Saturday, May 23, 2009

Is Holy Scripture the Word of God written or not?

This guy does not think so!

"The honorary title regularly given to the Bible (the “Word of God”) drains away the primacy that belongs to Christ alone. “You diligently study the scriptures,” said Jesus, “because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the scriptures that testify about me” (John 5.39).

Third, the precedents for obeying the Bible (should we be disposed to try) can be dire. That is what the Kirk thought it was doing as it arrested thousands of women for alleged witchcraft. It cited “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22.18, AV). Slave-owners and white racists thought their iniquities were justified by Noah’s saying: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9.25).

Women, disabled people, Jews, many other groups, and of course, at the root of the current disquiet, homo sexuals, all know what it is to find Christians against them who claim to be obeying the scriptures.

Fourth, obeying the Bible involves one in the personalistic fallacy. This is the fallacy of supposing that the Bible is a person with whom we have a personal relationship. If this sounds bizarre, you only have to say: “Scripture says,” or “The Bible teaches,” and the fallacy looms large."

Read the whole piece, entitled 'The Word of God was made of flesh and blood, not ink' by Adrian Thatcher can be found here. (H/t Thinking Anglicans).

Does Thatcher himself make a 'christological fallacy', that we can know what Christ is saying to us without the aid of the ink of Scripture?

2 comments:

  1. Does Thatcher himself make a 'christological fallacy', that we can know what Christ is saying to us without the aid of the ink of Scripture?It's very interesting, this Word of God business.

    Last week at Bible study somebody mentioned creationism and one fellow (a retired geologist) got upset and said that the whole problem with creationists is that they believe the Bible whereas what they should do is believe God. I wondered how he knows who God is without believing what is in the Bible.

    Thirty years ago, in order to know how to live the rest of my life, I came to the conclusion that I really had to try to discover whether God exists or not. Within a matter of weeks I had learned enough from general revelation to convince me that he does exist. But then I had to find out who he is.

    On the assumption that God is good and would not leave his creatures in ignorance of himself I decided to undertake a program of reading every "holy book" I could get my hands on. Hoping to save time and effort I decided to start with the book used in those societies where people were generally nicest to each other. So the Bible it was.

    By the time I got to Revelation I knew who God is. At Rev 3:20 it was decision time and the interesting thing, for me, was how hard it was to yield. But yielding seemed the only sane thing to do, so I did. And then the lights went on.

    I understand that many people come to Christ solely through reading the Bible. My own experience tells me that the Bible is more than just ink on paper. Somehow God's Spirit works in us through its words. Rather than saying we obey the Bible I think it would be better to say that we (try to) obey what the Spirit shows us in the words of the Bible.

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  2. Thanks Janice
    That is a wonderful testimony!

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