P.S. I should also add that I haven’t been in a CRC church in about… 7? years, so I don’t know if they’ve switched translations (though I doubt it).
Also, I have a couple other comments:
IMHO, you need to look a different translations and use references such as “Strong’s” ,etc to determine what is being said and within the context of where it is being said. Having Greek/Hebrew references are really helpful as well.
You should be careful with Strong’s Lexicon, though, as he definitely likes to tweek his English definitions in order to undercut the Catholic interpretation of the Bible.
Petros and
petra are a prime example. Strong claims that
petros means “a pebble or tiny rock” whereas
petra means “boulder or enormous rockface/rockwall.” (That’s not word for word as I’m at work and thus can’t quote precisely from my Strong’s Lexicon which is at home, but you get the picture.) It’s true that, in some ancient dialects of Greek,
petros and
petra were distinct and had these divergent definitions, however what Strong doesn’t in any way bother to mention is that this was not the case in
Koine Greek (i.e. Biblical Greek), and this distinction had not been used in any spoken or written form of Greek for at least 200 years when Jesus was alive and when Matthew wrote his Gospel. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any more carefully compiled
Koine Lexicon than Strong’s, and, just as unfortunately, practically every single Protestant Bible scholar accepts Strong’s definitions without question as though his was an inspired Lexicon dropped down from Heaven itself.
One of my back-and-forward discussions with my Presbyterian friend is on the subject of authority and on the canon. I can accept a large part of his argument but I struggle with the Protestant/Reform explanation of the canon. I have in particular never understood the basis for eliminating books of the Bible which had been accepted for 1500 years. It seems illogical to me to say:
(1) I believe in Bible Alone as my supreme rule; and
(2) I also believe that I can edit the Bible (Alone) down to so many books
I am not trying to start a fight but my understanding is that Luther even wanted to eliminate James, Hebrews and Revelation as well (?).
I do not know if Calvin was of the same view.
It’s been a while since I’ve read his
Institues, but I believe it was Calvin who coined the “spiritual discernment” method of determining the canon (I don’t remember the actual term coined, but that one seems to fit) by which one reads the books of the Bible, spiritually “discerns” them to be positively oozing with some ineffable quality of etherial inspiredness and thus one just “knows” by their sheer ability to make one’s soul vibrate that they obviously belong in the Bible. Personally, I find this “method” (if you can call it that) one of the most profound failures of Calvin’s otherwise very logical mind (seems more like madness to me). Particularly if you’ve ever sat down and read a decent number of the historical books in Scripture. I can understand how this “method” would lead one to throw out First Maccabees (I’m reading it now and, while it’s interesting, I don’t feel particularly edified by it spiritually), but then why not, by the same logic, throw out Leviticus, or the Chronicals, or… etc. It’s the most wishy-washy, subjective, relativistic concept of “canonicity testing” I’ve ever seen…
