Orthodox VI

I take some heat for this for my last post, and respond.....Its good to think it through.

DAVID,

YOU WOULD HAVE US READ THE CREEDS FIRST, TO INTERPRET SCRIPTURE!!!! WHAT CREEDS SHALL I READ???? HOW WILL I KNOW IF I AM MEMORIZING THE WRONG CATECHISM??? AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

The meat of your email was great… (individualism… compartmentalism) amen & amen…. Then you had to put that last line in there… you just had to do it… Your exegetical cart is before your horse!

How should we have come up with a multigenerational approach (from your example)? It is NOT HIDDEN IN THE TEXT! It has been there for all to see. The creeds, and memorial stones should affirm what we see in Scripture, not the other way around… Scripture affirming what we see in the memorial stones. We better not read something in Scripture and then go to a creed to see if it is correct!

I am calming down now. *in through the nose… out through the mouth…* Everything is subordinated to the primacy of Scripture. I know you agree with this. So it must be that I am doing a Nathan…. Sssssssss. Since I must be cluelessly missing your point, I will leave it alone from here on out. My premise… start with Scripture. Creeds and stones should affirm what we have handled of the Word. If they do not… listen to the argument, reject or repent, and grow.

No Lunesta for me tonight… I shall lie down & meditate on Scripture…

My responce:

Was it something I said?

Let me try and draw this together. Your right Rob, I am as Sola scripture as the day is long. Most of modern Christianity would agree to it to. But most would be unable to see from scripture what used to be clearly understood.

We come from the Word. But what God has done historically, will be a play out, from that word. Historical context. The creeds and confessions are a part of that witness to us when they harmonize with the word. Like Isaiah 46:9 Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me…

Martin Luther beat Eck, in his debates, because he knew church history.

I know Knox and other Reformers read the early church fathers, Origen, Augustine, etc they wanted to read what they wrote, not what the church said they meant. Historical understanding,context.

Jesus started with 12 who had the basic context for him, they were Jews. God then sovereignly chose Paul who had even a larger contextual picture to give us most of the New Testament.

The thinking of modern Christianity changed. (in the 1200’s I think.)A monk named Abelard started it with his ….A doctrine is not to be believed because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so…..( Another confession, I gussied it up and thought I was being led by the spirit when I read the word. But this is at heart what I used to do. I can see it now.)

Which when this thinking is fully mature.... ( Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant etc).... this became modern pragmatic thinking, this is Americana. Humanism, man is the measure. Exactly as Rob shared with the church about a month ago. About CS Lewis…. how man now sits in the judges seat and God and his word are in the dock.

…The medieval criterion had commonly been, “what say the church fathers?” or “what says the Holy father?” For the Reformation, it was, “what say the scriptures?” The modern world….responds with “ well I think” or “ in my opinion” or “as far as I am concerned “ and other like egocentric statements, especially since the romantic era of the modern age ”I feel” has been definitive for many….. ( from the “symposium on the fall of the west and the return of Christendom)

In the late 1800’s with Evangelicalism, us moderns, lost the context. We just needed to love one another and read our Bibles. But we did not exchange the old context for a new, neutral, way of looking at the Word.

When we say we are gonna “just use the Bible”, but we then bring the modern pragmatic world view that we were trained to use, that was inculcated into me, when we wake up, when we lie down…. they are as frontlets for our eyes and we have used them to interpret what we read.

We don’t know we are doing it.

We have all seen this, hopefully not recently. Let’s go around the room and ask everyone….“ what does that verse mean to you?”

Our minds want things to be predictable in content and scope, we can squish the Word into a shape, to fit our presuppositions.

I might have gone my whole life and not figured out from the word, that it is all, about His glory.

God’s word is the standard!

Someone needs to rub a little oral gel on Robs gums.