Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 14 - August 4, 2019
Code of Hammurabi,
Similarly, Greek
writers prior to Jesus expressed the idea that you should act toward others as you would want others to act toward you.
An example is the idea that a national deity becomes angry with his people and punishes them by handing them over to a foreign oppressor.
Appeal, therefore, must not be made to the Scriptures, nor must the contest be carried on concerning points where victory is impossible or uncertain or too little certain. For even though the discussion from the Scriptures should not so result as to place each side in an equal position, the order of things would demand that this point should first be decided — the point which alone now calls for discussion, namely: Who holds the Faith to which the Scriptures belong? From whom and through whom, and when, and to whom was the doctrinal teaching delivered whereby men are made Christians? For
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The first section deals with the idea that divine aid is needed in order to understand the true meaning of Scripture.
Like the mustard seed of Jesus’ parable (Matt. 13:31-32), a passage of Scripture may at first seem small and insignificant, but with proper spiritual cultivation “it grows into a tree and puts forth branches and foliage.”
We must be careful to avoid arrogant assertions about Scripture’s meaning in our dealings both with those outside the church and also with other Christians who read Scripture differently than we do.
Scripture; if any proposition appears to contradict Scripture, either the proposition is wrong or Scripture has been misinterpreted.32
“For if they had agreed on all things exactly even to time and place, and to the very words,” Chrysostom explains, “our enemies would have simply believed that they met together and composed what they wrote by mere human agreement. . . . But as it is, the discordance which seems to exist in small matters delivers them from all suspicion, and speaks clearly on behalf of the character of the writers.”51
“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?”52
Augustine in On Christian Teaching encourages Christians to read Platonist philosophers.63
Origen that the text is not meant to be taken literally: “Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars?”66 The “expanse” of Genesis 1:6 is our “outer person” (2 Cor. 4:16), and the lights that illuminate us are Christ and the church (John 8:12), with Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, and so forth as stars.67
First, Augustine believes that Scripture, when rightly interpreted, will never contradict what we learn from the natural world when the facts have been correctly understood. If a human theory about the natural world conflicts with a presumed teaching of Scripture, and “reason should prove that this theory is unquestionably true,” then “this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion proposed by man in his ignorance.”
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we
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The fact that these early Christians used Greek as their language of communication helped Christianity to spread throughout the Mediterranean world.
Irenaeus was the first to popularize the legend of how each of the Septuagint translators arrived miraculously at the same translation even though they worked in different cells.93
The books of later authors are distinct from the excellence of the canonical authority of the Old and New Testaments, which has been confirmed from the times of the apostles through the successions of bishops and through the spread of the churches.
Belief in the harmony between the testaments allowed Christians to see New Testament paradigms prefigured in the Old Testament. As Jerome says, “Whatever was said at that time to the Israelite people now is referred to the church, so that ‘holy prophets’ become ‘apostles and apostolic men,’ and ‘lying and frantic prophets’ become ‘all the heretics.’ ”10
As for the Psalms, how were Christians, who believe in the resurrection, supposed to read a passage such as Psalm 6:5, “For in death there is no remembrance of you”? On this passage, Augustine interprets “death” as a reference to the kind of sin that makes one unmindful of God.
“righteous men of long ago visualized the kingdom of heaven as an earthly kingdom, and predicted it accordingly.”
Origen also likens God’s deception to a father who conceals his affection from his son and outwardly shows only displeasure, so that the son might benefit from the discipline.
Anything that disagrees with the rule of faith, even if it is supported by scriptural prooftexts, is not true Christianity.
Irenaeus does not argue that Scripture could theoretically be read in different ways and that only tradition can settle which is correct.
Moreover, it made sense to assume that what Scripture teaches will agree with other reliable sources of truth. These other sources included non-scriptural traditions handed down from the apostles, the perceived consensus of the church in one’s own time, and the highest ideals of our religious sensibilities.
second, many modern teachers of Scripture arbitrarily devise their own (sometimes idiosyncratic) applications of biblical texts and impose them on others as if with divine authority, supported by historical exegesis but no clear explanation as to how the contemporary significance was determined.4
The idea that Scripture solves every problem that we put to it, which can lead to absurd interpretations if taken to an extreme,
Second, the idea that proper interpretation of Scripture takes place within the church points to the necessity of community and traditions in discovering the meaningfulness of Scripture.
