by Monte Wolverton
The other day I received a letter from a longtime friend, who mentioned she had purchased a Bible for her daughter. This shouldn't be unusual. A lot of my Christian friends buy Bibles for their children. But this particular friend is an ardent New Ager. Ostensibly, she had accepted Jesus as her personal savior in college. In later years, however, she adopted a New Age, mystical mind-set, even joining a network of professional psychic telephone advisers.
I shouldn't have been surprised, though, because my friend's religious inclusivity is more or less commonplace. Many nominal Christians and non-Christians alike believe Jesus existed, but they don't believe he is Lord. To them, Jesus was merely an enlightened man, wise teacher, mystic, prophet, ascended master, newscaster or moralist. He "sort of" died for our sins. He was heroic, but still only a man, to be held in more or less equal esteem with Buddha or Muhammad.
But this just doesn't work. Jesus made explicit claims about being THE Son of God (Luke 22:70). He claimed to be THE door to salvation (John 10:9) and THE atonement for our sins (John 3:16-17).
Either Jesus' claims are true, or he was deceived in the worst way. If the latter is true, Jesus is certainly not someone whose teachings we can trust.
Of Jesus, Peter says, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).
The belief that Jesus was only a man effectively pulls the plug on Christianity, the central tenets of which are the incarnation and atoning work of Jesus. If Jesus was merely a man, these things didn't happen and humanity is without hope.
Yet the Bible teaches that Jesus came to us in the flesh. He added flesh to his divinity, becoming the God-man. The Bible claims that Jesus was and is the son of God -- that he was sent to earth for our salvation -- that he was conceived by the Holy Sprit and born to a virgin -- that he was fully God and fully man -- that he died for our sins -- that he rose from the dead in an immortal body -- and that he lives.
If Jesus is not and was not God, then he could not have been payment for our sins. The belief that Jesus is God is the very core of Christianity.
My family and I sat in yet another friend's living room, enjoying our visit. We talked about many things -- his daughter's struggles in school, his own career trials, the blossoming career of his wife as a fine artist, and developments in the lives of our mutual friends.
But I knew it would come. And it did -- the moment when the conversation veered off the normal track and into the world of his own private interpretation of Scripture. While I was having my own hermeneutical problems at the time (hermeneutics is the science of interpretation of Scripture), my friend was in a higher orbit. He would select scriptures from his palette like an artist uses oil paint, creating a vivid but bizarre picture of his own reality, his own doctrine. Not surprisingly, he eventually started his own church -- one whose teachings are not at all in line with Christian orthodoxy.
If you'd asked my friend whether he held a high view of Scripture, he most certainly would have answered yes. But, in fact, the opposite was true. Instead of letting Scripture speak to him, he did violence to it -- subjectively interpreting the text and reading into it his own ideas.
He's not unlike like many Christians who think they respect the Bible, but fail to interpret the text in a responsible manner.
The apostle Peter writes: "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:20-21). Because the Bible is the inspired Word of God, humans are not free to read their own meanings into it. That being the case, we must approach the biblical text reverently and carefully.
But the reality is that every Bible student comes to the text carrying opinions and preconceived ideas. These ideas act like lenses to distort our view of Scripture. That's why there are procedures to ensure that we interpret the Bible as objectively as possible -- first, to see what it means in its context and second, to apply it to our lives.
R.C. Sproul, in Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, identifies three basic principles of sound Bible interpretation: 1) the obscure parts must be interpreted by the clearer parts, 2) the implicit must be interpreted by the explicit, and 3) the rules of logic must govern what can be deduced from Scripture. In this way, the Bible interprets itself. Subjective ideas and personal prophetic revelations have no place in this process.
Even more fundamental than these basic principles is the cardinal rule of Bible study: scripture must be read in context, for its original meaning to its original audience, before any modern application can be deduced. Most heresies result from a failure to follow this simple rule.
It's easy to fall into one or more of the following Bible study errors:
Proof-texting. This involves using selected scriptures as supports or "proofs" for a previously held position. This is in contrast to expository study, where lessons are drawn out of scriptures.Reading out of context. This error often goes hand in hand with proof-texting. Once removed from context, a quote can have any kind of spin put on it. When people remove a scripture from context, it is highly probable they are doing so with a pretext.
Contemporary analysis. Liberal scholars approach the Bible as a mere piece of literature. In the absence of a belief in divine inspiration and authority, it is possible to make all sorts of assumptions and hypotheses about the text, who wrote it and what each author had in mind. Whole sections can be dismissed as irrelevant or spurious.
Written for our day. Prophecy buffs suffer from this problem, reading the Bible as though it were a newspaper reporting some contemporary event. Of course, this is a blatant violation of the first rule of Bible study -- reading scriptures in context before any application to the modern day.
Alternative Scriptures. Some teachers hold that other books or authors are equal to the Bible. Nearly always, these writings present additional revealed "truth" which reinterprets or alters the meaning of the Bible.
The 66 books of the Bible were recognized as authoritative by the early church through a series of councils. Much earlier than that, Paul had reminded Timothy that even the Old Testament Scriptures (the only Scriptures extant at that time) were sufficient to "make you wise to salvation through faith in Jesus" (2 Timothy 3:15-17). With the canonization of the New Testament, the Scriptures are complete. They need no reinterpretation or amendment from some additional source.
No need for the Bible. A more recent and very dangerous heresy taught by some in the charismatic movement is that once we have Jesus, Scripture is no longer necessary. This would seem to be a convenient position for leaders who might wish to take their followers into nonbiblical doctrine and activities. And Scripture itself teaches quite the opposite.
My grandmother was concerned. She was a devout Christian, and my parents and I were not in line with some key Christian tenets. One of these involved grace. My parents and I believed in salvation by grace, all right. But we also believed grace was conditional on keeping the old testament law (with the exception of certain sacrificial or ceremonial laws, which were obviously no longer practical).
On occasion, Grandma would try to expose me to sound doctrine.
"You really don't need to keep those old laws, you know," she would tell me. "Jesus changed all that." She would quote Galatians 5:1. "Salvation by faith has replaced the law -- the law was only a schoolmaster to bring us to Jesus." She would quote Galatians 2:16 and 3:23-25. "The law was a mere shadow of things to come -- the reality is Jesus." She would quote Colossians 2:14-17. "Jesus has instituted a whole new covenant. It's time you put aside the old and put on the new." She would quote 1 Corinthians 13:10-13.
Sometimes I attempted counterarguments, but most of the time I said nothing. It was clear to me, even as a teenager, that my poor grandmother was terribly deceived, as I thought most professing Christians were. Imagine her surprise someday when she would finally learn the truth!
Imagine my surprise one day when I finally learned the truth! I had believed the false doctrine that grace through faith in Jesus is not enough to save us. Not only had I believed it, I had taught it. I had, in fact, been a heretic. Years later, long after my grandma passed away, her sound teaching finally achieved its intended result -- by God's grace.
If we believe scripture -- if we believe in Jesus and what he said -- we must also believe that his work of atonement on the cross is completely sufficient to save us from eternal damnation. Anyone who believes this is born again, has eternal life, and is saved (1 John 5:1-13). That God offers this salvation to all humans is grace. That we believe him is faith, which is itself a gift from God. Salvation is therefore by grace, though faith (Ephesians 2:8).
Salvation can't be earned by works. While a saved person will be motivated to do good works (Galatians 6:10), those works don't earn salvation, nor is salvation conditional upon good works. This was the central issue of the Reformation.
But 400 years later, many otherwise Christian churches and denominations still have the same problem. It's one thing to teach Christian behavior and values, but it's quite another to teach legalistically that these are required for salvation. Some churches even require new converts to overcome most of their known faults before baptism.
Such is not the teaching in the New Testament. Any righteousness we can muster is worth nothing to God. As the old hymn goes, "My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness." Because Jesus is God, he is 100 percent reliable. Because he is 100 percent reliable, you can be 100 percent sure of your salvation, no matter what anyone might tell you.
Some might think this article is legalistic because it gives four criteria for genuine Christianity: the Trinity (covered in the first installment), the deity of Jesus, a high view of Scripture and salvation by grace through faith. But these are not required works for salvation. Rather, they are the elements of faith that logically derive from the scriptural Gospel.
Heresy! It's not difficult to become a heretic. I was one. Some of my best friends still are. I pray that they will someday understand the truth. Heresy is common these days, just as it has always been. But Christians needn't worry about falling prey to heresies as long as they remain firmly anchored in Jesus and on the essentials of his Word.