The Bible and Truth: Biblicism and Evangelicals #4

Jesus said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).

The goal for every Christian should be to know and determine what the truth is. After all, we believe that all truth leads us to Jesus, who is Himself, the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). If we are called to live like Him and to become like Him, then knowing the truth is an important part of the journey.

NB: This is why we have named this ministry, “determinetruth.” It is not because we have determined the truth. It is because determining the truth is our goal.[1]

The problem is that this is not easy.

Protestantism asserts that the Bible is the primary, and to some extent the sole,[2] source for determining the truth.

The questions become: “how do we know what the Bible means?” and “how do we know that we are correct?”

These are the million-dollar questions: to which over the next several posts I will offer twenty dollars worth of thoughts. (you can make your contributions by following this link!)

The Holy Spirit and humility

Because the questions: how do we know what the Bible means?” and “how do we know that we are correct?” are not easily answered, I suggest that the role of the Holy Spirit must become central to the Christian life and the task of biblical interpretation.

After all, Jesus said, “He [the Holy Spirit] will teach you all things” (John 14:26).

Since everyone believes that the Holy Spirit is on their side, humility is also a vital component of biblical interpretation.

In other words, taking up our crosses and following Him applies to how we read and understand our Bibles.

Protestantism and biblical interpretation

One of the seminary courses I teach is biblical hermeneutics (i.e., the art and science of biblical interpretation: a fancy way of saying “how do we understand the Bible”).

Since Protestantism affirms that the Bible is the central, if not the sole, source of truth, the art and skill of biblical interpretation (aka “hermeneutics”) plays a primary role.

When the Bible confronts our lifestyle

The process of biblical interpretation is fraught with difficulties. Chief among them is the fact that most of the time we are not very interested in changing our lives.

We are comfortable. We have things under control.

What, then, do we do when a proper understanding of the Bible suggests that we are wrong on something—either in our beliefs and/or our ethics?

Well, instead of acknowledging the text and changing our lives to conform to it, we resort to other options

We ignore it. And believe it or not, we are good at this.

We deny it. This is perhaps our number one go-to option.

We are actually much better at this than you might think. One of the ways we accomplish this is to reject the source.

After all, there is no need to believe in something when the presenter is obviously a _________ (fill in the blank with whatever label is needed to justify our dismissing of the presentation: here are some common examples used by evangelicals—warning these are only examples and should not be used except by a professional.

• “Liberal”: we might as well as pull out the big guns at the beginning. This is perhaps the number one weapon of conservative evangelicals. We use this label when we are most desperate. Clearly, someone who is a “liberal” is either, godless, perverted, ignorant, anti-everything-that-is-right-in-this-world, stupid, blind, selfish, lazy, and/or a promoter of lies. You might want to reserve this label for the most extreme needs—though many conservatives fire this weapon first just to let everyone know that this battle will not last long.
• “Socialist/communist”: take your pick. They are essentially interchangeable among evangelicals. And they are equally lethal. Obviously, communists are all godless, so they do not need to be listened to. And socialists are lazy and want free handouts. Btw there is no reason to fuss about the early church living a sort of communist-style life in the early chapters of Acts. Nor do we need to worry about Jesus’ command, “Go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me (Mark 10:21). After all, that is not what He meant—well maybe not.
• “Atheist”: this label is similar to “godless.” It means that nothing they say can be trusted because they do not have God as their starting point. Consequently, all their arguments are wrong. Thus, when they say that “2 + 2 = 4” they just got lucky.
• I think you get the idea.

Now, if you are reading this and thinking, “those stupid conservative, narrow-minded, evangelicals, I hate it when they ignore the plain meaning of the Bible in order to justify their hate-filled beliefs,” then you might have missed the point.

The fact is that we all have built-in means by which we naturally tend to reject views that contradict our own:

Our assumptions on the meaning of the Bible

Another difficulty when it comes to understanding the Bible is that we all bring to the table a prior set of assumptions that affect how we read the Bible. Note: this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is, after all, impossible to not have presuppositions.

Now we would all like to believe that we come to the Bible with open hearts and minds and with the intent to know exactly what the Bible means. But if we are honest, we seldom, if ever, live up to this ideal.

And, though we all agree that it would be wrong to have false assumptions, the problem is that we seldom believe that our assumptions are wrong.

To be continued

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[1] In one sense, I would note that our primary objective here is to determine “theological” truths. At the same time, I would contend that we are after all truth. We might note that mathematical truths, for example, have a beauty to them that point to the intelligence of the creator.

[2] In reality, no one affirms that the Bible is our only source of truth. After all, the Bible does not say that 2 + 2 = 4.