Last Monday, the Session of GRPC unanimously voted to recommend me to the Presbytery to come under care and enter the ordination process. I will appear before the care committee of the Presbytery in April. As preparation, I today began a process of reviewing the Westminster Standards, reading through the Confession of Faith and Larger Catechism and seeing how much of the Shorter Catechism is still logged in the memory banks.
Anyway, I said all of that for a reason. I was particularly struck today as I read chapter 1 of the Confession and its discussion of Holy Scripture. Point 9 reads…
The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.
Wow. That is awesome. So much of our theological misgivings and poor interpretation of Scripture are due to isolating one text from the broader Scriptural context. God’s Word support and interprets itself. We must be cautious to interpret difficult texts through the light of other texts in the Scriptures. It is here at the old adage, “to every heretic, a verse” becomes so clear. We can make the Bible say almost anything we want, if we limit ourselves to a particular verse or passage that says what we want it to say. But those texts find their context and their meaning in the whole of canon and must be interpreted as such.
