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In your opinion, what constitutes worshiping Scripture?
NOT TESTING its Spirit against the Holy Spirit of agape love and forgiveness Divinely revealed and demonstrated by Jesus on the Cross would be worshiping the "words written in ink" as scripture!
Yes, but where did Jesus ever say that He was establishing a bible church?
That depends on what you mean by "bible church". Jesus quoted the Old Testament frequently enough that it's plain that He meant his church to hold scripture as the highest authority, and yet He constantly dug out the principles and not the letter. And as Paul tells us, Jesus gives teachers to the church as a gift, which indicates that "bible only" isn't consistent with the Bible!
So if by "bible church" you mean one where the scriptures are the highest authority, that's exactly what Jesus founded, but if by it you mean that the Bible is the only place we are to get teaching, then no, He didn't found a "bible church".
I've quoted this in the past. And it seems relevant now:
"But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as " the Word", " the Way" , " the Truth". The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ " in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge " not the Bible, save as leading to Him."
George MacDonald
John 17:17 “Thy word is truth.”
Jesus constantly said, “It is written.”
You are basically saying the Bible is not trustworthy.
If you consider the quote given, then in a way you're right: the Bible is untrustworthy unless it's used the way the good writer indicated, namely as leading to Christ. Any use of the Bible that does not point to Jesus cannot be trusted; as Jesus Himself said, the scriptures point to Him.
The church existed before the bible - no two ways around that.
The bible proceeded from the church, do you not agree?
No -- the scriptures proceeded from the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle says: "All scriptures are God-breathed...."
The scriptures proceeded through the church, not from it. Indeed that's what makes the Bible catholic: it proceeded from all the different churches as they read and pondered and prayed and made their lists of what was read in their church, and shared both those lists and copies of what they read in church. It was thus "kat' holon", "from/through the whole".
So the scriptures and the church proceeded from the Holy Spirit; the church has no authority over them beyond what the Fathers decided long ago when they acknowledged what the Spirit had said through the churches.
You may say that "the church existed before the bible", but that isn't the whole story: the church didn't exist before the Word, and that Word built the church as it built the scriptures, neither as a cord that encompasses the other but as two cords intertwined, each supporting the other. This is why the ancient Fathers could point to the scriptures as the highest authority yet at the same time assert that the scriptures cannot be interpreted apart from the church, the Body of Christ -- why scripture is not to be interpreted by individuals. It can be put this way: the church is formed by the Word, but the Word is what the church proclaims.
Last edited by mithrandale; 09-23-2022 at 01:33 PM..
No -- the scriptures proceeded from the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle says: "All scriptures are God-breathed...."
The scriptures proceeded through the church, not from it. Indeed that's what makes the Bible catholic: it proceeded from all the different churches as they read and pondered and prayed and made their lists of what was read in their church, and shared both those lists and copies of what they read in church.
So the scriptures and the church proceeded from the Holy Spirit; the church has no authority over them beyond what the Fathers decided long ago when they acknowledged what the Spirit had said through the churches.
You may say that "the church existed before the bible", but that isn't the whole story: the church didn't exist before the Word, and that Word built the church as it built the scriptures, neither as a cord that encompasses the other but as two cords intertwined, each supporting the other. This is why the ancient Fathers could point to the scriptures as the highest authority yet at the same time assert that the scriptures cannot be interpreted apart from the church, the Body of Christ -- why scripture is not to be interpreted by individuals. It can be put this way: the church is formed by the Word, but the Word is what the church proclaims.
For a Christian sound doctrine should NOT be based on the Bible. It should be based on JESUS CHRIST who is the ONE and ONLY Word of God in existence. The term is LOGOS and it does NOT refer to words in the Bible. It refers to the "mind of Christ" as the True Nature and attitude of God. HE Divinely revealed and personally demonstrated it on the Cross!!!
I put the words for "the logos" in bold. Literally translated (with amplification to bring out the import of the tenses and prepositions), it says:
In (the) beginning the Logos was being, and the Logos was being towards (the face of) God, and God was being the Logos.
"The Logos" does not refer to the "mind of Christ", it refers to Christ Himself, it refers to the God who was being the Logos. The Logos is the light who "is coming into the word", and that light is Jesus. The Logos is not, as you say, "it", the Logos is He, incarnate God, as John goes on to say:
John 1:14--
Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν
And the Logos, flesh (He) became and tented (or pitched His tent) among us.
"Tented" or "pitched his tent" was an idiom for saying that someone was physically present, so this is a Hebrew-style parallelism: 'the Logos became flesh' = 'he pitched His tent among us' -- both are saying that the eternal divine Logos became an actual physical flesh human like us and living among us.
The Logos is thus God with a body in such a way that we can point to that body and say, "That is God". He is not some disembodied "mind", He is a human person -- one of us.
The translations that I would not ever use are the Jehovah Witnesses' Good News Translation, and the New Living Translation and the Amplified Bible, because those two are more of men's beliefs from their denomination. Other translations that I don't use are the Catholics and the Calvinist ESV (English Standard Version), because I feel the Catholic and Calvinistic spirit in those translations.
The trouble with the Amplified Bible isn't that it is "men's beliefs from their denomination", it's that the choice of what to amplify fits the category of "men's beliefs". I think it was third year New Testament Greek (thus fifth year of Greek) when we were given an assignment to do our own 'amplified' translation and then compare it to the Amplified Bible and contrast the two. The big conclusion we all came to is that the Amplified Bible is both sloppy and slanted in what it picks to amplify.
I will say this, however. No doctrine should ever be built on one word, though I see it done all the time. We must let Scripture interpret Scripture. The Bible is it’s own interpreter.
If we have an honest heart, and we want to get to the truth, we will read, study and pray for God to show us His truth. We will do word studies and cross refererence. And most of all, we will read in context.
Scripture interprets scripture, but it does not do so alone: the fact that Paul tells us the Holy Spirit gives teachers to the church indicates that we need more than just the scriptures. For one thing, we need to understand what kinds of literature different sections are (happily, in the New Testament the forms of literature are very, very close to what we're familiar with), what those forms meant to the writer and his original audience, and thus what the message was intended to be. Looking at the scriptures in translation as though they were written in our forms of literature in our worldview has been the source of a great deal of error down through the ages, including the great heresies and smaller false teaching.
As a Lutheran pastor put it once, scripture indeed interpret scripture but first you have to know what the words of the scriptures in question mean.
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