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Monday, July 22, 2019

Scripture

The Bible clearly states that
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16-17)
Well, that clears everything up, right? I mean we have there the source -- "God-breathed" -- and the use -- "that the man of God may be complete" -- and the efficacy -- "equipped for every good work." You may (if you're tuned properly) may sense a "but" or maybe some flippancy in that last sentence, right? The truth is, everything I wrote there was accurate. So what's the problem?

The question often comes up, "So ... what constitutes 'Scripture'?" I've been told on many occasions, "You know, Paul's Scripture was the Old Testament. No one in the New Testament was thinking they were writing Scripture." So the idea is along the lines of "Well, maybe the Old Testament is what Paul was describing there, but not the New Testament and, oh, by the way, haven't we already tossed out most of the Old Testament?" Is this the case?

There is an underlying assumption going on in this line of thinking. The fundamental assumption is, basically, "Scripture is what we make it." That is, "It is Scripture if we say it is and it is not if we say it is not." There is, for instance, a common belief among Catholics that the Roman Catholic Church brought us the canon of Scripture. We decide what is and isn't God's Word. In principle, this is fundamentally flawed. If Scripture is "God-breathed," then clearly God is deciding what is and is not Scripture. Our role in all of this is to recognize what God has breathed out. We don't get to make it "Scripture." We receive it.

Given the mistaken underlying assumption that Man decides what God said, we might be done with this. There is, however, another element. The Bible doesn't agree that the Old Testament was Scripture and nothing else was.

Many of the New Testament writers quote Scripture in their writings. Sometimes they even say things like, "Like it says in Scripture ..." Most of that is indeed from the Old Testament, and we're not debating whether or not the Old Testament was Scripture to Christ and Paul. But not all of that was from the Old Testament. In 1 Timothy Paul tells Timothy, "Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,' and, 'The laborer deserves his wages'' (1 Tim 5:17-18). You'll note the reference to Scripture and you'll note the quote marks. He quoted two Scriptures. The first is from Deuteronomy (Deut 25:4). Old Testament. Got it. The second ... is not. As it turns out, this is a quote from Luke's Gospel (Luke 10:7) quoting Jesus (and the ESV actually puts this in red letters). Paul, then, refers to Luke's Gospel as Scripture. Not just the Old Testament. Another reference to New Testament as Scripture is found in Peter's second epistle. "And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:15-16). Very clearly Peter is referring to Paul's letters as Scripture on par with "the other Scriptures." Clearly Peter understood that Scripture did not end at the book of Malachi. The New Testament, then, is also Scripture.

To be completely honest, I think it is clear that those who argue that Paul was referring only to the Old Testament do so out of ignorance at best and, more likely, hostility to God's Word. It's not like our modern times are the only times that God's Word has been under attack. That's mostly because the history of humanity is built on the back of rebellion to God, so it stands to reason that "Did God really say ...?" would be at the core of that rebellion. I just wanted to remind you that God's Word is not vague, is not unclear, is not indefensible, and is not irrelevant ... no matter what the father of lies and those who listen to him have to say about it.

1 comment:

Craig said...

What I think is interesting when talking about what constituted scripture in the 1st century is that Jesus clearly referred to the Hebrew scriptures as scripture. But He also held the religious leaders accountable as if there was enough information in the scripture for them to have know who He was. He seemed pretty confident about that.

As to the NT, I agree that the texts you cite suggest that the Church was treating those letters and Gospels as scripture early in Church history.