The other day I saw this in a post: “The only way to know the truth is to read and learn the Bible” and I’ve been sitting with it. Here’s the thing: Jesus tells us that HE is the truth. So is the original post saying that the Bible leads to Jesus and therefore truth? Or are we trying to say that the words themselves are the truth? Because if it’s the latter, that’s getting close to idol territory… #Christianity#Bible#Truth#WhatIsTruth
@FrChazzz very very similar question to where we locate The Word of God, or the Logos. St John locates it with the person of Christ, many printed volumes of the Christian Bible put it on the cover. Is it Christ, The Scripture, that book right there? What holds the authority of the Logos over the believer, the living person of Christ or the letters printed on that page?
@spaceraser I sorta agonized over this for a few years during a time of deconstruction (which carried on until I was in seminary lol) and then I read Hebrews 4:12-13 in the NRSV where it says “the Word of God is living and active… and before him no creature is hidden…” It was then that I was like “well that settles THAT!” lol
@FrChazzz I was challenged by a friend to find anywhere in the scripture where the writings and teachings of the law, the prophets, or the apostles refer to themselves as “The Word of God”, and that was a helpful exercise. It’s unhelpful, our legacy of anti-intellectualism in American Christianity, which makes it difficult to insist on reading the scripture carefully and interrogating, “what does the scripture says about it’s own authority?”
@FrChazzz so much of deconstruction can feel like walking away from scripture as an authority in our lives into a wild and unordered space out in the world, when for me it was just detangling Scripture from what our heritage of sweaty, revival tent Biblicism says about scripture. In many ways, they were just wrong. Can’t blame them, though, most of them (talking about my own family here) had no connection to The Tradition, they were basically starting from scratch.
@FrChazzz one of my favorite authors, Chris Green, identified God’s sovereignty with His ability to surprise us, to be more and bigger than our expectations. He also identified a certain Biblicism (ranging towards idolatrous regard for the printed words of scripture) with the desire to possess, or even begin to comprehend the totality of the divine person. Obviously, the author (and I) would caution against that.
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