Ah, welcome back to the illustrious theater of Sola Scriptura: Reformed Edition™, where Scripture alone is the divinely-appointed GPS for navigating the Christian life. Here, every verse is sacrosanct—as long as it confirms our already established views, of course. Today’s thorny scripture that’s mysteriously excluded from our highlight reel is John 6:53: “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Ladies and gentlemen, do not adjust your theological goggles! This is not an optical illusion; it is an inconvenient truth. When faced with the unnerving command to eat flesh and drink blood, our fearless Reformed heroes suddenly become masters of evasion, pulling the Metaphor Card™ out of their Calvinist sleeves.
“But wait,” you say, “We’re literalists!” Ah, but it’s a selective literalism, tailored finely to the Calvinist creed. Predestination? Absolutely literal! Sovereignty of God? Irrefutably literal! John 6:53? Well, suddenly, we’re in the gray area of “symbolic language,” a cloud of interpretive mist where our ironclad rules don’t seem to apply.
You see, it’s not just any Scripture that earns a seat at the Reformed theology table; it’s the ‘right kind’ of Scripture, the verses that have passed the rigorous test of complementing established dogmas. The rest? Well, they’re relegated to the theological footnote, an “honorable mention” in the annals of doctrines.
And so, this ever-so-selective reading continues, a tightly choreographed dance around difficult passages that stubbornly refuse to conform to Reformed thinking. Sola Scriptura becomes Sola Convenient Scriptura, where Scripture alone is authoritative—as long as it’s amenable.
In this vaudeville of theological convenience, consistency is not the starring role; rather, it’s a bit player, making occasional guest appearances but never stealing the show. And as the curtain falls, we’re left wondering: Is it Sola Scriptura that guides us, or is it we who selectively guide Sola Scriptura?
Take a bow, Reformed Edition™; you’ve given us a performance for the ages—a masterclass in the art of theological selectivity.