The General Sense
The General Sense
Thirdly, we must look for the general sense of Scripture. This is the principle of harmony.
From a human standpoint the Bible is a symposium with a wide assortment of contributors. From the divine standpoint, however, the whole Bible emanates from one mind. It is the Word of God expressing the mind of God, and so possesses an organic unity. For this reason we must approach Scripture with the confidence both that God has spoken and that, in speaking, he has not contradicted himself.
Sir Charles Odgers, in the book mentioned earlier, gives as his seventh rule for interpreting legal documents “the deed is to be construed as a whole.” He goes on:
The deed must be read and interpreted as a whole in order to extract the meaning of any particular expression Every part of the deed ought to be compared with the other and one entire sense ought to be made thereof … Every part of it may be brought into action in order to collect from the whole one uniform and consistent sense, if that may be done The words of each clause should be so interpreted as to bring them into harmony with the other provisions of the deed if that interpretation does no violence to the meaning of which they are naturally susceptible.12
As with legal documents, so with the biblical text; we should seek to resolve apparent discrepancies and interpret Scripture as one harmonious whole. This will lead us to interpret Scripture by Scripture, especially what is obscure by what is plain, and never so to “expound one place of Scripture that it be repugnant to another.”13
This was John Knox’s argument with Mary Queen of Scots. In a private debate with her in Edinburgh in 1561 he asserted that the Church of Rome (which she said she would defend as the true Church of God) had declined from the purity of religion taught by the apostles. The Queen herself, he added, possessed little right knowledge, since she had heard no teachers but those allowed by the Pope and his Cardinals. At this the Queen said:
Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and they in another; whom shall I believe, and who shall judge?
John Knox replied:
Believe God, that plainly speaketh in his Word: and further than the Word teacheth you, ye shall neither believe the one nor the other. The word of God is plain in itself; and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, which is never contrarious to himself, explains the same more clearly in other places.14
We may say, therefore, that every text of Scripture has a double context, historical and scriptural. Its context in history is the situation in which it was written. Its context in Scripture is the place where it is found. So each text must be understood against both its historical and its scriptural background. These are our second and third principles of interpretation respectively, the principles of history and harmony.
Further, the scriptural context of every text is both immediate (the paragraph, chapter and book in which it is embedded) and distant (the total biblical revelation).
The immediate context is the more obvious. To wrench a text from its context is an inexcusable blunder, and many horrific tales are told of preachers who have done it. In his instruction on the local church’s responsibility to discipline an impenitent offender, Jesus said: “If he refuses to hear the church, let him be to you as a Gentile”—that is, let him be excommunicated (Matt. 18:17 AV). Now during the Tractarian movement which sought to restore the Church of England’s “Catholic” authority, its followers preached so often on the three words of this verse “hear the church” that they provoked Archbishop Whately to retort with a sermon on the equally truncated text “if he refuses to hear the church, let him”!
Perhaps this kind of trickery, which exploits a combination of words without any respect for their true contextual meaning, is so outrageous as to be comparatively rare. Yet I was myself greatly disturbed that the World Council of Churches (which ought to have known better) should take as the text for their Fourth Assembly at Uppsala in 1968 God’s great words in Revelation 21:5 (RSV), “Behold, I make all things new,” where the sentence applies to what he is going to do in the end when he makes a new heaven and a new earth, and should then proceed without any conceivable justification to apply it to the revolutionary political and social movements of today.
It is in some ways even more important that we should learn to see the Bible as a whole, and to read each text in the light of all. Let me give some examples of what I mean.
I promised in chapter 3 that I would say something more about the early chapters of Genesis. Perhaps these chapters are specially susceptible to misunderstanding whenever they are isolated from the rest of Scripture. My own position is to accept the historicity of Adam and Eve, but to remain agnostic about some details of the story like the precise nature of the tree of life and of the serpent. This is not to be arbitrary or inconsistent, however, for I have biblical reasons for both. That Adam and Eve were literal people seems clear from Romans 5:12–21, where Paul draws a deliberate contrast between the disobedience of Adam through which sin and death entered the world and the obedience of Christ who secured salvation and life. The analogy is meaningless if Adam’s act of disobedience was not an event as historical as Christ’s act of obedience. But as for the serpent and the tree of life, they both reappear in the Book of Revelation, where they are clearly symbolical, the serpent representing Satan and the tree eternal life. So I have a biblical (New Testament) reason for believing that Adam and Eve were historical, and an equally biblical reason for supposing that the serpent and the trees in the story may in some sense be meant to be figurative.
Some readers, uneasy about the notion that Genesis 3 may contain a figurative element, will declare my suggestion ill-advised on at least two counts. First, to question the literal nature of the serpent and the trees in Genesis on the ground of their symbolic appearance in Revelation is to confuse two quite distinct literary genres, they say, Genesis being narrative and Revelation apocalyptic. Secondly, it opens the door too wide: shall we not now be able to argue that all Old Testament references to snakes and trees are figurative, and even references to Jerusalem too since it reappears in the Revelation as a symbol? But no, my argument cannot be so easily dismissed. The Jerusalem of the Old Testament is obviously a literal city, and the many other Old Testament allusions to snakes and trees are also obviously literal. None of us has any difficulty with them. In Genesis 2 and 3, however, the text itself raises question in every reader’s mind. The serpent is certainly no ordinary snake, since it not only talked but actually presumed to deceive Adam and Eve by contradicting God’s Word and denigrating his goodness. As for the trees, although all other Old Testament trees are readily recognizable (oak, cedar, sycamore, balsam, olive, etc.), which of us has ever had in our woods or orchards a “tree of life” or a “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”? So what were they? Zoology cannot identify the snake, nor dendrology the trees. It is when these puzzled questions rise in our minds—about this specific snake and those specific trees—that the further reference to them in the Revelation comes helpfully to our aid.
Let me give another example of the need to let Scripture interpret Scripture. When I was a Cambridge undergraduate, I can remember being rather perplexed by the verse which says that the ten commandments were written on stone tablets by the finger of God (Exod. 31:18; Deut. 9:10). Was I required to believe this literally? Did a divine finger really appear and somehow inscribe Hebrew letters on stone? Certainly it is not impossible, for “the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace” in the case of King Belshazzar, announcing his imminent doom (Dan. 5:5, 24–28). But today I am not so sure that we were ever meant to take literally the statement about the finger of God writing the law. For now I have read the Bible more thoroughly, and I have come across other references to God’s fingers, all of which are symbolical. Thus, David referred to the heavens as the work of God’s fingers (Ps. 8:3). Again, after the plague of gnats on man and beast the Egyptian magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God,” and after Jesus had begun to cast out demons he claimed to do it “by the finger of God” (Exod. 8:19; Luke 11:20). If, then, the reference to God’s finger in the writing of the law is comparable to these other references, it seems that “the finger of God” is a biblical figure of speech for God’s immediate intervention whether in creation (the heavens), in revelation (the law), in judgment (the plagues) or in salvation (the exorcism of demons). Such an interpretation would be in keeping with the principle of harmony.
Another example of the importance of considering each part of Scripture’s teaching on any subject in the light of the whole is the second coming of Christ. It would be easy (and dangerous) to be selective in the texts from which we build up our doctrine. Thus, some passages indicate that Christ’s return will be personal and visible, indeed that he will come “in the same way” as he went (Acts 1:11). But before we press this into meaning that the Return will be a kind of Ascension in reverse, like a film played backwards, and that Christ will set his feet on the precise spot on the Mount of Olives from which he was taken up, we need to consider something Jesus said to counter those who wanted to localize his return:
For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. (Luke 17:24; cf. Matt. 24:27)
The truly biblical Christian, anxious to be faithful to all Scripture, will want to do equal justice to both these strands of teaching. The coming of the Lord will indeed be personal, historical and visible; but it will also be “in power and great glory,” as universal as the lightning, a transcendent event of which the whole human population of both hemispheres will be simultaneously aware.
In my last examples of the need to see Scripture as a whole, I want to say something about both the Mosaic law and the fulfillment of prophecy. This will throw light on the relation between the Old and the New Testament, and so on the question of progressive revelation. The principle of harmony does not deny that there has been progression in God’s revelation of himself and of his purposes, but emphasizes rather that the progression has not been from error to truth, but from truth to more truth.
Take the law of Moses. It is recognized in both Old and New Testaments that Moses’ law was God’s law. Moses was but the intermediary through whom God gave his law to his people. But does the divine origin of the law mean that it is all still permanently binding on Christian people? No. For Moses’ law was a complex code, consisting of moral instructions, ceremonial regulations and civil statutes. The New Testament clearly teaches that the ceremonial rules are now obsolete, the temple, priesthood and sacrifices having been fulfilled in Christ and the food laws having been abolished by him.15 The civillaws of Moses still have importance as indications of divine righteousness and justice, but no church or nation is under obligation to enact and enforce them today. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the civil code of Moses was framed for a people who belonged to God by redemption; they were both a nation and a church simultaneously, whereas today no church is a nation and no nation a church. For another, it was adapted to an emergent nation, who were first a nomadic and then an agricultural community. The moral laws of Moses, however, have not been abrogated. On the contrary, they are still in force. Christ died that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, and the Holy Spirit writes God’s law in our hearts (Rom. 8:3–4; Jer. 31:33; cf. 2 Cor. 3:6–8). Article VII of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles sums up these distinctions well:
Although the laws given from God by Moses, as touching ceremonies and rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.
We turn now from law to prophecy. The great conviction of the New Testament authors is that with Jesus Christ the “last days” foretold throughout the Old Testament had come, and that in him and in his people the great promises of God found their fulfillment. Paul could even claim before King Agrippa:
I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen. (Acts 26:22)
There is some disagreement among biblical Christians as to whether we are to expect the Old Testament promises about Israel’s future to be literally fulfilled, and whether the modern State of Israel in its occupation of the Holy Land is at least a partial fulfillment of them. Certainly God has a great future for the Jews, which is figuratively set forth by Paul as the grafting back into their own olive tree of the natural branches which had been broken off (Rom. 11:13–27). But there is no mention in the New Testament of any literal return of the Jews to the promised land. The overwhelming emphasis of the New Testament is that the Christian church is now “the Israel of God,” “the circumcision,” “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God” (Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3; 1 Pet. 2:9), and that God’s great promises to Abraham of both posterity and a land are fulfilled spiritually in Christ and his church:
Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham … those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith….
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us … in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit….
If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.16
To be more precise, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy is usually in three stages. First came an immediate or literal fulfillment. The second stage, in which we are living, is the gospel or spiritual fulfillment. One day will come the third stage, which will be the final or heavenly fulfillment. Thus, the promise to Abraham of an innumerable posterity was historically fulfilled in the children of Israel (cf. Num. 23:10; 1 Kings 4:20), is being fulfilled today in Christ’s people, and will be consummated in heaven in the “great multitude that no one could count” round God’s throne (Rev. 7:9). Again, the Old Testament prophets predicted the rebuilding of the temple, and there was an immediate and literal rebuilding under Zerubbabel. Today, however, it is the Christian church which is “a holy temple in the Lord, … a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit,17 and so is the individual Christian’s body also (1 Cor. 6:19–20). In the new or heavenly Jerusalem, however, there will be no separate temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple dwelling in the midst of his people forevermore (Rev. 21:3, 22).
In conclusion, let me emphasize that the three principles of biblical interpretation we have been considering are not arbitrary. They are derived from the character of the Bible itself as God’s Word written, and from the character of God as revealed in it.
We look for the natural meaning because we believe that God addressed his word to those who first heard it, and that it can be received by subsequent generations only insofar as they understand it historically. Our understanding may be fuller than that of the first hearers (for example, of the prophecies of Christ); it cannot be substantially different.
We look for the general meaning because we believe that God is self-consistent, and that his revelation is self-consistent also.
So our three principles (of simplicity, history and harmony) arise partly from the nature of God and partly from the nature of Scripture as a plain, historical, consistent communication from God to men. They lay upon us a solemn responsibility to make our treatment of Scripture coincide with our view of it.