Only Within the Communion of the Saints Can the Love of Christ Be Comprehended

“Scripture is not a legal document, the articles of which only need to be looked upon for a person to find out what its view is in a given case.  It is composed of many books written by various authors, dating back to different times and divergent in content.  It is a living whole, not abstract but organic.  It nowhere contains a sketch of the doctrine of faith; this is something that has to be drawn from the entire organism of Scripture.  Scripture is not designed so that we should parrot it but that as free children of God we should think his thoughts after him.  But then all so-called presuppositionlessness and objectivity are impossible.  So much study and reflection on the subject is bound up with it that no person can possibly do it alone.  That takes centuries.  To that end the church ahs been appointed and given the promise of the Spirit’s guidance into all truth.  Whoever isolates himself from the church, i.e. from Christianity as a whole, from the history of dogma in its entirety, loses the truth of the Christian faith.  That person becomes a branch that is torn from the tree and shrivels, an organ that is separated from the body and therefore doomed to die.  Only within the communion of the saints can the length and the breadth, the depth and the height, of the love of Christ be comprehended.”

-Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, Vol. 1, (p. 83)

“Theologians Never Come to Scripture From The Outside”

“Accordingly, theologians never come to Scripture from the outside, without any prior knowledge or preconceived opinion, but bring with them from their background a certain understanding of the content of revelation and so look at Scripture with the aid of the glasses that their churches have put on them.  All dogmaticians, when they go to work, stand consciously  or unconsciously in the tradition of the Christian faith in which they were born and nurtured and come to Scripture as Reformed, or Lutheran, or Roman Catholic Christians.  In this respect as well, we cannot simply divest ourselves of our environment; we are always children of our time, the products of our background.  The result, therefore, is what one would expect:  all the dogmatic handbooks that have been published by members of the school of biblical theology faithfully reflect the personal and ecclesiastical viewpoint of their authors.  They cannot, therefore, claim to be more objective than those of explicitly ecclesiastical dogmaticians.”

-Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1: Prolegomena, (p. 82)