"I Just Believe the Bible" | Theocast

Hi, this is John. And have you ever been in a conversation with somebody and they use the phrase, well, I just believe the Bible? Well, Justin and I are gonna have a conversation about that phrase. And really what it's called is biblicism, isolationism, where we take proof texts and take them out of context to make our point.

We're gonna talk about how that leads to heresy and theological controversy throughout history. So we hope you enjoy this conversation. It's lively, a little bit more academic, but I promise you it's gonna be helpful in helping you understand how to properly understand your Bible and love God's word.

Stay tuned.

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Thanks for listening.

Biblicism, Isolationism, and the Need for a Proper Hermeneutic

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations around clarifying the gospel and reclaiming the purpose of the kingdom from a reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina and I am John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And Justin is not in Asheville today, but he is in a beach house.

A condo.

A condo, sorry. He's in a condo getting some time away to rest and read. And I am definitely jealous and I am looking forward to do the same very soon. So, but before we get started, go ahead.

No, it's good to be with you, man. And this is the second year that I've done this. Our elders decided that it would be good for me to take a week a year to go away and read and study and write. And so I'm thankful to be able to do it.

It's a full week. I work hard, but it's also a nice change of pace. And it allows me to dig into stuff that I would not have time for otherwise. So last year I wrote some things for GRN and a paper for our own church on baptism and read a lot about confessionalism through history.

This year, doing some small writing projects, but then I'm also doing a deep dive into confessional Baptist history, like practical ecclesiology of our forebears from 300 years ago, like documents from the general assemblies back in the day in London, England, and all these kinds of things.

And so thankful for this time, man. And I hope it's profitable for my church and for the Grace Reform Network and for various things that we got going on.

For sure.

And for those of you on YouTubes, you'll see that Justin is sporting a new sweatshirt.

A hoodie, baby.

It's comfortable. It's very comfortable. If you didn't know this, we do have shirts. I've got one on says Crush Christ and Calm Down. We've got coffee mugs that say the same thing. We've got TheoCast coffee mugs and hats and shirts.

And I don't know if you like that kind of stuff. Every week somebody's buying something. So it's encouraging. You guys should start putting it on social media, which what are you wearing? So I don't know.

Is that weird? It might be weird.

I don't know. Maybe it's kind of like when people, I mean, well, no, it's not. I was going to say it's kind of like when people Instagram their food, but maybe it's different.

Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Anyways, let's get into the topic. Let's not waste any time because we don't have much time to waste. So Justin, today is definitely a particular topic that both of us are affectionately passionate about.

We both have been influenced by the effects of this in our experience in ministry and Christianity. So without further ado, my friend, let's get into it.

And we've seen the fallout of it, right? I mean, historically and in our present moment. You've seen the title of the episode. I just believe the Bible. Or you hear people say things similar to that where they'll say, you know, I just want to be a Bible person.

I want to speak like the Bible speaks. I'm just saying what the Bible says. And these are pious sounding statements. They sound good to us. It's like, well, who's going to object to that? I mean, of course, we're just going to go ahead and disarm this out of the gate.

The two guys behind the microphone sitting here talking with you, and we trust everybody that's tuning into a podcast like this. Our assumption is that we all want to be Bible people. We all want to be people of the word.

We all want to speak as the Bible speaks. We all want to track with the word of God. We all want the Lord to write his word on our hearts. So that's our baseline assumption.

And to interject, we believe it's sufficient. We believe it's inherent. It's God-breathed. It can be trusted. We all agree.

All of that. We affirm all of the above. And so that's the starting place for this conversation. What we're really trying to get after today is this. Throughout history, God's people have dealt with the scriptures.

Having said that God's people want to be people of the word, there are better and there are worse ways to go about handling the scriptures and interpreting and understanding them. So throughout history, there have been people who, with the best of intentions we trust, have gone to the scriptures and aimed to speak in a way the Bible speaks, talk like the Bible talks, believe the Bible, and have made grave and serious errors as a result of that.

We see it in our own day where people are acting as though they're the first people to ever read the Bible. Like we're just gonna go in here and we're gonna read this and we're gonna work to try to understand it and just look at the words on the page in order to do so.

And what we're gonna try to talk about today and in one sense contend for today is, hey, there's a better way to do this. The Christians through history have dealt with the scriptures. 2 ,000 years worth of time where the Spirit of God has been ministering in the church and people have wrestled with the Bible.

We are not the first people to take the Bible seriously. We are not the first people to read it. And so we can look through the history of the church and gain a lot of valuable information in terms of how people have understood the text.

There's something called the history of interpretation. There's something called the regula fide, the rule of faith. These things really matter. There are ecumenical ancient creeds of the church where people sought, dealing with the scriptures, sought to hammer out doctrine, really valuable stuff.

And we are, ourselves and many who listen to the show, are parts of various confessional traditions where there are confessions of faith that have also been produced in order to deal with the text and say what the Bible teaches.

And so there's a better way to go about doing this. And we're gonna talk about this today and try to expose some of the errors that result from something called biblicism. I'll just go ahead and define it.

Yeah, give us a definition.

For us right now. So biblicism is this posture, this hermeneutical approach, a way to go about interpreting the scriptures where we go and we just, we chapter and verse it. We're gonna say what's on the page.

And in one sense, whether we mean to or not, we are isolating those words. We are not taking those words into the context of the entire scripture. We are trying to divorce the Bible from theological frameworks.

That's right.

And just take it in a vacuum, as it were, and understand it. And so this is problematic on a number of levels. You end up creating a lot of tension, a lot of mystery that isn't there. You end up, with the best of intentions, pitting one text against another.

And again, with the best of intentions, you can draw some really, really bad conclusions. Sometimes these conclusions are really bumping up against what we would call Christian orthodoxy. And at best, they're misleading and confusing.

So that was kind of a long, long teeing it up for us today, but let's go, John.

Arius, the Nicene Creed, and Reading Christ in the Old Testament

Yeah, so I think just to hone in on biblicism, another way of saying biblicism would be, I like how you said isolation, it's isolationism. An example of this would be, Justin, if you heard me say, you have no idea what the context is, but you're getting this text from someone that knows me, and they say, Justin, I'm concerned.

I heard John say this to his child. If you do not listen to me, you will die. That sounds threatening. Like he's threatening his children with death. And your first question you would have to ask is, where did he say that and why did he say that?

Well, you call me and you're like, hey, John, what's the deal? And I was like, yeah, my son was about to step out into the street, and I said, if he's gonna do that, he's gonna die. And you're going, oh, well, that's just a true statement.

You actually have affection and concern for your son, and there's a context behind it. We do the same thing with scripture. We just drop a verse. We're not thinking about the context. We're not thinking about the author.

We're not thinking about the greater context. And we're like, this is what it says. Another way of saying this is literalism. Well, don't you wanna take the Bible literal? Yes, as it was intended to be taking.

But what we do is instead of taking the author's intention literally, we take the text words literally, and we isolate them, isolationism. We isolate them from the greater context. So we're gonna give examples of this and how this has gone wrong throughout history.

And just to explain this to the way that Justin has, we're not dealing with a culture who's died and a whole entire language that's died, and you've got one expert who's the expert on this particular culture and this particular language in these people groups, that is not the case.

Christianity has not gone away. And we have godly, well-trained men and women who have been studying scripture for 2000 years that we can go back and look at the debates. This is why creeds and confessions exist because we have had debates on whether or not we have interpreted God's word rightly and using those debates for our advantage.

So we're gonna give some examples from scripture, from history, and we've got a great one that we're even gonna use where Jesus himself

Several from the mountain of Christ.

Accuses people of isolation and literalism in such a way where they completely missed the point. So Justin, that's my additive to it. We can go ahead and jump in.

Yeah, and not to bury the lead, in the interest of clarity, like public service announcement time, we are saying that everybody has a theological system. Everybody has a theological framework. And we've done an episode on this in the past.

The question is not, do you have one? The question is, is your system, is your framework any good? Because even to say, I just believe the Bible, or no creed but Christ, no confession but the Bible, in and of itself is a confession.

It is a creed, right? And so it's not actually a tenable position to say that I'm just a Bible person because everybody has a hermeneutic, a method of interpretation. Everybody's got a framework. And so what we want to do is have a good one.

And our argumentation over the years has been that the scriptures actually present these things to us and give us these frameworks and give us these things, these tools that we can then go back to the text with and better understand it.

So here we go.

I mean, the safe way of saying this is we're trying to use the same examples and systems the New Testament writers are using. That's our argument here, is that we aren't using systems that a man outside of scripture has given us.

We believe the system that we're using has been given to us by scripture itself. So if the key has been handed to you in the text, you should use that key as, as Chad Bird calls it, the Christ key. I think we should pay attention to how the New Testament authors interpret the Old Testament and use that as a method going forward.

I could talk about that for the next 30 minutes, but that's not pointedly the emphasis of today's show.

We're going to give you a practical application of that.

I think we could start by highlighting how this has occurred in different ways through history, old, like more ancient history, if we even want to use that language, on up through today. We could give a lot of examples here, but we're just going to give maybe two or three.

So let's start with one that was a prominent heresy in the early church taught by a man named Arius. So Arius is reading the Bible.

He's reading...

We're talking third, fourth century.

Correct. And he's, he's reading the scriptures. He's piecing things together, right? Where he's reading in the New Testament, like first Corinthians and other places where Jesus is referred to as wisdom from God or the wisdom of God.

And then he's also reading texts like Proverbs eight, where the, you know, wisdom personified, which we all would understand to be about Christ, you know, and, and those things. And so he's, he's looking at the, this stuff and he's taking certain words, certain words on the page.

And he concludes that there was a time when the son came into existence. There were, in other words, there was a time when the son was not.

That's right.

And so he begins to, to teach that the son, you know, and Jesus in his incarnate state is a created being, the first and greatest creation of God, albeit, but still a created being. So the deity of the son and the deity of Jesus is called into question, obviously.

And this had to be dealt with in the church in that day. And we see, I mean, we could talk about Athanasius, we could talk about other fathers, but there are also several creeds that were produced in this era of the history of the church.

People will know that, you know, in 325, you have the Council of Nicaea. In 381, you actually, they met in Constantinople, but between, from those two councils and the creeds produced by them, we have what we often refer to today as the Nicene Creed.

Right.

The one in 325 is most explicitly about the son, but the one from 381, which is the one that we use in our church, you know, once a month, is more robustly Trinitarian. There were more material added on the father and the spirit, et cetera.

Right, to add to that, because the Apostles' Creed, which is older.

Circa 2nd century.

Right.

Rather than 4th century.

Right, and so because there need, because this debate arose, it's not the Apostles' Creed is not helpful or we don't love it, but it's not as pungently Trinitarian. So Athanasius had to step in and say, all right, listen, Eris is using the Apostles' Creed and subverting this very important nature.

Because, let me do this, Justin. Sometimes people, just to add to what you're saying, sometimes people are saying, you guys are getting so nuanced.

You're splitting heads.

In your theology, you're missing the greater part. And if you read the history of Eris, he was a Orthodox theologian. I mean, you read his other parts of his theology, they were sound. And so people would say, John, he's so sound in all these other areas.

Why are you taking aim at him in this particular area? Well, Athanasius was saying, because I have to take aim here. This isn't a debate over something that is not eternal. This is a debate over something that is eternal.

And therefore it matters.

Brother, anytime we're dealing with the person and the work of God, the son, the only mediator between God and man, there is no such thing as splitting hairs. Literally heaven and hell hang in the balance when it comes to these things, because he either is who he says he was, or he's not.

He either is God and man, truly both, the one mediator between us and the Lord. And he either then was able to accomplish atonement and satisfaction for sins and the fulfillment of the law and resurrection and all those things, or he wasn't.

And so, yeah, this stuff is critical. So then, and then in addition, you have the council of Chalcedon. So you have the Chalcedonian definitions of Christology coming up even in the fifth century after this.

So you see, I mean, there's a couple of centuries where the church is dealing with in the aftermath of Arius and this kind of teaching and the stuff that is being propagated around, the church has to deal with it, and they have to hammer this out.

Doctrine of the Trinity is more, it's systematized, it's formulized in good ways so that we can now succinctly articulate it, teach it, hand it down. A definition of Christology, the person and work of Christ is also hammered out, it's articulated, it's systematized so that we can better learn it, teach it, pass it down.

These things are valuable. And these creeds have been affirmed by Orthodox Christians for centuries and centuries and centuries at this point. And we do ourselves a great disservice and we put ourselves in great peril if we ignore these things.

And so to act as though these saints were not dealing with the scriptures, not trying to deal with the text in faithful ways, but also trying to take into account everything that the Bible taught about the Trinity or taught about the Father, Son, and the Spirit, taught about the Son, His person, and His work, is to misrepresent them.

That's right.

Because these people, I mean, John, they were trying to be Bible people too.

Yeah, well, they would quote things like, well, it says here He's the only begotten Son, which means at one point He was not begotten. At one point He was not. And we have to look at that and say, all right, why did the author choose in that context, in that culture, within that language, why did he choose to use that?

And is that the best?

Like Psalm 2, today I have begotten you.

Right, is that the best English translation? Because if you've ever spoken or learned the language, as you do know, that there is not always a clear one-to-one translation between one word to the X.

And we would all love a literal translation of the New Testament, or the Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and the English, but you actually probably would have a hard time reading it. So we have to be careful in this.

And so this is why when we interpret scripture and we get to something like, wait a minute, this sounds anti-Trinitarian, only begotten, you should stop and step back and go, all right, why do I feel this way?

Who else has thought through this? What do I not know that I need to know? I've never really met an evangelical who truly is an evangelical, right? They understand the gospel, who doesn't read scripture from a Trinitarian mindset.

Like when you read Genesis 1, you're putting Trinitarian theology into the text, right? Because you understand that God is not just one.

He is three and one.

He's three, right. But you don't learn that from Genesis, right?

Well, you see it. I agree with you.

You can see it.

I agree with you, because you do have, you have in the beginning God, and then we understand from other portions of scripture, this is exactly what we're talking about. From John 1 and other places, we understand that the agent of creation is actually the second person of the Trinity, the divine word, the son.

And then you also have the spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep in Genesis 1. And so yeah, with a proper Trinitarian framework from all of scripture, we can then read Genesis 1 and say, yeah, it's there.

This is proving our point in one sense, that this kind of systematic theology that's done in creeds and done in confessions is actually really helpful for us to be faithful students of the scriptures.

That's right.

So when you read things like begotten, you have to ask yourself, okay, is this a cultural issue? What's going on? Why is he using that language? Because it would seem one verse would counteract the rest of scripture when Jesus talks about being eternal, eternal with the Father, one with the Father.

One verse can't squash all other ones. We do this all the time.

We do, brother.

Well, it says it here. Yeah, but all these other passages say the opposite. So let's find a balance here to figure out what are we missing?

Exactly.

If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith Versus Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a Reformed confessional perspective.

You can get your free copy at theocast .org slash primer.

If you read something that is causing you to draw a conclusion that is outside the bounds of historical orthodoxy, you need to pause. You need to ask yourself the question, like maybe I'm wrong here. And also, I need to then think about this verse in its context and maybe the immediate context of the paragraph or the book that it's in, the testament that it's in, the era of redemptive history that it's in, and also in the context of the whole scripture and come to a place where I can understand this verse in a way that does not contradict all of that.

Eternal Subordination of the Son and the Limits of Proof-Texting

While we're here, let's just go ahead and talk about a contemporary example along these very same lines. There's been a lot of dust up on Christian Twitter. There's always dust ups on Christian Twitter.

But people are like, well, brother, I mean, which one? Depending on the day or the week. Over the last, let's say, six months, there's been a lot of metaphorical ink spilled, digital ink spilled on Twitter about the doctrine of the Trinity, in particular, how God the Son relates to God the Father.

So there's a lot of talk about EFS, ESS, so it's eternal functional subordination or the eternal subordination of the Son. And these things are calling into question historical, creedal, like Nicene, Chalcedonian definitions of the Trinity and the person and work of God the Son.

The reason that where this comes from, in part, and people that are articulating things about God the Son and how he relates to God the Father and people that are problematic, comes from this biblicism perspective, this biblicistic, if I can even use that word.

Yeah, where we're isolating verses and we're just trying to say what the Bible says. We're just trying to speak like the Bible does. Hey, I just want to believe the Bible. Guys, we'll go to the Olivet Discourse where Jesus will say that no one knows the day or the hour of his return.

The Father only knows. And now, the way that we understand that, John, without going off into the weeds and getting mired in the minutia here, is that that is a reference to Jesus in his humanity saying this.

It is not that God the Son, who is fully God, equal with the Father, doesn't know the plan. It's that Jesus in his humanity, because he is truly human, and he has, in one sense, limited himself, emptied himself, to use the language of Philippians 2, and has become truly human in order to represent humans.

He is saying nobody knows. Only the Father knows. And we could go into that maybe at some other time if we needed to, but what guys are saying these days is, well, I mean, it says only the Father knows.

We just want to be Bible people. And so, there is this eternal functional subordination, this eternal subordination of the Son where there is this way that the Son has always related to the Father, and then this has all kinds of ramifications for how authority and hierarchical structures work for us, and how women are to submit to men, and all these kinds of things.

And we're just like, hey guys, let's pump the brakes for a minute, because the things that you're saying about God the Son seem to contradict Nicaea, and seem to contradict Chalcedon, and also seem to contradict a boatload of other verses, other passages in the scripture about the divinity and the deity of God the Son being equal with the Father.

And so, maybe you need to pause and ask yourself, is my interpretation of one verse in the Olivet Discourse contradicting all of this other stuff, this avalanche of testimony that exists out there? And our answer to that is, yeah, we think it does.

Well, and there's, at times, there can be kickback against creeds of confession, saying, well, those are just man-made documents, to which I would agree. They actually are man-made documents. But there's a reason why they exist, and there's a reason why the church has affirmed them for so many years, because of, they are biblical.

They're a biblical defense against heresy. So, sometimes people are like, yeah, I understand what that says, but it's wrong. And I'm like, well, you should be really cautious sometimes about calling something the church has affirmed for hundreds of years, almost 2 ,000 years, and saying it's wrong.

Not to say that we can't do that. There's a lot of things in church history that we call are wrong, that some Christians have affirmed. But I do find it, it is interesting in that, how there's an aversion, at times, to history.

And it does feel like there's arrogance and there's pride. Listen, I know we take a lot of shots. I know we take a lot of shots at John MacArthur, so I'm gonna take a shot and then give a compliment at the same time.

So, John is not confessional, he's not creedal. And so, in his early years, he was preaching through the Gospels. And in doing so, he ended up denying the eternal relationship of the Father to the Son.

And so, he basically denied the eternal Sonship of Christ. And so, I'll link the article here. And in the article, it basically asks the question, is it true that John MacArthur has reversed his position on the eternal Sonship of Christ?

And the answer to that is yes. And then they provide a statement of why and what happened. But it's a great example of a guy, and I'm super thankful that John put a public statement out there. It's all there for the read.

But it's a great example of what can happen when you isolate yourself in a particular text and you're not allowing the greater context, and I would just say, allowing history, other people who've wrestled with the text to help inform you so you don't fall into the same heretical issues.

If John would have held that position and continued to hold to it, it becomes a, that's an issue, right?

Yeah, that's a heterodox position.

Yes, and so, you know.

Thank God he recanted and publicly said that, amen.

Praise the Lord.

John 3:16, Limited Atonement, and the Danger of Isolating Verses

Justin, some other issues that I don't think are heterodoxy, they can be if you take them to the logical conclusion. But people will do this with things like Calvinism and specifically whom to whom Christ died for.

So we will say, well, is it limited or is it unlimited? And they'll use particular passages out of context and say, well, see here, Jesus died for the sins.

Of the whole world.

And it literally says those words. So John, you guys are not taking the text literal. You're taking your system and you're imposing it on the text. And I hear that argumentation saying, okay, I am taking what all of scripture says and allowing it to inform what I see in this particular text.

And then people will say, well, you're allowing logic and theological systems to be what causes you to come to these conclusions. Same thing with like John 3 .16. It says for whosoever, right, believes, that means that you're imposing Calvinism.

You're imposing this onto the text. So these are great examples for those of you that may not be in the Trinitarian debate, but some of you who are listening probably are in the Reformed Calvinistic debate as an example.

This is where biblicism and isolationism is an example or I would say proof texting, where we're just gonna pull one phrase from one verse and say, see, Jesus didn't die for just a select group of people, he died for all.

That's a great example of how dangerous biblicism can be because you are ignoring the entirety of everything that scripture has said for one verse.

In my mind, it immediately goes to John 6 .37. I mean, it doesn't serve our purposes so well right now, but I just wanna say it. All the Father gives me will come to me and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.

So there you have this, Jesus in one sentence is effectively summing up a lot of that, that there are certain people that the Father has given to him and whoever comes, he'll never cast them out.

When I lay my life down for my sheep.

No, amen. I mean, there's a lot there. That's a good example though of how we tend to isolate certain verses and build a theology outward from one verse, when in reality, what we need to do is work from the whole, what's main and plain in the whole to help us understand individual verses.

Many people have said this through history. I say it a lot. I have, in listening to some Martin Lloyd-Jones sermons, I heard him speak this way, so I often will reference Lloyd-Jones when I say this.

If we do not understand the whole, we will do terrible things with the parts. That's the way we need to work. We don't need to invert that relationship and work from the small and the more obscure outward.

We work from the whole to the individual parts and that helps us be better interpreters of scripture. So let's talk about Jesus for a minute.

All right?

That'd be nice.

No, absolutely.

So just to give an example from the scriptures, we're gonna look at a couple of different passages and quote some stuff for you here from the mouth of Christ himself to demonstrate that there is a way to go to the scriptures and look at them and study them and be doing it all wrong.

And even Jesus said this. So it's not enough to simply just be a Bible person. It's like the question is, are you rightly understanding those scriptures? So John chapter five, famous words. We quote them often.

It's one of the most important verses or one of the most important passages for our hermeneutic, John.

Can we just say Jesus was the first to call out biblicism? Can we just go ahead and say that?

Yeah, I mean, I think there were probably, I mean, John the Baptist maybe too, but I mean, I agree with you. I agree with you. For the purpose of our episode today, yes, Jesus, the first to call out biblicism.

So John chapter five, many will know it, verse 39, verse 46 are the two that we're gonna cite. We'll probably also jump over to verses in Luke 24. So Jesus says to an audience of people who were students of the scriptures, studied the law for, I mean, it basically gave their lives to this and were trusted to interpret it rightly.

He says to them, John 539, you search the scriptures thinking that in them you find eternal life, but it is they that bear witness about me. Then in verse 46, again, John 5, he says, if you believed Moses, again, who wrote the Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, if you believed Moses, you would believe me because Moses wrote about me.

So what's he calling out there? He's calling out a way of studying the scriptures that is of no value. And he is saying there is a way, a particular way, that you need to study and understand the scriptures.

And here he's talking about the Old Testament. In an appointed way, he talks about the book of Moses in verse 46. He says, you need to understand these things, these documents, these books, these scriptures as a testimony about me.

And it's only in me that you're gonna find eternal life, and this has always been the plan. So he is saying, you're not just a Bible person. You're not just gonna say what the Bible says. There's a way you should understand it.

Right, and that's not new information. It's not like, oh, mic drop, oh, this is so new. No one's ever heard this before. It's supposed to be about Jesus. It's a rebuke. He actually tells the leaders of Israel, you should have known this.

You should have seen this, and I'm rebuking you for not seeing it, right? So it's not that all of a sudden Jesus introduces a new hermeneutic. He's like, it's always been this way. It's, right, and if you understand and you listen to the writers of David and David's words, you can hear that David actually understands these words.

He's looking for the son. And yes, there's metaphor and there's poetry, and you can see a lot of symmetry and typology, but you understand that the New Testament writers start going back. I mean, James does this a lot too.