This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 643: Restoration Theology 9: Applying Scripture in Your Context

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
643 Restoration Theology 9.mp3

Transcript

00:00
Hey there, I'm Shan Finnegan, and you are listening to Restitudio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:12
Although one of the most overlooked aspects of hermeneutics, figuring out how to apply scripture to your own context today is extremely important.

00:20
If you interpret the Bible well, but never ask the question, how does this affect me, what good does it do you?

00:27
Like the scholar of religion who is just curious, you can read the Bible and understand it correctly, but never experience the kind of change God wants for you.

00:38
Let's say you want to apply the Bible to your life today.

00:41
How do you do it?

00:42
won't do to just pick a verse here and a verse there, taking this one literally and that one metaphorically as you like.

00:50
No, you need a method to help keep you honest and to make sure you're not leaving anything critical out.

00:58
Today's episode is going to equip you to apply scripture to your life today in a methodical way, not only providing some clear guidelines of what to do, but also some problems to avoid.

01:10
Here now is episode 643, Restoration Theology, Part 9, Applying Scripture in Your Context.

01:26
We've been working our way up the Restoration Theology Tower.

01:30
We looked at the text of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the translation of Scripture.

01:36
We looked at the literary interpretation of Scripture, the historical interpretation of Scripture.

01:41
And now today we approach the subject of application.

01:46
And we need to ask two practical questions.

01:49
One, what did this mean to them in their time?

01:53
And 2, what does this mean to us in our time?

01:58
We have to ask both questions because if we don't understand what it meant to them, then it's very easy for us to create a new meaning.

02:07
And if you create a new meaning, it's probably a wrong meaning.

02:10
So we want to have the same meaning as what it meant to them.

02:14
And then if we don't ask the question of what does this mean to me today, we're not really Christian because we're not actually trying to follow what the Bible says.

02:24
Now this is not as easy or straightforward as many think.

02:26
Scott Duvall and Daniel Hayes in their book, Grasping God's Word, they write the following.

02:31
They say, well, often unconscious of their interpretive method, many Christians today nonetheless frequently employ an intuitive or feels right approach to interpretation.

02:43
If the text looks as if it could be applied directly, then they attempt to apply it directly.

02:48
If not, then they take a spiritualizing approach to the meaning, an approach that borders on allegorizing the biblical text, which shows little or no sensitivity to the biblical context.

03:02
or else they simply shrug their shoulders and move on to another passage, ignoring the meaning of the text altogether.

03:08
Now he said a couple of words that I want to highlight.

03:10
The first is spiritualizing and the 2nd is allegorizing.

03:14
Spiritualizing is when you take the text and you make it mean something metaphorical.

03:20
And same thing with allegorizing.

03:21
These are two very similar ideas.

03:24
And there are times to do that, but not all the time.

03:28
As with interpreting the Bible,

03:31
Applying the Bible has rules to it.

03:35
Learning these rules will help you be more consistent in how you apply Scripture to your life.

03:40
The starting point, though, before we get to these rules, is humility.

03:46
We must be willing to say, I could be wrong about this, or I could be wrong about that, or I might be doing it wrong.

03:53
Sometimes you'll come across a commandment that you don't like.

03:55
For example, Jesus took a radical line on forgiveness.

03:59
And you may say to yourself, well, I don't like that teaching of Jesus on forgiveness.

04:05
I don't want to forgive my enemies.

04:07
I don't want to let something go.

04:10
I want to hold on to it.

04:11
I want to just take that grudge and nurse it and say, oh, my precious little grudge.

04:17
Oh, I just love this grudge I'm holding against this person that harmed me.

04:21
But Jesus says to let it go.

04:24
And so what we do is we default to

04:27
our view of things.

04:29
And then when the scripture comes and it sort of attacks us and it challenges us and it calls us to a different way of living, this can be very hard.

04:39
And our minds may come up with all kinds of excuses and mental gymnastics so that we protect ourselves from the Bible.

04:46
But this is not the right way to do things.

04:49
Humility is saying, I could be wrong.

04:52
Humility is saying, I expect God to correct me through the Bible.

04:57
Humility is saying, I'm willing to change my mind on this.

05:02
That's why it's so important.

05:03
R.C.

05:04
Sproul in Everyone's A Theologian said, the academic world devotes much energy to biblical criticism, sometimes called higher criticism, which is an analytical critique of Scripture.

05:17
However, the biblical criticism in which we ought to engage renders us the object rather than the subject of the criticism.

05:24
In other words, the Bible criticizes us.

05:30
So this is part of being a Christian.

05:34
This is part of studying the Bible.

05:36
You're not going to study it like you study the encyclopedia and say, oh wow, look, aardvarks are really interesting creatures.

05:43
Look at all the things that they do.

05:45
The Bible's not like that.

05:46
The Bible is calling you to live differently.

05:50
It's challenging you to think about the world in a different way than what a lot of other people do.

05:56
So how do we do application?

05:59
Well, I want to give you rules.

06:01
I want to give you 4 rules and four problems.

06:03
So 2 sets of four.

06:05
Now in this book, How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stewart, they give us two rules.

06:12
And I want to start with their two rules.

06:14
The first one is,

06:15
A text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers.

06:21
So this is the idea, we talked about this last time, of anachronism.

06:25
That's taking something out of time inappropriately.

06:29
So we don't want to look at, you know, the old joke about what car did the apostles drive in and say, oh, it was a Honda.

06:38
Well, how do you know it was a Honda?

06:39
Well, they're all in one accord.

06:40
All right, well, that's obviously wrong because

06:46
The word accord 20 centuries ago had nothing to do with Honda automobiles, right?

06:53
In the same place.

06:55
It didn't mean a car at all.

06:57
Cars weren't invented yet.

06:58
It cannot mean something that it did not mean to them.

07:01
That's what they're saying here.

07:04
We don't want to make up new applications.

07:06
Whatever the application is, it had to make sense to them at their time.

07:10
Now there is an exception to this rule.

07:13
And the exception is predictive prophecy.

07:16
If the Bible is, and most, there's only 25% of the Bible that's prophecy, and most of that 25% is not predictive prophecy.

07:24
It's actually preaching to the people.

07:27
It's calling them to repentance.

07:30
All right, but there are some parts of the prophetic books that do have predictive prophecy.

07:35
And in a predictive prophecy, it's certainly possible for the prophet to predict something that at their time they didn't understand, right?

07:42
But the rest of scripture that's not predictive prophecy, whatever the application was for them is the application that we want for us.

07:50
Rule #2, whenever we share comparable particulars with the 1st century hearers,

07:56
God's Word to us is the same as His Word to them.

08:00
So this is an important little phrase, comparable particulars.

08:05
Are your circumstances the same as their circumstances?

08:09
That's what we mean by comparable particulars.

08:13
So much of the Bible deals with everyday situations.

08:16
So for example, if the Bible says, honor your parents,

08:21
if you have parents, then you have comparable particulars and you should honor them.

08:26
The application is directly applicable.

08:29
It directly relates to your life.

08:32
If you don't have parents, then you don't need to honor them because you don't have them, right?

08:37
Same thing with the spouse.

08:38
Like it says,

08:40
A husband should love his wife like Christ loves the church.

08:42
If you don't have a wife, this is because it's to the husband.

08:45
If you don't have a wife, you don't need to do that.

08:48
That's not a commandment for you.

08:51
Or work hardly as unto the Lord.

08:53
Well, if you don't have a job, how are you going to work hardly?

08:56
But if you do have comparable particulars, they had jobs, you have a job.

09:01
2,000 years ago, maybe the job was

09:04
more primitive, didn't have technology, but they were still working a job and you're working a job.

09:09
So we should both have the same application, work heartily as unto the Lord.

09:15
To this, I want to add two more application rules.

09:17
Rule #3, an application cannot contradict what the New Testament teaches or exemplifies elsewhere on how to live.

09:27
This goes back to the idea that God inspires scripture.

09:30
If God inspires scripture, then we should expect there to be a way to harmonize what appear to be contradictions in application.

09:42
So if your application of a verse is to do X, it won't do if somewhere else in the New Testament it says not to do X.

09:50
Let me give you an example.

09:53
divorce and remarriage.

09:55
It says in Mark chapter 10, verse 11, he said to them, Jesus said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

10:04
And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

10:09
So from this verse, you conclude that remarriage is always wrong, no matter what.

10:16
I mean, that's the way this verse reads, right?

10:19
The way it reads is you should not

10:22
divorce and then get remarried because then that's the same as committing adultery.

10:29
So what do you do when you get to Matthew chapter 19 and we read Jesus saying, and I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery and he who marries A divorced woman commits adultery.

10:45
How do you make sense of that?

10:47
Do we say, the New Testament contradicts itself?

10:50
Christianity is false, it's the end of the world.

10:53
No, I hope we don't say that.

10:55
What we do is we harmonize these together.

10:58
We say, okay, well, Mark is laying out the basic teaching of Jesus, which is that people should stop getting divorced and getting remarried.

11:05
And then Matthew adds to it, but there is an exception in the case of sexual immorality, which I personally read as adultery, but there are a couple different positions on that.

11:17
So, but wait, there's more.

11:18
In 1 Corinthians 7, verse 15, it says, Paul says, but if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so.

11:25
In such a case, the brother or sister is not bound.

11:28
It is to peace that God has called us.

11:31
So here we have a scenario in the city of Corinth, in a town outside of Israel, a town that has different morals.

11:40
has a different culture than Jesus and the Jewish people, where divorce is normal and accepted and remarriage is typical, it's every day.

11:49
And what Paul says in that context is, let's say you have two people that are married, they're worshiping the gods, they're pagans, they're not Christians, they're married.

12:00
One of them becomes a Christian.

12:02
And the other person says, I'm out of here.

12:05
I don't want anything to do with you.

12:07
What do you do in that scenario?

12:08
This is not a scenario Jesus ever faced because Jesus ministered in Israel, or actually in those days it was called Judea and Samaria and Galilee, right?

12:20
But the land that is historically known as Israel before that, Jesus is ministering over there where the culture has a lot of common agreement on strict rules about divorce and remarriage.

12:32
Whereas now Paul is dealing with Christians in another city with different rules.

12:36
And so this didn't come up for Jesus, so he didn't address it.

12:40
But it did come up for Paul, so he did address it.

12:42
And so what we do as interpreters applying the scripture to our lives today is we work them all together.

12:50
We work all the data together and we come up with something that is a little more comprehensive.

12:57
But before I go to that, I want to point out something on this verse in 1 Corinthians 7.15.

13:02
It has this phrase, in such a case.

13:06
Let it be so in such a case, the brother or sister is not bound.

13:09
It is to peace that God has called us.

13:12
So the way many people read this is when it says in such a case, it's just talking about the specific case of abandonment, where an unbeliever leaves a believer.

13:22
That's actually not the correct translation.

13:24
It doesn't say in such a case in the Greek.

13:26
It says in such cases.

13:29
This translation is just wrong.

13:30
And I don't know why they translated it incorrectly.

13:34
But if you look at other translations outside the New Revised Standard Version, which is what I'm reading from here, other translations get this right.

13:42
They say, in cases like these or in such situations as these, which tells me that this is not the only exception clause there is either.

13:50
So when we build,

13:53
the application for divorce and remarriage, we put it together like this.

13:56
One, Christians should not get divorced and remarried.

13:59
And 2, there are exceptions, legitimate exceptions, for sexual immorality, abandonment, and similar such cases.

14:07
See how we just work it all together?

14:09
That's what my rule #3 is all about, is recognizing the totality of the scripture of the New Testament.

14:17
Now, I want to say 2 caveats about

14:21
looking at examples, because we don't just have teaching in the New Testament, we also have examples.

14:28
Okay, so what I just showed you was from Mark and Matthew in 1 Corinthians.

14:33
These are all verses where it's teaching, it's saying, do this, don't do that, right?

14:38
There's also the example of Jesus.

14:41
And that's important for us.

14:42
It's not just his teaching, it's not just his words, but it's also seeing how he did things.

14:48
And we want to imitate that example.

14:50
But one of the problems with imitating Jesus's example is that he was still in a period under the law of Moses.

14:59
And so some Christians will look at that and they'll say, oh, well, Jesus kept the law of Moses, therefore all Christians should keep the law of Moses for all time.

15:07
That's not going to work in light of other things that the New Testament says about the law coming to completion and becoming obsolete.

15:15
So

15:17
We have to recognize that.

15:19
And also recognize that if we're looking at the apostles and their example, sometimes the apostles get it wrong.

15:26
So when Peter denies Jesus, are you going to imitate that?

15:30
I hope not.

15:30
When Judas betrays Jesus, are you going to imitate that?

15:33
No.

15:33
So there are lots of things to, when Thomas is doubting and he doesn't, I don't care that you guys all say you saw him.

15:40
I didn't see him.

15:41
I don't believe any of this.

15:43
We don't want to imitate that, right?

15:44
So when it comes to looking at the example in scripture, I think it's helpful to recognize there are exceptions as well.

15:52
All right, over to rule #4.

15:55
Unless clearly limited, the application should work for all Christians.

16:00
If an application pertains to husbands, wives, parents, children, that's what it's for.

16:07
You understand what I mean?

16:08
So if this is talking about how a husband should treat a wife,

16:12
You should not say, this is how all men should treat all women.

16:16
It's not true.

16:17
A marriage relationship is a special relationship.

16:20
If you have somebody who's married to somebody else, they don't need to look at you like they look at their husband.

16:26
It's not universalizable.

16:28
Same thing with parents to children.

16:30
If I'm talking to somebody that's younger than I am, but they're not my child, I don't get to use the parent-child protocols of the Bible with that person.

16:40
Unless in the case that somebody has agreed for you to mentor them, then it's fine.

16:46
But typically you want to recognize if the scripture limits the application, you want to respect that limitation.

16:54
Now, if it doesn't limit the application, then it should apply to everybody.

17:00
And so you might want to ask questions like, all right, does this application make sense for poor people who don't have access to technology?

17:10
Does this application work for persecuted Christians living under hostile governments?

17:15
Does this application work for women?

17:17
Does it work for people living with disabilities?

17:21
So let's take, for example, the concept of Christian perfectionism.

17:26
Jesus said, be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect, Matthew 5.48.

17:32
And John said, those who have been born of God do not sin because God's seed abides in them.

17:38
They cannot sin because they have been born of God.

17:41
So your doctrine is that after conversion, no Christians ever sin.

17:46
Based on these two verses, you build a doctrine.

17:52
Now you've set the bar so high that everyone is going to fail.

17:57
So that's no good.

17:59
That's no good.

18:00
The application you come up with from putting the scripture together should be able to apply to all Christians, not just people with high impulse control or low self-awareness, whatever the case is that results in perfectionism.

18:15
All right, let's talk about four problems of application.

18:19
I want to look at extended application, dissimilar particulars, cultural relativity,

18:25
and incorrectly grouped text.

18:26
The first two there are actually just the same as the two I already talked about, the first two before.

18:31
These are just like the negative side of it.

18:34
Problem number one, extended application.

18:36
When we derive a principle from scripture and extend the application to a new situation, we must be careful.

18:44
So Paul, I'm going to give you an example.

18:47
Paul taught the Corinthians that Christians should not be suing Christians.

18:53
but instead they should find somebody wise in their church to decide things for them.

19:00
When you sue somebody, it's over something financial typically.

19:04
And so you have a business that did some work for a homeowner and the homeowner says, I'm not paying you, did a bad job.

19:11
And the business says, what are you talking about?

19:14
I did the thing, you have to pay me.

19:16
And so now there's a suit, right?

19:17
The business is suing the homeowner for the money they feel they are owed.

19:21
just to give a specific example.

19:24
So now they go to the church and they say, we need somebody in here to decide this for us and figure it out, and we're gonna submit to whatever the decision is.

19:32
That's what Paul's dealing with.

19:34
Now you, 2,000 years later, read this and you say, oh, well, see, look, Christians should never sue anybody.

19:40
It's a sin for a Christian to enter a lawsuit, ever.

19:45
Well, no, that's not what it said.

19:47
What it said was,

19:48
Instead of suing each other and doing it before unbelievers, it said, find somebody wise to figure it out among yourselves.

19:56
It's not saying Christians can never sue anybody for any reason.

20:00
You see what I'm saying?

20:01
So that's extending the application beyond what it originally was.

20:06
Here are some helpful questions to ask.

20:08
Does extending the application contradict other scriptural statements?

20:13
Does extending the application align with general principles elsewhere in scripture?

20:19
Does extending the application align with or contradict the example of Jesus and the apostles?

20:25
So let's go on to #2 problem, which is dissimilar particulars.

20:31
And these are all kind of similar, so hopefully the repetition will make it easy for you to see how to do this correctly.

20:38
Let's think of the example of Romans 14, 13.

20:41
It says,

20:42
Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister.

20:52
I know and am persuaded in the Lord, Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself, but is unclean for anyone who considers it unclean.

21:02
If your brother or sister is distressed by what you eat,

21:06
you are no longer walking in love.

21:07
Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died.

21:13
So the specific situation is that Christians were eating together in Rome.

21:19
This is Paul's letter to the Romans.

21:21
So in the city of Rome, you have Christians eating together.

21:24
Some of those Christians are coming from a Jewish background, and some of those are coming from a non-Jewish background.

21:31
They're having a dinner together.

21:33
Jewish people believe

21:35
And it's because it says so in Leviticus that the animals should be killed a certain way and the blood should be drained a certain way.

21:42
How do they know that was what was done on the beef that's being served at the table?

21:48
How do they know?

21:50
They don't know.

21:51
They have no idea.

21:53
So those Jewish Christians said, you know what?

21:55
We're just not going to eat the meat.

21:57
We're going to eat the vegetables, but we're not going to eat the meat because we don't want to break our rules about kosher.

22:03
And Paul is saying to them, look, in this kind of scenario, don't pass judgment on one another.

22:10
Don't put a stumbling block in front of people.

22:13
And, you know, look, I don't think it's clean or unclean.

22:16
You know, he says, it's all clean.

22:19
Nothing's unclean in itself in the Lord Jesus.

22:22
But if you believe it's unclean, then it's unclean.

22:25
In that case,

22:27
don't put food that is going to be a stumbling block in front of other people that have this food scruple based on their cultural background.

22:38
Or in other words, do not let what you eat cause the ruin of 1 for whom Christ died.

22:45
Paul says basically,

22:47
later to the weaker brother or sister who is likely to be offended by your food choices.

22:56
Limit your rights for the sake of others.

22:58
Walk in love.

22:59
Now from this, you might derive the following principle.

23:03
When Christians are gathered together, always limit your freedom for the sake of the most sensitive and easily offended person.

23:13
So now we're 2,000 years later, somebody has, out of the kindness of their heart, stopped at a gourmet donut shop on their way to church.

23:25
And they bought these beautiful donuts.

23:27
They spent their own money, just a free will offering, and they bring them to church.

23:32
But then you've got somebody else in the church who is working really hard to lose weight and avoid sweets.

23:38
And that person is now offended that we have these beautiful donuts on the back table to eat.

23:44
So what do you do?

23:47
Do you say, oh, well, you've got to take these donuts out here.

23:50
Thanks, thanks, but no thanks.

23:52
You know, we can't have these donuts here because this person, this weaker brother is going to be offended.

23:56
So we can't, you see what I'm saying?

23:59
It's the same kind of thing.

24:00
So how do you know if what we read in Romans 14 applies to the donut situation?

24:07
How do we know?

24:09
Does it have comparable particulars?

24:12
Or are you extracting a principle out that is not legitimate?

24:17
Well, the way to test it is to look at the example of Jesus.

24:22
Did Jesus offend sensitive people?

24:27
All the time.

24:30
They accused him of being a drunk and a glutton.

24:35
And you know what he kept doing?

24:37
He kept drinking and he kept eating with those sinners.

24:40
Even though the religious people criticized him, Jesus continued to offend them, knowing it would offend them.

24:45
Not for the sake of offending them, but because he believed it was the right thing to do.

24:50
There are dissimilar particulars in this case.

24:54
Paul wasn't dealing with easily offended people.

24:57
That's not who he was dealing with.

24:59
He was dealing with Jewish converts to Christianity who weren't ready

25:06
to stop doing kosher.

25:08
Like keeping kosher was important to them.

25:10
And so this is not just like something like, oh, I'm so easily offended.

25:15
No, this is more of like an entrenched, I've been living this way my whole life kind of a situation.

25:21
And Paul's priority was to enable them to eat together.

25:25
It wasn't to stop doing something or limit something.

25:28
It was to get them to be able to eat together.

25:32
So

25:33
The scenarios between keeping kosher and eating donuts in church, I just think they're dissimilar and you can't apply one to the other.

25:42
Problem #3, cultural relativity.

25:45
Sometimes a command is specific to a cultural practice of the time.

25:51
So you have the command of scripture, greet one another with a holy kiss.

25:57
So I'm just gonna call you out in the room here.

26:01
I did not receive a holy kiss from any of you.

26:06
I did not feel any of your lips on my lips, on my cheek, any part of my hand, you know, like some societies, they kiss the hand, right?

26:16
Why don't we do this?

26:17
Why don't we follow the scripture?

26:19
Well, it's because it was a cultural practice for them at the time.

26:24
And this is funny because this command to greet each other with a holy kiss, it shows up in Romans and 1 Corinthians,

26:30
In 2nd Corinthians, in 1st Thessalonians, it's like repeated over and over again.

26:36
Why are we so comfortable ignoring it?

26:39
Well, because in our society, that's not a standard greeting anymore.

26:45
Now, I remember, and you probably remember too, when it was standard, when I was younger,

26:51
All the women kissed me on the cheek when I came in.

26:55
And these women ended up being older women and now many of them are gone, sadly.

27:01
Yeah, I used to get a lot of cheek kisses coming to church.

27:05
And it's been a while since I got, now that I said this, a bunch of people probably come up to me on Sunday.

27:10
But that's not the point.

27:12
The point is culture changes.

27:14
And this is talking about greeting.

27:16
This is not talking about specifically your lips.

27:18
This is talking about greeting somebody warmly, especially after COVID.

27:23
I think that changed a lot for a lot of people, the pandemic, where, you know, a handshake, I mean, what do we do, like this stupid elbow thing?

27:30
That was ridiculous.

27:32
But like handshakes and hugs, those are the ways that we warmly greet each other.

27:36
And so I think that's totally fine.

27:40
There are differences.

27:41
Each culture has their own practice of greeting.

27:45
And some is to kiss both cheeks.

27:48
Some is to kiss three, one side, the other side, back to the first side.

27:52
And in others, it might be to do like a bow, like some of the Asian cultures, right?

27:59
Each culture has their own way of greeting.

28:02
If we recognize this command is culturally embedded, then it is culturally dependent and we seek a cultural equivalent.

28:11
One of the ways you can tell this is you look at the send lists.

28:14
The scholars call them vice lists, where they're like Galatians 5, 19, Ephesians 5, 3, 1 Corinthians 6, 9, where Paul will list out like a whole bunch of sins.

28:24
You won't ever see any of these cultural practices in the sin lists.

28:28
Okay, on to #4, incorrectly grouped texts.

28:33
So I want to cover with you three kinds of misgrouping.

28:36
The first is where you group too few texts.

28:41
We recognize that verses are embedded in a literary context and a historical context.

28:47
But when we go to build a doctrine, what we do is we take a verse here and a verse there and we bring them together.

28:55
Everybody does this.

28:56
There's nothing bad about doing that.

28:58
But the problem is when you go to group these texts together, you could group too few texts, too many texts, or the wrong texts.

29:07
Let's look at an example of grouping too few texts.

29:11
Jesus says in Mark 11, 24, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.

29:20
He also says in John 14, 12, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and in fact will do greater works in these.

29:29
This is because I go to the Father.

29:30
So we group these texts together and we conclude, if you have faith, you can heal anyone at any time for any reason.

29:40
right?

29:40
The first one says, it will be yours, just believe, right?

29:44
And the second one says, shoot, you're going to do greater works than what Jesus did.

29:51
So obvious conclusion, if you just take these two scriptures, you're better than Jesus, you can heal anybody at any time.

29:58
They don't have to believe, only you have to believe.

30:02
What do we do here?

30:03
We didn't bring in enough verses on the subject.

30:06
We just brought 2 verses and we built the doctrine of healing on it.

30:10
And go ahead and try that and see how it works.

30:16
There is actually another verse that's important on this subject, and it's where Jesus went to his hometown and says he could not do many deeds of power there because they did not believe in him.

30:28
Even Jesus couldn't heal people when they didn't have faith, right?

30:33
So that I think is very significant.

30:35
Or what about the verse where it says,

30:38
They threw this dead guy into the tomb and he touched Elisha's bones and came back to life.

30:44
Nobody had faith.

30:45
Elisha's dead.

30:46
The guys that threw him in weren't trying to resurrect him.

30:49
They were just trying to toss him in there so they could hide.

30:53
And then the dead guy obviously didn't have faith either.

30:56
So like nobody had any faith and God still did a miracle.

30:59
What does that tell you?

31:01
It's more complicated than just like X plus Y equals Z.

31:06
So we want to group enough verses so that we don't fall into error.

31:10
It's also possible to group too many texts.

31:13
If you group too many texts, then you end up with just like something with too many exceptions and it's very muddy.

31:18
Or you can group the wrong scriptures together.

31:21
So look at this example.

31:23
You combine ideas that mutually reinforce each other, but cause significant problems.

31:28
Here's 3 verses.

31:29
Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death.

31:33
Colossians 1.14,

31:35
we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

31:38
John 11, 26, everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.

31:44
From these, you conclude from the first one that death is the result of sin.

31:52
And from the second one, you conclude you have forgiveness of sin.

31:57
And in the last one, you conclude that if you believe, you never die.

32:01
And so from this, you build a doctrine that

32:05
Genuine Christians never die.

32:08
That's your belief.

32:09
That's your new doctrine.

32:11
That's on your statement of faith.

32:12
Genuine Christians never die.

32:16
So let's run that through a little test.

32:20
Let's look at the rest of the New Testament.

32:22
Did Jesus die?

32:27
Did Paul die?

32:28
Did Peter die?

32:28
Like everybody died, right?

32:31
There are no Christians over 150 years old.

32:34
I mean, I don't know how old the oldest Christian is, but I'm sure it's not over 150 or else we'd hear about it in the news, I would think.

32:41
So it won't do to say, okay, no Christian.

32:43
What we did was we just connected verses together that don't belong together and created a nonsense application.

32:52
Now, since our focus in this class is evaluating doctrines against the Bible, let's consider some practical questions to consider about changing your beliefs.

33:02
Here are three practical questions.

33:05
If people switch to this doctrine or practice, how would it affect their lives?

33:11
Number 2, if a church or denomination switched to this doctrine or practice, how would they implement it?

33:17
Number 3, are there any challenges in getting along with other Christians, the government, or other institutions?

33:25
And then as you ask questions about, okay,

33:28
We built a doctrine, now we're going to apply it to my own life.

33:33
Okay, that's one thing.

33:34
But if then you apply it to your church, that's a much bigger thing.

33:38
Or to a denomination.

33:39
If your belief has real world effects that can bring harm, you better darn well be sure that it's right.

33:47
That you're not just going off in some sort of partial manner.

33:51
Let's review.

33:52
We covered 4 application rules and four problems.

33:56
We looked at the rule that there are context constraints.

34:01
That's the idea that a text cannot mean what it never could have meant in its original context.

34:07
So that was #1 there.

34:08
And we have #2.

34:10
You've got to have comparable particulars.

34:13
If your situation is not the same as the original situation in the Bible, then you're not free to just apply it to your life.

34:22
Number 3, it has to cohere with the New Testament.

34:26
So you can't come up with an application that only works for like a few verses, but then there's lots of other verses that say the opposite.

34:35
Number 4, broad application.

34:39
I'm glad it works for you, this application, but is it going to work for all Christians or just certain Christians who are like you?

34:46
Because that's not good.

34:47
You want it to be broadly applicable.

34:50
And then we covered these problems.

34:52
The problem of extended application, where you take an application and you extend beyond its original situation to new situations.

34:59
Or you have dissimilar particulars and you're trying to do the same thing that they did, but your situation is not really the same.

35:07
Or cultural relativity, where you're just in a different culture, so you shouldn't do the same thing they did because the culture is different.

35:15
And then #4, incorrectly group texts.

35:18
And that's probably the biggest one we're going to look at.

35:20
in this class is grouping our scriptures together.

35:24
We're actually going to look at that in a couple weeks when we look at systematic theology.

35:30
These are rules and problems, and this concludes the Bible part of this class.

35:38
We've looked at the text of scripture, translation, interpretation, and application.

35:45
I use the metaphor of a tower

35:48
for restoration theology, because in a tower, everything rests on the floor beneath it.

35:55
So I've been very careful to arrange things so that we can see the slow buildup over time of each level upon the level beneath it.

36:05
If you go to do biblical theology and you don't even have a good translation of the Bible, it's not going to work.

36:12
Or if you're going to go do systematic theology and you don't even recognize what the literary interpretation of scripture is, you're going to take verses out of context left and right.

36:22
So each layer builds on what came before.

36:26
And now we're ready to look at the theology section.

36:28
I've got 5 sessions on theology, biblical theology, systematic theology, analytic theology, historical theology, and comparative theology.

36:36
And then last of all, we'll reach the pinnacle.

36:40
of evaluating doctrine.

36:42
I'll give you a couple examples there.

36:44
But as for next time, our focus is going to be biblical theology and progressive revelation as we continue through this class on restoration theology.

36:57
Well, that brings this presentation to a close.

36:59
What did you think?

37:00
Come on over to restitudio.org and find episode 643.

37:05
applying scripture in your context and leave your questions, comments, and feedback there.

37:10
Now on a previous class, I actually had a theology class a couple, several years ago.

37:17
Boy, by now, maybe it's like six or seven years ago now.

37:20
Anyhow, it's there on the podcast feed and on the website and on YouTube and all that.

37:25
But anyhow, this was called Theology Class Part 18, and it was about atonement theories.

37:30
Someone named Peter wrote in saying, outstanding teaching

37:34
on atonement theories, Sean, and loved the follow-up commentary.

37:39
You have a real gift for teaching and promoting inclusiveness.

37:43
I started doing another study on why Jesus died and the meaning of his atonement about a month ago.

37:49
I was well into it and then came across your teaching here.

37:52
I had not heard of the communal substitution theory before and it deeply resonates with me as well.

37:59
It just seems to fit better with all of the scriptures than the others I have looked at so far.

38:04
I will come back and leave a more detailed comment once I have completed my own study on this topic.

38:09
I am looking into a few other atonement theories not mentioned as well.

38:13
One of the aspects I love about presentations from restitudio and trinities.org is the rigor and detail on topics, as well as the willingness to always look outside the box, always seeking truth wherever it may lead.

38:28
My philosophy as well, keep up the great work,

38:31
I look forward to meeting with you and other UCA members later this month in Sydney, Australia.

38:37
Blessings, Peter.

38:39
Well, Peter, thanks so much for writing in.

38:42
The Atonement Project that I embarked upon, just looking it up now, is from the year 2016, actually.

38:52
So, yeah, 10 years ago now.

38:55
Anyhow, this was a paper I put together for a theological conference that I was asked to speak at in Hampton, Georgia.

39:04
And it is actually on my website, restitudio.org.

39:09
You can search for why did Jesus die.

39:11
And in this paper, which there's a PDF for, and I think it's also on my academia page.

39:17
If you go to academia.edu, you can find a bunch of my stuff there too, if you prefer that format.

39:23
But anyhow, the first half of that presentation was just going through all of the scriptures on the topic of atonement, or at least all the ones that I could find.

39:31
Now, please keep in mind, 10 years ago was before AI, so it wasn't so easy to just find a list of scriptures as it is today.

39:39
You had to actually read, read, read, and take notes.

39:43
And so I found eight major different categories of what the scriptures say about Jesus dying.

39:50
And then

39:51
I also covered all of the major historic positions, at least that I was able to find.

39:58
Ransom theory, Chris's Victor, moral exemplar, satisfaction, penal substitution, and then governmental theory.

40:08
And then I finally ended with communal substitution, which was the idea of Joshua Thoreau.

40:14
And that was actually an interview I listened to on the Trinities podcast, episode 92.

40:20
And I thought Thoreau's essay on atonement was actually really good and solved some of the problems that penal substitution faces.

40:27
So anyhow, if you guys are curious about why Jesus died and that's a topic that interests you, I know that fairly recently some people have moved away from any kind of substitution views.

40:39
I still think that substitution works and it fits biblically.

40:44
But it's something that I am always looking at.

40:47
I'm always thinking about.

40:48
In fact, last weekend I was at a men's conference and I was talking to the men there in a breakout session, a workshop session about penal substitution.

40:58
And we were asking AI a bunch of questions about it just as a way to like demonstrate how AI works and like what kinds of questions are helpful for asking AI.

41:07
And one of the things that came up is that there are no early Christians before Augustine that believed in penal substitution, which to me is like a huge red flag.

41:18
It's not a deal breaker, but it definitely is a red flag.

41:21
So it's definitely something I want to look into more.

41:24
I would love to get back into this subject.

41:27
Like I said, it's been 10 years and read more about it.

41:31
But, you know, Peter makes a point here that

41:35
Dale and I and others in the restoration movement, also in the Unitarian Christian movement, although those are strictly speaking two separate things, there are plenty of restorationists that are non-Unitarians, but whatever.

41:49
The point is, we do tend to have a more open mind and we do tend to be very rigorous in the details because we know

41:57
that we have our biases, we have our limitations, we have our tribe, we have our way of thinking about something, and that has been proven to be wrong in the past.

42:08
So we want to see what, first of all, what are all the options?

42:13
Second of all, what are the reasons behind each of the options?

42:16
And then third of all, what are the defeaters for those reasons?

42:19
And that's just, I think, clear thinking, whether you're a science person,

42:24
or more into practical stuff like engineering or even legal rhetoric, right?

42:30
I mean, there's a lot of fields that function this way.

42:34
And I think it's just sort of part of God-given reasoning that we would apply that to theology.

42:39
The problem is people haven't been applying it to theology.

42:42
And you ask yourself, well, why not?

42:44
Why not, Sean?

42:45
Why haven't people been applying it to theology?

42:47
Because we have been told that you can't understand it and you just have to believe in it.

42:53
And it's a mystery.

42:55
And let me tell you something, Jesus does not talk like that.

42:57
Isaiah does not talk like that.

42:59
Moses does not talk like that.

43:01
I don't see that kind of argument in the Bible.

43:03
God doesn't talk like that.

43:05
So I don't think it's appropriate and I think it behooves us to search the scriptures, to put our beliefs on the chopping block.

43:13
And that's what this class is all about.

43:15
And I can't wait until next week when we'll have our chance to start delving into theology.

43:20
We've got 5

43:21
sessions on theology.

43:23
We're going to talk about biblical theology next, and hopefully that will be a helpful survey for you as well.

43:30
As for going to Australia, yes, I am going to Australia next week.

43:34
I'll be going to New Zealand in just a couple of days.

43:39
depending on when you listen to this, and visiting Zach and Kayla Mayo and Living Hope Christian Church of New Zealand, which meets in the Cambridge area, just a couple hours south of Auckland, if you're in New Zealand, or I should say a Kiwi.

43:54
And so I'm very much looking forward to spending some time with the church down there and then making my way across the ocean to Australia for the debate on Friday night, Dale Tuggie versus Michael Bird.

44:06
Man, that's going to be epic.

44:09
I can't wait to see that and to cheer on Dale Tuggy and also to speak at the Canterbury Christadelphian Ecclesia in just in the Melbourne area on that Saturday.

44:24
So we have a session from 2 to 5, myself, Dale Tuggy and someone else I believe is also speaking then.

44:30
And so that's going to be a really cool time.

44:32
So if you are in Melbourne, Australia, please stop by.

44:37
or get in touch with me.

44:38
Love to meet you.

44:39
And then of course, we'll be up in Sydney the weekend after that.

44:44
So that would be in, this is all March 2026.

44:47
Depending on when you're listening to this, could have been years ago.

44:52
But if you are listening to this and you are in Australia, I'd love to see you in Melbourne on the 21st, where I'll be speaking at the Canterbury Christadelphian Church, or Ecclesia, as they call it.

45:05
And

45:06
In the Sydney area, we'll be at the Tops Conference Center in Stanwell Tops on March 27th, 28th, and 29th.

45:14
So love to see the Australian brothers and sisters there, maybe a few Kiwis.

45:19
Who knows?

45:20
It'd be great to see everybody there.

45:21
Well, that's going to be it for today.

45:22
If you'd like to support us, you can do that at restitudio.org.

45:25
We'll catch you next week.

45:27
And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.