What the early Christians believed and practiced.
One of Methodism's legacy to the Christian world is a dissection of how John Wesley interpreted Scripture. They found out and published through Dr. Albert Outler what we now call the Wesley Quadrilateral for Scripture interpretation.
What makes Wesley's method stand out compared to most of the Reformers before him is his addition of TRADITION (of the early Apostolic fathers) as an important filter in trying to understand the word of God. In fact, Wesley studied their writings (these are the church fathers before Christianity was instituted as a state religion by Emperor Constantine of Rome in 315 AD) and even found out like we have in our Deep Dive studies that there is very little need to interpret further, since the Apostolic fathers have already interpreted for us much of the Bible especially the New Testament.
Unfortunately, their interpretations are very alien to most of western Christians today. Surely, we cannot be so arrogant to claim to know better than the disciples of Paul, John, Peter and the other apostles. In fact, these disciples had ample opportunity to be mentored and even ordained by the Apostles.
Various denominations and cults today who do not use Tradition as an interpretive tool have gone into various kinds of cultic errors and even heresies without knowing it. We would choose to leave them be except that most of the time they shame the Name of Christ by their doctrinal inventions and resultant practice. Paul said in Romans 2:24 that God's Name is blasphemed among the nations because of people like these.
We at CrossCulture Community would like to share our research with anyone interested in pleasing the Lord the right way, the way the Lord taught us, NOT BASED ON THE OPINIONS OF MANY THEOLOGIANS, STUDY BIBLES, COMMENTARIES or extra-biblical aids, many of which distort the truth of simple Scripture or show ignorance of the vast difference between the beliefs of the early Christians and the beliefs of our "traditions" today.
We recommend the following FREE Youtube channels. We are not saying that we should radically change based on these studies (although that might be the best option) but they are great lessons that would serve at the very least to check ourselves to see if our hearts are right with God or not.
We also have Deep Dive videos that discuss material from the above channels aside from our Sunday messages delivered by the late Pastor Tiffany Q. Sarcos
No comments:
Post a Comment