At critical times in church history, God has assembled His people to identify and repudiate the devil's latest doctrinal innovations. The first defining moment of this kind was when the church separated itself from Judaizers (Acts 15). There were many other defining moments during the early centuries of the church and again during the Reformation. The last, I believe, was almost a hundred years ago, when a wide range of Christian leaders contributed articles to the volumes known as The Fundamentals, which gave fundamentalism its name. These volumes affirmed true Christianity in distinction from the liberal and modernist counterfeit. Another minor defining moment occurred about thirty years ago when, partly through the influence of Harold Lindsell, many evangelical bodies declared inerrancy to be essential. (Fundamentalists were spared this moment because they had never admitted deniers of inerrancy to their ranks.)

We seem to be on the threshold of another defining moment. This time the issue has shifted from whether the Bible is true to how it should be interpreted. Many who are unwilling to abandon the doctrine of inerrancy are nevertheless unhappy with what the Bible teaches. To resolve this tension, they reinterpret the Bible so that it conforms better to contemporary ways of thought. They argue, for example, that the Bible does not really teach recent creation, or that it does not really forbid women preachers, or that it does not really condemn monogamous homosexuality.

Hermeneutics

That branch of Bible study which seeks to discover the rules governing the proper interpretation of Scripture is known as hermeneutics. Among devout Bible students, there has long been consensus as to what these rules are. The church must now reaffirm and defend them if it wishes to counter the current threats to sound doctrine. The authentic rules of interpretation include the following five.

The rule of authorial intent

No reader has the right to impose his own ideas on the text. Scripture itself clearly teaches that the only meaning of a text is what the Holy Spirit intended when He inspired the human writer (2 Pet. 1:20-1). It follows that every text has only one correct interpretation. If two readers disagree on what it means, at least one of them is necessarily wrong. Perhaps both are wrong. How do we discover the one correct interpretation? We must consult the author Himself, the Holy Spirit. We must allow Him to teach us.

Violations

1. We live in a time when the thinking of many people is colored by the idea that all truth is relative—that what is true for me may not be true for you. Thus, when someone prefers a doubtful interpretation of Scripture, he may justify himself by saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own interpretation," as if any interpretation is as good as another. The rule of authorial intent shows this thinking to be in error. The only correct interpretation is the one faithful to the author's intent.
2. Many mainline churches today are tainted with neo-orthodoxy, a form of theology derived from the philosophy of existentialism. It assumes that truth consists in experience rather than in facts. Many people in these churches use Bible words and concepts just to gain a satisfying sense of some reality beyond themselves—to achieve a religious high, as it were. They sing about the Trinity even though they do not believe in it. They read the Bible even though they view it as basically a collection of myths. To make Biblical language true and worthwhile from a standpoint of unbelief, they impose upon it subjective meanings that reinforce their own religious ideas and yield religious sensations. The goal is to feel good. Because they set subjective meanings in place of intended meanings, they are violating the rule of authorial intent.

The rule of univocal meaning

The basic sense of a passage is the single sense evident to any reader who allows the words their ordinary meanings and who expects the grammar and syntax to shape and combine these meanings in a normal fashion. (This rule should not be applied indiscriminately, without recognition that Biblical writers may sometimes propound a riddle or engage in word play. In either instance the words may bear more than one basic meaning.)

Violations

1. Many cults—from Mormonism to Christian Science, from Jehovah's Witnesses to Seventh-Day Adventists—purport to be based on the Bible. How can such divergent belief systems find a footing in the same book? The answer is that every cult foists interpretations on the Bible that distort what the Bible actually says. Instead of respecting the true single sense of a decisive passage, a cult changes the sense to suit its own peculiar views.
2. Among contemporary evangelicals, an increasing number have no objection to women preachers or monogamous homosexual unions. They concede that the Bible appears to forbid both, but they argue that God was merely seeking a good fit between His Word and ancient culture. Less restriction on a woman's role would have been too radical for a church grounded in patriarchal Judaism, and condemnations of homosexuality were useful for combating the homosexual promiscuity that flourished in the Greco-Roman world, especially in pagan temples. But, in the view of these evangelicals, God sees modern society as ready for both women preachers and homosexual monogamy, and the Biblical prohibitions against them are outmoded. They counsel a reader today to see such prohibitions only as examples of God graciously adapting His message to man's level of understanding. But how does anyone know what God thinks apart from His Word? If His Word says that He opposes something, we cannot conclude that He now favors it without viewing His objection as a relative statement, with different meanings in different historical settings. In other words, we must assign His Word more than a single sense, against the rule of univocal meaning. Moreover, to suppose that the Bible does not give us God's latest views treats Him as if He were a politician who takes one position at one time and another position at another time, according to what serves His advantage.
3. We need not seek any significance in the numerical values of letters, in the physical layout of the original text, in combinations of separated words or letters, in punctuation, or in any other coincidence. In a recent best-selling book—Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code (1997)—the author assembles all the letters occurring at certain intervals and interprets them as prophecies, finding even a prophecy of Kennedy's assassination. But all this is sleight-of-hand to impress the naive. The same technique can be used to fabricate any message whatsoever. Many books of like nature appear on such Web sites as The Prophecy Club.

The rule of context

The context of a passage may supply clues to the correct interpretation. Such clues may even clarify a passage that otherwise would be obscure. An example is the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matt. 13:31-2). Only by comparing it with the other parables in the same chapter (especially the first two, the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Wheat and Tares) do we discover that it describes the future of the church. Its prediction that the church in its final stages would be corrupt comes to light only if we notice that the growth of the mustard plant parallels the spread of leaven in the next parable (in Scripture, leaven always represents sin), and only if we notice that the birds in the first parable of the series, the Parable of the Sower, represent workers of Satan (vs. 4, 19).

Violations

Many heretical doctrines violate this rule. The Catholic teaching that Peter was the first pope appeals to Matthew 16:18. But in context, the rock is not Peter, but Christ.

The rule that Scripture explains itself

How do we know that leaven represents sin? We draw this conclusion from a comprehensive look at all the references to leaven in Scripture. In obedience to this fourth rule, we rely on Scripture to explain itself. That is to say, in the places where leaven is a symbol with obvious meaning, we expect that the meaning will be the same, and that this meaning will help us interpret the other texts referring to leaven.

Through such an investigation, we find that Scripture consistently associates leaven with evil. Before celebrating Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the people of Israel were required to go through their houses and remove every trace of leaven (Ex. 12:15). This ritual depicted their need to remove sin from their lives before they sought fellowship with God. Paul explicitly identifies leaven as a symbol of malice and wickedness (1 Cor. 5:6-8; Gal. 5:7-9).

In general, the New Testament explains the Old. Without the New, we could not be confident that the Old contains types and allegories, and we would scarcely know how to interpret them.

A type is a person or event that pictures a person or event in the future. The New Testament informs us that Melchizedek is a type of Christ (Heb. 6:20-7:3). That Joshua the high priest is a symbol of the Branch—that is, Christ—is made plain even in the Old Testament (Zech. 3:8; "wondered at" can be translated "of symbol"; Isa. 11:1; Zech. 6:12), but only from the perspective of the New Testament do we understand the significance of his name, Joshua (that is, Jesus). Other Old Testament figures who seem to be deliberate types of Christ are Joseph, Joshua (Moses' successor), and Hosea. Such figures as Pharaoh, Haman, and Antiochus Epiphanes (foreshadowed in Dan. 11:21-35) appear to be forerunners of the Antichrist. The New Testament teaches that the rites of Mosaic religion furnish types of Christ's redemptive work (Heb. 9:8-9).

The question that has always vexed expositors is this: Just how much liberty do we have to discover allegories? Some church fathers and many commentators during the Middle Ages carried allegorizing to extremes, even so far as to neglect the plain meaning of Scripture. To a modern student of the Bible, many of the allegories that they drew from Scripture seem far-fetched and arbitrary. In reaction against allegorizing, most Bible-believing expositors since Reformation times decline to look for any allegories besides those Scripture itself identifies.

There is one major exception. The Song of Solomon has traditionally been read as an allegory of Christ's love for the church. This interpretation is doubtful, however, since the church is a mystery largely hidden from the Old Testament. The Song may well be an allegory, but dealing with another theme altogether: specifically, with Jehovah’s relationship to Israel.

The rule of literalism.

The Bible is to be taken literally unless it is using symbols or a figure of speech.

Figures of speech

A figure of speech is an expression implying an idea other than what is actually stated. Five kinds of figurative language are prevalent in Scripture.

1. Metaphor. The most common kind of figure in Scripture is the metaphor, backbone of Hebrew poetry. No less than five metaphors occur in a single verse (Psa., 18:2). A metaphor speaks of an equivalence when there is no more than a resemblance. God is not a high tower; He merely in some ways resembles one.
2. Metonymy. Metonymy is the substitution of a related concept for the intended concept. We find examples in 1 Thessalonians 5:19 ("the Spirit" is substituted for His activity or manifestations), Isaiah 22:22 ("key" replaces the broader idea of authority), and Luke 16:29 (Moses and the prophets stand in place of their writings). In all these cases, the literal meaning is false or impossible.
3. Synecdoche. Synecdoche is another kind of substitution—in this case, a part for the whole or a whole for the part, as when Jesus says, "The Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20). For other examples, see Judges 12:7; and Acts 27:37.
4. Ellipsis. An ellipsis is an abbreviated expression that requires the reader to supply the missing words. Taken literally, an ellipsis might be nonsensical. In the Greek of 1 Corinthians 3:2, for instance, the writer says, "I gave you milk to drink and not meat." He does not mean that he refrained from giving them meat to drink. Of similar nature are the expressions we find in Luke 1:64 and Psalm 74:7 (in the latter case, the translators supplied the omitted words).
5. Hyperbole. Hyperbole is rhetorical overstatement, a fairly common device in the Bible (Gen. 22:17; Deut. 1:28; 2 Chron. 28:4; S. of S. 4:4).