What glasses do we use in reading the Bible?

I like this comment which is found on a called to communion post. This comment ia found here and is by Christopher Lake--it is his reflections on the glasses we use when we come to the Bible

Having once been a *firmly* convinced Calvinist (for years), I can empathize with your thoughts here:

The Reformed hermeneutic is pretty tightly packaged and logical, fitting well with our modern self-consciousness, this is true, but when you consider that it was sin after all that God wants to save us from one can hardly help reading Paul in this way. Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord; there is no good in you; none is righteous, no not one……and all that. Hard to see oneself in a different light.

I have “been there.” I have studied the Bible as a Calvinist, and the theology seemed so clearly *there* to me, right in the Scriptures. In part, it was Biblical study and exegesis which *brought* me to Calvinism. (In retrospect, I see *major* problems and holes in that study and exegesis…) I can empathize with how Reformed thinking seems so “solidly Biblical.” Reformed preachers and teachers know how to teach the Scriptures… or, at least, some of the Scriptures.

Which brings me to my next point. In my experience, Reformed people have a horror of “proof-texting.” They disdain it in those of other theological paradigms, and they try to avoid it themselves. However, I have lived as both a Calvinist and a Catholic, and I have seen that, for better *and* for worse, the Reformed paradigm is *built* on proof-texting– or, at best, on “proof-passaging.”

In retrospect, I ask myself, why did my Calvinist pastors/elders almost always go to Pauline passages to teach us about salvation (how to be saved) and to Jesus, to tell us how to *live* in light of our *already-permanent justification and salvation*?

In most of the Reformed preaching and teaching that I heard and read, it was as if Paul was our model evangelist of the true “Biblical Gospel,” and Jesus was, by comparison, our “Christian living” ethicist! Something was wrong…

It became more and more obvious to me that something *was* wrong, when I finally, consciously, took off my “Reformed glasses” for a fresh look at Scripture itself. I began to see, with “new eyes,” Job being described as a man who was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” (Job 1:1, ESV) I remembered my pastor preaching about this verse, “exegetically,” reminding us that *no one* is righteous, other than through the imputed righteousness of Christ… which flies explicitly in the face of what the verse actually says about Job!

Not that Job was a morally good person *apart* from God’s grace, to be sure– all goodness on our part is ultimately from God. However, the verse does speak of Job being a morally good person, and there is absolutely no *hint* of imputed righteousness in it. One may well posit that this is so, because Job lived, and the Old Testament was written, so long before the coming of Christ and His death and resurrection.

However, the more that I read and studied of the Bible without my “Reformed glasses,” the Lutheran concept of imputed righteousness appeared, more and more, to be a “doctrine/tradition of man,” built upon proof-texting, and the Catholic teaching of infused righteousness showed itself to be the more *holistically Biblical* teaching.

In the Reformed paradigm, what does it finally mean to say (as Scripture does) that “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working”? If all Christians have Christ’s *perfect* righteousness imputed to them, then no Christian’s prayer is any more “powerful” than any other Christian’s prayer! Such a concept flies in the face of this verse.

There are so many more examples… I could write for hours upon hours, for days, weeks, and months, about how imputed righteousness does not hold together, in light of the whole of Scripture. I will gladly give more thorough examples in another comment, if you want, Alicia, as I don’t want to be guilty of proof-texting myself. (!)

In the passages of St. Paul, to which you referred, about none of us being righteous, he is making a point about our utter, desperate dependence on God, for any of our goodness (both ontological and moral goodness). St. Paul is not preparing the “Biblical ground,” so to speak, for such Reformed sermons as Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”