Have you ever heard a Christian say something along the lines of, “Scripture destroys that argument!” At the best of times, this appears to be an excited proclamation of the Scripture’s power—indeed, the power of God and his truth over all things. At the worst of times, however, such statements can become more of a prideful declaration of one’s own understanding, namely, that one’s own interpretation of the Bible has destroyed the opposition.

This approach demonstrates aggression rather than the love and gentleness we are called to show towards our fellow saints and those outside the covenant community. Furthermore, when we weaponize Scripture, another problem can be that we conflate our interpretation of Scripture with the actual authority of Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura has never meant the colloquial ideal of “just me and my Bible.”

This lies at the very heart of the problem with biblicism—not only the kind that denies creeds and confessions, but the kind which denies even the possibility of there being another valid interpretation different from one’s own. But God has given his church a better way. The Father has graciously ensured that his children are never alone. He not only comforts them with the gift of his constant presence though his Word and Spirit, but he also provides his grace through his chosen means of Word, sacraments, and prayer amidst his chosen people/place.

One example of these kinds of biblicist statements is found in discussions surrounding creation, including the age of the earth, the length of God’s creative act, and the modern ideas of evolution birthed from the mind Charles Darwin.¹ On this issue, we might have heard or said, “Scripture destroys Darwin!” But should this be our aim? Should we set ourselves to destroy Darwin, or should we submit ourselves to Scripture and let God deal with the dead? Some will read this and assure us that we can have it both ways. They will insist that submission to Scripture does destroy Darwinism. While that may very well be, such cannot be our primary aim when we come to the Word of God. The Word of God cannot be the thing we go to in order to prove our case on any given issue. Why not? Because the Word of God is just that—it is God’s very word to us. The results of the Word are for God alone to determine, not for man to demand. It may be that your demands seem to match God’s determinations. Yet, it will not take long before they clash, and you find that your approach to Scripture has been wrong all along.

Darwin is not known as a man who submitted himself to Scripture. In his letter to F. A. McDermott, he says, “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation and therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”² To such rebellious men and women, the Word of God says destruction awaits. Yet, let us not rejoice over the death of the wicked. Let us be slow to judgement, that we may understand the deeper issue. The problem lies not so much in the theories Darwin formulated, or the ideas of his followers many years later; the real problem rests in not submitting to Scripture as one’s highest authority in all of life.³ The solution then, for Darwin, his followers, and even his detractors, is to submit to Scripture as the very Word of God.

Just Me and My Bible

Let us return to the well-intentioned but misguided Christian who comes to the Word of God to destroy some person or ideology with Scripture, such as Darwin or Darwinism. The main problem—which can be true of both conservative academic arguments as well as arguments from your everyday conservative Christian—is that they do not submit to Scripture as Scripture interprets itself. Their argument often goes something like this: The Bible says God made everything, so God made everything. The Bible says “day,” so God did it one day at a time. The Bible says “six days,” so it took God six days. And so it goes, point by point. Although each of these statements is true in a sense, to state them and believe them in this way is misguided at best, and actually misleading and even false at worst.⁴

Rather than speak specifically about the different possible conclusions one can draw and hold to consistently from the Genesis creation account, I would like to first focus on my claim that to state them and believe them in this way is misguided at best, and is actually misleading and even false at worst. The great problem here is that “this way” is a hermeneutic of biblicism, an interpretive method with an overly simplistic and naive view of the words one reads on the pages of Scripture. The naivety of this hermeneutic lies in the assumption that the words must mean exactly what the interpreter thinks they mean, based especially upon how those words are used in their own life.  Our feelings, presuppositions, and life experiences are real and are always at play in our understanding and application of God’s Word. But if we believe the Bible is actually God’s Word to us, then we must recognize the danger of relying only upon ourselves as the alone source and standard of its meaning.

Unchecked subjectivism is often coupled with neglecting other vital matters such as the complete phrase(s), the context, and the genres, structures, and frameworks that these words and phrases are presented in, not to mention having little to no grasp of the original languages, or worse, to image you have an understanding that you do not, in fact, have.⁵ An additional problem is how inconsistently one applies this hermeneutic throughout the rest of their reading of God’s Word, let alone the first two chapters of Genesis.

Day Means Day; Work Means Work; Rest Means Rest?

Allow me to illustrate the problem by continuing to use this Genesis example. If one believes the Almighty God worked upon his creation for any amount of time, and if one actually believes the Almighty God rested for any amount of time, then they might be unorthodox in their belief about God who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. You might be shocked when you read that, but I am not trying to be shocking. I italicized the words worked and rested for a reason. What one means by the words worked and rested is essential to whether or not one has an orthodox (true) or unorthodox (false) view of the Creator. “The Bible says” is simply not an interpretive method that one can utilize consistently or stand upon for very long. The problem is not in the Word of God, for it is God breathed and therefore infallible, inerrant, and absolutely authoritative (2 Tim 3:16). Rather, the problem is in our being wise in our own eyes, assuming our interpretation to be infallible and inerrant simply because we think “the Bible says” something (Prov 26:12).⁶

If by worked, one means God had great energy at the beginning of the morning, along with intentions that may or may not have gone according to plan, that he began to sweat and grow weary by about the middle of the day, needing to take breaks here and there to replenish himself with resources, and that by the end of the day, he was spent and unable to put forth anymore worthwhile effort, and so went to rest for the evening until he was refreshed once again the next morning, and that he did this until the seventh day when he rested in a full and complete way, having finished the job as it were, then one would be unorthodox. To be fair, those I have met who hold to a biblicist interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 do not believe this about God. And yet, to be clear, some of the most consistent biblicists are open theists, who do, in fact, affirm that God changes and does not have any eternally fixed decree. They might very consistently say, “The Bible says he worked and he rested. The only meaningful way I can understand those words is that he did those very things—he took time and effort to make things by his work, and he took time to rest and be replenished so that he might continue to work another day. I am just taking the Bible at face-value. Day means day, work means work, and rest means rest.” Using a biblicist hermeneutic, it is hard to explain to the open theist that he is wrong if we are simply going by what “the Bible says.”

Notes

1. By Darwinism, I am thinking especially of the belief that man as we know him today came to exist over vast amounts of time which have allowed for the appropriate adaptations to occur, replicate, and develop, especially through natural selection. What began as stardust developed and branched into simple organic matter, which then became both more complex and more simplified, branching off further unto numerous other organisms, to then produce various pre-human species. Ultimately, this led to a particular group of branches giving us Homo sapiens, or what we call humans. All of this contrasts with the idea that Adam was specially created by God as recorded in Genesis 1 and 2.
2. Charles Darwin, “Letter to F.A. McDermott, 24 November 1880,” in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 28. ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
3. This is not to say that Scripture speaks authoritatively to every single matter under the sun, because it does not. Yet, where it does speak, explicitly, and by way of good and necessary consequence, it has absolute and supreme authority—it has the final say (Westminster Confession of Faith 1).
4. To read about the senses in which statements such as these are not true, see Meredith G. Kline, “Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony,” Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith 48, no. 1 (1996): 2–15; “Because It Had Not Rained” Westminster Theological Journal 20 (1957/58): 146–57.
5. To begin addressing these matters, see Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003); Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997); Michael Brown and Zach Keele, Sacred Bond (Dorr, MI: Reformed Fellowship Inc., 2017).
6. NB. Matt 16:21–23 and the rebuke of Christ to Peter, declaring, “Get behind me, Satan!” in spite of Peter’s assurance of what “shall never happen” to his Lord.

©Bryce Souve. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Bryce Souve

  

  Rev. Bryce Souve was born and raised in Southern California. He married his high school sweetheart and they have five children. He received his Master of Divinity from Westminster Seminary California and has served as pastor to Bethel Reformed OPC in Fredericksburg, VA since 2024

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