Q3. What do the Scriptures principally teach?
A. The Scriptures principally teach, what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.
There are two basic parts to this answer. In a word (or two)—doctrine and practice. The teaching of Scripture is called “the pattern of the sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13). The word that Paul uses there for “sound” (ὑγιαίνω) is the word from which we derive the English for “hygiene.” Here this means more than simply cleanliness, but a total wholeness of body. In other words, it means “healthy.”
The order will matter here. Doctrine comes before practice on purpose. Note that in Paul’s letters (as a rule) doctrine comes before practical application. Why is that? In simple terms, it is because we have to know what is true about reality before we can responsibly act within it. This priority of truth shaping life wars against the American philosophy of Pragmatism.
Pragmatism says, “If it works, do it!” Or in the words of Nike: Just do it! But as we have already seen, no personal experience—even carefully examined metrics on “what works”—can determine truth. Truth determines what works.
If someone says, “I don’t care about truth. That’s pie-in-the-sky philosopher talk. Show me what produces results! What is real is what works!” My first response to that person is Works for what? How do you know that what you are working on is what God would have you working on? Or, even if it is, how do you know that you’re doing the right task in the right way?” Predictable response: “Because it works! It produces desired results.” But that is circular reasoning. It only brings us back to whether or not those ends (or desired results) are proper to begin with. We can’t get out of that vicious circle by the metrics of this world. No statistic can relieve of us of the burden of discovering truth first in order to shape life.
Doctrine: or What We are to Believe
How can I put this as simply as possible? Bible study is for discovering reality: God’s reality. Bible study is not an exercise in jumping through spiritual hoops to say we did our devotional time. Bible study is not for sharing our feelings about “what this text means to me.” Bible study is not even more faithful if it “sticks to the text,” if what that means is joining the ranks of those who are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). In the Bible is truth. That means that categories have to form in the mind.
The answer here focuses on what to believe concerning God. That is the very meaning of theology. If we take the definition of theology offered by Thomas Aquinas, then it is the science of God and all else in relation to God. There is a very good reason for this twofold breakdown. It is that there are really only these two classes of objects of study. And furthermore, if God made all that there is besides himself—if all created things are what they are because God is who he is—then it follows that the medieval schoolmen were right in saying that “Theology is the queen of all sciences.” All other studies are taken out of their context if they are never considered in light of God. All other things are ultimately theological things.
However, this is really a shorthand answer that the Puritans gave to us. The book of nature already tells us things about God (cf. Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:19-20; 2:14-15). The Bible tells us more about his character. The trouble is that what it tells us is at first unsettling. So we must be taught a doctrine of God in Christ. Remember the words of Jesus: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6). Apart from Christ we will not see God as sons and daughters would see, but as convicts on the run. What we are running into—without Question 3 specifically addressing it—is the necessity of Scripture. And there are quite a few things we can say about this necessity, but what this question and answer focuses on is the necessity of knowing God, which implies two needs that Scripture fulfills. We need to know God more accurately than nature will afford, and we need to know God more favorably than nature leaves us with.
Once we are reconciled to God, then we can really learn from him. We can now be Christians with a worldview. The biblical lens is first a mirror into our own souls—“discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12)—but it also interprets everything else. So Paul says that, “The spiritual person judges all things” (1 Cor. 2:15). So the Bible moves inward but also outward. It leaves no stone unturned in anything that we could ever think about. But notice that in both the idea of God and the more refined idea of salvation in Christ, what is taught “principally” becomes an interpretive lens for that “all other things.”
People are often afraid of the use of any lens, any presupposition, any “preconceived categories” imposed on the text. They will say things like this: “I just want to know what the verse says on its own.” But there is no such thing as a verse in isolation. Not only is it all one coherent word of God, where “The sum of your word is truth” (Ps. 119:160), but Jesus made himself the lens through which to view all the Scriptures: “it is they that bear witness about me” (Jn. 5:39).
Practice: or What We are to Do
Last week we looked at this verse by Paul to Timothy that affirmed the divine character of Scripture. All Scripture was breathed out by God; but if we examine the rest of the verse and the next, we not only have an “all of Scripture” but an “all of life” principle:
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).
In God’s word is God’s will. Not only the outer glimpses of God’s will of decree (that is, what he ordains to be), but also our guide into God’s will of command (that is, what he expects from us).
In our first steps out of pragmatism, we may not go far enough. We may see that truth about reality comes before doing in reality. But then we are still so gripped by instant results and the allure of “real life,” that we may start to try to get the order right, but still not be transformed in our minds to put all of that “real life” inside God’s real world. Romans 12:2 and Hebrews 5:12-14 are two verses that help us see that the transformation of this order for us goes all the way to placing expectations for who I am and what I’m to do and how I’m to feel—all of these individual and experiential and practical and relational aspects of my life inside the real, real world, and thus to crucify much of what I’ve been calling the “real world.”
Notice what “practice” or “application” really is. The answer uses these words on purpose: what duty God requires of men. Not merely: “What application I can get out of it?” Not even simply: “How does this passage apply to my life?” Which subtly comes to mean: “How can I fit this passage and shape this passage and mold this passage into the course I have already set out upon?” But there is a main and plain will of God first, that is God’s will for all of his image-bearers; and then, having fallen from that state and being restored by God, there is for all Christians this will: “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3).
Much of how that works will have to wait for the section of the Catechism on the law of God. But we don’t pit law against gospel. Christians are not lawless people, and the New Testament is not the dead end of God’s commandments. The words of Jesus that we looked at last time are worth examining again. When he says,
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished (Mat. 5:17-18).
It is customary for antinomians to point to this and conclude that with the coming of Christ we see the setting aside of the commandments. After all, isn’t it true that all things are accomplished in Christ? But two things may be said as a surface reply. First, it would be rather awkward for Jesus to announce the continuing relevance of the commandments, ordaining that it be retained in a Gospel that would be written and first read only after he died and rose, only to mean it exclusively for the audience right in front of him and enduring only for less than three more years. Second, we might ask whether the words, “all [that] is accomplished,” terminates on the death and resurrection of Christ rather than the whole of his mediatorial work: including his Second Coming. If “all that is accomplished” really means “all that Christ accomplished,” well then, this becomes the more natural reading.
That said, all Christians ought to at least agree that the first gateway to God’s will, his will for us that is never left behind is the gospel will.
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:28–29).
What does God require? First and foremost: Believe in his Son. It takes the Scriptures to bring us to Christ, since it is there where we find the good news. We cannot say that we seek for God if we will not look for him in Christ; and we cannot say that we love Jesus if we do not define him by his word and take him at his word. So, in the words of Thomas Watson,
“The Word is the field where Christ the pearl of price is hid. In this sacred mine we dig, not for a wedge of gold, but for a weight of glory … Scripture is the chart and compass by which we sail to the new Jerusalem.”1
In these two sections of the answer to Question 3, we have the Puritans against pragmatism. By speaking of doctrine first, they stood in the classical stream of subordinating the practical to the theoretical: that is, defining what to do in the “real world” to making sure we know what we are talking about by calling such a world “real” in the first place. But these Westminster divines were also providing a resource for us against mere biblicism: that is, the notion that the Bible can be taken in what Schaeffer called “bits and pieces” thinking, as if it is more honoring to God’s word to extract it from God’s world and apart from the minds that he has given to us to put the puzzle pieces together according to an emerging vision of the box top. There are things principally taught.
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1. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 35.
