DOWN WITH SOLA SCRIPTURA

Orthonomy may be defined then as a kind of “correct harmoniousness” or beauty. In effect, when it is used as here [in regard to Sola Scriptura], it means the employment of aesthetic or harmonic purity as a tool for discerning truth—and therefore the intent and authority—of anything, be that thing doctrine or practice. Thus it is very common to find that many emergent Christians are genuinely confused and befuddled by the Reformation Protestants’ constant wrestling with modernist questions of historicity.

An emergent, in observing heated debates or impassioned conversations about the factualness of the Virgin Birth, for example, can be truly puzzled. For him or her, the whole “problem” is just not “there” in any distinguishable or real sense. For the emergent, as he or she will be quick to say, the Virgin Birth is so beautiful that it has to be true, whether it happened or not…

The new Christianity of the Great Emergence must discover some authority base or delivery system and/or governing agency of its own. It must formulate—and soon—something other than Luther’s sola scriptura which, although used so well by the Great Reformation originally, is now seen as hopelessly outmoded or insufficient,… (The Great Emergence, 149, 150, 151)

Phyllis Tickle

See also:

PHYLLIS TICKLE AND THE EMERGING CHURCH: IT’S NOT IF SOLA SCRIPTURA ENDS BUT WHEN

PHYLLIS TICKLE: WHERE NOW IS THE AUTHORITY?

PHYLLIS TICKLE: TICKLING ITCHING EMERGENT EARS

WHO IS PHYLLIS TICKLE?

THE CULT OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY ROTTEN ROOT OF THE POSTLIBERAL EMERGING CHURCH

WE FEEL HOMOSEXUALITY IS NOT A SIN

KEN SILVA: IT’S TIME TO RETHINK THE ISSUE OF HOMOSEXUALITY