Seven Lessons I Have Learned: Lesson #2 – Trust no one
All you need to study the Bible is a Bible with cross references, a few different translations, a good concordance, or a computer with those features.
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The Truth is in here, in your Bible. On Biblical matters, study things for yourself.
Whatever anyone else tells you, whatever you read, no matter how good it sounds; no matter how well respected the source; until you can defend it from the Bible, or other standard references, without reference to who you heard it from, it’s just hearsay and speculation. Study it out until you make it your own, or decide you can’t.
Scripture, for the most part, explains itself on important principles. But Scripture leaves a lot of detail to our imagination. In my experience, all you need to study the Bible is a Bible with cross references, a few different translations, a good concordance, or a computer with those features.
Any claim, any argument, any new idea or new idea, anything you may read or hear, should be testable by those tools. Our basic fundamental beliefs can easily be confirmed and defended with those simple tools. It will likely turn out that issues of controversy within the ecclesia are controversial for the reason that Scriptural evidence is less convincing.
I used to spend a lot of time defending our beliefs on Internet discussion sites. I found that I rarely used or needed any books, such as Ron Abel’s Wrested Scriptures, or any Christadelphian books at all, because the defense of our basic beliefs does not rest on the works of our “Pioneers” or any Christadelphian teachers, but on the Bible itself.
I also found that arguing never changes any minds, but that’s another issue. The reason that arguing never changes minds is that human beings are not rational or logical creatures. We are emotional. That makes us human. It makes us capable of loving and caring, in the image of God, but it also makes capable of sin.
But, back to my point: You can’t truly say, “I believe” until you believe because you have personally studied it enough to make up your own mind.
Will you always be right? Of course not! But you will be correctable, because you will know what your beliefs are based on. Someone who accepts the conclusions of others cannot be corrected, because their beliefs do not rest on facts or reasoning, but on acceptance of authority.
Also, make sure you give careful consideration to the arguments on each side. You can easily jump to error if you only listen to one side, and only look at the passages that tend to support that side. I think the greatest error in Bible study is seizing on one passage that seems to support our preconceptions, while ignoring the many that disprove them.
So, study for yourself. Leave unstudied conclusions as undecided.
Prophecy is the exception to that, because prophecy often deals with events after the Scriptures were completed. As such, prophetic interpretation is inherently less certain, as it is not internally verifiable within the Bible. For that reason, we should be especially skeptical of interpretations of prophecy.
Our late brother, John MacDougall,
Portage Ecclesia, IN,
2021