about us has the capacity to mediate our experience of god relating to us. This! is the truth of the Incarnation: god came in human flesh born as a baby and placed on straw; if that, then everything of creation is a sacrament of our union with god because nothing in creation is now alien to god.
Sacrament is not figuration. It is mystery. The mystery that we are loved by the Divine Creator, saved by the Firstborn of Creation, and sustained by the Holy Spirit… ALL of whom are met in life and whose marvelous gifts are bestowed upon us in the living of life.
Figurative tropes come from rationalistic 19th century German theology. A theology which lit the western world with a fire that burned old superstitions no longer useful but which understood human kind as individual, reason-capable minds rather than as embodied persons embedded in community. This has been a tragedy: misplacing the social for the sake of the abstract (mental) individual.
Even in these thugs who don’t know where the concept of sola scriptura comes from we see the regression of a hermetic band that misuses reason to calcify progress and reinstall a set of anachronistic creeds just because they trust their own limited world and distrust all others. Stan, Craig, Marshal, the fake Scot and all of them are regressed children of the cheaper Enlightenment’s faith in the absolute validity and universality of an individual’s systemic thought. But they’ve never known who it was who tried to define God and the world from a desk and so they call him god.
We know that our experience cannot comprehend the whole. We need the community of the world to be our best moral selves. We are not the ordained Masters of the Universe. We know we are made better persons, wiser peoples within the diversity and inclusion of all. And as Christians we know that figurative tropes and metaphorical tricks are not enough to bind us together in this world.
We need god to be with us.
In our scriptures, Jesus promised god would be with us. Not as a book, though god can be experienced and known by our engagement with scripture. Not in the seas or in the wood though god comes near in our enfolding by seas and woods and stars. Not in the city though god’s glorious work of love with us - who are created just a little lower than the angels but higher than all else - can be absorbed best in human civilization.
But because the Spirit of god abides in us and in all god’s creation by virtue of the rebirth of all in the Incarnation - so through! all these things god comes to be present with us. A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible experience of god’s grace, which is god’s life. Everything is a sacrament. Everything can support the sole representative of god’s authority over all: the living Christ. Scripture; two thousand years of reasoning, searching church councils; the reasoning of each Christian about faith in every time and place ALONG WITH one’s community; and the experience of faithful life in a sacrament-filled creation… these are our sources telling us the good news that we are loved and that our purpose is to love in turn.
"Because "God-breathed" is clearly figurative."
The expression is figurative. It's meaning is not. Do you even know what it's supposed to mean?
See, Dan? Like you, Marshal, as a protestant, has to rationalize the visual of Godbreathed. Just the visual alone is not a trustworthy experience in protestantism because protestantism must distrust the senses. The sense are too much bodily representative: a corrupt body. But somehow protestants exclude the mind: BUT! only their mind from corruption.
So, unlike you, Dan, because Marshal lives in a dead creedal past, he has to control what is represented in the figural. As a liberal protestant, you don’t need to control the figural. You accept that the reasoning of Christians may come to different understandings. But the one understanding not allowed is absolute exclusivity. Judgment. Because reasoning minds will differ. And so, you’re a modern protestant.
In modernity we must depend upon reason. But we accept its limits. And there are other considerations. In Marshal’s dead sectarian Protestant-war ideology, only one reason is escapes Judgment: one’s own.
Marshal and the other thugs actually worship reason while we do not. For us it is essential but subjectively limited. For them: sola ratio. One reason alone. Theirs.
Any response, Dan, to my position?
And a note to Craig: The anonymous comment isn’t mine. I’d love to be moderated. But before moderation comes reading and engaging. Which you avoid.
You are confusing yourself - or are unaware - the sola scriptura claims that scripture is the ONLY source of authority for faith. Hence: sola.
Judaism funds authority in the vast midrash: 8 centuries of accrued commentary on Torah. Methodism has a quadrilateral set of authoritative sources: scripture being primary (hence prima - but prima infers secunda), tradition, reason, and experience. This Quadrilateral is a system for interpreting scripture by which interpretations change with the times. Look it up. Anglicans and Lutherans also find tradition and reason to be secondary sources of authoritative impact to and about scripture. Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy (most of Christianity just between the two) believe that the ecumenical councils of the first thousand years are authoritative as secondary to scripture. Collectively the Councils and theology undergirding and drawn from them are called Tradition.
If you don’t know what you’re looking for Craig, you won’t be close to answers. If you had read what I’ve written, you wouldn’t have made this mistake.
Marshal is dead wrong that the early church fathers believed in sola scriptura. I have quotes from the Fathers re the authority of Tradition along with scripture as “the faith” in Jesus Christ was handed down before the NT existed and running in parallel with the formation of the NT that took 400 years to evolve.
Craig is also wrong about Islam.
“And you are wrong about Islam.
“Constellated around the central theme of God’s unity, and sharing a spiritual heritage with Judaism and Christianity, the Qur’an serves as the foundational text of the Islamic faith, enshrining its teachings and beliefs across a gamut of theological, legal, ritual, ethical and eschatological questions. Treated with similar reverence are reports that record the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, collected together in a corpus of material referred to as Hadith. Some accounts are pithy and concise, while others include lengthy statements, covering a range of topics: his rulings and judgements, testimonies, words of exhortation, personal qualities and accounts of key historical events in his lifetime. An example of its use is that while the Qur’an prescribes the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, the hadiths supply an intricately exhaustive range of detail pertaining to its performance.
There was opposition within the early Islamic tradition towards the writing down of the hadiths as it was believed that the transmission of knowledge should remain essentially oral. In this respect, Islam seemingly shares an epistemological distinction with Judaism, which differentiated between the written Torah and the Oral Torah. With the aim of safeguarding the Prophet’s legacy, this opposition was eventually surmounted, and the codification of traditions generated a voluminous corpus of literary materials. Moreover, for centuries much of the literary scholarship cultivated in Islam was based on the painstaking study of this textual source.”
https://www.bl.uk/sacred-texts/articles/sources-of-wisdom-and-authority-in-islamic-sacred-texts
In his latest comments on his post about you, Dan, Craig sounds like he’s finally learning from me! He’s bobbing and weaving😂 and he can’t admit he read what I wrote because he’s so fragile he’d break. But he’s doing better.
But he still has things to learn.
Before there was Christian scripture the christian community did just fine telling the good news of the messiah to first to the Jews and then to Gentiles. Yes, some went off the rails (Paul took on many). But no more than today. After the apostles the early church looked to the people who knew the apostles. After those, the leaders who knew the leaders who knew the apostles. The news that god had taken on human life, had preached love and healed all kinds of diseases, had died under state execution so that human life could be lived in communion with god giving us the capacity to cooperate with god’s own salvific love was world changing for the greater Mediterranean expanse and, very quickly, beyond. This was the “Tradition passed down from the apostles” and was the authoritative gospel around which the Christian community gathered before there gospels and letters, while the gospels and letters were written and for the 400 years for copies of written scriptures to arrive in all outposts of Christianity. Some of these scriptures didn’t make it in the Bible but sustained the community nonetheless.
Further, even having a NT canon did little to answer deep questions. How is Jesus both god and man? How much can we say about that and what can we not say? How can god be 3 and 1?! What kind of language do we use to understand such a thing? What is necessary to be saved? What is helpful but not necessary? How do we choose leaders? Who is head of the community after the apostles are dead? How do we choose? Who can stand and speak? Who cannot? Neither Jesus nor Peter nor Paul nor any apostle spell these things out, though Paul did address early communal structure but in the next three centuries communal structure grew far beyond the small, minority communities Paul formed. And then! the Church became the state religion of the Roman Empire!!
Christianity, now having bishops governing regions in Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, France, Syria, Turkey, Persi, etc, began to define its thought in conciliar meetings, which produced creeds and commentary. These, too, were counted as authoritative Tradition in the Christian faith. These creeds had the guardrails of scripture but went beyond scripture. The church counted this as life under the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit.
And as I have written, there is biblical precedent though not articulated biblical law or commands about growing beyond scripture:
1. In John, Jesus says he is giving them a)a new commandment: to love each other; and b) a new person of the godhead to abide in and with them.
2. Peter is shocked to learn at Cornelius’ house - abstractly in a vision - from God that Gentiles were heirs to the promises of Christ as well. The Christian’s in Jerusalem had a hard time with this but eventually bowed to the will of god as revealed in the Spirit.
So, principally scripture but preceded and accompanied and enlarged by Tradition and ever reinterpreted in the light of contemporary action of the Holy Spirit in the experiences of each succeeding generation in the Christian church. (You don’t have to acknowledge you’ve read this either: but! you really need to grow and strengthen your faith. Fragility hardens the heart. And we know how that goes.
Again, I largely agree with everything you're saying. I am just objecting to the notion that Scripture is the SOLE authority and understanding Scripture is the province of modern conservative evangelicals. The point being, we have no one authority to which to objectively authoritatively appeal for one objectively provable, demonstrable answer.
Good points about the church preaching the gospel prior to the Bible (and I'd add, Jesus preached the gospel prior to the church). That latter being a critical point.
If Jesus DID preach "the Gospel" as he repeatedly said and encouraged his followers to do and IF Jesus doesn't espouse the virgin birth or SS or "the gays are bad" or all manner of questions and ideas modern evangelical clings to as "essential" Christianity, in what reasonable sense can it be "essential?" Those may well be essential doctrines of the evangelical church tradition for the last several centuries, but they are not teachings of the one they/we name the Christ.
This reality that the things modern evangelicalism (and other traditions) pronounce as essential tenets of Christianity being entirely or nearly entirely absent from Jesus' literal teachings is part of what drove me away from modern conservative evangelicalism.
Your final comment here perpetuates the flawed thinking that Christ's words are only that which are attributed to God the Son in the NT, ignoring that God the Son is God Himself, and what is said in the OT has no connection to God the Son. In the same vein, you ignore that God the Holy Spirit is also God and what comes after the four Gospels through the writings of the Epistle writers guided by the Holy Spirit also is connected to God the Son.
In any case:
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isa. 7:14).
"All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel,” (which means, God with us)." – Matthew 1:22-23
It's a stretch to suppose Christ was unaware of the Isaiah passage, and thus would He have "espoused the virgin birth" despite His doing so not having been recorded in any of the Gospels. What He did say was "It is written..." a billion times demonstrating His own reliance on the Scripture of His time being the sole authority by which to understand God and His Will and His understanding of the Scripture of His time would have made His opposition to anything related to homosexual behavior a rather moot point.
So once again, the evangelical/conservative Christian/ACTUAL Christian regards as "essential" that which is found in Scripture. IF they are in the OT, they are espoused by Christ. This is reality. You can't separate the Testaments in order to reject that which you find inconvenient to you and your friends. There's nothing at all "Christian" about that, conservative or otherwise.
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