mccarthyism

I was pleased, at the time, with the previous entry as an admittedly incomplete but (I fancied) honest and fairly insightful summary of my own thought regarding the Biblical paradigm of truth. Since then I've had occasion to rethink it quite a bit and I find it has some glaring inconsistencies and imbalances. Rather than rewrite it, though, I'll just add a couple of editorial comments.

First, I wrote that "'internal and pneumatic' is a fair expression of my own reading of the New Testament". This was an overstatement of a position which was already something of an overreaction. Clearly, truth must be both internal and external, pneumatic and dogmatic. And so we find it to be in Scripture. This is so obvious as to be not worth saying: my intention was not to deny dogmatic (or even objective) truth in Scripture, but to suggest that the common evangelical teaching of "the Word" is out of balance, and that the internal, pneumatic aspect is often neglected. To make the truth purely dogmatic leaves us utterly at the mercy of our own interpretation of the text. But neither is there any concrete certainty in the indwelling Spirit. Our interpretation of external dogma is certainly flawed, but so is our obedience to the Spirit. Both the Spirit and the Scriptures are perfect and infallible; neither offers (what I seem to be so determined to find) a foolproof application of divine truth to our lives. We still "see through a glass darkly." It is no good trying to escape this tension, either by fancying that we can understand the Scriptures perfectly or by elevating the Church to infallibility. Both sides must be involved; but we don't have perfect access to either.

Second, my word study of "logos" was incomplete at best. It served its purpose in pointing out that in the New Testament the "Word" is not limited to Scripture alone (something we all knew already) - it didn't do much else. My intent was to show another aspect of the Word: the Word multiplying, growing, living and active, dwelling within us richly. To be convincing even on that level would require a much more comprehensive study.

So, it is back to work I guess. My persistent interest in this topic stems from a general discontent with the evangelical paradigm of truth. Ironically, the doctrine of sola scriptura seems to be inconsistent with Scripture itself, for the reasons I gave below. The evangelical placement of Scripture as the be-all end-all of divine revelation seems contrary to Scripture itself, and tends to put the believer at the mercy of his own interpretation of the text. This is complicated (rather than simplified) by the modern interpretive milieu. I can't help seeing sola scriptura as a reaction to modernism: a deduction from perceived necessity rather than an application of historical and recorded revelation.