As a Jewish convert to Christ via
evangelical Protestantism, I naturally wanted to know God better through
the reading of the Scriptures. In fact, it had been through reading the
Gospels in the “forbidden book” called the New Testament, at age
sixteen, that I had come to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God
and our promised Messiah. In my early years as a Christian, much of my
religious education came from private Bible reading. By the time I
entered college, I had a pocket-sized version of the whole Bible that
was my constant companion. I would commit favorite passages from the
Scriptures to memory, and often quote them to myself in times of
temptation-or to others as I sought to convince them of Christ. The
Bible became for me-as it is to this day-the most important book in
print. I can say from my heart with Saint Paul the Apostle, “All
Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for
doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”
(2 Timothy 3:16).
That’s the good news!
The bad news is that often I would
decide for myself what the Scriptures meant. For example, I became so
enthusiastic about knowing Jesus as my close and personal friend that I
thought my own awareness of Him was all I needed. So I would mark verses
about Jesus with my yellow highlighter, but pass over passages
concerning God the Father, or the Church, or baptism. I saw the Bible as
a heavenly instruction manual. I didn’t think I needed the Church,
except as a good place to make friends or to leans more about the Bible
so I could be a better do-it-yourself Christian. I came to think that I
could build my life, and the Church, by the Book. I mean, I took sola
scriptura (“only the Bible”) seriously! Salvation history was clear to
me: God sent His Son, together they sent the Holy Spirit, then came the
New Testament to explain salvation, and finally the Church developed.
Close, maybe, but not close enough.
Let me hasten to say that the Bible is
all God intends it to be. No problem with the Bible. The problem lay in
the way I individualized it, subjecting it to my own personal
interpretations-some not so bad, others not so good.
A STRUGGLE FOR UNDERSTANDING
It was not long after my conversion to
Christianity that I found myself getting swept up in the tide of
religious sectarianism, in which Christians would part ways over one
issue after another. It seemed, for instance, that there were as many
opinions on the Second Coming as there were people in the discussion. So
we’d all appeal to the Scriptures. “I believe in the Bible. If it’s not
in the Bible I don’t believe it,” became my war cry. What I did not
realize was that everyone else was saying the same thing! It was not the
Bible, but each one’s private interpretation of it, that became our
ultimate authority. In an age which highly exalts independence of
thought and self-reliance, I was becoming my own pope! The guidelines I
used in interpreting Scripture seemed simple enough: When the plain
sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense. I believed
that those who were truly faithful and honest in following this
principle would achieve Christian unity.
To my surprise, this “common sense”
approach led not to increased Christian clarity and unity, but rather to
a spiritual free-for-all! Those who most strongly adhered to believing
“only the Bible” tended to become the, most factious, divisive, and
combative of Christians-perhaps unintentionally. In fact, it seemed to
me that the more one held to the Bible as the only source of spiritual
authority, the more factious and sectarian one became. We would even
argue heatedly over verses on love! Within my circle of Bible-believing
friends, I witnessed a mini-explosion of sects and schismatic movements,
each claiming to be “true to the Bible” and each in bitter conflict
with the others. Serious conflict arose over every issue imaginable:
charismatic gifts, interpretation of prophecy, the proper way to
worship, communion, Church government, discipleship, discipline in the
Church, morality, accountability, evangelism, social action, the
relationship of faith and works, the role of women, and ecumenism.
The list is endless. In fact any issue
at all could-and often did-cause Christians to part ways. The fruit of
this sectarian spirit has been the creation of literally thousands of
independent churches and denominations. As I myself became increasingly
sectarian, my radicalism intensified, and I came to believe that all
churches were unbiblical: to become a member of any church was to
compromise the Faith. For me, “church” meant “the Bible, God, and me.”
This hostility towards the churches fit in well with my Jewish
background. I naturally distrusted all churches because I felt they had
betrayed the teachings of Christ by having participated in or passively
ignored the persecution of the Jews throughout history. But the more
sectarian I became-to the point of being obnoxious and antisocial-the
more I began to realize that something was seriously wrong with my
approach to Christianity. My spiritual life wasn’t working. Clearly, my
privately held beliefs in the Bible and what it taught were leading me
away from love and community with my fellow Christians, and therefore
away from Christ.
As Saint John the Evangelist wrote, “He
who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom
he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20). This division and hostility were not
what had drawn me to Christ. And I knew the answer was not to deny the
Faith or reject the Scriptures. Something had to change. Maybe it was
me. I turned to a study of the history of the Church and the New
Testament, hoping to shed some light on what my attitude toward the
Church and the Bible should be. The results were not at all what I
expected.
THE BIBLE OF THE APOSTLES
My initial attitude was that whatever
was good enough for the Apostles would be good enough for me. This is
where I got my first surprise. As I mentioned previously, I knew that
the Apostle Paul regarded Scripture as being inspired by God (2 Timothy
3:16). But I had always assumed that the “Scripture” spoken of in this
passage was the whole Bible-both the Old and New Testaments. In reality,
there was no “New Testament” when this statement was made. Even the Old
Testament was still in the process of formulation, for the Jews did not
decide upon a definitive list or canon of Old Testament books until
after the rise of Christianity. As I studied further, I discovered that
the early Christians used a Greek translation of the Old Testament
called the Septuagint. This translation, which was begun in Alexandria,
Egypt, in the third century B.C., contained an expanded canon which
included a number of the so-called “deuterocanonical” (or “apocryphal”)
books.
Although there was some initial debate
over these books, they were eventually received by Christians into the
Old Testament canon. In reaction to the rise of Christianity, the Jews
narrowed their canons and eventually excluded the deuterocanonical
books-although they still regarded them as sacred. The modern Jewish
canon was not rigidly fixed until the third century A.D. Interestingly,
it is this later version of the Jewish canon of the Old Testament,
rather than the canon of early Christianity, that is followed by most
modern Protestants today. When the Apostles lived and wrote, there was
no New Testament and no finalized Old Testament. The concept of
“Scripture” was much less well-defined than I had envisioned.
[To Be Continued)
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