Biblical Authority: Part IV

New word for the day: fissiparous.  It means "tending to break up into parts or break away from a main body; factious." (from Dictionary.com)  N.T. Wright claims that the more evangelicals have insisted that they are "based on the Bible, the more fissiparous [they] become; the church splits up into more and more little groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right."

If you're just joining this conversation, I'm referring to a lecture by N.T. Wright, which became an article that you can read here. 

Wright goes on to talk about how he thinks these fissiparous churches actually ending up belittling the Bible they so passionately want to exalt:

Basically they imply...that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right sort of book by engaging in these hermeneutical moves, translation procedures or whatever.

Next time we'll begin to examine the view of authority that the Bible, itself, provides.

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Links to the rest if this series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IIIb, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIIb, Part VIII, Conclusion

Comments

[Just Me]

You just made that word up!?! Right?
I certainly think that this can happen - the splintering - but I don't think that they either implicitly or explicitly suggest that God has given us the wrong sort of book, but that "they" know exactly what the book says and "you" don't. (as Wright stated earlier) I just don't get the conclusion he draws.

[Bill]

Sorry. I'm skipping over parts of the article and that might make it harder to understand his conclusions.

I think he's talking about how God has chosen to convey truth to us through certain forms. Our "hermeneutical moves [and] translation procedures" are an attempt to abstract and even systematize that truth. It's as if we're saying the form God chose was not quite the best one. Perhaps we should realize that the forms we prefer actually serve to hinder the way that God has chosen to speak to and through us.