Regarding the below...yes,
their relationship with Jesus (which, Izzy, involves his "indwelling
presence"), shared as members of a community.
The original point, if I
recall the distant beginning of this thread correctly, is not that we have
less than Scripture, but that we have more
than Scripture: we have Scripture and we
have a vital relationship with Christ, who lives in us by his Spirit.
Do we arrive at the relationship with Christ by the act
of reading the Bible, or is it the relationship/indwelling that
empowers and illuminates the Bible to us? The Word is before the
word.
Actually it's the opposite to what you
write above Debbie because "faith comes by hearing and hearing by
the Word of God" as in
your "word" above. The prophet writes "how shall
they hear without a preacher and how shall they preach except they
be sent" Isa 52:7; Rom 10:14,15;
Titus 1:3; trust me, Preachers don't go out clinging to some vicarious
spirit, they go out by faith and
boldly proclaim God's Word (as in Bible).
We've talked about oral
tradition elsewhere in this thread; the Good News was no doubt
being repeated over and over in those earliest days of the church, and part
of the ministry and inspiration of the Holy Spirit was some
believers correcting other believers, whether orally or in writing. God
did not need people to "decide" which writings (or utterances) were inspired
in order for those writings/utterances to have power and be used by the
Spirit through the relationship people had with Christ.
That was then Debbie, this is now - and
the same Holy Spirit who inspired all that talking and writing, states in
Isa 8:20 that "To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according
to this word, it is because there is no light in them" so it behooves us to
check everything by God's plumbline and I would hope they were doing
this in the earliest days of the church.
(In fact, that will have
been part of the set of criteria used to identify the canon.) In any
case, the decisions that established the canon (whether OT or NT), in
the absence of one, must have been themselves inspired as the
result of a relationship; that's part of what we are saying when we say we
believe the Bible, is it not? Now that we have the canon, the Spirit
still enlivens the Scripture to our hearts in the same way he did
before the decision--and graciously makes use of all our faculties in doing
so. Am I making any sense to
anybody? Debbie
I don't know Debbie because I'm not sure
what you are saying; I believe that God supervised what is now called
the canon and I accept the scriptures
available to me in my generation as His Word and every bit as authoritative
today as when given at Mt. Sinai. So what is the problem here?
Does this make me a Bible idolater - is there some other standard of truth
you know about for today?
jt
