on the walk

We cannot underestimate the central authority of the Bible.

I often find myself out of step in many conversations about difficult decisions.   Other people seem much more impressed with the wisdom that can be found in experience or in experts.  Or they are very confident in the wisdom they will gain from the subjective experience they will have as a result of prayer. I am not.  They may be right and I may be wrong, but for me the only authority that carries much weight is the Bible.

This is why I devote so much of my energy to learning how to wisely and faithfully interpret the Bible and apply it to our lives.  As the old line goes, it is our only rule for faith and practice.  That doesn’t merely mean that it is the best one, it means what it says, it is the only one.

Consequently although I am not a biblicist, the Bible is where I will start for any major investigation of what the church is called to believe and how the church is called to live.  So long before I consider what we can know about God through the post-biblical language of the trinity, I am going to consider what we can learn about God from scripture. And long before I consider what I can learn from the traditions of church worship and programming that I have inherited in my life of faith, I want to return to scripture, to ask, “What is the church doing?”

So I am not a biblicist.  I know that God has continued to guide the church and we must learn from the wisdom of all of church history.

But as my rule for faith and practice there is one source.  The Bible.

So that is where we will turn for our foundation of the core events of the church.

on the walk

-Ethan

Consequently I believe that while the Bible is the sufficient rule for faith and practice it is not exhaustive.  The Spirit still speaks.  Christians have had lots of good ideas since the Bible was written and I am please to benefit from those ideas.

There are some Christian circles in which this is not a radical suggestion, but I grew up in a tradition and I minister in a tradition in which biblicism is easy to find.  In fact a major family of this movement of churches goes by the name acapella Churches of Christ.  They will not use instruments in worship.  This is because in the new Testament there is no record of instruments being used in a worship service.  Some other Christians insist that women where head coverings. This is biblicism.  This view holds that every post-biblical innovation is an innapropriate Christian practice.

If this view had a motto it would be “If it is not in the Bible, I won’t do it.”

You may be thinking to yourself, “that sounds like a great motto.”  I agree.  It does sound like a great motto, but believe me, it isn’t.   It turns out that Christians have thought of lots of good things that aren’t in the Bible.  Now of course because they are not in the Bible that means that we can’t pretend they are essential, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good things.

Here are a few things that are not in the bible,(or at least not in the same way we have them today.)

• Church Buildings
• Offering Trays
• Projectors
• Christmas
• Easter
• Sunday School
• Seminaries
• Heated Baptisteries
• “Quiet Time”
• Church Calendar
• Daily Office
• The Trinity
• Alter calls
• and lots of other stuff why don’t you help me add to my list.

See that is all good stuff.  I wish that it was as easy as being a biblicist.  INstead we have to ask the much more difficult question.  Is this practice or teaching that is not in scripture still faithful to scripture.  Does it exprtess what scripture teaches without going further than scritpure does?

That takes discernment and the wisdom of the whole church guided by the Spirit and that is why I am not a biblicist.

(tune in to my next post for the big BUT…)

And this matters for our conversation about church events.  It won’t be as simple as asking what are the 3 or ten or fifty types of events that the church in Acts had.  Just because they had an event doesn’t mean that we must and just because they didn’t doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.  As we ponder the core evens of the church we will need submit fully to the authority of scripture but to do that we must do more than just copy the church in Jerusalem or Phillipi or Corinth (please don’t copy the church in Corinth).
on the walk

-Ethan

There is a translating frenzy in American Christianity.  This is a good thing for at least two reasons.  Continue Reading »

Ethan Magness to readers, greetings.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the power and usefulness of genre studies. This post will make more sense if you read that one, so you may want to check it out. You can find it here or look in the list of recent posts for “i love genre studies.”

I certainly don’t have time to talk about all the implication of genre studies. That is just as well since most of the time the real power comes out when you are ready to study a particular text. Continue Reading »