ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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God provided the Bible for us. What God did not provide, is us to pick a random interpretation of scripture some historical men decided was true. One is divinely inspired, the other is not.
God sent our Lord Jesus Christ, who founded His Church and called together a group of people calling them His Apostles. At our Lord's ascension He instructed those same Apostles to remain in Jerusalem until the coming of the Holy Spirit, which happened on Pentecost--afterward they were to go out and be His witnesses beginning in Jerusalem, then throughout Judea and Samaria, and then to the nations.
The Scriptures are those writings which this same Church which our Lord established have received, historically, as divinely inspired and to be read in the context of Christian worship. That's what the Bible is.
We can, of course, confess that these Scriptures have been received down through the centuries by the Providence of God, and in this way God has, through His Church, given His Church the Holy Scriptures of the Bible for our good and benefit--as St. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, for correction, reproof, etc. How are the Scriptures to be used for correction, reproof, etc? Look at the context: Paul is instructing Timothy in matters of pastoral ministry. The rightly dividing the word of truth is told to Timothy; and Timothy is likewise told that the use of Scripture for the benefit of the Faithful--for teaching, correction, etc--as part of the pastoral ministry.
Does that mean these things are exclusively relevant to pastors? No, but the explicit context of 2 Timothy is pastoral.
And this is why the individual simply making up whatever they want the Scriptures to mean doesn't work--it's why biblical exegesis and interpretation is about the work of scholars, exegetes, theologians, etc.
The Bible isn't our personal toy, where we get to run off and go play a game of religion. The Bible is Sacred Scripture, and it is for the benefit, the edification, of the whole Church. And that means taking the Bible seriously. Not just saying whatever we want, whenever we want.
As a Lutheran I have just as much a problem with a single Pope in Rome claiming total authority in the Church; how much more should I then have a problem with ten million self-proclaimed popes running around. At least the Pope in Rome is held accountable to the structures in place in Rome. The self-pointed popes that run rampant throughout modern neo-Protestantism wish to be free of all accountability.
-CryptoLutheran
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