Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: sidelight on inspiration of Scripture Message-ID: Date: 7 Jan 90 02:14:59 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 43 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Recently I ran across some notes I took during a sermon a while back. The chief point of the sermon was that the smallest division in the Bible is the *book* (except for the Psalms); the chapter and verse divisions are *not* inspired. If people merely go to a concordance and pick out all the verses on a particular topic, different people may arrange those verses in different ways and get different interpretations of God's ideas on that topic. (This preacher didn't use, but certainly implied, the old saying, "A Bible text out of context is pretext.") If you want to really know God's mind on anything, read a whole book of the Bible through to get a total impression of what that book says about the topic. And the books say different things, e.g., Matthew, John, James, Hebrews, and Romans look at the same general topic (faith) from very different angles. I'm not sure I remember this exactly, but he said something like this: Matthew sees faith as childlike trust; John as an intimate relationship; James as something that will, if genuine, eventuate in good works; Hebrews as a mental conviction; and Romans as "saving faith". And that's just one example. Considering just how BIG God is, and how complex we are, it makes sense that God would talk about the same thing in many different ways to meet different needs and to cover the whole of the topic. So just picking a verse or two and saying "The Bible says " is at best a half-truth; the verse is in the Bible, yes, but it needs to be seen in the context of at least the book in which it appears, and preferably of the whole Bible, to get the true meaning of what the Bible is really saying. I'll close with a couple of mildly humorous notes on the sometimes bogus versification of the Bible: I surely wish I could kick the jerk who, for no apparent good reason, put a verse division in the middle of the "fruit of the Spirit" list in Galatians.... It's been said that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses was accomplished by a drunken monk riding horseback. Every time he hiccuped, he started a new verse; and every time he fell off the horse, he started a new chapter! -- Jeff Sargent att!ihlpb!jeffjs (UUCP), jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com (Internet) AT&T Bell Laboratories IH 5A-433 (708) [new area code] 979-5284 [In the OT, even book divisions aren't always significant. E.g. the division between I and II Kings is almost certainly just because the whole thing wouldn't fit on one scroll. This may even be the case with Genesis and Exodus, etc. --clh]