I’ll share with you some insightful words that I read the other day. John Mark Hicks is doing a study on biblical interpretation in Churches of Christ (hermeneutics is the scholarly term). In the third post in this series, as he discussed the use of Baconian logic in our hermeneutic, Hicks stated:
The irony, of course, is that the Bible as a narrative of redemption is no longer the ultimate truth here. Rather, it is the systematic conclusions of an inductive-deductive method that finally gets us to the truth–it collects the scattered truths (facts) of the Bible, unearths what the Bible only implies, assembles together, collates them, orders them and produces a system (”sound doctrine”). The truth as given to us in the form in which Scripture offers it is thereby insufficient. We need to induct the facts, deduce the new truths, arrange them, systematize and order them into a presentation of the Truth.
Is it any wonder, then, that though Scripture never offers us the “five steps of salvation” or “five acts of worship” members of Churches of Christ in the mid-20th century were as certain about these as they were that Jesus died for their sins. Their certainty was derived from their confidence in the method–generated by the Enlightenment, popularized by natural science and applied by human wisdom. And, at the same time, they thought their method was “common sense” or even the Biblical method itself.
Wow! That perfectly describes my experience. Our divisions aren’t about what the Bible says; they are about what we say about what the Bible says. At some points the conclusions became what mattered. Vary from the brotherhood approved conclusions, and you’re a liberal at best, a heretic at worst (not sure where “change agent” fits on that sliding scale).
In the beginnings, the Restoration movement was about NOT dividing over inferences, about letting the Bible be our only guide. At some point, we decided the Bible wasn’t complete enough as written; we felt the need to cut and paste and fill in the gaps with syllogisms, proof texts and “necessary inferences.”
Maybe it’s time for us to have a back to the Bible moment.