JY: Welcome to GearTalk. A podcast on biblical theology. Today, Tom and Jason outline four foundational presuppositions that should guide our approach to the Scriptures. This is the first part of a three-part series on biblical interpretation.

JD: Hi friends, this is Jason and we welcome you back. We are recording in a different venue today and so it may not sound quite the same as we usually have it, but hopefully it’s going to work. We have in mind three podcasts in a row focused on biblical interpretation, specifically on the task of interpreting Scripture. So two words that we often hear when it comes to biblical interpretation are exegesis and theology. So we want to start there. Tom, define for us these two terms, exegesis and theology, and clarify how they relate.

TK: So exegesis, which comes from a Greek noun, the idea here is discovering what the biblical authors intended their texts to mean. So it’s not saying what I want it to mean, what I would like it to mean, what I think it means to me. It would be what the biblical authors intended their texts to mean, so I’m discovering something that’s actually there.

JD: So the text isn’t producing its meaning, it’s really conveying the meaning that the authors had at the beginning.

TK: Right. And theology really is a study of God. And there’s different types of theology. We’ve actually talked about them on previous podcasts. So you can have a biblical theology. So how God’s Word, I think you would say, progresses, integrates and climaxes in Christ.

JD: Yes, exactly.

TK: Systematic theology—if we want to systematize teachings in the Bible about certain theological topics. So, for instance, what does the Bible teach about angels? What does the Bible teach about hell? That sort of thing.

JD: And systematic theology is really—we try to capture that in statements of faith that our churches might have to help guide—this is where we stand on what the Scriptures are and who God is and what was the work of Jesus. And so it takes our understanding of Scripture and really puts it into topics.

TK: And for us, this is actually for every believer. This is really important and you can go to our website handstotheplow.org and see our statement of faith. That would be an example of systematic theology being played out. And we actually want people to do it because we want you to see the core convictions we have behind the things we’re producing.

JD: Right. Third type of theology?

TK: And then finally, there’s practical theology. So what is my response? The Christian’s response to the Bible’s truths. What do we do with it?

JD: So what does it mean—here we’re really dealing with things like ethics, and we’re dealing with our daily walk of faith, so faith and practice. And so now that we know who God is and we understand where we fit in his story, how then shall we live? That’s really what’s at stake with practical theology.

TK: Yes. What do we do? And we approached the text—and this is this first podcast today—with presuppositions in mind. So things we’re already thinking about the text as we approach it. We obviously weren’t born with these presuppositions, they come from somewhere, but we’re saying for a believer, these are foundational presuppositions we should have, and we have four of them. We’re going to outline today that we’re saying this is what it looks like for a healthy believer going through the interpretive task, dealing with God’s Word, these are four presuppositions that really mark a solid beginning to studying God’s Word.

JD: Yes, that’s right.

TK: So where would you start, Jason? What’s presupposition number one, would you say?

JD: Well, in contrast to—believe it or not—much of the world, the first presupposition is that this book that we hold in front of us, this Scripture, is indeed God’s Word. It’s not like any other book on the planet, because in it God has disclosed himself and his will in a way that we can understand. The Bible is called special revelation as opposed to general revelation. Romans 1 tells us when we look at creation, we encounter God. His glory is everywhere.

TK: So when I see this—when I see the stars or something like that, that’s general revelation.

JD: That’s right. And that’s telling us something about God. But it’s not enough information to let us enjoy a relationship with him, to allow our sin problem to get overcome, we need more, and that’s what the Bible is. And our first presupposition is that biblical interpretation really necessitates that we view Scripture as God’s Word. It’s God-breathed, 2 Timothy 3:16. Think about how the psalmist talks about it—the Words of the Lord are pure, his law is true, every one of his righteous rules endures forever, his commandments are right. This is what the Bible is.

Historically, and we’ve addressed this a little bit on a previous podcast, historically the very fact that it’s God’s Word has carried with it implications regarding its authority and its accuracy. And there’s two key words I think that are important for us to deal with—one is infallibility and the other is inerrancy. Tom, could you define for us what we mean by Scripture being infallible?

TK: I think infallible—a good way to say it, and you can even think of even a guide you would have somewhere, like if you were in the mountains you’re trying to get somewhere. And you’re wondering how trustworthy is this person? Well, infallibility means the Bible is a sure and safe guide. We don’t wonder whether it’s going to lead us into good pastures and the places we should go. It is always sure, always safe.

JD: That’s right.

TK: And then inerrant is saying the Bible is true and it’s trustworthy. And this actually demands a little bit of explanation. We’ve talked about it on previous podcasts. But inerrancy is saying in everything that it intends to say, it is absolutely 100% true and trustworthy. It does give permission for the Bible, though, to speak in ways that we speak. So we’ve talked about it before—we talk about the sun and we say that the sun rises, and that’s not scientifically accurate language in one sense. But humanly it’s very accurate language. And the Bible has permission to speak like that.

JD: Right. So infallibility is dealing with the sureness and safeness of Scripture as a guide with respect to faith and practice, with respect to doctrine and ethics. What the Bible teaches, it is always right and it will lead us in the right way. Inerrancy—that’s a word dealing with facts, issues of history and chronology and geography, science and the like, where the Bible speaks. It does so accurately because it’s God’s Word, and God has no errors. God is always trustworthy.

TK: he cannot lie. We hear it, we read in Titus.

JD: Amen. And so that’s our very foundational first presupposition—that when we approach the Bible, we’re approaching it as unlike any other book. The Bible is God’s Word, and I think only if we approach Scripture that way do we have hope of encountering, understanding what God intended in that book. We need to know its nature and approach it with a proper humility, a proper respect.

TK: I think this for me is really a freeing thought too—that thought of I am not approaching the text having to wonder whether it’s true or whether it’s good. When I come to it, I might not understand what it means, but as far as what it is at its core, I don’t have to wonder, is this word good? Is it from God? That has already been answered for me.

JD: That’s right. And so everything I’m approaching, if I’m struggling with interpretation—like say connecting two different passages that don’t seem to line up—automatically I know the problem is not with the Bible. The problem is with me.

TK: Right.

JD: I don’t understand it enough and so I need to have a proper disposition that approaches Scripture with humility and is willing to wrestle hard enough, dependently enough in order to arrive at the right answers. But we believe that God is going to be consistent in what he proclaims and that there’s going to be a unity to the whole of Scripture because of its nature. It is God’s Word and that brings with it implications.

TK: Right. So second presupposition is biblical interpretation assumes that Scripture’s truths are knowable. And the idea is this—if God has spoken, he wanted people to be able to hear and to understand what he said. That’s why when we talked earlier about general revelation, we’re talking about special revelation. There’s a reason he gave us this special Word. It’s so that we might be able to know.

JD: That’s right. It’s amazing how many times the Bible either commands us to know something or assumes that we know something. It implies that truth is graspable, that communication works, that God can actually share something with purpose, and we can receive it as he intended.

I think about Peter’s words in 2 Peter 3, when he said—I recognize when you start reading Paul’s letters, there are some things in them that are just hard to understand. I was actually in dialogue with a fellow scholar professor who was arguing that we can’t—we should not be dogmatic about what Scripture says because there’s too many questions. What Peter said—and I brought this up—I said, “What I hear you saying is potentially what Peter was saying. I understand that Paul is difficult at points to really grasp.” And he said “Yes, yes, that’s exactly it.” But I said, “Do you know what he says next?” And he just paused and I said, “What Peter says is that the ignorant and unstable twist Paul’s words to their own destruction as they do the other Scriptures.” Even though things are hard to understand, Peter believed that Paul’s words were understandable, and it’s the ignorant and the unstable that twist them to their own destruction.

So we need to do what Paul commanded Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:7—“Think over what I have said to you and God will give you understanding in all things.” There are many preachers in certain circles that don’t think studying the Bible is important because they have the Spirit and the Spirit’s going to lead them. Paul says, “Think over what I have said and God will give you understanding.” God’s granting understanding does not mean don’t think. The two work hand in hand as we dependently enter into interpreting Scripture. We believe that God is going to clarify for us what he intends, but often it comes through rigorous thinking.

TK: And we’re not saying that the Holy Spirit isn’t involved with that process.

JD: That’s right, he gave us the book, and then he guides us in the interpretation of the book.

TK: Right. I think sometimes in certain books that we would put in a category of “Well that’s a little more difficult”—Revelation would be an example, it’s a kind of literature a lot of us are certainly not familiar with on an everyday basis—and people will almost put it in a category of “Well, that’s impossible to understand, so I’m not even going to think about it.” But what we’re saying in this presupposition is that all of God’s Word is knowable, and that would include books like Revelation or books like Ecclesiastes. God put it there so that we might know it, and the church might benefit from it. So we should be careful not making jokes about certain books like, “Well, nobody knows what that means.” That actually is belittling something that God did and expects us to learn about.

JD: Now when we’re saying this, we’re not saying that all of Scripture is equally clear. What we’re declaring is that the Bible is sufficiently clear. The scholar Wayne Grudem, who’s a friend of mine, he said the Bible itself testifies that we can understand it. But then he says, all these things—listen, we can understand the Bible, but not all at once, not without effort, not without ordinary means. By that, he means the process of study, the process of meditation. Not without the reader’s willingness to obey it—we’re not going to understand it if we don’t have a heart to surrender to what it says. Not without the help of the Holy Spirit, not without human misunderstanding—meaning none of us should claim we’ve got it all down. And then the final point, he says never completely. We can understand the Bible, but never completely because there’s always more of God to know.

TK: That’s really good. I think I would add—and I’m sure he would in his idea there—but that idea of the community being part of interpretation, that so much of Scripture is presuming you are part of a people and you are using this text together.

JD: Yeah, that’s good. God has made every member of the body priests. And we’re all working together to gain clarity. It doesn’t mean there aren’t certain individuals who are more equipped than others, or who are giving their whole selves because God has gifted them as teachers. And yet none of us should think I’m supposed to do this all on my own. We need the help of others, others throughout church history and others in our own communities of faith.

TK: Right.

JD: And think about the Bereans in the book of Acts. Paul commends them because they didn’t just listen to what Paul said, they evaluated what Paul said and they evaluated it up against the Scriptures. So even ministers who are teaching week by week need to maintain a humility and celebrate that people would have questions and come to you. And boy, I think how many times I’ve learned from my students or from those in the pews that have been listening to me preach because they’ve come up and given me questions. And I thought, “Oh, I didn’t think about it that way before” and then all of a sudden I grow because God had shown them something that he hadn’t shown me yet, and he wanted to use them to get me there.

TK: Right, right. Agreed. So we’ve gone through two—number one, biblical interpretation necessitates we view Scripture as God’s Word and #2 was it assumes Scripture’s truths are knowable. Number three, presupposition—biblical interpretation requires that we respond and we respond appropriately. This is really big because it means that the words on a page are not an end in themselves, something is supposed to happen in my life.

JD: Yes. I think about Ezra 7:10. It’s for so long, many years, been a guiding verse for me in my ministry. Verse 9 says the hand of the Lord was upon Ezra. Then verse 10 says, “because Ezra set his heart to study and to practice the Torah of Yahweh—that is the law of God—and to teach both statute and rule in Israel.” Study the Word, practice the Word, teach the Word. What Jesus calls hypocrites are those who study and teach without having practiced, and God wants us to be those who approach Scripture with a disposition of “I’m ready to respond to you, God.”

I mean what it really is, is here we are hovering over our study tables and wanting to know what God says, and then what we find is that our hearts should be underneath the Word, not over the Word, not bringing our own thoughts to it, but ready to humble ourselves and receive its guidance and see our lives changed.

I think about the acronym, which one of my former pastors taught me. It just grows out of the first word in four different verses from the Psalms. Psalm 119:36: “Incline our hearts to your testimonies and not to selfish gain.” Psalm 119:18: “Open our eyes that we may behold wondrous things from your law.” Psalm 86:11: “Unite our hearts to fear your name.” And Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” I-O-U-S. That’s a prayer that I have prayed many times as I open up the Bible morning after morning: “Incline my heart, Open my eyes, Unite my heart, Satisfy me with your steadfast love. IOUS. It’s the disposition we want to bring to Scripture. I am ready to respond to you, God. I’m ready to receive.”

And that response comes in two forms. After we’ve studied, which I would break down as observing carefully and understanding rightly and evaluating fairly, we want to practice. Study, practice—and that practicing includes two parts. It includes feeling appropriately about what we have observed and understood and evaluated, feeling rightly. God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases. A king’s heart is like water in his hand. “Fear—work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it’s God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” And I sit here and I hear that, and I say, “Oh my, God, you are great. I am small. Please work in me to will and to work what you please. Guide my heart.” And I have that disposition. I want to feel appropriately so that then I can act wisely. And only then am I ready to teach in helpful ways—articulately, boldly. So that sense that what we’re talking about here is that those elements of feeling appropriately and applying wisely, that’s what the practice part of Ezra’s resolve is.

TK: And if you take that part out, if you—and we all see this in different parts of life—but if you take out the “that person doesn’t do what they read,” none of us respond well to that in anything we see where we say that that person ultimately betrays they don’t believe what they’re reading, because if they did, they would do it.

I just flipped open to Revelation 1 because we brought it up just a little bit ago about understanding a text. And so much of Revelation falls into that category for a lot of people of, “Oh, these are facts, and maybe they’ll say about the future or whatever.” But John says something interesting at the beginning. He says in verse 3, “Blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it.” And it’s that second part—it’s not just hearing, it’s something in Revelation, but all of God’s Word, that the blessing rests on those who keep it. And even in a book like that, where you’re wrestling saying “I don’t know what this word means,” but God, you intend me to know it. I believe I can know it because there’s something here you want me to be keeping. And obviously that demands all of what we’ve been talking about. But apart from that, the keeping part, the whole interpretive process is incomplete because it was intended to be going there. So Jason, what’s number four?

JD: Yeah, after recognizing that biblical interpretation is going to require that we respond appropriately, we need to recognize that it culminates in a life that is dependent on God. Indeed, the application will only be possible through dependence on God. So biblical interpretation that culminates in application demands God-dependence.

This is Paul saying to Timothy, “Think over what I have said to you and God will give you understanding in all things.” Or Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “I worked harder than all of them. Yet it was not I, but the grace of God that was in me.” “Work out your salvation,” Philippians 2:12 and 13, “Work out your salvation with fear. Work out your salvation with trembling.” Why Paul? Why should I be fearing? “For it’s God who works in you to will and to work for his good pleasure.” My will and my working are fully dependent on God creating a heart to do that.

So I’m saying biblical interpretation that works its way out in proper living for God needs to be a type of living that brings him glory rather than takes glory away from him. And that will only come through dependence.

TK: Would you say that if I’m reading the text in such a way that I’m not feeling a need for any help or God-dependence or even community, that I’m ending up in the wrong spot? And I’ve read it wrongly—like if I read it and I end up with a spot of, “I can do this by myself,” basically that thought—you’d say I didn’t hear it right, then.

JD: Yeah, I think so. I think of 1 Corinthians 2:14 where Paul says “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. Indeed, he’s not able to understand them because”—and here’s the kicker, here’s what we’re talking about—“they are spiritually discerned.” Without the help of the Spirit, we won’t understand the Word. When he says to understand it, I think he means without the Spirit, we’re not going to embrace it or affirm it or align with it. We’re not going to delight in it. We’re not going to be able to apply it.

I think about how Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3 that a veil of hardness was over the eyes of most of his Jewish contemporaries, and that only through Christ is that veil taken away so that they could see and hear as God intended.

TK: That’s good. I think the passage we’re just in that I was talking about—that Revelation begins with “Blessed are those who hear” and the whole context is in a community—“and who keep this.” And then you start reading things in the book and saying, how are we going to keep this? Letters to churches where church discipline needs to take place. Oh, God, please help us do this. Help us be strong. It is putting you in a spot where you realize I am not going to make it, God, if you don’t step in and help me. So a desperation, but a confident desperation comes in our prayers of “You’ve given us your Word. You’ve given us your Spirit, but Father, you have to help us do this.”

JD: One of my former pastors said, “God’s grace does not make my working unnecessary. God’s grace makes my work possible.”

TK: Right, right.

JD: And I think about the prayer—I mean it’s a prayer to me. Peter commands it, 1 Peter 4:11, “Let him who speaks speak as if speaking the very oracles of God.” If that doesn’t by itself just make a preacher tremble on Sunday morning and tremble in their study—“Oh God, when I open my mouth, I want to speak as if speaking the very oracles of God, not my own words. Your own words. Your words. I want to be able to speak in a way that the people can see what I’m saying in your book and have it change their lives.” So “Let him who speaks speak as if speaking the very oracles of God.” And then it says, “Let him who serves serve in the strength that God supplies so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” To serve in the strength he supplies—to have that sense of dependence.

I remember being struck—it was a conference and the topic of the conference was on prayer, and my wife asked me the night before, “Are you excited to go to the conference?” And I said, “Well, the topic isn’t, you know, Christ and the Old Testament or something. But yeah, I’m excited” and I went. And the very first message—the first words out of the preacher’s mouth—“The level to which prayer is important to you is the level to which depending on God is important to you.” And God used that single statement, the first words out of this preacher’s mouth, to sear me. And I dropped to my knees and I just began to cry, literally cry with tears in my eyes and ask God to forgive me. Make me a dependent man. And God help me treasure prayer, because at its core it’s expressing “I need you to disclose your Word to me. I can’t change the hearts of my people as I enter into this process of biblical interpretation and biblical proclamation. I need to do it with your help. This is your Word. By your Spirit that disclosed it in the beginning, now work in my heart and prepare me. Ready me. Put me underneath your book and change my life.” That’s the countenance that I need to have. And there’s been times in my ministry where it hasn’t been there. And God help me, God keep us faithful.

So presupposition one: Biblical interpretation necessitates that we view Scripture as God’s Word. Number two: Biblical interpretation assumes that Scripture’s truths are knowable. Presupposition 3: Biblical interpretation requires that we respond appropriately. And #4: Biblical interpretation that culminates in application demands God-dependence. We’ve got more to say on the interpretive task. We’re going to pick it up on our next podcast. Any final comments, Tom?

TK: I would like these things to mark my life. That’s my final comment.

JD: Amen. Brothers and sisters, thanks for listening. See you later.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstotheplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.