A Problem With Bible Reading

A Protestant, evangelical hermeneutic approaches reading and studying the Bible by letting Scripture interpret Scripture.

Years ago, pastor Bryan Lorrits publicly rebuked a book by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. The book is called Black and Tan. In the book Wilson reflects on slavery, race, and culture in America. I dug into the book myself. Like many others, I found it problematic (to put it kindly), and I wrote a review. I observed a thread needled through Wilson’s flawed volume: the outsized influence of Wilson's postmillennial eschatology. Eschatology is the Bible’s teaching about the “end” or “last” times. Postmillennial eschatology generally teaches that the gospel will spread through the world, Christianize the world, and thus usher in a golden age of Christ's reign on earth. Postmillennialism was more prevalent when it seemed that Christianity and the gospel was quickly and massively growing in influence. Many, like American Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), argued that the gospel would spread into the nations, the world would be fully Christianized, and the golden age would arrive. Postmillennialism, though, stumbled out of popularity with the many atrocities of the twentieth century. Many started to believe that the world wouldn’t just march to Zion, and to notice that the Bible doesn’t seem to promise anything of the sort.

Back to Wilson. Wilson's problematic arguments about slavery, the Civil War, and American culture were (are) a direct consequence of his postmillennial theology. "The gospel will win out, so we can take it slowly and let things get better without war," is the basic gist of the book. Wilson argued that the Civil War was more evil than the “run of the mill” evil of chattel slavery. Obviously, I disagree, strongly. My point, though, isn’t about Wilson or postmillenialism (although I would advise you stay away from both). The point is that Wilson illustrates a perennial problem for Christians. We are ever in danger of allowing favored doctrines, Scriptures, or themes to influence our theology in illegitimate or disproportionate ways. For Wilson, the problem is that eschatology is famously (one of) the least certain of the major Christian doctrines. When it starts controlling your beliefs about ethics and other theological themes, you're skating where the ice is too thin to hold you.

I’ve been thinking about this as I have been studying (i.e., getting beat up by) the 70 weeks of Daniel 9:24-27.

Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city — to bring the rebellion to an end, to put a stop to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy place. Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until an Anointed One, the ruler, will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be rebuilt with a plaza and a moat, but in difficult times. After those sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the coming ruler will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come with a flood, and until the end there will be war; desolations are decreed. He will make a firm covenant with many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and offering. And the abomination of desolation will be on a wing of the temple until the decreed destruction is poured out on the desolator.

Almost literally no two Christians read this small four-verse text the same way. I won’t give you my reading of it here, either. You can visit our church on Sunday for that, if you’re interested. Instead, I want to note how fascinating and troubling it is that folks end up letting their reading of these verses become a controlling factor in their eschatology specifically, and their theology generally. This is exactly the opposite of a Protestant, evangelical hermeneutic and doctrine of Scripture. Our doctrine is sola Scriptura, that Scripture alone is our authority and our Word from God. Our hermeneutic is our approach to reading and studying the Bible. A Protestant, evangelical hermeneutic approaches reading and studying the Bible by letting Scripture interpret Scripture.

Scripture Interprets Scripture

We believe that Scripture interprets Scripture. God is his own best interpreter. He knows what he means. So if read something that says “God is sovereign” in one place and “God is good” in another, we let these things interpret each other. God’s sovereignty is always good (never bad) and God’s goodness is always sovereign. We don’t need a pope or a priest to tell us this, because Scripture can interpret itself.

Riding the coattails of this core conviction is the conviction that more clear texts are the interpretive control over the less clear ones. Alistair Begg helpfully points this out in a sermon on Daniel 9. We don’t take Daniel’s confusing vision of weeks and years, write out a detailed chart of world history, and then wrap our theology around it. Instead, we look at the clear teaching of the Bible on the return of Christ, the way God will make a new heavens and new earth, and then we wrap our reading of the confusing passage around the clearer teaching.

Related to this is the way folks geek out and stir up around obscure or third-tier teachings. Eschatology is, again, a common one. Spiritual warfare can be another. So can a biblical doctrine of vocation. And on and on. Such excitement and emphasis ends up sketching a caricature of the full teaching of the Bible. A caricature takes the real look of a thing and distorts one aspect of it until it looks funny or cartoonish. When you inflate something that the Bible itself doesn’t, it makes the holy Word of God look like a carnival sketch. Again, with Daniel's 70 weeks, folks can get so deep into the weeds or so geeked about the details that they get bored by the main point: the gospel and the kingdom!

This connects to current debates in evangelical and Southern Baptist networks about the sufficiency of Scripture in faith, life, and the church. Too often, those banging the drum for the sufficiency of Scripture invert its actual practice by letting unclear or debated texts control the theological discussion. Or by letting less central doctrines control the theological discussion. Or by getting excited about second- or third-level things rather than the main things. Or by _________.

Here we should remember, again, what Begg says on Daniel's 70 weeks: the Bible is inerrant but the preaching of it is not. A key difference between evangelical theology and fundamentalist theology can distill into this: evangelicals (should) have humility about their understanding of second- and third-tier doctrinal issues. Fundamentalists, generally speaking, can tend to hold their interpretations with the authority of a papal decree. Don't get me wrong here. I’m all in and have staked my life on holding without apology or compromise the truth of the Bible, God, and his gospel. I will fight for it until I die, by mercy and grace of God. But I won’t fight and die for things that Jesus himself didn’t die for.

Think of it this way. If my home or family was under serious threat, I would defend them even if I had to die to do it. But I’m not going to challenge someone to a duel because their dog pooped on my lawn. No, I don’t appreciate a neighbor who lets their dog doo that without using one of those little baggies. But that’s not a battle to the death kind of issue. Too often, too many Christians are willing to go to war for dog’s mess on the lawn and ignore the thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. We can too easily focus on the third-level things and yawn about the eternal things.

I think it’s because we don’t know or remember how to rightly divide God’s Word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). I also think we’re far too easily bored with Jesus. We get bored of Jesus and his mission, so we find other things to get us excited. The Bible is clear about the main things, and those should be our focus and emphasis. To quote Begg one last time, “The main things are the plain things.” Let’s allow them to be enough for us, and let’s read the Bible rightly.