Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Seek and (unfortunately) you will find
Athanasius's fourth—century battle with Arian interpretations of Scripture is illustrative of the issues here. There is no doubt that Athanasius held Scripture as the ultimate authority for the Christian and, therefore, all theological truth. But the Arians also agreed with this. So the battle with the Arians was “not a battle for the Bible, but a battle over the Bib1e.”(Leithart, Athanasius, 33 [emphasis added by Allert]) The Arians, as Athanasius claims throughout his Four Discourses Against the Arians, use scriptural terms but fail to accept the truth of Scripture and merely "array" themselves in scriptural language. For Athanasius, one can use Scripture but still miss its meaning. He would likely agree with the medieval saying in reference to the Bible: “This is the book in which everyone looks for his own convictions, and likewise everyone finds his own convictions."—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, page 79
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