The problem with loudly claiming the Bible as your only guide to faith and practice is that, at the same time, you may be quietly claiming your own intellect as your only guide to the Bible. If you aren’t, what other guide to the Bible do you claim? Can’t think of one? I suspected as much. <\/p>\n
Do you think the human brain is powerful enough, or innocent enough, to understand the ways of God? The apostle Paul didn’t, and his brain was probably more powerful than yours. If you don’t want to obey the truth, don’t worry, you won’t. You won’t understand it or even appreciate it, even if you study it for years.<\/p>\n
If the Bible was meant to be studied like a textbook, the marginal notes would be part of the inspired canon. So would the topical index. If Jesus meant the foundation of his church to be his teachings, instead of his imperishable Spirit, he would have organized and categorized them better. He would have explained all his parables. Even better, he wouldn’t have told any parables. Stories are too hard to fit into a systematic theological outline.<\/p>\n
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t intend to build my faith and practice on anything that contradicts the Bible. I don’t believe the Bible makes any mistakes. But I want to believe in what the Bible makes of itself, not what I want to make of it. <\/p>\n
For centuries, the Bible’s teachings have been analyzed by historians, philosophers, archaeologists and astrophysicists. And what do I make of the Bible? That’s the wrong question entirely. In the end, the only question that matters is, what is the Bible making of me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The problem with loudly claiming the Bible as your only guide to faith and practice is that, at the same time, you may be quietly claiming your own intellect as your only guide to the Bible. If you aren’t, what other guide to the Bible do you claim? Can’t think of one? I suspected as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desperate-suggestions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}