Darryl has a great post at Old Life featuring a quote from Ken Myers on the limits of Scripture. A lot of non-confessional evangelicals and too many ostensibly confessional evangelicals misunderstand sola Scriptura.They think it means either that, if the Bible doesn’t speak directly to something that we can’t know anything about or they find a way to make the Bible speak to things to which it does intend to speak. Both of these misunderstandings are forms of biblicism (“Just the Bible, Maam”) The first misunderstanding is silly because it denies “good and necessary inference” (WCF 1.6) and needlessly leads to agnosticism. The other misunderstanding seeks to make the Bible speak authoritatively about things to which it does not intend to speak. The first approach is a favorite of certain broad evangelicals whole like to sequester Scripture so that they can exercise autonomy in ways that are contrary to Scripture. The second version of biblicism, a kind of fundamentalism, however, is even more insidious because it claims the authority of Scripture for everything. It puts the Bible interpreter in a place of authority and power (which makes it all the more difficult to give up). The problem is that at least some of the claims are not actually “good and necessary” inferences and are based on poor, de-contextualized biblical exegesis or are not confessed by the churches but have become practical orthodoxy in some circles.

The confessional Reformed way is neither the way of latitudinarian evangelical biblicism nor is it the way of fundamentalism rationalism (i.e., the claim to know what God knows even if he has revealed himself thus to the rest of us). The confessional Reformed way is to read Scripture with the church. To confess those good and necessary inferences (e.g., the continuing moral obligation of the Sabbath, the Regulative Principle of Worship, the due use of ordinary means) without binding the consciences of God’s people where the churches have not found a good and necessary inference.