The Bible never claims to be, in its entirety, the Word of God.
I have aligned myself with the use of the term “Word of God” in scripture.
You are the one embracing the words of men, words contrary to the use in scripture.
If you cannot repent now of disagreeing with the use of the term “Word of God” in scripture now, perhaps you will come to that level of maturity in the future.
27 posts were split to a new topic: Denying that God is triune puts you outside orthodox Christian teaching?
The Bible never refers to Communion either. Or Eucharist. Or the Lord’s Supper. Those are just the words of men. (Funny how you use “words of men.” As opposed to what, the Word of God, maybe? 
) Maybe we should disavow those names as not biblical and having no place in our worship.
The bible doesn’t include the word Rapture. And I don’t think it includes the word… bible. Far more problematically, it makes no mention of chocolate or tortillas.
That’s why all my arguments for why there will be chocolate in heaven have no good proof-texts.
But the Bible does refer to other things as “the word of God.” The Bible might fit within some of those things (e.g., God’s message or revelation to us); but not all of them. So…not “wrong,” per se, but certainly potentially misleading…?
‘The Bible never refers to Communion either. Or Eucharist. Or the Lord’s Supper.”
When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper .
Yes, the Bible uses the term “Word of God,” and it never refers to the Bible.
So Christy supports a use of the term inconsistent with scripture.
I support the use of a term consistent with Christian history. My faith is definitely not based just on my personal interpretation of the Bible, it’s based on the apostolic tradition and the orthodox teaching of the church, which I believe has been guided by the Holy Spirit, throughout history.
If I heard someone in my Evangelical context say, “I shared the gospel today,” I would assume that by “gospel” they meant they told someone that Jesus died for their sins so they could be reconciled to God. That is how “the gospel” is used in my speech community. However in the Gospels “the gospel” that Jesus and his disciples went around preaching obviously means something entirely different because, Jesus had not died for anyone’s sin and that wasn’t what he went around preaching about. He preached the great values inversion of the coming Kingdom of God. What my hypothetical Evangelical friend means is arguably not even what Paul means by gospel elsewhere in the New Testament. It’s okay, I understand what my friend means. I understand what the Bible says. We can use the same biblical word two ways. Now maybe it is an issue that in our time we have reduced the robust gospel of the New Testament to “trust Jesus as your personal Savior so you can go to heaven when you die.” But that is irrelevant to whether or not I can understand what my friend means by “gospel.” I learned what “gospel” means in Evangelical contexts by hanging out with Evangelicals. I learned what the “gospel” means in the Bible by studying the Bible.
Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple.
As to the Magisterial Reformers, Luther’s relationship to the Catholic Church was complex, and for a significant period time he sought to reform the Catholic Church internally. One might simply point out that papal authority is not at issue in 95 Thesis, which is in many ways the essence of Luther’s reformation thought. Calvin was less concerned about internal reform, but then he arrives on the scene later.
As for the Radical Reformers most of them believed that all human civil authority (Inc. the pope) was corrupt beyond rescue. Sure they set the Bible against pope, but they did the same with anyone else who would ‘wield the sword’ of Government. So at least they were consistent.
But to insistent that the development of the Reformers Doctrine of Scripture was polemical is to misunderstand the Reformation. Certainly, the Reformation eventually installed the Bible in place of the Pope as the final authority on matters of faith and godliness. However, I think a charitable reading of say Luther or Calvin would see that they do not envision themselves as doing something new, but returning to a belief which is very, very old. Wether they achieved that goal is a debate for another day.
My comment was not about Luther. It was about after the reformation.
I doubt the gospel, the good news, has changed. It was and still is the same as we find in the discussion with Nicodemus in John 3. We believe and follow.
But that is not relevant to calling the Bible the Word of God, when the Bible itself has different meanIngs for the term Word of God.
And yet you said,
It was this statement in bold that I was responding to. If I have misunderstood you, my apologies. Could you clarify in quoted section, please? Please, you could provide the names of some of the reformers that you did have in mind?
Thanks.
It’s totally relevant because the Bible itself clearly has different meanings for the term gospel.
The meaning has. You are really going to argue that Jesus went around Jerusalem and Judea preaching “I died for your sins to reconcile you to God”? That’s just being stubborn. And clearly wrong.
If Mark’s Gospel is anything to go by the cross was Jesus best kept secret. Even those he did tell, which wasn’t many, either didn’t get it or thought he was pulling their leg.
No, I am going to argue that the good news was not His death. The good news is that the Messiah came and we can believe and follow Him.
Jesus forgave sins before He died. His death was not a requirement for the forgiveness of sins.
But that is not what Evangelicals mean when they talk about the gospel. I know that and you know that.
And again, you are far outside orthodoxy here if you say the good news Christianity offers is that Jesus came and we can follow him. You skipped over the atonement, which is kind of a big deal.
I don’t know a single evangelical who would consider Vance’s definition an adequate description of the biblical gospel. Neither would the church I attend accept a candidate for membership or believer’s baptism based on Vance’s description of the gospel.
@03Cobra, we can debate the rightness or wrongness another time, the point is your description of the gospel is not what I mean when I use the word, not what any of my other evangelical friends mean when they use the word ‘gospel’.
I would use gospel to mean something like ‘the good news that Jesus the Messiah, the son of God, took on a human nature to live the life we could not live, and die the death that we deserve as punishment for our sin and then rose bodily from the dead after three days.’
Again, we can debate the theology another day, the point is we are using the same English word in two demonstrably different ways.
The modern source for YEC belief is Ellen G. White. And while the fundamentalists came to embrace YEC the founding document, so to speak, The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth doesn’t promote YEC. In fact it says this:
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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