Knowing Scripture II: Rules for Private Interpretation

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and we are in the second week of a new series that will last six weeks. The series is on knowing Scripture. And with me this week is Will Boyette.

Good to have you, Will. Hey, Jon. And I'll get Will to introduce himself in a minute, but let me mention before I forget, and Teddy has to interrupt me and tell me to start all over, we are doing a giveaway week with this series, different books or commentaries that help us to understand Scripture since we're studying that topic.

And this week's giveaway is the Reformation Heritage Study Bible. Now it comes only in the King James Version. It is by Reformation Heritage Books. And really, the special thing about this Bible, there are many study Bibles.

It's a good study Bible, but even if you don't read the King James normally, at the end of each chapter, Dr. Beeke has given notes and thoughts, little guidance there for how you might take that chapter and apply it in the context of family worship, which is really helpful, especially if, Dad, you know, you feel like, well, I don't know, I'm not a preacher, you know, am I supposed to prepare a 20-minute talk, you know, and you look at your seven-year-old there and you think, no, that's not, you know, they won't sit still.

So it is helpful, and there are so many good study helps for family worship, but this is one of them, the Reformation Heritage Study Bible. So if you want to know more about that, you can look at the description.

Well, Will, thanks for being with us, and tell us just a little bit about yourself. Well, thanks for having me, John.

Well, I didn't grow up in church. I actually didn't really start going to church until I was married. And they were not healthy churches. They were prosperity gospel churches, charismatic churches. They were very, very loose with Scripture.

So it wasn't until about, you know, three or four years ago that I really started reading the Bible for myself. I believe that I was converted by reading Scripture alone. And I think me and you met about that time, and you became a friend and mentor, and I've been coming to the church for the last couple of years.

Well, we're having different people with us each week because we want, as we look at this topic of how to study the Bible carefully, we wanted to invite folks that aren't seminary trained or pastors, and so, you know, because always there is the temptation of feeling, and all of us feel it at times, that, well, if I had a better library, or if I understood Greek and Hebrew, or if I had grown up in a Christian home, you know, there's just always an excuse available, you know, right at the edge of our life to say, well, that's a good excuse, and that's why I don't study my Bible.

But Sproul's little book, Knowing Scripture, it's written on a collegiate level, really. Our young people are going through it right now in the church, but it does take some adjusting. So this is a helpful book.

What we want to do in the podcast is really just hit the high points of each chapter. If you want to read the book on your own, you can, and it is a book that can be a little intimidating, if you haven't read books like this before, but the basic principles are principles that every Christian, with a little effort, can apply and really benefit from.

So, Will, why don't you just kind of walk us through, what are the key things he's going to be talking about in chapter two?

Well, the first thing he starts off with is he talks about how there's a Bible in most every home, especially in the Western world. He quotes a survey that said the average American home has about four Bibles, which is pretty incredible to think about.

But sadly, not all those are used for, you know, the study of Scripture. They're used for decoration or hand-me-downs or just to have, and I think that's a pretty sad thought. R .C. Sproul goes into the price that was paid by the martyrs for us to have the Scripture in our common language.

And that'll kind of lead us into Martin Luther, Martin Luther's contributions of giving the man the Bible in the common tongue, and as well as the doctrine of private interpretation, some of the benefits and dangers associated with that.

He also goes into Luther's doctrine of a priesthood of all believers, how that's abused and misunderstood, but how it can also be helpful. And then on into objectivity and subjectivity and the great danger of subjectivism, how easily it can sneak its way into our teaching, even when we mean well.

And then the last section of this chapter, he talks about the teacher, how great it is that we can study Scripture alone in our own language or study the Bible with other believers, but it doesn't replace the need we have for the teacher and those called by God to teach.

They're both means of grace to the Christian.

All right, well, let's jump in. Luther, as you mentioned, his great contribution in the Reformation, there are a couple of them that Sproul points out. One is that he did translate the Scripture into the common language of the German people, and since we're not German, people reading German Bibles, we may not be aware that Luther's translation really became like the King James or the authorized version of Germany.

Really, a fantastic job and an immeasurable gift to the church that God used him to give. But another thing that Luther gave was the reviving of the biblical doctrine of what Sproul calls private interpretation of Scripture.

That is, that every believer, by the help of the Spirit and with the Scriptures in our hands, if we approach the Scripture correctly, we have not only the privilege, but the duty of studying and understanding the Bible for ourselves.

He gives the quote from Luther when he was called to the city of Worms to speak to the authorities, church and state authorities. He was being accused of heresy, and when he was asked to recant his writings, his famous reply was this, unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I cannot recant, for my conscience is held captive by the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. So really, you know, such a stirring, it's... Very strong. Yeah, such a great statement from a man whose life was on the line. We take those words seriously, and they're great words.

But while Luther was emphasizing that each man, each woman is bound to what Scripture says, and not just what the priest or the pope or the council or the confession or the commentary in front of you says the Scripture says.

That can be abused. Sure. So what is he not saying to us? Well, he's not saying it's a free-for-all.

He's not saying that we should just be careless with our interpretation of Scripture. You know, we could twist it to our own desires, our own needs. It's kind of the same as the Catholic Church having it in Latin and saying, hey, because it's in Latin, we can read it and you can't, and we're responsible alone for its interpretation.

He's not saying those things.

Another thing he's not saying is that, and you mentioned this in the introduction, he's not saying that because we have the privilege and responsibility of interpreting Scripture for ourselves, he's not saying that there is no place for teachers, living teachers, the pastor that gets up in the pulpit on Sunday or, you know, the small group leader, but also teachers that once were living teachers, but now all we have is, you know, what we have is their books.

And it doesn't just have to be an individual, you know, we say, well, I read John Owen on such and such, I read this person, but it can be groups of believers who came together and carefully crafted a catechism or a confession.

It's not saying there's no need for those. In fact, I think we could say that it is unbiblical to say that the only thing we need as a Christian is the Bible. But Will, how could you defend that statement if you agree with it?

If someone says, all I need is the Bible, and could you help them to see that the Bible itself doesn't teach that?

Yeah, the Bible tells us that we are given more than the Bible for our teaching, and that expresses itself. It's the work of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ to give us great teachers, and those great teachers have come together and give us the ancient writings, the confessions, you know, the counsels, those things.

When they're coming alongside the Bible and they're in agreement with Scripture, they're good. When we see that those things are not in agreement with Scripture, they're bad. And I think we also have to make sure that we don't lean on them instead of Scripture.

You know, they're not supposed to supplant Scripture.

Yeah, and I think that third one is the difficult one. It's one thing to read a book and we compare it with Scripture and we say, this does not match. But it's another thing when the very benefit we receive from God giving teachers throughout the ages is so sweet to us, so helpful, we can kind of become enamored with a teacher or a church tradition, you know, a group of teachers, and like you said, we don't realize that they've become our Bible now.

Yeah, the Bible is the supreme authority. It is wholly sufficient for all those things. What we want to look at is the derived authority. You know, do these confessions or the writings of the great men of God that came before us, do they derive their authority from Scripture?

Or are they trying to usurp the authority of Scripture?

Yeah, that's a very important distinction, what you mentioned. The difference between a book having authority in itself and teachers or books from teachers having a derived authority from that book. That is an important category to have in our mind, you know, to be able to distinguish.

Sure.

You know, irregardless of the individual, if it's the private individual or the church or, you know, someone like the Pope, it doesn't give you the right to distort the Scripture. You know, private interpretation does not give us the right to distort the Scripture, no matter our educational or religious pedigree.

When Luther talked about the priesthood of all the believers, how does that apply to what we're talking about?

Well, every Christian has a role to perform in the total ministry of the church, and that's not that every Christian is isolated to themselves. It doesn't mean we don't need the church, and we don't need leaders, and we don't need, you know, creeds and confessions and things like that.

And we should never believe that God doesn't call men to spiritual leadership, because he absolutely does, and the Scripture tells us that. So I think it goes back to what we was talking about. We can't judge the validity of this doctrine by its abuse and misuse.

Right. You know, when we think about the responsibility to interpret the Scripture personally, that has been abused. You know, and since the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church could certainly, they had plenty of examples of, you know, the fragmentation of the church.

You know, how many Protestants are there? And, you know, if you look at it that way, you could say, well, were the Roman Catholic authorities correct?

Well, there was a valid concern about schism, and we've got to see it play out. But like Luther said, you know, even though it might lead to this free-for-all, this personal interpretation just kind of running wild, the freedom for an individual to be able to read Scripture in their own language, it was worth it.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's the abuse of what Luther was bringing to the forefront again. That was the problem, not the doctrine. So the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that we do have a part to play, I mean, that really just reinforces the seriousness of careful study of the Scripture.

If my life matters in the kingdom, and God has made me not just to be right with Him, but has made me to be a part of His body, of His church, and I have a part to play in that. I'm not free, as you mentioned, to isolate myself.

I'm my own priest, but nor am I free to just say, well, I have no part. I'm not the pastor. I'm not a missionary. Maybe I'm not even a Sunday school teacher, but you have a part, and your ability to do what the Lord would have you to do day by day, to be a living picture of Him, to speak on His behalf, to be used for His glory where you're at, that is greatly impacted by how carefully you approach Scripture.

Yeah, I think that'll lead us into the objectivism and subjectivism, because when we take those objective truths, there should be a response, and I think that's kind of what you were saying.

Yeah, so objectivity and subjectivity, both are parts of the Christian life, but what Sproul warns us against is what you've said, is subjectivism, this kind of rampant subjectivity. I think that if we keep some rules in mind, we'll be safe, and the first rule is this, that all passages have one meaning.

Yeah, one valid interpretation. Right, so we know what they say, and we are laboring to understand what they mean, and that means, what did they mean to the people that they were written to? What is that objective truth?

So whether John Snyder ever existed on planet Earth or not, this passage means that. It stands by itself in that sense. It's not affected by how we feel about it.

Yeah, context is extremely important.

Right, so in its original context, what did it mean? So that's the objective, unchanging truth, and our job is to labor to understand that. So that's the objective truth, but then the subjective application, taking that truth from the page, and by the help of God, finding how we bridge that truth to those people, all the way to my life today as a follower of Christ, how do those principles apply here?

And, you know, not leaving it just in concepts, where my brain is full of new truths, my heart is unaffected, my marriage is unaffected, you know, my work is unaffected. Well, we call that dead orthodoxy.

Yeah, it's, you know, what is the objective truth here, and how does it experientially relate to me, you know, as a follower of Christ? You know, how is that objective truth applied to my life? What it's not saying is, this is what it means to me, or, you know, this is my opinion, but it means something different to me.

I think those are dangerous things.

Yeah, so subjectivism is when you come to Scripture, and you are kind of the context for every passage, you know, and so you read it, and you say, wow, you know, this is the response I had in my emotions, or this is kind of the thought that came to my mind, and without noticing it, your response, emotional or even, you know, your opinion, that becomes more significant than what it actually said.

You know, the objective truth that's there, the one proper interpretation is kind of skipped, and you move immediately to, this is kind of what I feel when I read that, and that kind of, it's like you have a new Bible now, my feelings about that book.

Sure, we try to make ourselves the original subject, and by doing that, we distort it.

Right, so that's the first rule. A passage has one meaning, and then the second rule is a passage may have many applications. Sure. And that is where it is very appropriate to say, okay, now what about me?

What about my family? What about my church? You know, how do I apply this? So one way to safeguard ourselves is to remember two words, order and connectivity. Order, always the objective truth, what does the passage mean in its original context, must come first.

If ever we put the application first or my response to it first, then we have, in a sense, we've supplanted the Bible with our responses. It's not enough to say, well, now I understand what this passage actually means.

I've compared passages with passages. I've looked at the context. I've read some commentaries. I've looked at the original Hebrew and Greek, and I figured it out. Well, good. It's a good first step, but it can't stop there.

Objective truth understood must not only be first order, but it must be connected to real application, or else we don't have that full picture of the Christian's response to the Scripture.

If those truths aren't applied to our lives, then the Scripture hasn't done its job, and we only increase in just knowledge and pride.

Another way to say this is that exegesis is what we're trying to do, not eisegesis. So, Greek words, exegesis means to draw out from the text. Eisegesis means we read into a text, and that's something that we're all prone to, no matter how long we've been Christians, whether you've been to seminary or not.

We read a text, and it will be tempting to kind of inject our thoughts into the text instead of recalibrating our thoughts by what is drawn from the text.

Sure, I think that's how we come up with a lot of new ideas. I'm reading a passage of Scripture, and I come to a conclusion that no one in the last 2 ,000 years of church history has came up with. I'm probably wrong.

Yeah, yeah. You would really need to be able to defend that by Scripture, and I doubt that any new idea could ever be defended as true. But there are truths that have been forgotten or neglected, and the Protestant Reformation is a picture of that.

Luther wasn't saying, actually, guys, I'm the first one to see this. In his arguments, he went to Scripture, but then he affirmed or confirmed or illustrated that this was scriptural by going back to early church fathers and saying, I'm not the first one to say this.

Others have seen this in Scripture. So our conscience is held captive to Scripture, but that means there is a terrifying weightiness about how we approach the Bible. We do not want to just read it quickly, take just the surface feelings we have, and think, well, that's what that's talking about.

There are basic rules for approaching an ancient text. How do I read this book? How do I understand what it's saying?

Well, we interpret Scripture for Scripture, and that's the good hermeneutics.

Right, and that's what we're coming to in the coming weeks. What are the basic rules or the hermeneutics? What are the principles for interpreting the Bible? And the question is, do we see that being used by the men in the Bible, Paul and the other writers who are saying, this is what the psalmist was talking about?

Well, how did you come up with that? We say, well, God guided them. Well, yes, but are there, in the way that we see the New Testament writers commenting on the Old Testament, are there patterns there that we can see?

These are solid biblical principles for interpreting biblical passages, and I think that we'll see that Sproul will be a good guide as we work through those.

Sure. I talked a little bit earlier about prosperity gospel. Those are great examples of, unfortunately, the twisting of Scripture to come up with a particular point. And I think when we see those things, and we also think about our own selves as growing Christians and the eagerness to share Scripture with one another, it is terrifying, like you said, how easily we can be well-meaning, but we can share the wrong idea or the wrong interpretation of Scripture.

And by doing that, we're false teachers.

Yeah, I don't think any of us would ever read the Old Testament and the New Testament and see the false prophet of the Old Testament and the false teacher that Paul warns against in the New. None of us would read that in our daily Bible readings and think, you know, that's me.

But it could be us if we are careless. Sure. We don't want to be that, but that doesn't mean we won't be that. We want to make sure that in all the counsel we give people, the advice we give, you know, someone gives us a call, a friend is having a hard time in their marriage, and it's so easy just to give kind of homespun wisdom with a few Bible phrases attached, but what if that's not what God would have us say?

And what if we're ignorant of that because we didn't study? We were talking earlier, Will, about the fact that gathering real knowledge, the church as a whole, you know, through the centuries and the individual Christian or the local church, gathering clear teaching from Scripture, a pool of teaching is so valuable, but ignorance is no friend to the Christian.

So we want to make sure that we make the best use we can of the Scripture by approaching it in the most careful way. Well, the chapter is a wonderful chapter, Personal Bible Study and Private Interpretation is Sproul's title for this second chapter in his book, and it does point out that each Christian has the privilege and responsibility of interpreting Scripture correctly, their conscience is to be held to that Scripture, and that while God has given them a part in the body that is significant, they are, you know, we do believe in the priesthood of all believers, that doesn't mean they're isolated from the church and no longer need teachers.

And as we approach the Scripture, we want to be particularly careful to make sure that the objective truth, what did that mean to its original audience in their context, that one correct interpretation, that comes first, and it's always to be connected to practical application in the life of the believer.

And God has given us His Spirit who teaches and gives us a heart that wants to know and to do His will. Well, thanks for being here with us this week, Will. And before we go, we want to remind you that there is a giveaway, the Reformation Heritage Study Bible, with Dr. Beakey's notes at the end of each chapter that help with family worship, and so you can find more information about that in the description.