The Gathering of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina
Bringing Baptists of North Carolina Together for Christ-Centered Ministry Volume 12, Issue 7
September 2007
Bible Freedom . . . Bible Responsibility by Larry Hovis, Coordinator
Among the many books on the shelves in my office are twenty-five Bibles. Here are a few of them: My grandmother’s Bible – In the 1970s, when my grandmother was in her latter years of life, she gave me a Bible she had obtained several years earlier. Surprisingly, it isn’t the King James Version, but the Revised Standard Version. I literally wore the cover off of that Bible. The Living Bible – Like most kids of my generation, I had a Living Bible, given to me by my parents on my birthday in 1973. It was important to me, and this book had a huge impact on a generation of young Christians during a time of transition in American and church culture, despite the fact that my New Testament professor in seminary always referred to this paraphrase of the Scriptures as “that green thing.” Oxford Annotated Bible – I first acquired this particular edition of the Revised Standard Version when I took Introduction to the Old Testament as an undergraduate at N.C. State University. It continued to be my primary study Bible throughout college and seminary, in the classroom
and the church. It’s now held together with duct tape! Ordination Bible – On April 26, 1987, on the occasion of my ordination, my home church presented a Holman New American Standard Bible to me as a symbol of their love and support, and as a reminder of the day when the people of God laid hands on me to set me apart for the Gospel Ministry. I am blessed with lots of Bibles and the freedom to read them as much as I want. In reality, only a few of them are regularly opened. I imagine that’s true for a lot of Christians. We have more Bibles than we can, or do, actually read and study. As Baptists, we talk a lot about Bible freedom, and we should. There was a time in history in which average Christians were not free to study the Scriptures for themselves. Either they didn’t have Bibles, or they couldn’t read, or they found themselves in a religious or political system where they were not allowed the freedom to read and study the Scriptures. Today we have the opposite problem. We have so much Bible freedom that we take it for granted. Viktor Frankl, the celebrated neurologist
and psychiatrist, wrote in his best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that for freedom to endure, liberty must be joined by responsibility. He proposed that the “Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Perhaps we need to extend this concept to all of our Baptist rhetoric about the Bible. Rather than remaining stuck in a debate about Biblical inerrancy vs. Biblical freedom, we should invest energy into practicing Biblical responsibility. Continued on page 7.
CBFNC Missions Initiative November 2-4, 2007 Henderson-Littleton Area An opportunity for faith and action to meet For individuals, families, Sunday School classes, youth groups, missions circles and others Work a day of missions on Saturday followed by an evening of fellowship and celebration; spend Sunday in worship and at lunch with one of the four sponsoring churches. See page 5 for more details. Register today - deadline October 1!