For Fellow Aliens: The Eight Rules of Interpretation

Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Eight Rules of Interpretation

So many Christians are Biblically illiterate - relying more on the insights of their favorite teachers than on their own diligent study of God's Word. Any truth-seeking christian should, with great fervency, follow what legal experts have used for over 2500 years, the Eight Rules of Interpretation to protect them from heresy:

Rule of Definition.
Define the term or words being considered and then adhere to the defined meanings.
Rule of Usage.
Don't add meaning to established words and terms. What was the common usage in the cultural and time period when the passage was written?
Rule of Context.
Avoid using words out of context. Context must define terms and how words are used.
Rule of Historical background.
Don't separate interpretation and historical investigation.
Rule of Logic.
Be certain that words as interpreted agree with the overall premise.
Rule of Precedent.
Use the known and commonly accepted meanings of words, not obscure meanings for which their is no precedent.
Rule of Unity.
Even though many documents may be used there must be a general unity among them.
Rule of Inference.
Base conclusions on what is already known and proven or can be reasonably implied from all known facts.

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“There are many who speak only of the forgiveness of sin, but who say little or nothing about repentance. If there is nevertheless no forgiveness of sins without repentance, so also forgiveness of sins cannot be understood without repentance. Therefore, if forgiveness of sins is preached without repentance, it follows that the people imagine they have already received the forgiveness of sins, and thereby they become cocksure and fearless, which is then greater error and sin than all the error that preceded our time.” MELANCHTHON

“Satan tempts us at the point of our physical needs, not that we might gratify them to excess, but that we might think of nothing else and gratify them at the expense of our usefulness in this world. Satan tempts us at the point of our ambitions, not that we might engage in positive evil, but simply accept the fact of evil, learn to live with it, come to terms with it, and maintain a discreet silence in the presence of it. Satan tempts us at the point of our religion, not that we might disbelieve in God, but that we might demand certainty; -- that kind of certainty of God that leaves nothing to faith, nothing to God himself. These are the moral struggles that have reality for people such as we are; the subtle temptation to renounce our duty in favor of what is attractive, that insidious allurement to a kind of a half-goodness which is the essence of everything bad and which is more productive of suffering and hatred, war and misery in this world, than all the designs of wicked and greedy people combined.”

Arthur Leonard Griffith (God's Time and Ours)

My research suggested that people are simply not being pastored. Often ministers are out of touch with what's happening on the ground, as they are surrounded by a wall of secretaries and voice mail. Congregants have to wait up to a month for an appointment, if they can get in at all. Once-a-week home Bible study groups lack depth and theological know-how for help with the serious problems many of us face. Many churches refer people to professional counseling that costs at least seventy-five dollars an hour. Those lucky enough to have a health plan that pays for counseling usually find the only counselors on approved HMO lists have no concept of a Christian worldview.
Julia Duin from the book "Quitting Church"

I cannot believe in the spirituality of any Christian man who keeps an eye open for the approval of others, whoever they may be. The man after God’s own heart must be dead to the opinion of his friends as well as his enemies. He must be willing to cross important persons as obscure ones.
He must be ready to rebuke his superior as quickly as those who may be beneath him on the ecclesiastical ladder. To reprove one man in order to gain the favor of another is no evidence of moral courage. It is done in the world all the time. We’ll never be where we should be in our spiritual lives until we are so devoted to Christ that we ask no other approbation than His smile.
A.W. Tozer

I may . . . pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets—that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue—that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame . . . [I] may partake of trendy diversions—that’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote . . . represented a serious impact on our time—that’s fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and beg you to believe me, multiply those tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing—less than nothing, a positive impediment—measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty.

—Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Richard D. Phillips, Jesus the Evangelist (Reformation Trust Publishing, 2007), 127

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Eight Rules of Interpretation

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