Religion How Do Christians Know When Their Understanding of Scriptural Teaching Needs to Change? Ten Questions to Consider.

Oct 1, 2021 by

We should be very wary of changing our minds about a teaching or practice that has been taught clearly, continuously, and authoritatively on the basis of scripture throughout the history and breadth of the Church. The following ten considerations can help us think carefully when friends inside or outside the Church ask us to reconsider what the Bible teaches.

How do Christians know if their understanding of what the Bible teaches needs to change?

Although this question is increasingly common, it’s not new. The earliest Christians had to determine what to think about the moral rules they inherited from Judaism (e.g. Acts 15:1–29). What was still valid and what was obsolete? Over the last two thousand years, Christians have continued to wrestle with whether this or that moral teaching or practice based in scripture has changed.

My academic training is not in Old or New Testament studies. Though I’m not an expert, I—like all Christians—am called to understand scripture and how it applies to my life. Most Christians believe the Bible was not written only for the experts or the clergy. While we definitely learn from those who have studied scripture professionally, all are called to read scripture and wrestle with what it means. Some things are too important to be left entirely to the experts!

Here, I offer ten questions we should consider when others claim that this or that understanding of a biblical teaching has to change. Before I begin, I should note a few assumptions that I make.

Read here

See also: Unpersuasive and unorthodox – a response to Bishop Gregory Cameron’s words to the Welsh Governing Bodyby Martin Davie: Cameron’s claim that the bill to permit the blessing of same-sex marriages is not a ‘a sell out to the secular spirit of the age’ goes against the historical evidence… many Western Christians have become seduced by the thinking of the world around them and have sought for apologetic reasons to develop a reading of the Bible and an understanding of Christian sexual ethics that is line with it… the Welsh bill to permit the blessing of same-sex marriages is part of this process of cultural assimilation.”

 

 

 

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