A. The Bible, the original writings of the historically accepted canon of sixty-six books contained in the Old and New Testaments, is the exclusive, inspired Word of God, and, as such, it is God’s revelation as our ultimate authority for faith and practice.
- Exclusive – 2 Timothy 3:15-16 (note: refers to those Scriptures Timothy knew as a whole from childhood, i.e., Law, Writings, Prophecy—the Old Testament); 2 Peter 3:16; I John 4:6
- Inspired – John 10:34; 2 Peter 1:19-21; 2 Peter 3:16; 1 John 4:6
- Systematic approach – God loves his creation (John 3:16). God interposes himself in his creation (Psalm 20). God reveals himself to his creation (Romans 1-3). God requires of his creation attitude and action consistent with his revealed character (Romans 1:18-20). Therefore, considering God’s revelatory interposition upon creation and his love and infinite nature, God both could and would provide a complete communication to humankind of all he wants us to know of him and how he wants us to respond to him. Since we have a closed canon of Scripture accepted through the millennia as his Word, we may be confident that this is the complete and exclusive revelation of God to all humankind.
- Preservation – 1 Kings 19:18; Isaiah 1:8-9; 37:31; 43:21; Ezekiel 6:8; Romans 9:27; 1 Peter 1:5
OK, I know I'm being a bit picky, but I'm a stickler for parallelism. Should those points under point A be descriptors of the Bible? So, the Bible is exclusive. The Bible is inspired. The Bible is systematic approach?? I guess I don't see the clear connection. I know how the third point is connected, but I'd like to see the connection articulated clearly.
ReplyDeleteAlso, under B, there is only one point. Shouldn't there be two?
Okay, I should explain how I'm doing this. The bullets underneath are meant simply to give backup for the main points (A, B, etc.). The B point was speaking of preservation so I had one point of Scripture backup for it. The A point had two main ideas--that the Bible is the exclusive revelation of God and that the Bible is inspired by God. So, originally I had two bullets with references for each major idea. The Systematic Approach part was included as a sub-bullet under the Exclusivity backup. But the editor for the blogspot post would not allow me to use nested bullets. So I kept the systematic approach as a third bullet. If I would actually print this for a Constitution, I would have the Systematic Approach indented under the first bullet--Exclusive. Does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteTherefore, (1) point A has references as backup for two ideas--exclusive and inspired, with the exclusive backup having an additional sub-bullet about a systematic approach, and (2) point B, having only one idea--preservation, has only one bullet for backup references. The bullets, then, are not really part of the outline, but just used to show references. Therefore, I didn't think I needed two bullets in traditional outline fashion.
If you can think of a better arrangement for this, please let me know.
So, why isn't there something about inerrancy?
ReplyDeleteWhy no statement on inerrancy? Well, I'm not sure it is a fundamental necessity. All the arguments I can think of for inerrancy seem to lose their effect if no inerrant manuscripts are preserved. And we know the manuscripts we have now are inconsistent with one another in minor points. So, even if we did have some manuscript that was "inerrant" what good would it do (based on the arguments for inerrancy) if we do not know which one it is?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I kind of think the originals were inerrant. But if someone believes in inspiration and authority, but hedges on inerrancy concerning things like grammar, spelling, other minor points based on the individuals doing the writing, I'm not sure that I would want to bar them from our assembly.