something, everything

Brad East:

In Linebaugh’s treatment of Scripture the church is nowhere to be found. For that matter, equally absent are tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit. The result, if I may put it this way, is an account of the Bible and its message that is maximally and perhaps stereotypically Protestant. By this I don’t mean the book is “not Catholic.” I mean that it is so intensely focused on the “solas” — Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—that it leaves by the wayside other essential features of the gospel.

Disclosure: Jono Linebaugh is a friend of mine, but then so is Brad, and I’ve written in commendation of both of them, so I think all that cancels out.

If “an invitation to Holy Scripture” must also give an account of “tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit,” then it will be the size of the Church Dogmatics and won’t be an “invitation” to anything. For the same reason that I think it would be fine to write an invitation to the sacraments that does not also give an account of Holy Scripture, I think it’s fine to write an invitation to Holy Scripture that’s just about Holy Scripture. If we think every book has to be about everything relevant to the topic of that book, then we’ll never find a book worthy of our praise.