The Bible This Year

Jerome Studies Scripture

Art by Lowgan

At the start of each year for the last few of them my wife and I begin using new Bible translations for our daily studies. We do this in hopes that the unfamiliar words will perhaps shake us loose from an unexamined assumption now and then. I also use the translation here as much as possible for the same reason.

Last year we both tried The Voice, a very interesting Bible that uses out-of-the-ordinary wording and page design to force you to think about what you're reading. If you want a translation that's as far from the King James Version as possible, that's the one for you.

The year before that I used the little-known Easy to Read Version (ERV), which became one of my all time favorites.  It can be tricky to extract the meaning from the Bible's foreign languages (hebrew and greek) and put it accurately into english, especially simple, commonplace english. But the ERV translators have a knack for doing just that and are so good at it that I kept finding myself smiling at how well they rendered this or that verse.

For 2016 I wanted to use the New Jerusalem Bible, a translation near and dear to my heart. In fact I actually am using it for my personal studies, but unfortunately it's one of the few Bibles BibleGateway -- to which I link all this blog's scriptures -- doesn't have. In fact nobody online does, with the sole exception of Catholic.org, but theirs is homely, drowning in ads, and very awkward to use.

So this year I finally chose the venerable Good News Bible to be the 2nd translation on Authentic Light. I've used the GNB off and on for years and owned several copies (that fell apart), but I've never really been enthused about it. However it has this one irritating habit: whenever I read a scripture and think, "You know, a better way to translate that verse would be..."  the Good News Bible frequently has already translated it that way. You may have noticed that I quoted it a couple of times on my Wednesday post.

Translating "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil," (Matthew 5.17) as "I have not come to do away with them, but to make their teachings come true" is just exactly right.

Plus it's the script of my all-time favorite Jesus film, The Gospel of John. You can really see what an effective version it is in that movie, with people acting it out.

So for this year, the Good News Bible it is.  Always backed up, as usual, by my primary version, the NET Bible.

The Verse That Keeps Me Christian (It's probably not the one you think)

Read Part 2 >>

Van Gogh's 'Sorrowing old man'
("At Eternity's Gate")

Sometimes you just feel like your whole life has been a waste. At least I do, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one. Sometimes it just impacts you that your life hasn't turned out at all the way you wanted, that all those hopes and dreams have come to nothing. Sometimes it seems that nobody really cares about you, that no one actually loves you, and when you look at yourself you really can't blame them. Sometimes you just reach bottom -- the bottom of bottom, and it really aches.

Now I hasten to point out that generally I'm a happy-go-lucky, easygoing guy. Ask anybody. But I have been right down in that dark hole. Maybe you have too. The worst part is that it's almost impossible to communicate what you're feeling to anyone else. Nobody seems to get it. You're in that hole by yourself.

Everybody, I would think, handles 'the hole' differently, hopefully in healthy ways (e.g., not drinking yourself into a stupor and deciding to live there). Being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth you'd think I should be able to pull out a magical Bible quote to sustain my soul. And I do have a verse... but it's probably not the one you think.

The Depressing Book

Back in the Old Testament there's a rather depressing little book called Ecclesiastes (or sometimes Qoheleth, after the title of the person who wrote it). It's one of those books that theologians -- Jewish and Christian alike -- have wondered what the ancients could have been thinking when they included it in Scripture. But there it is. Ecclesiastes is the kind of book that doesn't encourage you with the idea that one day you'll go to Heaven; it says, "Who knows?"

That's the book that helps me when I'm in the hole.  My 'magic Bible verse' is in the 2nd chapter:

This made me hate life. It was depressing to think that everything in this life is useless, like trying to catch the wind.

Ecclesiastes 2.17, (ERB).

Not exactly the 23rd Psalm. But this guy gets it, at least for me.  This is God saying, "Welcome to the hole. Yes, I even know about this place."

In my life I have found that what helps me in the depths is not all the encouragement in the Bible, but God's frank acknowledgement and full comprehension of the fact that at that point I hate life and it looks useless.

I have often thought that without a book as 'real' as Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I probably wouldn't trust it as much as I do. The Christian God isn't a fluffy bunny God who doesn't want to hear about certain parts of our little human lives because he'd rather ignore the hard stuff. He's not a Disneyland God; he's a battlefield God, a bad-side-of-town God.

Somehow this sharp little verse sums that up for me.

Commitment

George Muller

George Muller is one of my spiritual heroes. In the 19th century he famously established a huge orphanage that rescued thousands of children from the streets, and did it entirely through prayer and faith. Purposely, he never asked for money as a public demonstration that God still answered prayer as he did in the Bible.

He was also a famous writer and speaker. In a conference address called "Jealousy for God in a Godless World", Muller made these remarks, which are quite timely today.

___________________________

As we are drawing nearer and nearer the close of the present dispensation, spiritual darkness, departure from the Holy Scriptures, and consequent ungodliness, we have reason to believe, will increase more and more, though coupled with a form of godliness (see 2 Timothy 3.1–5). Therefore the path of a true disciple of the Lord Jesus will become more and more difficult; but for this very reason it is of so much the more importance to live for God, to testify for God, to be unlike the world, to be transformed from it. If we desire that thus it may be with us, it is needful that we give ourselves to the prayerful reading of the Holy Scriptures with reference to ourselves. The Bible should be to us the Book of books; all other books should be esteemed little in comparison with the Bible. But if this is not the case, we shall remain babes in grace and knowledge. 

And now, beloved fellow-disciples, how many of us are in heart purposed to live for God, to be zealous for God, and to be truly transformed from the world? We have but one brief life here on earth. The opportunities to witness for God by our life will soon be over; let us therefore make good use of it. Let none among us allow his life, nor even a small part of it, to be wasted, for it is given to us to be used for God, to His glory, in this godless world.

George Muller
Jehovah Magnified: Addresses
"Jealousy for God in a Godless World"

Does the Bible Teach Anything Clearly?

Photo courtesy Rushay (RUSH) Booysen

"Well, that's an odd title for a Christian blog," you may say to yourself.

Maybe, but a scholarly blog I ran across recently (thanks to Twitter) quotes Wayne Meeks, a famous biblical scholar, who believes we should stop using the phrase, "The Bible clearly teaches..."

So let us renounce the phrase, “the Bible clearly teaches” (says Dr. Meeks).  And every time we hear it let us immediately be on our guard... In our situation, when people say, “the Bible clearly teaches,” instead of, for example, “we can learn from the Bible if we stand within a certain community’s tradition,” or “we can find these ideas in Scripture if we construe Scripture in such-and-such a way”… when they do that, they are really masking the locus of the authority they are claiming.

Now, I have to agree with Dr. Meeks in one sense. Most of the times that Christianity has had egg on its face over the last 2000 years have been times when we weren't actually insisting on some scripture but on our own explanation of it. Handy example: the legendary conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church. What the Church actually ended up defending was the greek scientist Ptolemy's idea of how the universe works -- not that "God the Father Almighty [is the] maker of heaven and earth," as the old creed says. Galileo himself believed that too, after all.

Teachers of Christianity always have to make sure that what we're defending is what the Bible itself says and not our explanation of what the Bible says.

That isn't my main point today but it would make a good topic, so I may post on it in the future.

Fuzziness

That doesn't seem to be Dr. Meeks' main point either. He appears to be saying that the Bible itself isn't clear, that you can't say the Bible clearly teaches anything because it clearly doesn't. To get anything worthwhile out of it at all you must "construe" it or draw its meaning from a "certain community's tradition."

But think about this: All of the things the Bible contains were written by people who knew what they meant at the time. And much of it was written to other people who also knew what they meant. And although we live at a 2 to 3 thousand year remove from their time, it is still entirely possible to recover what they meant. Historians and textual critics and archaeologists do it all the time and with all kinds of books -- not just the Bible.

Have you ever read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey?  You may not have gotten every cultural nuance but did you pick up the main points? Doesn't the Iliad clearly teach that Agamemnon and Achilles, both full of pride, quarrelled over the captured princess Briseis causing Achilles to leave the battle (trust me, it does).

What about Plato and Aristotle? Do we know pretty clearly what they taught? Yes. Why? Because we know a lot about them, their world, and can read their language. Sort of like any other book you read. Including the Bible.

If we read it intelligently, the Bible is quite clear on most things. True some passages are a bit obscure (nobody is sure what St. Paul is getting at here, for instance. Or here.). But it is not a fuzzy, obscure book, and there are a disturbingly large number of things that 'the Bible clearly says'.

Living Words

(This is a modified version of a post I wrote a few years ago.)

A sacrament is a material object or action that God has chosen, in his complete freedom, to use as a conduit for his grace. The Christian movement has revolved around sacraments from its start. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions teach 7 sacraments -- baptism, confirmation (called "chrismation" in Orthodox churches), communion, holy orders, penance, anointing of the sick, and marriage. Meanwhile, most Protestants only observe the two specifically set up by Jesus of Nazareth, baptism and communion. Down through the ages innumerable followers of Jesus have attested to the mystical power resident in these simple things.

But you may have another sacrament sitting on your bookshelf. The Bible has always worked like a sacrament in the Community of Jesus -- a physical book that God uses to convey his free, unearned, transforming power and kindness to his wayward children.

Instruction Book?

Here in the western world there is a tendency, based on thinking that goes back to the Enlightenment, to see the universe mechanically. We assume that everything operates like an impersonal machine and if we can just understand the mechanism we can make it work. All we need is an instruction book.

It is popular, particularly in Western Protestantism, to think of the Bible as a kind of super instruction book. All we need to do is memorize the important dates and grasp the formulas, and we'll be able to make our religion "work." And of course, there definitely is quite a bit of wise advice and uplifting insight in Scripture. But the Bible does not purport to be just a wise and wonderful book; it purports to be revelation, a living entity through which the Holy Spirit of God speaks -- in the present tense. Just as Jesus of Nazareth was not just a wise and wonderful teacher but the unique revelation of the Living God.

Jesus taught that King David wrote his Psalms "by the Holy Spirit" (Gospel of Mark chapter 12, verses 35 - 37), and that Israel's holy books were filled with, "things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets," (Gospel of Luke chapter 24, verses 27 and 44 - 47 ERV).

The early Christian movement believed "[Moses] received life-giving words (literally, "living words") from God to give to us", (Acts of the Apostles chapter 7, verse 38 ERV). For them -- and for us -- "God’s word is alive and working. It is sharper than the sharpest sword and cuts all the way into us. It cuts deep to the place where the soul and the spirit are joined. God’s word cuts to the center of our joints and our bones. It judges the thoughts and feelings in our hearts." (Letter to the Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12 ERV).

As the scholar J. N. D. Kelly wrote, "Whenever our Lord and His apostles quoted the Old Testament, it is plain that they regarded it as the word of God," (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 60). It was the same with the Apostle's writings by the time the last one died, because the Jesus followers recognized that they carried the revelation that the Messiah had entrusted them with (p. 56).

Not a Normal Book

What I'm suggesting is that nice leather-bound book you have on your desk or in your car is not just a book: It is something that intelligent 21st century people get vaguely uncomfortable with, something that some scholars devote their lives to showing it is not.

It's supernatural.

When we crack our Bibles open we are exposing ourselves to the creative power of God's own being, as God wants us to experience it. Reading the Scriptures, as John Wesley used to say, is a "means of grace," a sacrament that connects us with God. And then anything can happen.

Modern people aren't supposed to think that way. We can explain all that miraculous stuff away with our current understandings, can't we? There's no need to go there, surely.

But as C. S. Lewis wrote, "Like it or not, you belong to a supernatural religion."

Noah, Hmm... I Wonder

Wondering if Noah (the movie, that is) will be worth seeing?

Here is a 3 part article by Jerry A. Johnson, Ph.D., President and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters who was invited by Paramount to see it. From his conservative-but-not-particularly-dogmatic viewpoint he sees 5 good points, 5 bad points, then makes some generally positive comments at the end.

DANGER: Many, many spoilers!!

GOOD
http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/february/noah-five-positive-facts-about-this-film.html

BAD
http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/february/noah-five-negative-features-about-this-film.html

WORTH PAYING TO SEE?
http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/march/noah-application-for-christians-and-hollywood.html

Bread

Jesus answered [Satan], “The Scriptures say, ‘It is not just bread that keeps people alive. Their lives depend on what God says.’”

(Matthew 4.4 ERV)

"...One Heart and One Soul..."

Irenaeus of Lyon

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"There is one body and one Spirit, and God chose you to have one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. There is one God and Father of us all, who rules over everyone. He works through all of us and in all of us."

(Letter to the Ephesians chapter 4 verses 4 - 6, ERV)

___________________

Irenaeus was a leader, thinker, and writer in the early Christian Movement. He had grown up in the church at Smyrna (in today's Turkey) led by Polycarp, a legend in the early church. Polycarp had been a student of John the Apostle himself, and he passed on stories and teachings from John and other "elders" in the Movement. Irenaeus absorbed it all with the fabulous mind he had. As an adult he moved east to Lyons, France where he cared for the Movement's outpost there and handed on the 'deposit of faith' as he had heard it from Polycarp, who had received it from St. John the Apostle who received it from... Well, I imagine you can see what makes Irenaeus so important in the history of the Christian Movement.

In his guest-blog today, Irenaeus describes what was in the revelation Jesus entrusted his Apostles with, and how carefully it was handed on.

Now the Church, although scattered over the whole civilized world to the end of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples its faith in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven, and the earth, and the seas, and all that is in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets proclaimed the dispensations of God—the comings, the birth of a virgin, the suffering, the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily reception into the heavens of the beloved, Christ Jesus our Lord, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to restore all things, and to raise up all flesh, that is, the whole human race, so that every knee may bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Saviour and King, according to the pleasure of the invisible Father, and every tongue may confess him, and that he may execute righteous judgment on all.

The spiritual powers of wickedness, and the angels who transgressed and fell into apostasy, and the godless and wicked and lawless and blasphemers among men he will send into the eternal fire. But to the righteous and holy, and those who have kept his commandments and have remained in his love, some from the beginning [of life] and some since their repentance, he will by his grace give life incorrupt, and will clothe them with eternal glory.

Having received this preaching and this faith, as I have said, the Church, although scattered in the whole world, carefully preserves it, as if living in one house. She believes these things [everywhere] alike, as if she had but one heart and one soul, and preaches them harmoniously, teaches them, and hands them down, as if she had but one mouth. For the languages of the world are different, but the meaning of the [Christian] tradition is one and the same. Neither do the churches that have been established in Germany believe otherwise, or hand down any other tradition, nor those among the Iberians, nor those among the Celts, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those established in the middle parts of the world.

Irenaeus of Lyons (early 2nd century – c. AD 202)
Against All Heresies book 1 chapters 10 sections 1 - 2 (written about AD 180)

The Year of Reading Scripture for the First Time

Synchroblog is a little community of Christian blogs that post on a particular subject each month. This month our topic is "New Beginnings." The bloggers who published are listed at the bottom of this post for you to peruse. Visit us all! We're an interesting and eclectic group!

_______________

I'm back from a short New Year's break, during which I've been making plans for this blog in 2014. One thing I've become rather fascinated with, and mentioned briefly in an earlier post, is the question, "What would the Scriptures sound like if they had only been discovered last year?"

What if Christianity and Judaism were just obscure sects known only from brief mentions in a few ancient writings -- until now? (I'm doing this from a Christian perspective but, of course, this idea would never work unless the Jews were also forgotten). Now their foundational documents have been discovered hidden away in dry desert caves in a remarkable state of preservation, and translated into English for the very first time.

Two thousand years of theological and scholarly jargon do not exist, nor do the traditional renderings we are comfortable with. For the first time we must puzzle out ways to express complex theological ideas that our regular Bibles represent with words like "righteousness," "justification," "sanctification," "redemption," "godliness," "resurrection." And perhaps most difficult of all, "faith," "hope," and "love."

Easy to Read

So my resolution this year is to try to read the hoary old Book with fresh eyes. To assist me in this I'll be using a remarkable but little-known translation called the Easy-to-Read Version -- or ERV for short -- put out by the Bible League International (home of the World Bible Translation Center). The ERV will be my standard translation on this blog for the next year.  It's available on Bible Gateway if you'd like to try it too.

The ERV is translated for people who speak English at approximately a 4th grade level. (It actually got its start as a Bible specifically translated for the deaf community. That version and the ERV are separate projects now, and The English Version for the Deaf can be found here). Unlike most other Bibles for people with limited English skills, the ERV scholars don't use an artificially limited vocabulary. The Basic Bible is a good example of that, using a list of 850 words plus some "special Bible words." Instead the ERV tries to use the natural vocabulary and grammatical constructions that you'd use to convey the meaning to a 10 year old. That doesn't mean though that certain concepts are hidden because they're too "adult." Adam still "has sexual relations with his wife Eve," and "she still becomes pregnant and gives birth," for instance (Book of Genesis chapter 4 verse 1, ERV), just like us modern day folks.

I'll probably write a full review of the ERV later in the year, after I've used it more. Easy reading though it may be, I'm also finding it to be an accurate, well-done translation.

For my purposes though the main advantage of the Easy-to-Read Version is that it cuts me off from traditional religious language when I read Scripture. Perhaps it will help a few scales fall from my eyes that I didn't know were there.

*       *       *

Her are the posts from this Synchroblog:

Jen Bradbury - Enough

Abbie Watters - New Beginnings

Cara Strickland - Bursting

Carol Kuniholm - Acorns, King, Beloved Community

Done With Religion – A New Year, A New Beginning

Kelly Stanley - A Blank Canvas

Glenn Hager - Overcoming The Biggest Obstacle To Reaching Your Goals

Dave Criddle - Get Some New Thinking

David Derbyshire - Changed Priorities Ahead

J A Carter - The Year of Reading Scripture for the First Time

Damon - New Beginnings: Consider These 5 Questions Before Tying The Knot

Jeffrey Kranz - Where To Start Reading The Bible

Joanna990 - On survival – my one word for 2014

K W Leslie - Atonement

Happy - my One Word 365 surprise

Michelle Moseley - Ends and Beginnings

Matthew Bryant - A New Creation

Liz Dyer – It’s a new year and time to make some new mistakes

Edwin Pastor Fedex Aldrich - Foreclosed: The beginning of a new dream

Jennifer Clark Tinker - Starting a New Year Presently

Loveday Anyim - New Year New Resolutions

Loveday Anyim - New Year Resolution Dreamers

Loveday Anyim - New Year Resolution Specialists

Loveday Anyin – New Year Resolution Planners and Achievers

Jeremy Myers - Publish Your Book with Redeeming Press

Amy Hetland - New Beginnings

Phil Lancaster – New Beginnings

Mallory Pickering – Something Old, Something New

Margaret Boelman – The Other Side of Grief

Kathy Escobar - One Image

Most Eligible Scripture

If you come here to learn or discuss basic, historic Christianity, chances are you've been looking into your Bible quite a bit. Of course, so are a lot of other people. Ever wonder what everybody else might be interested in?

According to the leading online Bible site BibleGateway.org here are the top 10 scriptures looked up by the 456 million visitors to their site in 2013:

1. John 3:16
2. Jeremiah 29:11
3. Philippians 4:13
4. Romans 8:28
5. Psalm 23
6. Proverbs 3:5-6
7. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
8. Romans 12:2
9. Philippians 4:6
10. Joshua 1:9


And we most wanted to know what Scripture taught about these 10 topics:

1. love
2. peace
3. faith
4. children
5. heart
6. hope
7. joy
8. prayer
9, strength
10. pray

The article has some other interesting factoids as well. Read it here.

The BibleGateway and Authentic Light Combine Forces!

A few weeks ago and quite unexpectedly, BibleGateway, the enormously popular site for searching the scriptures, invited my humble blog to be a charter member of a program they were starting called "The Grid." Essentially, if I would put this badge on my blog, use them whenever I needed to quote the Bible, and say something nice about them once in a while, they would, in return, expose Authentic Light (and our Twitter stream, @AuthenticLight)  to their 140 million view per month firehose of traffic, along  with some cool insider stuff.

So I scratched my bewhiskered chin thoughtfully and finally, astutely replied, "Are you kiddin'? Let's do it!"

If you visit some of the other charter member blogs (there's a list of us here) a frequently heard refrain is: "I've been linking to and recommending you all along anyway. Now I'll just be doing it to more people and with a nifty badge."

It is pretty much the same with me. I've used a couple other sites for a specific translation, particularly Bible.com to use the translation notes for my go-to translation, the New English Translation. But on their site it's rather cumbersome to actually cite a specific verse. So, despite my love for Bible-nerd stuff, for some time now I've used the BibleGateway for the NET too.

As St.Peter might say in a similar situation, "Who else can we go to?"

(Ok, flimsy attempt at humor.)

The Secret of National Bible Week

1940 was a very scary year to be alive. Hitler was ravaging Europe, Pacific nations were being conquered, and the Great Depression had by no means disappeared. Many Americans were determined to stay uninvolved and isolated but it was becoming increasingly apparent that they and the other democracies of the world were being surrounded. A latent fear was pervasive.

In the midst of this a group of professionals in New York felt it was important to turn people's minds to the hope offered by the Bible. So they formed the National Bible Association to simply encourage people to read this pivotal book, regardless of their religions affiliation or lack thereof.

In 1941 the first National Bible Week was observed the week of Thanksgiving and they've been held ever since. This year it runs from November 24th through 30th.

Now, it is true that Bible Week is, to a great extent, part of the "civic religion" that I see as one of the ways we try to shave the rough edges off the Christian Movement and make it comfortable. Jesus is not here to be the mascot of any government or society; he is here to take over. To repeat N T Wright's famous dictum, "If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not."


But I also believe this: The Bible is a time bomb. "The word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword," one of our early thinkers said, "piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit, and joints from marrow; it is able to judge the desires and thoughts of the heart," (Letter to the Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12). Saint Paul himself found that the Great Announcement of the Gospel was not just a series of words but, "God's own power for salvation," (Letter to the Romans chapter 1, verse 16, CEB).

When the Scriptures are read, the human heart is exposed to God's raw, transformative energy. This is not an ordinary book. Anything can happen. The corridors of history are rife with stories of people whose lives were changed and minds convinced simply by reading this book. In many churches, reading the Bible is known as a "means of grace," a physical thing or action that God uses to convey his life and mercy to us.


If National Bible Week prompts someone to pull their old family Bible off the shelf -- or even use the Bible Gateway gizmo at the upper-right of this page -- and start reading the Prophetic Scriptures, well... you never know. That time bomb might just go off.

"...The claims of Jesus Christ..."

"Resurrection of Christ"
by Guerau Gener

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty... if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless; you are still in your sins."

1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 14, 17

______________________

It is well to bear in mind that faith is deeper and wider than a spiritual experience: it is an acknowledgement of the claims of Jesus Christ and an obedience to his commands. It consists primarily in personal devotion to a living Savior, but it also entails a confidence in the apostolic testimony concerning who he is and what he has done. Our faith is directed not simply to the mystical presence of Christ or to the unconditional, but to Jesus Christ crucified and risen according to the Scriptures. The act of believing (fides qua creditur), though supremely important, must never prevail over the content of faith (fides quae creditur).

Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1: God, Authority, and Salvation

"... Out of the holy Scriptures"

Meditation for a Sunday Morning
(Borrowed from the Creedal Christian blog, one of my favorites.)


"I now feel compelled instead to write to encourage you to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints."

Letter of Jude chapter 1 verse 3

______________________

No doctrine concerning the divine and saving mysteries of the faith, however trivial, may be taught without the backing of the holy Scriptures. We must not let ourselves be drawn aside by mere persuasion and cleverness of speech. Do not even give absolute belief to me, the one who tells you these things, unless you receive proof from the divine Scriptures of what I teach. For the faith that brings us salvation acquires its force, not from fallible reasonings, but from what can be proved out of the holy Scriptures.

 ~ St. Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 313-386)