Streams of Living Water by Richard J. Foster

Author:Richard J. Foster [Foster, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062046338
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Faithful Repository

This evangel message has been faithfully preserved and presented to us in Scripture. The Bible is the Word of God written, just as Jesus is the Word of God living. Evangelical faith is biblical faith. The Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — stand at the heart of the biblical witness, for they faithfully give us the Christ event. The Epistles are the interpretative record of the Christ event, and we receive the Hebrew Scriptures as the written Word of God because Jesus did. And Paul’s confessional statement is ours as well: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

Many and varied are the apologetic witnesses to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, and beyond affirming their validity, we need not go into them here. But alongside them we can add what the old writers called the indicia, the inward testimony of Scripture, for it is the uniform witness of the Church that, as illuminated by the Spirit, Scripture authenticates itself.

The evangelical witness affirms the primacy of Scripture as the only infallible rule of faith and practice. This cannot be stressed enough. Scripture has primacy over other writings; primacy over church tradition; primacy over individual religious experience; primacy over the individual conscience; primacy over individual revelations, dreams, and visions; primacy over culture.70 As the Protestant reformers put it, Sola Scriptura, the Scripture alone.

This important confession gives us a standard or a norm for discerning faith and practice. Theologians, in fact, call Scripture the “formal norm” (just as Jesus and his message are the “material norm”) for Christian faith and practice. This by no means solves all of our problems, for huge questions of interpretation (hermeneutics) remain, but it does give us a basis upon which to work on the various problems that confront us almost daily.

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