Handling Aright the Word of Truth

Editor: Paul Earnhart

THOSE DISENCHANTED with the lack of “progress” in the churches have written much in recent years about the need for a new approach to the Bible if the church is to survive. Our present approach is said to be the product of eighteenth century Enlightenment thinking and in great need of revision. Whether that is true or not is a question we propose to deal with in this issue of the magazine. But what is absolutely true going in is that those who propose this “new hermeneutic” are on record as offering no real assurance that it is not just another example of what they oppose—a creature of late twentieth century culture rather than the way the Bible sees itself.

It is no news that men sometimes mishandle the Scripture in order to escape the will of God. It is a hoary old trick devised by the devil who showed his skill at quoting the Bible out of context when tempting Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:5–6). Afterward the Lord was confronted regularly by some of the devil’s understudies who had their own clever way with God’s revelation. The Pharisees thought nothing of stepping into God’s silence with their own traditions (Matthew 15:2) which at best polluted divine perfection with human nonsense and at worst invalidated divine commands (Mark 7:8–9). Of a similar ilk, the Sadducees, stubborn in their denial of the resurrection, kept raising far-fetched hypothetical questions while refusing to draw the necessary conclusions which the facts of Scripture demanded (Matthew 22:23–33).

The New Testament is full of apostolic warnings about the misuse of the sacred writings. “… there are some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:7). “For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God …” (2 Corinthians 2:17). “… but we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully …” (2 Corinthians 4:2).

The absolute bane of Bible interpretation in the post New Testament era was the “new wave” method of allegorizing Scripture, a purely subjective process of searching for what was believed to be the deeper message of the Bible wholly unrelated to its actual words. It was a device which Jewish exegetes borrowed from Greek philosophers who, embarrassed by Greek mythology, wanted to reject its true message while still claiming to believe it. Characteristic of much Jewish exegesis in the first century, it came at last, with some exceptions, to dominate Bible interpretation among nominal Christians all the way to and through the Middle Ages. It was in the Reformation that men like Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin and others, whatever their shortcomings, turned men back to a straightforward, common sense approach to the message of the Bible based on the actual grammatical meaning of the words. This put the Bible back in the hands of the average man.

The Bible is God’s word in human language and we are to understand it in just the same way we understand all human speech. The so-called rules of Bible interpretation are not rules at all, but descriptions of how men innately communicate with each other through language. It is how God made us. We do not need to be tutored in some exotic skill to understand the Bible, but merely to use the one which is native to us and which we use continually with great effectiveness. What we need is an attitude of mind which will cause us to listen to what God is saying and, listening, to understand and obey.

Paul, in his last epistle written with death hovering over him, urged Timothy to “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, NIV). Timothy’s task has become ours. It is our hope that the following articles will help us see that the common sense way we have been dealing with Scripture is not synthetic, but intrinsic to the very way that human language communicates. The cry for a “new hermeneutic” may be nothing more than the allegorizing of the Greeks, a way to “believe the Bible without having to accept its message. And beware of those who want to “modernize” the church with a more “up-to-date” approach to the Bible. The morning newspaper is certainly “up-to-date,” but we all know what happens to old newspapers. What we need is something unchanging, something eternal (Revelation 14:6).

Why Honest Hearts Can Under

Earnhart, P., ed. (1993). Christianity Magazine Theme Editorial: Handling Aright the Word of Truth. Christianity Magazine, 10(8), 11–12.