Bible Alone?

I hear a lot that all I need is my Bible and I can figure things out myself. While I do believe the Bible's main themes are plain for all to see (like Jesus is the Messiah), we are often ignorant of something things the Bible assumes we know. The big one is that the Bible was never meant to be explored solely in a single person's experience. It is to be explored in a community. Why?

Justin Taylor wrote a great article (found here) talking about this very thing.

He writes:

And yet the irony is that if we use only this book, we may in fact be in disobedience to it. We should count good teaching about the Bible — whether through commentaries, books, sermons, study Bibles, and so on — to be a gift from God for the good of His church (see Eph. 4:11; James 1:17). So what may look pious on the outside (“Just me and my Bible!”) can actually mask pride on the inside.

We cannot have a arrogance to believe that we are all alone. NO one (including me) is above community. Carl Truman basically said the same thing in his warning to Ph.D. students in a recent article. Every heretic starts out doing the same thing: studying the Bible alone.