An Exercise in Humility
From Barclay:The battle of proof texts is a battle with no victory. Isaiah says, "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4). Joel says, Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am a warrior" (Joel 3:10). In the Bible we are constantly being confronted with this kind of contradiction. Clearly, what we must do is to find the total message of the Bible and to think about it.
There must be an end of the belligerent hurling of texts at each other, and a real attempt to bring the whole gospel to the questions we discuss.
If we are to do this, there is one thing that, perhaps above all we must try to avoid.
We must try to avoid going to the Bible in order to find in it material to support ideas and theories which are in fact our own.
When we study the Bible we must sit down in humility before it and listen, not to our own voices extracting our own meanings from the Bible, but to the voice of God as it speaks to us in His book.
It will be an exercise in humility, but it will also be a path to truth.
posted by Thurman8er @ 1:55 PM
2 Comments:
Amen my Math Brother.
Just think of how many less church-splits, church-fights, broken relationships, and people just turning their back on a relationship with Jesus if we had a history devoid of proof-texting.
BTW - If you disagree with any of this I must remind you that God told Noah to build the Ark out of gopher wood.
Praise God that "grace-centered" is now part of our vocabulary in the church, and hopefully will replace patternism, legalism, and the "Law of Silence".
Another interesting biblical commentator is (as I've e-mailed to you) Al Maxey.
Post a Comment
<< Home