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To: DungeonMaster
Words mean things. A lack of words also means things when it comes to the bible.

No, lack of words still signifies nothing. There is no passage in Scripture which says 'only Scripture is inspired of God' or 'only Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, etc.' There is, however, a passage at the end of St. John's Gospel, which asserts its incompleteness.

And words can mean many things as the dispute on-thread about the translation of 'presbyteros' shows. We Orthodox pray that our bishops be granted 'rightly dividing the word of truth'--'dividing' meaning interpretting, since the original Greek text was not punctuated, so how it was divided was crucial to its meaning. 'Sola scriptura' is not what it claims to be, but a substitution of a rationalistic tradition with little grounding in spiritual experience for the tradition of the Church.

The exegetic principle of not intepretting 'one passage of Scripture so as to be repugnant to another' (to use the old Anglican formulation) is as old as the Church, and as applied to the Old Covenant Scriptures, older. It does not, however, lead to the conclusions that 'sola scriptura' protestants draw. Most 'sola scriptura' protestants, for instance, follow Zwingli, and deny the reality of the Eucharist, despite Christ's words, "This is My body" and "This is My blood". (Somehow that word 'only' that isn't in the text seems to pop into the middle of 'do this in rememberance of me' when protestants read it, the same at is pops into 'all Scripture is inspired of God'.) Absent the non-existent 'only', it is not repugnant to any passage of Scripture to take Our Lord at His word, and, as the Church always has, regard the Eucharist as really being His Body and His Blood.

4,969 posted on 01/10/2007 7:12:17 PM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know. . .)
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To: The_Reader_David
No, lack of words still signifies nothing. There is no passage in Scripture which says 'only Scripture is inspired of God' or 'only Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, etc.' There is, however, a passage at the end of St. John's Gospel, which asserts its incompleteness.

Yes there is, it's in my tagline.

John 21: 25 And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.

By the way, how do you read that and conclude the bible is not complete?

5,007 posted on 01/11/2007 4:47:25 AM PST by DungeonMaster (Acts 17:11 also known as sola scriptura.)
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