What does the Bible say?
It is Reformation Day this week! (It happens to coincide with a large cultural festival marked by pumpkins, skeletons and ghosts, which is far less encouraging). Reformation Day is when we remember the time on October 31, 1517, when the German monk Martin Luther made his complaints about the state of the Roman Catholic Church public. As was custom, he nailed his 95 complaints to the church door in his town of Wittenberg. It marked the start of what became known as the Protestant Church. The catchcry was “what does the Bible say?” Instead of having our life and practice being determined by a mix of tradition and culture with a little Bible, everything was compared to what the Bible said. This had all kinds of flow-on effects, from getting the Bible translated into all kinds of local languages to making Bible explanation the centre of the worship service instead of the mass.
Covering the events and the impact of the Reformation is too much for one small blog post. If you’re a reader (and I strongly encourage you to be!), you might want to read The Essence of the Reformation by Kirsten Birkett (simple, not too long, and also contains some key writings from the time). If you want something more detailed, Diarmaid MacCullouch’s The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided is great. And if you want something really fun, you might try Nick Page’s A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation.
For the purposes of this blog post, I want to point out two ways that Biblical authority is under attack today. People of all ages and places have a tendency to fall into tradition or mysticism and make the Bible secondary. Yet our modern moment, with so much of our input mediated through technology, presents us with some particular things to beware of.
- The danger of celebrity preachers. Most of us have preachers we trust to teach us the Bible. Ideally, this will be the pastor in your local church. On top of this, we have access to preachers all around the world through the internet. Many Christians follow blogs and podcasts from people they enjoy. This has the potential for much good building up. Yet there is also a danger. We can lose our discernment, just agreeing with a person we like and not comparing what they say to the Bible. Some people have a massive platform and a cult following, and their identity can grow to a point where people listen to them and not the Bible. They then might move – wittingly or not – into many speaking about cultural matters, matters of opinion, and many absorb their views as fact. We should be careful. All preachers, even good godly ones, are sinners and limited and make mistakes. We should compare what we hear to the Bible all the time.
- The second danger is that so much of the content online is fed to us in small sound bites. We love twenty second videos. Many of us have lost our attention span for things much longer than that. And sure, twenty seconds of encouragement from the Bible is much better than nothing at all, or just a series of cat videos! But what do we lose in this sound bite age? We lose context. We lose the ability to look at things deeply and well. We are forced to trust the speaker and not check what they say. This is hardly meditating on God’s word day and night, as Psalm 1 encourages, or speaking of all these things as we go about our day, as Deuteronomy 5 tells us to do.
We have the great gift of God’s word in a form we can understand and afford. This was not true for many Christians through world history and still is not true for everyone. Let’s listen to God’s word carefully. Like the Reformers, let’s ask what the Bible says when it comes to all kinds of topics. There is no substitute for reading the Bible yourself; don’t always have it mediated through someone on the internet. Ask God to help you, read it, and think through what it says. The Bible is such a great gift, and we should use it well.