Really. Scripture doesn't talk. Unless you are simply citing a verse, or reciting it, you aren't saying what "Scripture says." You are appealing to an interpretation, either yours, or someone else's. This is why most people trapped in the nightmare of Sola Scriptura have to eventually question the salvation of someone with whom they cannot agree, or decide the difference isn't that important. Most "nice" people take the latter, which is why otherwise kind, thoughtful, Christians end up agnostic or worse. No one has bothered to really question the method/premise: "All we need to do is search the Scriptures. Everything we need is in there." Well, consider it questioned, brethren. Openly, repeatedly, and without shame. Moreover, most of you are missing some books in your Bibles. Yes, I know what they told you. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Does it mean that we stop reading them? NO! It means we are a lot more humble about exactly what we find. It means that a "traditional" teaching was actually handed on by someone to someone else. You cannot expect that an innovator will fail to use his individual interpretive authority, given to him by the adoption of the premise, to reject your view. Easy as pie. Welcome to chaos.
The full force of this hasn't hit most of you, and you will call me a "liberal," or something worse. You'll hide yourselves in myriad derivative authorities, like denominations, confessions, and the like. It may seem to help, for a while. But the Bible reader that disagrees with you knows a truth very well, and he's going to exploit it, daring you to prove him wrong: If God didn't say it, it doesn't matter.
In other news, if I had a dollar for every time someone used the word "church" as in "the church" to refer to some vague, amorphous, collection of people claiming to follow Christ, whilst having no meaningful visible or otherwise connection to one another, my money problems would be over.
Does it mean that we stop reading them? NO! It means we are a lot more humble about exactly what we find. It means that a "traditional" teaching was actually handed on by someone to someone else. You cannot expect that an innovator will fail to use his individual interpretive authority, given to him by the adoption of the premise, to reject your view. Easy as pie. Welcome to chaos.
The full force of this hasn't hit most of you, and you will call me a "liberal," or something worse. You'll hide yourselves in myriad derivative authorities, like denominations, confessions, and the like. It may seem to help, for a while. But the Bible reader that disagrees with you knows a truth very well, and he's going to exploit it, daring you to prove him wrong: If God didn't say it, it doesn't matter.
In other news, if I had a dollar for every time someone used the word "church" as in "the church" to refer to some vague, amorphous, collection of people claiming to follow Christ, whilst having no meaningful visible or otherwise connection to one another, my money problems would be over.
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