God Gave Me Faith to Trust His Word

I spent a good number of years as a Fundamentalist Pentecostal prior to my being driven by an incessant focus on the law into despair and finally hatred of God. The absence of pure Gospel being preached, and instead replaced with a "gospel" of works righteousness drove me to atheism where I wallowed under the weight of the law for eighteen years until one day God fished me out of the dark pit of death I was in and gave me a gift of faith so that I would receive the forgiveness of sins.

I think it difficult for some to understand just what sort of gross attention is given to the law by some Fundamentalist Christians and the reasons why they do it. I would like to offer up something anecdotal which I hope will help some grasp part of the root of terror many Christians live in daily. 

I think one of the greatest problems of Fundamentalism is how they approach the Scriptures. While I certainly agree with the Fundamentalist that the Holy Scriptures are the inspired Word of God and do not err (inerrancy), I approach the Scriptures much differently today as I did while a Fundamentalist. Today, I correctly approach the Scriptures as inerrant because God gave me the faith to believe that they were given to us in order to bear witness of Jesus Christ and in particular Christ's death, burial, and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:17). God has brought me the hope in Jesus Christ by working through His Word to bring me to faith.

While a Fundamentalist, I believed the Scriptures were primarily given to me as a guide book to life. God preserved the text as error free so that I could have answers to everything I encountered in life. The result was I constantly looked to the Scriptures for something I needed to do in order to make my life better. 

Martin Chemnitz, while not directly addressing the points I am making here, writes something which I believe touches upon this issue. In answer to the question "Are all things that are sufficient for people as the Word of God for faith and conduct of life contained in the sacred writings" Chemnitz writes

"For it is the function of the Holy Spirit to suggest and, as it were, recall to mind, the things that Christ said and taught, Jn 14:26. And though not all miracles, just as not all discourses of the prophets, Christ, and the apsotles are individually set forth, yet the Holy Spirit included in Scripture the sum of the whole heavenly doctrine, as much as is necessary for the church and suffices for the faith by which believers obtain life eternal, Jn 20:31". —The Enchiridion, CPH 2007 transl. Poellot, Preus, Williams p. 43.

A couple things I take notice of from Chemnitz's words is first of all, it is the Holy Spirit working through the Scriptures that make us wise unto salvation (2 Timothy 3:15). Secondly, "it is the function of the Holy Spirit to suggest and, as it were,  recall to mind, the things that Christ said and taught." That is, the Scriptures are a means through which the Holy Spirit reveals to us Christ. Thirdly, and finally, the Holy Scriptures do not contain "the whole heavenly doctrine," but only a "sum" of it which is sufficient and necessary for creating faith "by which believers obtain eternal life." In short, the Holy Scriptures is not an exhaustive manual about living life and answering all the questions that life might toss at us.

Taking the Scriptures to be a "rule book" about how to live life means turning God's Word into nothing but law. The Scriptures, then, become a "death book" which doesn't really reveal to us a living Jesus coming to us with the good news, but instead the Word of God becomes another stony tablet of Moses' declaring what we ought to be doing for God.

There is no doubt that the Scriptures contain law, but this is only for the sake of working repentance in our hearts. The Scriptures are given to point to Christ and what He has done for all of humanity. As a Lutheran, I confess that the Holy Scriptures are a means of Grace. That means it isn't a science textbook which will tell me if "Global Warming" is one of the signs of the Apocalypse. This also means that the Holy Scriptures is not meant to answer every question I have about life and neither is it a book from which I can derive a purpose driven plan in order to become a better me. 

The Scriptures are not an error free law book, or guide to good living.

I, as a Christian and Lutheran, confess that the Holy Spirit gave me a gift of faith whereby I can receive the forgiveness of sins won for me by Christ on the cross some two thousand years ago. As a result of the faith given to me for salvation, I trust that the Scriptures are in fact the Holy, inerrant, Word of God. God gave me faith to receive the truth of His Word and all that is sufficient and necessary for obtaining life eternal.