Covenant Theology, Scripture, and Reformed Confessions — Unit 9: Reading Scripture the Reformed Way: Grammatical-Historical and Christ-Centered

Key Verse

"And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." (Luke 24:27, NKJV)

Learning Objectives

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. Explain why a church that holds to Scripture alone also needs a method of interpretation.

2. Describe the grammatical-historical method and list five of its principles, including the Westminster Confession's rule that Scripture interprets Scripture.

3. Explain what it means to read the Bible as Christ-centered, and name ways in which Christ is found in the Old Testament.

4. State objections from historical-critical, dispensational and other readers fairly, and answer them from the Reformed side.

5. Describe a simple sequence for moving from a text to a sermon that is faithful to the passage and to Christ.

The Voice of This Course

This course is written from inside the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, for students who belong to it. It is conservative and confessional. We hold that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God. Because we hold this, we want to read it well. Where others read differently we state their view fairly and then answer, as Scripture says, "Test all things; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The CTS course in hermeneutics gives a general introduction to interpretation. This unit shows how the Reformed tradition has read the Bible and why.

Why a Method Is Needed

Unit 6 taught that Scripture alone is the final norm. But a norm must be read. Two people who both say "the Bible says" can mean opposite things. The Reformers saw this clearly. When they rejected the authority of the church to decide the meaning of Scripture, they had to say how Scripture could be understood. Their answer was not that every person may make the Bible mean what he likes. It was that the Bible has a meaning, put there by God through the human authors, and that this meaning can be found by honest study, by comparing Scripture with Scripture, and by the help of the Holy Spirit.

The Westminster Confession says that the infallible rule for interpreting Scripture is Scripture itself (1.9). The Second Helvetic Confession teaches the same. Method is therefore not an addition to the doctrine of Scripture. It follows from it. If God has spoken in human words, then we must listen to those words as they were spoken.

The Plain Sense Against the Fourfold Sense

In the Middle Ages many teachers read the Bible in four senses: the literal, the allegorical (what to believe), the moral (what to do) and the anagogical (what to hope for). Some of this was useful, and the great medieval teachers loved Christ. But the system could be abused. Preachers could find almost anything in any verse by calling it an allegory. The meaning then came from the preacher's imagination, not from the text.

Luther and Calvin both turned away from this way of reading toward the plain sense of the text. Calvin, in his comment on Galatians 4, criticized the way earlier teachers had spun allegories out of Scripture. Historians of interpretation point out, fairly, that the Reformers still learned much from the medieval and early church commentators and did not throw the past away. But the direction was clear: the meaning of a passage is the meaning that God and the human author put into the words.

The Westminster Confession states the result in a famous phrase. When there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, it says, that sense "is not manifold, but one," and it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly (1.9). A text does not have a hundred hidden meanings. It has one meaning, which may be rich and may reach to many applications. This is the principle behind the grammatical-historical method.

The Grammatical-Historical Method

The name has two parts. "Grammatical" means that we study the words: their meaning, their grammar and their use in the sentence. "Historical" means that we study the setting: who wrote the passage, to whom, when, and why. Here are the main principles.

1. Study the original languages, or use those who have. The Westminster Confession says that the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, inspired by God, are the authentic Scripture, and that the people of God must be able to have it in their own language through translation (1.8). Pastors who can use Hebrew and Greek should do so. Others should compare faithful translations and use good commentaries.

2. Read the passage in its context. A verse belongs to a paragraph, the paragraph to a book, and the book to the whole Bible. Most errors in preaching come from lifting a verse out of its setting.

3. Respect the genre. The Bible contains law, narrative, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, letters and apocalyptic. Each has its own rules. A proverb is a wise saying and not a promise without exceptions. A psalm of lament is poetry and uses strong images. A prophecy may speak in symbols. The plain sense of a passage includes its figures of speech. When Jesus said, "I am the door" (John 10:9), nobody thought that He was made of wood.

4. Seek the author's intended meaning. We ask what the writer meant and how the first hearers would have understood him. We do not begin by asking what the text means to me.

5. Let Scripture interpret Scripture. The clearer passages explain the less clear. No interpretation may contradict another clear teaching of the Bible, because God is the author of the whole and cannot contradict Himself. This is sometimes called the analogy of Scripture, or of faith.

6. Depend on the Holy Spirit. The Confession teaches that we are convinced of the Bible's authority by the Spirit, and that saving understanding of the Word needs the inward illumination of the Spirit (1.5, 1.6). The psalmist prays, "Open my eyes, that I may see Wondrous things from Your law" (Psalm 119:18). Paul says that the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14). Method without prayer is dry. Prayer without method is careless.

Together these principles have a humble result. They put the preacher under the text. This is also what Ezra's helpers did when they read the Law to the people: "So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading" (Nehemiah 8:8).

Reading Christ-Centered

The Reformed tradition adds something that is not contrary to this method but completes it. We read the whole Bible as the story of Christ and of the covenant of grace that comes to its fulfilment in Him.

Our Lord Himself taught us to read this way. On the road to Emmaus, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself" (Luke 24:27). Later He told the disciples that everything written about Him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). He said to His critics, "You search the Scriptures... these are they which testify of Me" (John 5:39). Philip began from Isaiah 53 and preached Jesus to the Ethiopian official (Acts 8:35). Paul says that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4), and that all the promises of God find their "Yes" in Him (2 Corinthians 1:20). The letter to the Hebrews opens by saying that God, who spoke in many ways by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son (Hebrews 1:1-2).

This is how the apostles read the Old Testament. It fits the covenant theology of this course, in which God's one plan of grace runs from Genesis to Revelation (see the unit "The Covenant of Grace from Adam to Christ"). The Old Testament is not a different religion. It is the same gospel in promise, as the New Testament is the same gospel in fulfilment.

How Christ is found in the Old Testament

Careful Reformed interpreters speak of several ways, and each is grounded in the text and confirmed by the New Testament.

• Promise. God promised a deliverer from the beginning, as in Genesis 3:15, and renewed the promise to Abraham, to David and through the prophets.

• Type. A type is a person, event or institution that God designed to point forward to Christ. Paul calls Adam "a type of Him who was to come" (Romans 5:14). Paul says that Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us (1 Corinthians 5:7), and Hebrews explains that the sacrifices and the priesthood were shadows of the good things to come (Hebrews 10:1). Types are real because God made them so, and we can be sure of them when the New Testament says so.

• Prophecy. Passages such as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 speak of the suffering and glory of the Messiah.

• Pattern and contrast. The history of Israel shows people and kings who fail, and so creates a need for a greater prophet, priest and king, who is Christ.

• Fulfilment. Every strand of the covenant reaches its goal in Him.

The guard against abuse

A Christ-centered reading must be restrained by the first method. An old and sad habit is to turn every detail of a story into a symbol of Christ, so that a rope or a color becomes a sermon on the cross. This is the old allegory in a new coat, and it takes the meaning from the preacher's imagination. The right order is this: first ask what the passage meant in its own setting; then ask where it stands in the history of redemption; then ask how it points forward to Christ or finds its answer in Him. If the New Testament names a type, we may preach it with confidence. If it does not, we should speak with caution and show our reasons.

Objections and Our Answers

Objection 1: Historical-critical reading says the Old Testament must be read only on its own terms.

Many scholars hold that each text meant only what its human author and first audience understood. To read Christ into the Old Testament, they say, is to read later ideas back into earlier texts.

Our answer. We agree that we must begin with what the author meant, and we do. But we deny that this is the whole matter. Scripture says that "no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation" and that men spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21). The Bible has two authors, God and the human writer, and the divine author knew the whole story when He gave each part. The apostles read the Old Testament as pointing to Christ, and they did so on the authority of Christ Himself. If we accept their teaching, we may read as they did.

Objection 2: A consistent literal reading requires that Old Testament promises be fulfilled as they were written.

Dispensational Christians hold that a plain reading of the prophets, especially about Israel, land and temple, must be kept even when this is not how the New Testament uses them. They say that Christ-centered and covenantal readings spiritualize the text.

Our answer. We honor their wish to take the Bible at its word, and we also hold to the plain sense. But a plain sense includes the way the inspired writers themselves explain the promises. James reads the promise about the rebuilding of David's tent as fulfilled in the Gentiles coming to Christ (Acts 15:15-17), and Paul says that those who are of faith are the children of Abraham (Galatians 3:7). The unit "Old and New Covenants: Continuity and Discontinuity" states the dispensational view in full and answers it. Here we only say that being literal means following what the text says, in the way the text is meant, including its figures and its fulfilment in Christ.

Objection 3: Christ-centered reading flattens every passage into the same sermon.

This is a fair warning, and it comes from within the Reformed family. If every sermon ends the same way, hearers do not learn what the particular passage teaches. The commands of God can also be lost.

Our answer. We take the warning seriously. A good sermon lets the passage speak with its own voice, including its commands and warnings, and then shows how the passage stands within the one story that leads to Christ. Christ-centered reading does not remove the law or the call to obedience. The unit "Law and Gospel; the Three Uses of the Law" shows why: obedience is the fruit of grace and not its root. Course 5 returns to preaching in the unit "Expository Preaching in the Reformed Tradition."

Debate: How completely did the Reformers break with older ways of reading?

Historians of interpretation disagree. Some stress a sharp break with the medieval fourfold sense. Others stress how much the Reformers learned from earlier teachers, and how long some of the older habits lasted. The Reformers did put the plain sense first, and they did keep their love for Christ in all the Scriptures.

Pastoral Application

A young pastor is preparing a sermon on David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17). He has been taught two ways. One says, "Be brave like David and face your giants." The other says, "David is a picture of Christ, so preach the cross."

He follows a better order. First, he reads the chapter in its setting. Saul, the king, had failed, and Israel was afraid, and David, the anointed shepherd, says that the battle belongs to the LORD. The text itself says that the LORD does not save with sword and spear (1 Samuel 17:47). Second, he places it in the story of redemption: God raises up a king from Bethlehem to save His people when they cannot save themselves. Third, he asks where this points: to the greater Son of David, who fought for a people who did nothing. Fourth, he applies it. The congregation is not first called to be David but to be among the people who are rescued, and then to trust the LORD in their own fears. The sermon is faithful to the passage, and it is faithful to Christ.

Summary

Scripture alone is the norm, but a norm must be read. The Reformers turned from the medieval fourfold sense to the plain sense, and the Westminster Confession teaches that the true sense of a passage is "not manifold, but one," and that Scripture interprets Scripture (1.9). The grammatical-historical method studies the words and the setting, honors context and genre, seeks the author's meaning, compares Scripture with Scripture and depends on the Holy Spirit. The Reformed tradition also reads the Bible as Christ-centered, following Luke 24, John 5 and the apostles, finding Christ through promise, type, prophecy, pattern and fulfilment. We guard this reading against allegory by asking first what the text meant, then how it fits redemptive history, and then how it points to Christ. Historical-critical readers, dispensational readers and Reformed critics of flat preaching each raise real points, and we answer them from Scripture.

Further Reading

• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Beveridge translation, 1845), Book 1, chapters 6-9.

• The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter 1, especially sections 6-10.

• The Belgic Confession (1561), Articles 2-7, and the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chapters 1-2.

• William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying (1592).

• Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1872-73), volume 1, on the rule of faith.

• B. B. Warfield, essays on the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

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