“The unthinking fundamentalist wants to reduce the whole problem to a very simple equation — ‘just stick to the Bible.’ His belief is that fooling around with traditions in the first place is what cause the problem. We may call this the ‘tradition as demon’ position. ‘We don’t believe in tradition. We have never believed …
The Primal Confession
“After all, the Table of Contents in our Bibles is one of the Church’s first and most important confessional traditions” (Mother Kirk, p. 61).
Selling Bibles In Every Possible Configuration
“We should all be realists by now and not expect the solution to come from those who are profiteering off the problem. If a serious reform of this particular publishing travesty ever got large enough for anyone to notice it, the caterwauling of Textual Critic and Businessman, in close harmony with one another, would lead …
University of Whatzit
“A more biblical vision would see the Church as guardian or custodian of the sacred text. Just as the Jews, the Church of the Old Testament, discharged their obligations with regard to the Scriptures, so should the Church under the New Covenant. What God had spoken through His prophets was entrusted to His covenant people. …
Bible Mongery
“So through a series of complicated circumstances, we have come to the last point, which concerns the handlers or marketers of the text. We see that text of Scripture now established by the neutral Academy, and is afterwards packaged, copyrighted, marketed and sold by hustling and enterprising entrepreneurs. The Church today has no authoritative role …
Another Thing Science Can’t Do
“The reconstruction of the autographic text is a task outside the competence of science, and any attempt to submit the task to scientific canons will only result in increasing confusion. A process of scholarly reconstruction here makes sense only when undergirded with faith in the living God who controls the flow of all historical events. …
Providentially Protected and Preserved
“So we must understand there are two different approaches to textual work. One expresses confidence that God has protected His Word down through history. This is a faith position — faith in God. The other presupposition says that it is up to man, through neutral, scholarly, and scientific means, to determine what the original text …
How Christ Arranged It
“The canonical books of the Old Testament are thirty-nine in number. Our Lord referred to this canonical range when He spoke of the death of certain martyrs from the Old Testament . . . (Matt. 23:35). Abel was killed toward the beginning of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish canon, and …
Churches, Not Doctrine Clubs
“The headship of Jesus Christ over the church has a very practical application in issues of reformation. If a church is a Christian church at all, this means that it does not ‘have a right’ to its own doctrinal traditions. The headship of Christ means that He is the final authority, and he has set …
Not An Abstract Principle to Affirm, But a Concrete Task to Complete
But who gave any of us permission to be an eschatological pessimist? Not Jesus Christ. He said that all authority in heaven and on earth was His, and that our job was to disciple the nations. He wasn’t giving us something to shoot for; He was giving us something to do” (Mother Kirk, p. 42).