A Myth of Sola Scriptura

Wikipedia defines Sola Scriptura as:

Sola scriptura (Latin ablative, "by scripture alone") is the doctrine that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. Consequently, sola scriptura demands that only those doctrines are to be admitted or confessed that are found directly within or indirectly by using valid logical deduction or valid deductive reasoning from scripture. However, sola scriptura is not a denial of other authorities governing Christian life and devotion. Rather, it simply demands that all other authorities are subordinate to, and are to be corrected by, the written word of God. Sola scriptura was a foundational doctrinal principle of the Protestant Reformation held by the Reformers and is a formal principle of Protestantism today (see Five solas).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura

That however is not the myth to which I refer, the myth is when the Bible is used without out using valid logical deduction and valid deductive reasoning; the Bible only without the aid of reasoning and logic, as one of the comments on my last blog said “taking the Bible as it reads”. What does that mean, as it reads? The myth is that you don’t have to take the time and effort to logically interpret the Bible, the myth is that knowledge from outside the Bible is not needed for the interpretation of the Bible.


The Bible in fact does not define itself, just as with any other document of any language the Bible requires both fields of study known as Lower and Higher Criticism. And both of those fields require knowledge of humanity found outside the Bible. The information from outside the Bible is used to understand the culture the times and the language of the material in the Bible. A simply example is the Chiasm, now the Bible does not define what a Chiasm is but it uses them. Our understanding of poetry from the poetry of other ancient literature is used when we see poetry in the Bible. We don’t have to simply claim the Bible tells us everything we need to know about poetry. Poetry frequently is not literal and may cause people to come to wrong interpretations when something is poetic and it is assumed to be literal. One can say that is the way it reads but unless the reader is informed of the poetic characteristics they take the text in ways it was never meant to be taken. For example the book of Job says the stars sang together, if not view poetically people I have seen come up with ideas like the stars are beings from other planets. Despite the poetic nature and despite the context there are probably hundreds of such off the wall interpretations to some simple piece of poetry. 
 
Poetry is just one of the problems in interpretation; another is the assumption that past knowledge when used makes that knowledge used appear to be religious truth. As we saw in my recent article, Bibliotatry, about Jesus taunting the Pharisees when they asked him to make the people stop praising him and he stated if the people stopped the rocks would cry out. Another similar example is when Jesus said that a seed had to die before it could grow and produce more seeds.

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24 NIV)

We know that the seed does not actually die, this is figurative it seems like it is dead and buried but with modern techniques we can actually prove that a seed carries on respiration, those that don’t are truly dead and they won’t germinate. For example the Tetrazolium test or as the simple test when I planted my edible pod peas from my crop last season some seeds floating at the top of the cup of water, those are not going to grow. Dead seeds don’t grow! But we understand the meaning of a new life a fresh start from the context and the figurative language of Jesus but what we know is because of our cultural and scientific and often our own experiential knowledge. There is little doubt that the Bible writers expected people to read with those ideas from outside their writing. We would hardly expect God in His inspiration process to expect differently. But it is the tradition of the Fundamentalist that says the Bible interprets itself. It does not and neither does any other written work because authors expect their readers to use some reasoning skills. Even with symbols the Bible does not necessarily interpret itself because it will often use multiple symbols and the context is needed to recognize just which symbol is meant for which idea in reality.

Does this mean that human beings have to interpret the Bible with human reason? The answer is yes, you can’t get there any other way, it is not a magic book  with writing that absorbs into the mind without the mind thinking, reacting and yes interpreting data. God has given us minds to use and we should be using them and all the tools that the mind can come up with that aid the process of understanding. The book of Isaiah writes:

…Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. "Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. (Isa 1:17-18 NIV)

The Lord says to reason together and learn to do right, you can’t get there without reasoning and thinking and learning that is what our minds are for and we need to use them to understand the Bible and see what it says in context and does the context fit our situations and acknowledge the progressive revelation about God and man that we see in the Bible itself as well as how what we have learned in the thousands of years since the Bible’s individual books were written.

So don’t let the fundamentalist tell you that you are using human reason to understand the Bible, it is simply a cheap and deceitful trick they use to make you think that their certainty is somehow superior. After all it is a truism that the more you know the more you find that you don’t know. If the more you know makes you see even less…then maybe what you think you know is not really knowledge let alone truth.

 

 

The Adventist Myth of the Bible Only

John McLarty has an interesting article on Adventist Today entitled, Answering Fundamentalists. It has a couple of problems however. The first is the definition of fundamentalist. He follows the same definition that the makers of the Last Generation Movie used. His definition is:

“…In this sermon, when I speak of "fundamentalists" or "fundamentalism" I have two dominant characteristics in mind. First, is a radical commitment to a single text as the only source of authority? In Christianity, this is exemplified by the slogan, The Bible and Bible Only. Or the bumper sticker, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." The second characteristic of fundamentalists is their belief that the best religion is that which is most similar to the pure, authentic religion of their spiritual forebears…”

It is that first characteristic that is the problem. Because no matter how you look at it, it is simply not true. The Bible is not their only source of authority. The second characteristic is however the most revealing of the Fundamentalist. Tradition is the source of the fundamentalist’s authority. That tradition is then read into the Bible and once incorporated it becomes their truth and the truth that they declare they find in the Bible.

There is a simple example that we can use to demonstrate this fact. I wrote about the subject in regards to Jimmy Swaggarts study Bible. Here is the example from that article, (Swaggart’s commentary in red):

“Consider what he says: even though the Lord had explained to the First Family the necessity of the Sacrificial System, that is if they were to have any type of communion with God and Forgiveness of sins. There is nothing in the Genesis account about anyone explaining a sacrificial system to Adam and Eve or Cain and Abel. To back up his false statement or at best his assumption stated as fact he says: There is evidence that Adam, at least for a while, offered up sacrifices. Really? Where is there any such evidence?”

Growing up Adventists it was always assumed that Adam and Eve offered Sacrifices, why we even have paintings on our Sabbath school Quarterly of the offering of Adam and Eve.

We don’t get that from anywhere in the Bible, we do get something similar from John Wesley who was the founder of Methodism and had a major impact upon Adventist theology through Ellen White, a former Methodist, and no doubt other Adventists pioneers. Here is what Wesley notes on the Bible says:

“3:21 These coats of skin had a significancy. The beasts whose skins they were, must be slain; slain before their eyes to shew them what death is. And probably 'tis supposed they were slain for sacrifice, to typify the great sacrifice which in the latter end of the world should be offered once for all. Thus the first thing that died was a sacrifice, or Christ in a figure.”

It is now a common belief among Christians particularly Fundamentalists. Yet it can not be found in the Bible at all. It is inserted into the story and used from there on as evidence for several other subsequent ideas.

A similar example can be illustrated in Isaiah 14 and the funeral dirge of the Prince of Babylon called Lucifer in the Latin and carried over into the King James Bible. Lucifer through  teachings of some early Christian leaders in the 2^nd and 3^rd century became equated with Satan, but that is not found in the Bible and it is not found in the beliefs of the Jews. (see Who is Lucifer or Satan Mis-identified).

As you can see those are simply two examples where non-biblical ideas are accepted and inserted into the Bible.

The rest of John McLarty’s article deals with the idea of the Bible and the Bible only. Because this is what Fundamentalist have told themselves that they believe. McLarty shows some examples where people from Adventist backgrounds hold to some differing beliefs while each one claims that they accept and follow the Bible and the Bible only. The truth is that in the cases and the people he mentions not one is really following the Bible and the Bible only. Because it is a fiction, it does not exist. We simply cannot tear ourselves away from all the traditions that infiltrate the Christian religion. Some of us have tried for years to remove from our thoughts the ideas that previous traditions have inflicted upon us only to learn of some more hiding in our interpretations or in the interpretations of people we listen to or read. It is a constant noise in Christianity and it magnifies with each passing generation.

Within Adventism itself the problem is amplified because we have incorporated a vast amount of additional writings that we refer to as the “Spirit of Prophecy”. As one Anti-Adventist fundamentalist website says:

“… The proper scriptural rule is: "The Bible, and the Bible only, as the rule of faith and practice." Seventh-day Adventists do not abide by this rule, but add to the Bible the writings of Mrs. White, and make them superior to the Bible;”

Some may argue that Adventists don’t make the Spirit of Prophecy superior to the Bible but that it is an authoritative addition to the Bible cannot be argued. Hence if you do a Google search of the term "Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy" you get 31,800 hits. We heard it recently from the new President of the Adventist church Ted Wilson who said:

“When we are transformed by His grace, we will preach, teach, and witness to

the straight message from the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy in a humble, loving, winsome manner.”

“I praise the Lord that Nancy and I were both raised by godly parents. In neither of our homes did we ever hear one disparaging word about the Bible or the Spirit of Prophecy. We were both brought up to fear the Lord and reverence His Word.”

It is such a common term in Adventism I don’t even see why an Adventist would make the claim that we find in this Adventist World article by Kwabena Donkor is an associate director of the Biblical Research Institute.

“At a time when creeds had a strong hold on churches, Ellen White was instrumental in encouraging the church to stand by the Bible as the only source of faith and practice. She was firm on the principle of “the Bible, and the Bible only, as the standard of all doctrines, and the basis of all reforms.”² This commitment to the primacy of Scripture that permeated the thinking of the pioneers continues to be emphasized in Adventist thinking today.”

If you think of some of those reforms of the nineteenth century, Health Reform (Alcohol Temperance, Tobacco Temperance), Dress Reform even Abolition of slavery; are these really ideas that are from the Bible and the Bible only? The answer of course is no they are not reforms predicated on the Bible they are reforms that one can find a few texts that may say something that the reformer will use but they are not developed from the Bible and the Bible only. Remember also that these reforms though we connect them to Ellen White were common among the reformers of the nineteenth century.

Adventist still hold to a lot of the old Puritan beliefs, some of which some of us grew up with. The idea that one should not go to theaters, the idea that one should not play a game or go swimming on the Sabbath. These were Puritan beliefs established hundreds of years before Adventists even existed and none of which are Bible and Bible only beliefs.

The problem is that we can and people do read all kinds of things into the Bible and then pretend that they have gotten their ideas out of the Bible. Fundamentalists deceive themselves and deceive others by proclaiming that their accepted views are the truth and their accepted views are the products of the Bible and the Bible only. It is this deception that produces the intolerance and the absurdities that predominate the religious thinking of Fundamentalists. It is not their respect for the Bible that is the problem it is their disrespect of the Bible, their ability to shape the Bible to their traditions that is the problem.

Unfortunately it appears that the fundamentalist deception is in the midst of resurgence in Adventism today if the appointment of our new President is any indication and I am certain it is a pretty accurate indication.