Although race was not a major category for Wesley, in a society that defined people's place along racial lines, he might well have agreed that those races who were oppressed had better access to
the true meaning of scripture that those that oppressed them.
Within each, he traces how Reformation battles over the criteria for determining
the true meaning of Scripture and the proper definition of doctrines shifted authority to natural science, politically ordered confessional institutions, privatized choice, material aggrandizement, and a social - knowledge system finally untethered to religious categories and rationales.
As we mature in our faith, some of us may be able to shake off some of our personal biases and get closer to
the true meaning of Scripture.
His balance on this matter of an integral exegesis is so important while we are faced with both a rationalism and a post-modern spiritualism which both denude
the true meaning of Scripture.
So let's say you're right that there is only one
true meaning of scripture — I'm assuming that only god knows it, being all - knowing and everything.
Yet notice that Jesus tells them over and over in the Gospels that even though they are Bible experts, they know nothing about God, loving others, obeying the law, or
the true meaning of the Scriptures themselves.
Not exact matches
It is only here that you will begin to understand the
true nature,
meaning, and significance
of the cross, not just for our understanding
of God, but also for our understanding
of Scripture, and most importantly, our understanding
of ourselves.
But it is also a human word: the human beings who wrote it were also
true authors.8 The
scriptures therefore share to some extent in the nature
of the incarnation: they use human things as the
means for God to communicate with us humanly.
«To speak
of God's Kingdom,» says Wright, «is thus to invoke God as the sovereign one who has the right, the duty, and the power to deal appropriately with evil in the world, in Israel, and in human beings, and thereupon to remake the world, Israel, and human beings... When full allowance is made for the striking differences
of genre and emphasis within
scripture, we may propose that Israel's sacred writings were the place where, and the
means by which, Israel discovered again and again who the
true God was, and how his Kingdom - purposes were being taken forward... Through
scripture, God was equipping his people to serve his purposes.»
The word
of the Lord will always agree with the
true meaning and / or the
true interpretation
of scripture).
They are learning what it
means to follow Jesus into the world, to experience
true community with other believers, to read
Scripture in a new light, and to serve others out
of love rather than compulsion.
In this approach, the postliberal answer to the truth question is that
scripture is
true in the manner
of its distinctively mixed genre and that, yes, it is enough to say that biblical truth is the capacity
of the text to draw readers into a Christian framework
of meaning.
That does not
mean that the idea
of Purgatory is necessarily
true and it must be assessed in the light
of scripture as a whole and, in my view, there's simply not enough biblical support to affirm it as an established doctrine.
If one believes the Bible to be inspired or a guide for Christian living but doesn't necessarily believe it is inerrant or the literal word
of God, that doesn't have to
mean we just throw it all out... it doesn't have to shatter your worldview (i.e. it's either all
true or all false — fundamentalists love to think this way and teach others to do the same) Use the Episcopal 3 - legged stool model (
Scripture, reason, tradition) or the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (
Scripture, tradition, reason, experience).
It is based on the conviction that the Christian
scriptures give a unified, consistent account
of the nature and destiny
of humanity and cosmos, that is at once existentially
true (it speaks to our subjective need for order and
meaning in our personal existence) and cosmologically
true (it gives a
true and adequate picture
of the way our world objectively is and will be).
Calvin was convinced that the Church
of Rome fell into decay when
true interpreters
of scripture were eclipsed by sophists and deceivers who obscured
scripture's
true meaning with their distorting glosses.
No part
of reading comprehension 101 is you put the
scriptures into historical context to get the
true meaning of what is written.
What probably he
means, for it is certainly
true, is that they did have a great many writings which are
of the nature
of scripture, and might very well have been a part
of a canonical selection, had one been made.
Here we find at the beginning the new set over against the old in strong antitheses, in a peculiar interpretation
of the Old Testament which evidently aims to establish its
true meaning as against the scribal interpretation, thus completely destroying, as we have before observed, the formal authority
of Scripture.
Blomberg offers as his definition
of inerrancy one penned by Paul Feinberg: «Inerrancy
means that when all facts are known, the
Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly
true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.»
If I told this to a devout Christian or Muslim, due to the evangelical nature
of religion, they would most likely quickly get into an argument on disputing which form
of the Word is the
true Word (interestingly enough, the Qur» an mentions the Bible as an incomplete version
of the
scripture,
meaning that it is still
scripture).