Confessing Evangelical

Chris Williams has posted an interesting flight of fancy comparing children pinning the tail on the donkey (or rather, as it often works out in practice, on each other!) with the treatment of the Bible by post-Reformation "sects".

Now I'm always a bit wary of bandying words like "sect" around, as it often seems to be used as part of the following irregular verb:

We are a church.
You are a sect.
They are a cult.

But his point about the misuse of Scripture, especially in the absence of a clear, "churchly" confession of what Scripture is saying, is echoed by (guess who!) Hermann Sasse:

[Like the Reformed,] also for us Holy Scripture occupies the central position in the church. However, there is no denying that in this sinful world Scripture can also be misunderstood and misused. For a century before there was a New Testament the church had the same Bible as the synagogue. As soon as there was a New Testament it was commandeered by all the heretics. Today we share the same Bible with the worst of the sects. The true church is gathered not around Scripture but around the rightly understood, the purely and correctly interpreted Bible.

(We Confess Jesus Christ, p.84, emphasis original)