Pastoral Musings

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Joel said,

What collected, affirmed, confirmed, and tells you how to interpret Scripture?

What, indeed?

Joel will probably say that the “what” is tradition, but is it?

Is it merely tradition to recognize, accept, treasure, and preserve Scripture?

Perhaps it is moreso a reverence for God that leads to a reverence for Scripture.

Just musing….

Let me hear from ya’.

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Article 5: The Authority of Scripture

• We receive all these books and these only as holy and canonical, for the regulating, founding, and establishing of our faith.
• And we believe without a doubt all things contained in them– not so much because the church receives and approves them as such but above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God.For even the blind themselves are able to see that the things predicted in them do happen.

Article 6: The Difference Between Canonical and Apocryphal Books

• We distinguish between these holy books and the apocryphal ones, which are the third and fourth books of Esdras; the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Jesus Sirach, Baruch; what was added to the Story of Esther; the Song of the Three Children in the Furnace; the Story of Susannah; the Story of Bell and the Dragon; the Prayer of Manasseh; and the two books of Maccabees.The church may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books. But they do not have such power and virtue that one could confirm from their testimony any point of faith or of the Christian religion. Much less can they detract from the authority of the other holy books.

Article 7: The Sufficiency of Scripture

• We believe that this Holy Scripture contains the will of God completely and that everything one must believe to be saved is sufficiently taught in it. For since the entire manner of service which God requires of us is described in it at great length, no one– even an apostle or an angel from heaven, as Paul says–^2 ought to teach other than what the Holy Scriptures have already taught us. For since it is forbidden to add to or subtract from the Word of God,^3 this plainly demonstrates that the teaching is perfect and complete in all respects.Therefore we must not consider human writings– no matter how holy their authors may have been– equal to the divine writings; nor may we put custom, nor the majority, nor age, nor the passage of time or persons, nor councils, decrees, or official decisions above the truth of God, for truth is above everything else.For all human beings are liars by nature and more vain than vanity itself.

  Therefore we reject with all our hearts everything that does not agree with this infallible rule, as we are taught to do by the apostles when they say, “Test the spirits to see if they are of God,”^4 and also, “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house.” Gal. 1:8; Deut. 12:32; Rev. 22:18-19 ;1 John 4:1 ;2 John 1:10

Full confession here.

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In Fundamentalist churches we often speak of meeting Jesus.  Usually what we mean is that a person enters into a relationship with God through faith in Jesus.  Sometimes we mean that we have an encounter with Jesus that brings about a radical change in our lives.

What we often miss in Fundamentalist churches is the fact that one must meet Jesus in His Word before he meets Jesus in any other fashion.  After all, Jesus is the Word ( cf John 1:1-4,14 )

Not only so, but when the two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, it was not the personal knowledge of Jesus that stirred their souls and made their hearts burn ( Luke 24:32 ).  What made their hearts burn was that fact that Jesus gave them an understanding of the Scriptures; and understanding of Himself in the Scriptures ( Luke 24:13-32 ).  Only then did Jesus make Himself known to them.

Instead of living our lives by subjective experience, we should turn to the authoritative Word of God and find Jesus there.  If we go humbly, we will meet Him every time we open our Bibles.

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What the Conservative school oppose is not Biblical criticism, but Biblical criticism by rationalists. They do not oppose the conclusions of Wellhausen and Kuenen because they are experts and scholars; they oppose them because the Biblical criticism of rationalists and unbelievers can be neither expert nor scientific. A criticism that is characterized by the most arbitrary conclusions from the most spurious assumptions has no right to the word scientific.

 

Regarding the views of the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly all, if not all, of the real leaders.
1.They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; “legendary exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes.”
2.They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture.
3.They were men who denied the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural. Their theories were excogitated on pure grounds of human reasoning. Their hypotheses were constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture. As to the inspiration of the Bible, as to the Holy Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation being the Word of God, they had no such belief. We may take them one by one. Spinoza repudiated absolutely a supernatural revelation. And Spinoza was one of their greatest. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous, and considered that the so-called supernatural element was an Oriental exaggeration; and Eichhorn has been called the father of Higher Criticism, and was the first man to use the term. De Wette’s views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian rationalists, and regarded the first four books of the Old Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen, says Professor Sanday, wrote in the interests of an almost avowed Naturalism. That is, he was a free-thinker, an agnostic; a man who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and living God. (Brampton Lectures, 1493, page 117.) He wrote from an avowedly naturalistic standpoint, says Driver (page 205). According to Wellhausen the religion of Israel was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation from an imperfectly monotheistic kind of semi-pagan idolatry. It was simply a human religion.

 

In one word, the formative forces of the Higher Critical movement were rationalistic forces, and the men who were its chief authors and expositors, who “on account of purely philological criticism have acquired an appalling authority,” were men who had discarded belief in God and Jesus Christ Whom He had sent. The Bible, in their view, was a mere human product. It was a stage in the literary evolution of a religious people. If it was not the resultant of a fortuitous concourse of Oriental myths and legendary accretions, and its Jahveh or Jahweh, the excogitation of a Sinaitic clan, it certainly was not given by the inspiration of God, and is not the Word of the living God.

the dominant men of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter of fact, as we shall presently show. Some of the men who have been most distinguished as the leaders of the Higher Critical movement in Germany and Holland have been men who have no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the possibility of a personal supernatural revelation. The men who have been the voices of the movement, of whom the great majority, less widely known and less influential, have been mere echoes; the men who manufactured the articles the others distributed, have been notoriously opposed to the miraculous.

 

It has become identified with a system of criticism which is based on hypotheses and suppositions which have for their object the repudiation of the traditional theory, and has investigated the origins and forms and styles and contents, apparently not to confirm the authenticity and credibility and reliability of the Scriptures, but to discredit in most cases their genuineness, to discover discrepancies, and throw doubt upon their authority.

In the first place, the critics who were the leaders, the men who have given name and force to the whole movement, have been men who have based their theories largely upon their own subjective conclusions. They have based their conclusions largely upon the very dubious basis of the author’s style and supposed literary qualifications. Everybody knows that style is a very unsafe basis for the determination of a literary product. The greater the writer the more versatile his power of expression; and anybody can understand that the Bible is the last book in the world to be studied as a mere classic by mere human scholarship without any regard to the spirit of sympathy and reverence on the part of the student. The Bible, as has been said, has no revelation to make to unBiblical minds. It does not even follow that because a man is a philological expert he is able to understand the integrity or credibility of a passage of Holy Scripture any more than the beauty and spirit of it.

 

Complete article here.

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First of all, I am not a member of the SBL.  I have never been to a meeting.  I am not sure that I every shall, though I think I would find it quite enjoyable.

What I do not understand, however, is the feeling that some have about SBL and believers.  After the annual meeting last year, and again this year, I’ve read complaints by some that there are people at the SBL meeting who are evangelical believers.  The issue is not always framed in these terms.  Sometimes the term is “confessional”.  Why complain about that?

The true issue is this;  when we read the Bible as it presents itself to us we find that it is confessional in nature.  It calls for us to believe in a Creator who is omnipotent, transcendent, omnipresent, benevolent, righteous, and holy.  There are many other things we are called to believe, as well.

Not only so, but the Bible claims that it can only be truly understood by people who are believers.  Proverbs 1:7 in the Old Testament AKA Hebrew Bible and 1Corinthians 2:10-14 are examples of this.

Oh, I truly understand that we can look at background, history, culture, society, literature, and many other things and we can understand them without being believers in Jesus.  Much can be learned in these fields by people who are not believers.  That I will not deny.

I find it somewhat strange, then, that those who do not believe in Jesus should complain about people who do believe in Jesus meeting with the SBL, presenting papers, and having meetings in conjunction with SBL.

What else should one truly expect?  Should Christians lay aside their beliefs when they come to discuss the Bible?  Should they stay away from academic discussion of their Holy Book?  Should they..???

What should they do?

Methinks the complaining academics should remember what it is they are studying.  It is a religious text.

Expect religious people to study it.

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