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The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God: Interlude

By Josh Brown ⋅ August 22, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

This is going to be a book by the time I’m done formulating my thoughts. Anyway . . . as they continue to simmer and build . . . I thought I’d share this with you in the interlude. It’s from Scot McKnight’s review of Craig Allert’s A High View of Scripture? which I’ve not had the opportunity to read.

Excerpts . . . 

Tied into our view of the Bible is our view of the Church. No matter how much we’d like to say “The Bible is my only creed” the facts are against such a view. Why? The Bible we believe in did not drop from the sky, nor was it discovered in a bundle all at once — Presto! there it is on the day the last book was written. There’s no signs that God’s big business was getting the whole Bible put together so we’d have something for our sermons. It’s all messier than this.

The major thrust — in fact, it dominates the book — of Allert’s intelligent and important book is that one is hard-pressed to believe in the Bible without believing in the process the Church used to discern those books. In other words, the notion that we can believe in the Bible alone wrecks against the reality that Bible was never alone and is never alone. There is always a Church with it. To believe in the Bible is a tacit belief in the Church that discerned which books were in the “canon.” The Bible emerged out of the Church as its primary authority for doctrine and practice, but it was not alone — the Bible and the Church are together. Which also means that belief in the Bible is also belief in the creedal understanding of the gospel that was at work in the Church as that Bible rose to the top of its sources of truth.