Posted on 05/06/2011 8:37:56 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
....Recent debates about biblical inspiration and inerrancy have obscured for some what has been the received wisdom for all orthodox Christians: Holy Scripture is a divinely bestowed, Spirit-generated gift of the triune God and should thus be received with gratitude, humility, and a sense of reverence. Christians do not worship the Bible but the God they do worship—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has revealed himself and his plans for them and for the world through the words and message of the Bible. As the great Methodist leader John Wesley put it: “The Scriptures, therefore, of the Old and New Testament are a most solid and precious system of divine truth. Every part is worthy of God and altogether are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess. It is the fountain of heavenly wisdom, which they who are able to taste, prefer to all writings of men, however wise or learned or holy.” Thus the Bible cannot be read just “like any other book” (Jowett’s phrase). Its contents must be received in faith, the kind of faith that is formed by love and leads to holiness....
....At the time of the Reformation, the doctrine of the Trinity once again emerged as a major point of dispute, especially between the mainline reformers and certain evangelical rationalists among the radicals. The doctrine of the Trinity could not be surrendered because it had to do with the nature and character of the God whom Christians worship. This God, the triune God of holiness and love, was not a generic deity who could be appeased by human striving but rather the God of the Bible who had made himself known by grace alone through the sending of His Son, Jesus Christ, “for us and for our salvation.” To enter into the mind of Scripture with a trinitarian hermeneutic is to come to know this God and not another. As Todd Billings puts it, “The Bible is the instrument of the triune God to shape believers into the image of Christ, in word and deed, by the power of the Spirit, transforming a sinful and alienated people into children of a loving Father”....
....In the sixteenth century, translations of the Bible were accompanied by the translations of the liturgy. Luther’s German Mass and Order of Service was published in 1526; Calvin’s Form of Prayers came out in 1542. As part of their protest against clerical domination of the Church, the reformers aimed at full participation in worship. Their reintroduction of the vernacular was jarring to some since it required that divine worship be offered to Almighty God in the language used by businessmen in the marketplace and by husbands and wives in the privacy of their bedchambers. The intent of the reformers was not so much to secularize worship as to sanctify common life. For them, the Bible was not merely an object for academic scrutiny in the study or the library; it was meant to be enacted as the people of God gathered for prayer and praise and proclamation....
.... Jacques Maritain’s famous book Three Reformers presents the story of Luther as the “advent of the self.” Luther was the supreme individualist, Maritain claimed, a rebellious monk pulling down the pillars of Mother Church by placing his own subjectivist interpretation of the Bible above that of 1500 years of ecclesial tradition. In this view, Luther and the reformers who followed him were early advocates of what Wilhelm Dilthey called “the autocracy of the believing person.”
Although this interpretation of the Reformation has long been popular, it is actually a projection of modern themes onto the Christian past. Luther’s approach was not carried out in lonely isolation from the Church. On the contrary, he undertook all his intellectual work within the Body of Christ extended throughout time as well as space. All the reformers read, translated, and interpreted the Bible as part of a centuries-old conversation between the holy page of God’s Word and the company of God’s people. While in many cases they broke with the received interpretations of the fathers and the Scholastics who came before them, theirs was nonetheless a churchly hermeneutics. What R. R. Reno has written of theological exegesis in general applies directly to the reformers: “To be a Christian is to believe that the truth found in the Bible is the very same truth we enter into by way of baptism, the same truth we confess in our creeds, the same truth we receive in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.” Our knowledge of God’s truth is not just participatory and based on a receptive epistemic humility, it is also corporate.
This inattention sadly includes neglect of the history of biblical interpretation, the practice of reading Scripture in the company of the whole people of God.
chapters from the same Biblical book:
| Chapter 1
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Chapter 2
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Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
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Chapter 5
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Chapter 6
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Chapter 7
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Chapter 8
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| Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
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Chapter 11
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Chapter 12
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Chapter 13
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Chapter 14
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Chapeter 15
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It is ironic that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, much misunderstood, has led to the neglect among Protestants of older biblical commentaries, even those of the reformers themselves. J. N. Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren, tried to eliminate all vestiges of the Catholic tradition, including ministerial orders and the use of biblical commentaries
Didn't need to. Already saw who posted it ;-)
Are you saying that only Calvin and Luther got the ‘holy’ methodology and formula to read Scripture?
I cannot find those words uttered anywhere... as a matter of fact the drought is long and hard that God said He was going to send when it comes to the hearing of the Word.
Amos 8:11 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD GOD, that *I* will send a famine in the land, NOT a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of the HEARING the words of the LORD:......
So IF there is a HEARING drought that can only happen because of the TALKERS do not know what they are talking about... There is NO shortage of church houses or ‘holy’ men, so the problem is in what they are claiming.
The French word réssourcement is often associated with the renewal of theology within the Roman Catholic Church that led up to the reforms of Vatican Council II. This movement involved a fresh engagement with the biblical and patristic sources of the Christian tradition. It’s a return to the riches of our sacred history that should be familiar to the Christian historian
Great article. Bookmarking to finish later.
Malachias 1:11 For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts.
Of course, in removing books from the bible on his own authority, he probably missed an important verse of scripture:
"And if any man takes away from the words of this book, God will take away from him his part in the tree of life and the holy town, even the things which are in this book."
I also have several copies of the Bible with the Apocrypha. However, like many Catholics over the centuries, and like Luther, I reject them as authoritative for doctrine. And since “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...”, I conclude that something that isn’t useful for rebuking and correcting isn’t scripture.
It is also my understanding that the CofT left the question open - is the Apocrypha good for doctrine?
http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2008/02/semi-authoritative-catholic-canon.html
>>”And if any man takes away from the words of this book, God will take away from him his part in the tree of life and the holy town, even the things which are in this book.”<<
And within the context of the time of the writing of that sentence, one needs to be careful how they identify what “this book” was
That is the second time I’ve seen that picture. It doesn’t do much for me since I believe it is attempting to satirize exactly what we are to do. Don’t get me wrong. I think that it is best to bounce your interpretation of scripture off other Christians, and the bible says as much, but since we are all individually responsible for our own individual relationship with Christ (it IS one on one) that we are therefore responsible for our own interpretation of His word and our acceptance of other’s (such as the Pope or any other church leader) interpretation.
So in reality, we are either advocates of YOPIOS or we are lemmings following another mere mane. I choose the former.
**exactly what we are to do.**
Are you saying that you are greater than God in interpreting the Scriptures through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?
NOT!!!!!!
In an attempt to display an understanding of the schism you have revealed a complete ignorance of the history of the German language.
In the 16th century there was no Germany and no common official "German" language. In its place were regional Germanic languages and dialects which were, in many instances, as distinct and different from one another as modern German is from Norwegian or modern English. Dating back to the original Germanic tribes they often evolved differently based upon the region and other cultures they were in contact with. Even the surviving modern derivatives are hardly understandable to someone who knows only standard German, since they often differ from standard German in lexicon, phonology and syntax. In fact, per Ethnologue (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics): "If a narrow definition of language based on mutual intelligibility is used, many German dialects are considered to be separate languages.
At the time of Luther there were literally hundreds of German dialects and derivatives spoken across Europe, many still without a written version and it was quite common to not understand people in adjacent villages. Of the small percentage of the population that were literate they were literate in Latin which was the language of the law, of trade; and the Church. To suggest that Luther's rejection of the Vulgate Bible somehow brought instant enlightenment is lunacy. What occurred were many unique and errant translations of the bible, turned out by small private printing shops in small numbers resulting in the equivalent of the internet in terms of legitimate content. The result set the table for today's "Sola Google" Protestants like yourself.
The great irony missed by Rome and its lemmings is that even when their “church authorities” pronounce their approved meaning of the Scriptures, the individual in the pew must read (or listen) to those words and personally understand what it is that is being said...uh-oh YOPIOS back at you. They cannot escape the fact the text returns to individuals for understanding. Great post Alex.
The Bible is front and center in the worship of the Church.
Strange, I thought God was front and center in the worship of the Church.
Please be more specific. There are too many "Romes" to choose from:
1. Presbyterian Church of Rome, Rome, PA
2. Rome Presbyterian Church, Rome, Ohio
3. Rome Presbyterian Church, Proctorville, OH.
4. Rome Presbyterian Church, Rome, PA
5. Presbyterian Church of Scotland – Rome, Italy
6. First Presbyterian Church, Rome, GA
7. First Presbyterian Church, Rome, New York
8. First Presbyterian Church. Rome, Italy
9. St Andrew's Church, Rome, Italy
10. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Rome, GA
11. New Rome Presbyterian Churches, New Rome, OH
12. Rome Scottish Presbyterian Church, Rome, Italy
13. New Lyme Presbyterian Church of Rome, Rome, OH
You have been listening to too many inactive Catholics.
There is only one truth as interpreted through the three pillars of the Church - the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Tradition (which comes down person to person from the apostles) and the Magisterium.
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