Sometimes today readers start with our specific doctrinal assumptions and read them into the Bible. One danger with this method is that it keeps us from ever learning anything new. If we read the Bible only as a textbook of what we already believe, we are likely to miss anything it has to teach and correct us.
Another danger is that it makes our doctrine the “canon” rather than Scripture. Then when we talk with fellow believers from different denominations, we each insist on our view and cannot really dialogue, because we are not willing to start with the Bible itself. Then the loudest voice “wins”! It is therefore very important to learn the Bible’s perspectives the way they are written.
But this does not mean that we do not care about what the Bible teaches about various matters (i.e., its doctrine). It just means that we try to listen carefully to what each passage in its context is saying before we try to put the various points together. (Christians will disagree most on how we put the points together, and that is where we need to be most charitable with one another.)
Some books of the Bible emphasize some themes more than other books do. Thus, for example, if one reads the Book of Revelation, one is more likely to find an emphasis on Jesus’ second coming than in the Gospel of John; in the Gospel of John, by contrast, there is a heavier emphasis on eternal life available in the present. In the same way, when Paul writes to the Corinthians about speaking in tongues, he emphasizes its use as prayer. By contrast, when Luke describes tongues in Acts, it functions as a demonstration that God transcends all linguistic barriers, fitting Luke’s theme that the Spirit empowers God’s people to cross cultural barriers.
Different writers and books often have different emphases; these differences need not contradict one another, but we must study them respectfully on their own terms before we try to put them together. When we do put them together, we often find that the fuller perspective is bigger than any one picture we originally assumed.
When a specific passage seems obscure to us and we cannot tell which way the author meant it, it often helps to look at the rest of the book to see what the author emphasizes. Thus, for example, the fact that the Gospel of John so often stresses that future hopes like “eternal life” are present realities (e.g., John 3:16, 36; 5:24-25; 11:24-26) may help shed light on how we approach John 14:2-3. At the same time, we should never forget that each New Testament writing, however distinctive, is also part of a larger context of the teaching of apostolic Christianity, which had some common features. Thus, though the Gospel of John emphasizes the presence of the future, it in no way minimizes the fact that Jesus will return someday future as well (5:28-29; 6:39-40).
In this blog, I usually focus on particular passages, often in light of the context of the book of the Bible in which a passage occurs. But of course I take for granted that when we build our lives on Scripture, we want to build our lives on the whole of Scripture, finding the ways it fits together best, especially in light of the fullest revelation in Jesus’s incarnate mission, death and resurrection. Although they are usually taught as separate disciplines, theology and Bible study are not opposed to each other. But to hear the theology of Scripture, we need to approach it in the right way, hearing the distinctive voice of each part of Scripture.