Views on Scripture - Part 1
Growing up in the CofC gives you a peculiar view of scripture. Besides learning all the different reasons the Baptists down the road were going to Hell, I was also learning how to apply the two major rules for Biblical interpretation :
and
CENI or Command, Example, and Necessary Inference - This hermeneutic expresses the pattern by which the Bible authoritatively communicates God’s will. Essentially, any command, any example, or any logical inference is binding on the conscience of the believer.
This may sound innocuous on the surface but what it leads to is using Eph 5:19 as “proof” that instrumental music is verboten or using 1 Cor 16:1-2 as incontrovertible evidence that we are required to gather on every Sunday.
Here’s something from Rubel Shelly that may shed some more light on how this works :
Authority is established by example. Consider the observance of the Lord’s Supper. The Scripture records the command of Jesus to the effect that his followers must remember him by eating the Lord’s Supper. (I Cor. 11:24-25). But the commandment does not instruct us as to when this memorial is to be observed. We learn of the time of its observance from an examination of the actions of the earliest Christians. Their example serves to instruct us. Acts 20:7 is the first New Testament passage to specify a day on which the church gathered to eat the supper. If the day of this observance was unimportant, why did Luke take the trouble to mention it? Furthermore, his Greek construction (with the definite article) implies habitual action. Therefore this was a regular assembly, the stated purpose of which was to eat the Lord’s Supper. There can be no reasonable doubt that this passage definitely links the Lord’s Supper to the Lord’s Day. From this example of the early church we have divine authority for Sunday observance of the Lord’s Supper and for Sunday observance only. We have no authority to observe this memorial on Tuesday night or daily. Our authority is for Sunday observance and to go beyond what is authorized is to commit sin.
What this approach does is make the Bible into a kind of divine concordance that we are required to cross-reference in order to figure out the correct pattern to follow. It minimizes, if not destroys, the contextual backdrop of any particular passage. In fact, context can be as granular as one word - linking words like “truth” or “light” across multiple passages to create doctrine that was never there. And perhaps most onerous, the scripture becomes about me and what I need to do rather than about God and what He has done through his Son.
So what causes someone to break out of this mindset? I’ll save that for next time.
Note : The quote from Rubel Shelly is from 1972. I’m almost positive he’s changed his position since then.
