I had a radical thought a few days ago. I’m sure I’m not the first to have this radical thought, which means it probably isn’t that radical after all. However, with that rousing introduction, read on!
I was raised in the church of Christ (as evidenced by my lowercase "c") and I still hold onto much of the teaching I received (I still flinch when people say pastor, for example). One of the major lessons I was taught has become a motto, or very nearly a mission statement, for the church of Christ: Speak where the Bible speaks, be silent where the Bible is silent.
I was taking a shower the other day and I started thinking about that phrase and the foundation for it. It seems to me that the phrase itself is not a Biblical concept. Obviously those words are not in scripture (which I didn’t know until I was in high school), but neither is the basis for the statement.
The closest we come to this idea is in Rev. 22:18-19. However, it appears that the author is talking about the words of prophecy included in Revelatshuns rather than the entire Bible. Of course, there was also no Bible when Revelateshuns was written, nor did the authors know that their writings would be included in a collection, so how could the verse be written with the whole Bible in mind?
I’m interested in what others think about this subject. I haven’t explored scripture exhaustively to discover if "Speaking and silence" are somewhere else, so if there are some valuable verses out there, please share them.
