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2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” All Christians should affirm this of course, but the amount of scripture and our separation of culture, language and time from when it was written down means we do not need to do all the work of reading and interpreting ourselves, particularly if we are lay leaders and are not dedicating our life’s work to scriptural study.
Hermeneutics is how we read or interpret the bible. From the time of Martin Luther, protestants have largely held to the idea of sola scriptura. This literally means “scripture alone” and defines scripture alone is the highest and final authority on our theology. Unfortunately, as outlined in Appendix A, in recent generations this has too often become confused with solo scriptura or “scripture only” as the basis for our theology. This is the result of various groups simply rejecting the historical work done by anyone – even raging anti-Calvinists are largely not aware of the Arminian position or Pelagius’s work. They are simply “bible only” people. The problem with solo scriptura is that it is scripture unhinged from 2000+ years of study, the wisdom of our elders and church fathers, as reflected in creeds, confessions and councils which are subordinate to but not in conflict with scripture. In short, it leaves each believer with the huge task of processing and synthesizing some 757,439 (ESV) words of the (English) bible into useful and practical information. People are left with a document translated out of its original language and pulled from a solid understanding of the historical context. Without these helps, the modern western church seems to have ended up increasingly adopting extreme biblicism and proof-texting as normative. The individual’s freedom to read and absorb scripture is errantly contrasted with (rather than seen as cooperation with) the combined learning of 2000 years of the saints. In short, we can and should study for ourselves, but we should take advantage of our church, our elders, and those who have invested entire lifetimes to understand the scriptures better.
Creeds are formal statements of beliefs. The Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds are often cited as the minimum requirements for the label of Christian to be applied to a person or their beliefs. Those who reject these very short documents are often doing so simply because they need the freedom to include one or more beliefs that are fundamentally UN-Christian in their worldview. The creeds are focused on who we believe in (the Triune God).
Confessions are usually longer and go into more detail about what we believe.
Catechisms help us further outline our beliefs and doctrines, and why we believe them. Most all can be found with “proof texts” citing bible texts that underscore what is being said in them. The Westminster Standards, consisting of the Westminster Confession, shorter and longer catechisms took six years to write by the Westminster Divines. The divines were 121 clergymen, 30 laymen, plus a bunch of Scottish Presbyterians who were schooled in the original languages and the Reformers. In short, these were world-class experts in theology.
Today, it’s increasingly popular to simply believe what one thinks the bible might say about something. This leads to lots of people believing things that are partial truths: “The Devil Made me do it!” and “God helps those who help themselves” and “God won’t give you more than you can handle”. These are dangerous beliefs that unhinged from a real biblical education, people simply won’t realize aren’t really biblical. In essence, people can (and will) do all things through a verse taken out of context. Rejecting centuries of Christian scholarship should not be done lightly as Finney and others have done, and using their works to help mold our own understanding of the scriptures should be encouraged. Again, as a practical matter (outlined earlier in this paper) the average time spent reading anything by Americans is shorter than ever. We should gratefully acknowledge and leverage the Divines’ work to our own benefit, as well as to help summarize and teach the faith to new generations. These documents provide a much more balanced view than trying to simply reduce our faith to John 3:16 – which while it is 100% true, it is only a sliver of what God wants to say to us. ALL scripture from 2 Timothy 3:16 means all scripture, not just one scripture ripped from context. We are responsible for and should gratefully receive all of scripture, which is a much bigger task.
