Let me reiterate, then.
1)The Bible never claims to be, in its entirety, the Word of God.
2) Calling the Bible “the Word of God” misleads people and leads to incorrect views about the Bible. And the practice cannot be justified with scripture.
3) In the extreme, this can lead to Bible worship.
4) The young generations have more information available now than those of us who are old had when we are young. Just saying “the Bible Is the Word of God and it says” is an approach that does not work as well as it did in the past. We who are believers should move away from unsubstantiated, man-made claims if we are to influence the young generations to follow Jesus.
Thanks for the welcome, Roger. Much appreciated. Apologies if I misread you - it was not intentional. Perhaps you might be kind enough to reread the paragraph I quoted to see if it sounds ambiguous enough to account for my mistaken reading. Thanks.
Agreed. Yes and Amen.
I’m glad we agree here too. So then are you willing to admit were incorrect when you said that this translation practice helps us ‘to understand that the Bible is not absolute or divine.’ when in fact it does no such thing?
And she is entirely able and justified in giving the Bible this honorific if she so chooses to. OK sure, do some Christians idolise the Bible? No doubt. Just like many idolised their children, job, sex, career, intelligence, science, car, opinions, cat, the list is endless. As Calvin once said (paraphrase) ‘the human heart is an idol factory’. However, that does not mean that it is Incorrect or idolatrous to call the Bible the Word of God.
I honestly believe, this is an issue of conscious for every believer to decide for themselves. I respect your weaker conscience in this area; I’m not going to make you call the Bible the Word of God. I don’t even ask you to agree with me. I simply ask you do not seek to bind the consciences of others who are doing nothing wrong by calling the Bible the Word of God. Which, by the way you were doing when you quoted the first commandment, whether you were aware of it or not. In return, I am willing to endeavour for your sake to refer to the Bible as the word of God in replies and posts directed to you. I’ve no doubt others would be willing to do the same.
Um… Roger! You’ve done it again! You’ve made a claim that you are knowledgable in a certain area (previously bible translation, now historical theology of Scripture) and then tagged your own opinion on the end so it appears as a fact. Perhaps you don’t mean to or are unaware of what you are doing? I struggle to believe that you would do it intentionally.
Either way, whether belief in the Bible as the absolute word of God has had a negative impact on the church is entirely your own opinion. Here the in UK it is evangelical churches with a robust theology of Scripture which are growing and flourishing.
As to evangelicals making the Bible the Word of God in an absolute sense, come on! I’d get a refund on the books you read () . Surely you don’t think evangelicals taught these ideas to the churches of the 2nd Century or to Calvin, Luther and the writers of the Reformed confessions do you? As you’ll know from your studies, it is anachronistic to call the Reformers and those who immediately followed them ‘evangelicals’.
There are many who would dispute this, but I am not one of them.
Do you personally know anyone who fell into Bibleism just from calling it the Word of God?
The practice is justified by normal English usage. No scripture needed.
Who exactly are making these claims? There are small groups that promote Bibleism or KJVonlyism but they have bigger issues than what they call the Word of God. You really seem to be grasping at straws to support your position here.
Have you thought about this question? I suspect you know it is not possible to accurately trace and pinpoint the sources of error in the minds of people.
Do you think a damaging, misleading practice should only be addressed if it is the sole contributor to false beliefs?
When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.
And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.
The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
[ Peter’s Report to the Church at Jerusalem ] Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.
Then both Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, “It was necessary that the wordof God should be spoken first to you. Since you reject it and judge yourselves to be unworthy of eternal life, we are now turning to the Gentiles.
But when the Jews of Thessalonica learned that the word of God had been proclaimed by Paul in Beroea as well, they came there too, to stir up and incite the crowds.
Words (or in this case, phrases) have something called a semantic range and can have different referrents in different contexts. You can’t go back and replace instances of the word pastor in an English Bible with “ordained seminary grad salaried by a local church” either, even though that is what pastor means in English in many contexts. That doesn’t mean it is somehow wrong to call ordained seminary grads salaried by local churches “pastors” in English. That is how its meaning in English language developed, and it is now part of its current semantic range.
Vance I believe you have fallen into a very common misunderstanding of how dictionaries work. Dictionaries are not final authorities on what a word means, they are more like records of how the word is used at the time the dictionary is compiled.
This is reflected in top draw dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As OED word entries contain a history of the word origins and usage over time.
As I say, it is a very common misunderstanding, people do it with lexicons too.
If definitions have never “developed”, then just where is it that you think they came from? Or if they have suddenly stopped developing as of October 23, 2019 - is this now the special snapshot of all time where words finally have their forever meaning?
There’s nothing developing here. It’s a part of standard English usage, and has been for centuries. See this Sermon by Jonathan Edwards, for example, “The Scripture is the Word of God.”
And, no we don’t agree, because you insist on denying the reality of how English speakers use words because you have some kind of ideological problem with it, and you won’t concede that words can have multiple referrents.
With respect Vance, this sounds a lot like a slippery slope fallacy. I never suggested we should or could make up any definition we like, I merely said that dictionaries are not the final authority.
Though as it happens people make up new definitions all the time anyway. Teenagers are constantly doing this much to the parents’ generations annoyance and confusion. For example, in the mouth of a teenager words like sick, wicked, edgy, chicken, dope, dude, and bro all have meanings for that group of people which are different from a strict dictionary definition. In fact, if they are in the dictionaries now, it is because these groups of people popularised that usage over and against the dictionary definition of their day.
So you see, usage in context is the final authority on word meaning not dictionary definition.
Apparently so. I see now that I should have interpreted that as that such a definition for “Bible” never developed at all - as in you deny the existence (or at least the validity) of such usage. My apologies.
"I stopped using specific language. I quit saying: The Bible says, the Bible teaches, the Word of God says, the Word of God teaches…this was not a change in belief or theology for me. This was simply a change in approach to talking about the Bible.”
That is the nice thing about North Point. Disagreements on minor points are allowed. The difference is, however, you likely checked some websites, while I have been listing to the sermons and leading a small group for a dozen years.
But did you really read the quote you provided? He QUIT saying that. Look again.
) . Surely you don’t think evangelicals taught these ideas to the churches of the 2nd Century or to Calvin, Luther and the writers of the Reformed confessions do you? As you’ll know from your studies, it is anachronistic to call the Reformers and those who immediately followed them ‘evangelicals’.