Digital Logos Edition
In Reading Scripture with the Reformers, Timothy George takes readers through the exciting events of the sixteenth century, showing how this dynamic period was instigated by a fresh return to the Scriptures. George immerses us in the world of the Reformation, its continuities with the ancient and medieval church, and its dramatic upheavals and controversies. Most of all, he uncovers the significant way that the Bible shaped the minds and hearts of the reformers.
This book shows how the key figures of the Reformation read and interpreted Scripture, and how their thought was shaped by what they read. We are invited to see what the church today can learn from the fathers of the Reformation, and how these figures offer a model of reading, praying and living out the Scriptures.
“Another tension of the period grew out of the desire to make the Bible available to everyone in the common languages of the day.” (Page 13)
“One of the best recent introductions to the theological interpretation of Scripture is J. Todd Billings’s The Word of God for the People of God, in which the value of premodern biblical exegesis is affirmed and defended against popular objections.17 Billings emphasizes the churchly context of reading Scripture—the Bible is the church’s book and is meant to be a means of grace, an instrument of communion with God. The sterility of the historical-critical method resulted in part from the sequestration of biblical studies to the context of an increasingly secularized academy divorced from the life and faith of the people of God.” (Page 28)
“For Luther this schema is totally inadequate. Original sin is not merely the privation of quality in the will or simply the loss of light in the intellect or of strength in the memory, but, in a word, it is the loss of all uprightness and of the power of all our faculties of body and soul and of the whole inner and outer person.” (Page 156)
“A third issue related to how the Bible was used in the life and worship of the Protestant churches. For the Bible was meant to be not only read, studied, translated, memorized and meditated on. It was also to be embodied in preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, singing, praying and service in the world.” (Page 14)
“For now it is sufficient to recognize the danger of using sola scriptura as a slogan to cut ourselves off from reading along with the fathers and reformers of ages past.” (Pages 25–26)
Author, professor, and well-known Reformation church historian, Timothy George, has provided the church with an excellent introduction to Reformation-era principles of biblical interpretation, preaching, and commentary writing. . . . George's volume is especially helpful in analyzing the way in which the Reformers read and interpreted Scripture and why their approach is of continuing benefit to the spiritual life of the contemporary church.
—James M. Garretson, The Banner of Truth