A gracEmail reader in Singapore sends thanks for this ministry, then asks, "Is there a problem with our hermeneutic (the way we read and interpret Scripture) in the Churches of Christ?"
Someone recently admonished: "The New Testament provides the pattern which the true church must follow. We learn that by commands, examples and necessary inferences. The church revealed in the New Testament is the one we must imitate if we respect Bible authority."
A college Bible professor asks the difference between saying that the New Testament is 'normative' and saying that it provides a "pattern."
the plague of patternism (five gracEmails)
All Christians agree that Jesus is our pattern.... This short gracEmail series is not about that. It is about an oddity and aberration that has marked the Christian tribe into which I was born and raised.... The peculiarity is at once a doctrine, a way of reading the Bible and an approach to "doing church." We can call it patternism.
A gracEmail subscriber heard a ... preacher say that if we do just as God commands we cannot have instrumental music since the New Testament does not specifically command it. He called this "the law of silence." What should we make of this?
A gracEmail subscriber asks whether we are capable of correctly concluding from the Bible what God intended to convey. "I believe we can," he says, "and that's why I think obvious conclusions from the Bible are so clear that all other people should also see them."