As someone once famously said, you are certainly entitled to your own opinions, but to your own facts;
Biblical literalism is supported by @28% of Christians. Far from the norm.
And your premise is that 'might makes right'? Always a poor defense. However, I will agree by way of a tangent - I can easily agree that 70% of the church has become worldly.
The Christian Bible (New Testament) has always been thought of as a collection of divinely inspired (not dictated) texts and/or scriptures.
Study the heptadic structures encrypted into the NT, and you'll have a good idea just how inspired they are. No man wrote that. A man may have been pushing the pencil around, but those constructs plainly show whose content is being written down.
During the oral tradition period Jews told stories about God and God's relationship with people for centuries before anything was written down in what eventually became the Old Testament and while names and messages may have remained intact, details probably did not.
Standard academic propaganda. The Jews know dang well that Moses WROTE Torah down, just as the Scriptures say. It is the 'Wisdom of the Elders', the Jewish tradition, that supposedly comes word-of-mouth... The very tradition that Yeshua pointedly discounted as a prominent part of his ministry.
The concept of sola scriptura is a man-made construct of the Protestant Reformulation which decentralized the Christ as the central figure in Christianity, replacing it with The Bible as the center of the belief system;
Entirely incorrect.
there is no place in the Bible that establishes the concept of sola scriptura. Protestants can only try to defend the concept by interpreting and deciphering texts in the Bible to support their argument, but that alone defeats the sola scriptura/literalism heresy. If the Bible is to be taken literally, then the Bible must clearly say that it must be taken literally without need for interpretation.
The entire structure of the Bible demands literalism.
Torah requires precise and literal exactitude, without which it's very structure collapses. If YHWH didn't mean every word of it, if we are free to pick and choose, then the law is nothing, and we have no need of a savior - The whole thing is rendered moot.
The prophets likewise require literal exactitude - Again, if we are free to twist the prophets, then there is no value in their foretelling, and the primary proof that YHWH is GOD, which has been left to all generations, is struck down.
Yeshua requires literal precision as we are to keep his words, and that necessarily underwrites the literal precision of Torah and the Prophets. You will not understand Yeshua without a literal knowledge of Torah. The savior requires the law, and the law requires the savior. With incremental precision, or both are made null.
The entirety of the Book is a series of interlocking, interwoven contracts. Literally every page. What legal document is not taken on it's face? What governance allows allegory into contractual law?
And underneath it all, interwoven throughout, is an undercurrent of prophecy that is the signature and imprimatur of YHWH.
One cannot even begin to understand the fulfillment found in Yeshua without first understanding the prophecy contained in Torah - In the Jubilee, in the Feasts, in the prophetic construct of the Temple and the Tabernacle (two different lessons), and etc. The very law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is prophetic in every word. Amazing.
Likewise the narrative. If one misses the prophetic content in the patriarchal inheritance, one will miss the function of a full third of the prophecy itself. If one is unaware of the prophetic inheritance of Ephraim, as an example, one will never understand the mechanisms within the NT wrt the prodigal son, and the 'fullness of the Gentiles'.
These are but meager examples. For one to fully propound upon the intricacies and complex interactions contained within the Book, it would take a lifetime (in my case, it certainly has).
To suggest anything but sola-scriptura in the face of those intricacies is nothing short of ludicrous.
That isn't to say there is no interpretation, as it declares itself (rightly dividing). But that interpretation is best found in a literal take. To do otherwise, I have always found, abuses something elsewhere in the text. That's the very beauty of it. One cannot take any of it without taking all of it. By the letter. Such an amazing construction. It is simply a marvel.
You will of course be able to quote several passages in the Bible from which you will ask that a conclusion be reached which supports sola scriptura but the moment that you ask that a conclusion be reached or that a passage be interpreted in a way that reaches your predisposed conclusion, you've just proven the fatal flaw of literalism.
I think I have already properly answered this bit above, with the exception that, if one thinks my conclusions were predisposed, one would be left wondering at the road I have taken from staunch Reformed to Messianic Christianity. My path could not be considered 'predisposed' in the least. In fact, quite the other way around. Anything but predisposed.
There are contradictions, and what you've suggested that should be done about them destroys the concept of literalism.
Not at all. I will take one common misconception as an example: 'He will be called a Nazerene' is a commonly cited 'contradiction' - Critics will tell you that no such prophecy exists. But it does. a simple abuse of the Hebrew hides it, and an ignorance of husbandry where olive trees are concerned obfuscates it, But it's there, and in a profoundly literal and extraordinary sense.
Proverbs 25:2 “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” (KJV)
Such wonderful fruit is to be found with the meat of the thing. How anyone an be satisfied by the milk is entirely beyond me.
But, I have stretched the standards of the forum far enough - I ascertain that you and I have embarked upon an interfaith argument which is frowned upon here. I will welcome you to continue by pm, and list your contradictions, which I will take the time to answer, each by each, as I have done so many times before... Who knows, you might just give me something novel to chew upon.
Would that I could answer right here in front of everyone - I can, and do desire to - But unless given license directly by admin, I think we have ventured too far.
Good day.
