A person might point to the Bible he holds in his hands, and say, "This is the word of God, my only authority for religious faith and practice". Then he might point to the head that sits on his shoulders and say, "My own thoughts, reasonings, opinions, and feelings have no such authority, and I must not
The person above, who pointed to the head on his shoulders may so strongly believe the statement he made, that he would be willing to have that very head cut off rather than withdraw his statement. And he should be so willing, because there are clear and solemn warnings at the beginning, middle, and end of the Bible against adding to the word of God or taking away from it
The Bible claims for itself that...
(Isa 55:8-9 1Co 2:1-16).
A SIMPLE EXAMPLE
Here is a simple example. In the Bible, God reveals that he thinks he is the Heavenly Father. But many people think God should be the Earth Mother and they refer to God as "She". Now they should say, "Lord, if you think you are my Heavenly Father, then so will I think". Instead they say, "I think God is my Earth Mother, and I'm not going to change my thoughts on this matter for any patriarchal god, so I'll change the scriptures to
Getting back to the statement at the beginning of this lesson... It raises interesting questions about the function of the human mind with regard to interpreting God’s word. Were we to switch off our minds and stop thinking, then we would be unable to hear, understand, or respond to the word of God. Whilst the thoughts of God alone are the authority for religious faith and practice, the purpose of God’s word is to reveal his thoughts to our minds. Therefore our thoughts and minds must function when it comes to
God himself says, "Come now and let us reason together"
When God says, "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts" he does not intend us to stop thinking, because he says, "Let us reason together". In fact, this is a simple example of how we apply our minds to God’s word. As we think about these two statements, we understand, without much difficulty, that we are to let God’s thoughts modify our thoughts, but our thoughts must
There are three areas of human reasoning without which we could not use the scriptures as our authority. Any time we turn to some part of the Bible for authority, we face three fundamental questions, and we mere mortals have
The first question concerns the integrity of the words we are reading. This has nothing to do with the integrity of God himself, or of anything he says. Rather, it concerns the document in hand which purports to be what God thinks and says. How do we know it is genuinely the word of God? Is the text uncorrupted and is
We may not always feel able to think this through and research that issue for ourselves, and we may well trust experts and scholars to do so. But somebody has to apply the human mind to this question. Manuscripts and translations don’t have errors in orange and correct words in purple, do they? So the human intellect must exercise itself to verify the manuscripts of God’s word, and to faithfully translate them into other languages. An enormous amount of thought has gone into this task
The second question concerns the interpretation of the words we are reading. What do they mean? Even if they are correctly translated from genuine manuscripts, the reader still has to think and to reason, in order to understand what the
This one question generates many more questions.
Obviously when people disagree about what a passage of scripture teaches, someone is not understanding correctly what the writer of that passage meant. Even when people agree, that still does not prove that the writer of the scripture meant to say what they make him say. A process of reasoning is therefore necessary. The mind of the reader must try to get into the mind of the writer and thus into
The third question concerns the implementation of God’s word. How do these words apply to me? We realise, when we read the Bible, that the messages we are reading were written in times past by various people for various purposes. They were not written directly to us. So we have to determine how we should appropriate to ourselves a message originally
When we read what Moses said, when he was addressing the children of Israel in the desert, or Jesus when he spoke on the mountainside to the multitude, or Paul when he wrote while imprisoned to certain churches
One cannot establish Biblical authority without asking questions like those above. One cannot answer those questions without employing human judgment and forming human opinion. Only when I use the head on my shoulders for reasoning, can I use the Book in my hands
We have seen that our thoughts and reasonings should not be allowed to change the thoughts of God which the Bible reveals. On the other hand, those thoughts of God should influence and enlighten our thoughts so that our thoughts are brought into
This lesson was intended