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What is the bible?
Posted : 6 Apr, 2010 12:24 AM
Hallo everybody,
in recent threads I have noticed some people tossing around scripture quotes to prove arguments and sometimes hardly anything else. I got in some cases the idea that the application of scripture is lead by a certain basic thought, and scripture is used to back this up.
It has been stated several times that the scripture was infalibe. So based on the infability of scripture people argumented with scripture quotes to back up their thoughts.
Now I wonder in which way people here believe that scripture is infallible. I wonder which kind of application of scripture people here consider right, and which kind they consider wrong.
What is the position of scripture? What is the position of exegesis? What is the position of hermeneutics for people in this form?
I want to start out giving my thoughts, mabe I add to it or make things clearer in following posts. I find that I cannot make my thoughts clear in first times, but I try to get to the point
I do have my problems ith speaking of the scripture as being infallible. After all, scripture is a thing, a book, not alive, not doing anything on its own. How can scripture than be more infallible than an orange or a hammer?
One might say: An orange does not contain thoughts, scripture does, and those thoughts can be wrong or right. So in this way scripture can be more infallible than a hammer. A hammer contains no thoughts.
I am still not convinced, as the thoughts are not in the text we read, but the text constitutes those thoughts in our brains. Maybe it's not even the text alone but also other things that we have experienced etc. Like in the morning I have read about big companies firing workers and raising managment payments at the same time, so this causes certain thoughts when reading about the rich having a hard time getting into heaven etc.
A text itself does not do anything, it does not contain anything, it does not tell anything on its own. Take a text in a foreign language you don't know. It will tel you nothing. Or will it? Maybe you get some thoughts looking at the strange signs and symbols of a strange language, completely unrelated to the text itself but at the same time they were started by you looking at the text...
What I want to say is that I think you always need somebody alive to have thoughts, a nonliving thing does not think and cannot contain thoughts. A dead thing can not even make thoughts for others, it is always somebody living who has thoughts and makes thoughts, produces them, based on things we see, hear, read, smell, remember, whatever.
So this is also true for the bible, if we can say that the bible is a dead thing. I do think that the bible is dead. It is not infallible, as a dead thing does not fit into categories as fallibility or infallibility. The bible is not God, because God consists of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and those are alive. Bible is not human, and not animal, not even plant. Not alive.
Everything we get from the bible is what we get from it by reading it ourselves, so all action comes either from us (as we are alive) or from somebody else, also alive, like the Holy Spirit, or simply somebody who explains things to us or tells us how he or she sees it. This person can him- or herself be guided by the Hoy Spirit. Or possibly aso by Satan, who knows...?
So I read the bible mysef, wehn I read it, and I tend not to think of it as a set of rules, because wide parts of the bible are not rules, but stories told. There are letters, there are arguments of every kind in scripture. Some things are said without being in the focus, others are in focus. I try to find out what the author of a biblical text wanted to say by writing it, or what a redactor wanted to say, as many biblical texts are the result of a redaction that changed the original ideas of different authors, for example the story of the great flood compared to the epic of Gilgamesh...
Reading the bibe and getting ideas about what authors and redactors might have said alone brings me nothing. This is only exegesis. It is important to what extent and for what I use the findings of bible lecture, so to say: What is my target. Aso the question what do I presume before, like what I wrote above...
I can find myself hermeneutics, there are various on the market, even when you reduce your search to theology or even prtestant theology.
But I still think, this is not enough: I myself cannot get anything infallible out of the bible, as whatever I get from it is what I made of it, as stated above. And I am falible, so whatever I get out of the bible myself is fallible, and this is true for every other person, however pious he or she might be, for nobody can get rid of his or her carnal mind.
It is my strong believe, that we need necessaryly the Holy Spirit to get anything good from the bible. If we try to get something from it without the Holy Spirit we can only get false thoughts in the end. And we cannot control the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit is God and God cannot be and will not be controlled by men.
This is why I am doubtful about quoting scripture in postings. I do so myself, and I wonder hwo much of it is good. I think it can ony be okay if there was some personal revelation about that passage, so we are only repeating what God told us personally through this piece of scripture.
So I read my scripture and hope for the Lord to open it to me. At some pieces He did, with most He didn't, and many are connected with passages where He spoke to me.
This is why I hardly back up my words on here with scripture (this and being lazy searching and not knowing so much of it by heart as others do).
Taking some scripture that gets in my line of thoughts can be supporting what I think, but also be meant in a different way. Without revelation from God, how can I know? So if I cannot know, how can I bring it forth here on the forums?
So I rather want to speak of what I was told by the Lord, or maybe what I think I was told. I want to speak about what I experienced in the Spirit, and I am also looking for people sharing their thoughts with me. Because there is something I have not spoke about yet:
What if we are mislead, how can we know?
Actually know, like knowing 2+2=4 we can never do (if you guys know the movie Matrix you know the thought that we can not know anything for sure).
But we are all followers of Christ, and we are told to be in contact, to meet for service and help one another, have love for one another. So we also speak about our personal revelations, and if there are others with the same revelation this is a hint, or if there are some who have a revelation that tells us differently. And finally there is always scripture to be read by us, waiting for further revelation, for furtherly being touched by Him. He will correct us if we go wrong one way or another. And our sisters and brothers can give us hints, hopefully without condemning (as this does only drive poeple further apart from one another, and this is a result ony Satan can like, that people are far away from one another).
So what do you guys think about scripture not being arguments for debate, but content to be spoken about? About the Holy Spirit not being the researched object of discussion (and thus a to-be-controlled-by-men-object) but being a sought but uncontrollable base for ourselves.
Tell me about your thoughts, and God bless you all.
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