History is important. That was post #1.
Sound Doctrine is important. That was post #2.
Ours is an Apostolic Faith. That is, we have received it from others.
We received the written Word of God, on the authority of the First generation of Christian Disciples. They were sent by Jesus. (This would include Paul.) Jesus Himself was sent by the Father. Technically, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the first Apostles, as they are both "sent".
Why is this important?
It places boundaries on how we should believe. We were given a pattern of what true belief looks like. We see it in the life of Christ, and we see it in the gospel. This was echoed in the life and message of the apostles He sent.
We cannot be faithful to the God of the Bible without being faithful to the Original Intent of its Author.
As far back as Eden, humanity wanted to "re-imagine" God's Word. We have been tempted to make it fit what we wanted or believed the world to be.
Does "has God REALLY said..." sound familiar?
It should.
And we're still hearing it today. The pretend-professors of faith haven't stopped. They know the "Christian-ese" lingo, they draw a crowd and profit handsomely. They are often 'cutting edge' and have the 'new revelations' and the 'latest thing' from God. Maybe this-or-that-unusual -experience. Something that makes them "special". They're never drawing people back to the well-worn road of biblical orthodoxy.
What do you suppose the itching ears verse was a warning against, if not this? Trendy preachers, and flashy shows. It was the false prophets in biblical times that drew big followings, and were well-loved by the worldly. Be cautious about the top selling (supposedly) Christian books and speakers. Examine what they tell you to believe. If Paul praised the Bereans for not taking the Apostle's word for what he was saying, but called them noble for measuring it against the Bible, should we not check our "celebrity preachers" today in the same way?
The newest doctrine or exciting experience are NOT what we should be chasing. We should desire HIM, especially in His Word.
Here are just three examples of God describing his Word as being of utmost importance: Moses, Deuteronomy, and King Saul. If that list is too short, search "word" in Biblegateway, and see a long list of others.
Moses' and Saul's examples are interesting. Moses had a "small deviation" from God's instructions. He was told to speak to the rock, and water would flow from it. He spoke to the people, and struck the rock. The fact that God worked a major miracle there did not change the fact that Moses was in sin for dishonoring God's word. Result? Moses was barred from entering the promised land. Lesson? Presence of a miracle is not a divine endorsement of behaviour.
Similar story with Saul. He was given instructions relating to the battle with the Amalekites: wipe them out, give no quarter. But Saul took the possessions and the King as trophies. Did he go to war? Yes. Did he defeat the Amalekites? Yes. As Saul tried to justify himself, he argued that most of them had been destroyed. But God didn't accept the excuses. He treated Saul's partial obedience as complete disobedience. Lesson? Success in your field of work is not a divine endorsement of behaviour, either.
Result? God gave Saul's kingdom away to "someone better".
If this seems overly extreme to you, maybe you underestimate how passionately God values his Word. God esteems it as highly as he does his Own Name. (He expects we should too.)
If anyone could have been qualified to preach from subjective experience, Jesus could have. He had so much to draw from, and was Himself completely untainted by sin. So did he preach experience? Nope. He Preached the Word. In fact it was the Word (not experience or emotionalism) that was preached throughout New Testament.
This is where history and sound doctrine dovetail.
Tradition: is it good or bad?
YES -- it can be either.
When it displaces God's Word, and co-opts it into new meanings, tradition is bad. Mark 7 deals with this. But tradition is also mentioned in a positive sense: I Cor 11:2 (keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you), as well as 2 Thess 2:15, 1 Thess 3:6.
Where does this leave us? How do we proceed with seemingly conflicting messages concerning the importance of tradition?
It works like this:
1) Begin with the Word of God. It is your starting point. Study it carefully.
2) Weigh it against the WHOLE COUNSEL of scripture, for a balanced view of what you are studying.
3) Bring an attitude of humility and prayer to seek the Author's original intent.
4) Compare that with the tradition handed down.
(This is where things can get dicey.)
If there is substantial agreement with your careful, prayerful reading of scripture, and the conclusions made by God's faithful from years gone by, you have probably divided God's word rightly.
If there is a substantial disagreement, you have tension between your studies and tradition, go back to the first 3 steps, and take your time.
One of you is wrong. Maybe both. There have been great moments in Church history when someone has rediscovered the meaning of the text, where one man with the Bible stood against the World. (Athanasius and Luther come to mind.) But it is far more likely that YOU are off in left field.
Find someone with a solid and mature faith, and discuss it with them. If they are as solid as you think, they can expose gaps in your understanding, and correct them.
If your reading STILL differs from the historically dominant one, make VERY CERTAIN that the entire Word of God affirms the point you are arriving at. Because Scripture is NOT of a private interpretation.
Either way, you will have grown with respect to your faith and God's word. Rejoice!
What Is Christian Freedom? Galatians 5:1–6, Part 2
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If you try to be justified under the law, you will remain under the curse.
But if you stand firm in the grace of the gospel, you will enjoy true
freedom....
15 hours ago
5 comments:
I like your emphasis on obedience to God's instructions, and the reminder to compare our understanding to the whole counsel of God is useful.
I'm a little less comfortable whenever someone contrasts preaching the Word with preaching experience. True, we are not to preach experiences unsupported by Scripture, but it is also often our experience of God that opens our eyes to dimensions of the Word which we would otherwise not have seen. This was exactly the point of Jesus' critique of Nicodemus in John 3:10-11. He explicitly referred to his own experience as authoritative. For another New Testament example, consider Paul's Damascus road conversion. His whole theology was shaken by an experience (a divine encounter) which turned his previous understanding of the Word upside down. Yet another New Testament example is supplied by Peter whose understanding of Scripture and the Kingdom of God was transformed when the Holy Spirit was poured out on Cornelius (Acts 10). Or consider the Resurrection or the Day of Pentecost - both pivotal moments when experiences of God's power led to crucial new understandings. Of course we do not live in the first generation and we are not given the privilege or responsibility of discovering new truth, but I have frequently found it to be true that new experiences have opened my eyes to riches in Scripture which I had not previously seen or understood. Likewise it was (at least in part) the experience of meeting Jesus, the impact of His person, that transformed the understanding of His first disciples and showed them things in their own Scriptures which they hadn't seen before. So while I fully agree with your caution about preaching personal emotional experiences unsupported by Scripture, and it is imperative that we not preach our experience instead of preaching the Word, I also believe it is imperative that our preaching of the Word be illumined by a living experience of God, otherwise we will be like the Sadducees who knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For this reason I find the contrast between Scripture and experience unhelpful unless it is qualified by a recognition of the value of Christian experience in understanding Scripture, because what we actually see over and over again both in Scripture and in Christian history (e.g. the First Great Awakening, to take just one example) is people whose understandings were blown apart by encounters with God which caused them to understand God in greater depth and see things in Scripture which had always been there but which they had not previously recognized. I like Wesley's quadrilateral which includes Scripture, tradition, reason and experience as means of arriving at correct understanding. In Wesley's application of this method, Scripture of course had first place in importance, followed by reason and tradition, but with experience also playing a role.
"our experience of God that opens our eyes to dimensions of the Word which we would otherwise not have seen."
You're not so far from my position as you may think.
Experience gives you new perspective. Yes. It gives you new questions. Also true.
What does one DO with new perspectives and questions?
You go back to the WORD, and check their validity.
I would differ with your assessment of the Sadducees' error. They were very much like today's liberal theology group. They excised parts of scripture that did not fit their "experience" or "understanding" of what life was *really* like. E.g. anti-supernatural biases.
Experience is helpful, but I see no call to place authority in it.
Authority rests elsewhere.
I wasn't suggesting that experience is EVER authoritative OVER scripture, but I believe that to contrast "preaching the Word" with "preaching experience" at times may be a false dichotomy. We should NEVER preach our experience if it differs from what is in the Word, but if our experience illuminates what is in the Word and opens up new dimensions of understanding then it becomes worthy of being proclaimed. So the Apostles, when criticized by the guardians of the tradition, said "We cannot help proclaiming what we have SEEN and HEARD". This is called testimony, is it not? And we are told in Revelation 12 that they overcame the accuser by the Blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.
I completely agree that we should preach the Word, but the Word is not (only) a book, often in Scripture the term "the Word "(Greek rhema, Hebrew debar) refers to the content of a revelatory encounter with God - as in "the word of the Lord came to John in the desert" (substitute the name of any one of the Biblical prophets). It as this revealed word, arising out of an encounter with the Almighty, which the prophets proclaimed. Although we don't get new revelation today in the sense of new truth, we still have experiences / encounters with God that open our eyes to His truth as contained in Scripture, on the basis of which our preaching changes because we understand things that we did not understand before. This can be seen in the lives of luminaries such as Luther, Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, to name only three of many. Therefore, although every understanding must be tested against the written Word (first) and the collected wisdom of the saints over time (second) , it is not helpful to contrast the Word and Experience as if they were opposites.
Apart from that, I agree with the main thrust of what you are saying.
As for the Sadducees - Jesus rebuked them because they had an unbelieving heart in approaching the Word and did not know the power of God, therefore they did not really understand the Scriptures either. I do agree that in some ways they were more like today's theological liberals than like today's conservative evangelicals. However, much of conservative evangelicalism is afraid of spiritual experiences and operates in functional unbelief with regard to the power of God - believing that in the past people had powerful spiritual experiences, but profoundly distrusting the possibility that the God of the Bible might still behave in the same way today. This type of theology rarely bears much fruit in Third World mission fields where everyone knows the spiritual world is real, and only those who have learned to walk in the power of the Spirit can bear much lasting fruit.
Wes,
Thinking some more about your statement "authority rests elsewhere". I agree. Ultimately authority rests with God Himself. He will always be consistent with His past self-revelations, but that consistency will not always be immediately obvious to us. That is why - even though every valid experience will ultimately be seen to be consistent with Scripture - God at times overturns our understandings by granting us powerful encounters with Himself. At times like these, sometimes we are carried along by a sovereignly-ordained flow of events which we only fully understand afterwards. This is not putting "emotion" ahead of "scripture". It is putting God in his rightful place - after all it is He who watches over His word to perform it, not His word (Or our previous understandings of it) that watch over Him to dictate what He may or may not do. He will be faithful to Himself; He cannot be otherwise.
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