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Could Christianity Survive Without the Bible?

Scholars classify religions along two main lines within which, of course, fall countless variations. These are mystical and the revealed. Mystical traditions, religions like Tibetan Buddhism and some variants of Hinduism, find their validity in the personal experience of the individual practitioner. Revealed religions like Christianity are based on the revelations of inspired individuals, prophets, and the oral and written accounts of their experiences, their scriptures. Christianity, being a revealed faith, could not persist without a revelation. This revelation, according to Christianity, is the Bible, every word of which is supposedly inspired by deity. Therefore, to maintain that Christianity could survive without the bible is to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of this revealed religion.

Some might attempt to counter this argument by noting that the sacred scriptures of the East, the sutras, tantras, and the Vedas play a role in their corresponding faiths much like the Bible does in Christianity, This, however, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of these mystical traditions. The Buddhist scriptures, for example, offer an account of the method by which Guatama Buddha reached enlightenment. Anyone possessed of the requisite self-discipline and who exactly replicates the Buddha's actions will also attain enlightent. So despite their countless descriptions of worlds and deities and such seen in meditation, the sacred scriptures of the east are essentially enlightenment cookbooks. These visions and meditational deities, then, are like the pictures of food found in recipe books. It all boils down to: Do such and such and such and so will happen.

Christianity is different from most other faiths in that its emphasis is almost one hundred per cent on morality, history, and recitation of prayer. The Bible is a book containing accounts of events that actually did occur sometime in our past. Persons inspired by deity, prophets, recorded these stories so that we might draw morals from them. The ten commandments, for example, are mere moral injunctions and not recipes for spiritual enlightenment. Dogmatics are a central feature of Christianity and the ultimate catechism is the Bible. Without it, splinter faiths would proliferate as they did in the days of the early church fathers fight against Gnosticism. Already, with billions of bibles in print, we are witnessing the increasing fragmentation of Christianity as doctrinal disputes and heretical spin offs proliferate. The only glue binding all of the Christian faiths together is their emphasis on the Bible and their belief that it contains the actual revelation of God's word as spoken through his inspired prophets.

Christianity would quickly dissolve if the bible were one day suddenly to disappear.

Learn more about this author, Dexie Runns Long.
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