2 Timothy 2:15 Be diligent to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth.

2 Timothy 3:16–17  All Scripture is inspired by Goda and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.bb

In the past, Christians who spoke about the status of the Bible tended to speak of the Bible’s truthfulness, reliability, sufficiency, inspiration, inerrancy, and so forth.

Today, there is popping up an Otis, saying, how can I know with certainty what the Bible is saying?

They keep saying that you cannot know “for sure” or “for certain” or “for 100% certain. The argument seems to be that if you do not know something “for 100% sure,” then you do not truly know it. In other words, you must possess omniscient knowledge about something before you can legitimately say that you know that thing well enough to build life decisions on your putative knowledge.

Therefore, they say you cannot say that any particular sin is wrong, often they use, homosexuality as their example.

Their concern is, unless you know with omniscient knowledge that the Bible really does condemn homosexual behavior, and unless you know with omniscient knowledge that the books of the Bible with those passages in them really do belong to the canon of God-inspired books, and unless you know with omniscient knowledge that this is the way God himself wants those ancient texts to be interpreted and applied today, then you have no right to speak as if these things are truly known at all. According to Demas, you are free to choose some other path.

How can I be certain what books really belong in the Bible?

 How can I be sure that my interpretation of any text is correct and, still more, what its proper application is when I draw lines from texts that are two or three thousand years old and written in another language and in another culture to our life in the early twenty-first century?

At a milder level, many preachers who are not entertaining the sweep of the epistemic challenges some raise may nevertheless face somewhat similar challenges as they prepare their Sunday morning sermons.

Which interpretation of the text in front of me is correct?

How can I declare what the word of the Lord is saying if I cannot be certain what it is saying?

Or which of us have tried to explain what the Bible says on some sensitive topic or other, only to be dismissed with the line, “But that’s just your interpretation”?

The subject is much too large and multifaceted for a brief reflection, but it may not be inappropriate to lay down a handful of markers.

First, it is deceptive, and even idolatrous, to set up omniscience as the necessary criterion for “certain” or “sure” knowledge.

It is deceptive to set up omniscience as the necessary criterion for “certain” or “sure” knowledge, and this for at least four reasons.

First, We commonly speak of human knowing without making omniscience the criterion of true knowing. This is true even in the Bible. For example, Luke tells Theophilus that although many people had undertaken to hand down reports of Jesus’s life and ministry as reported by the eyewitnesses, he himself carefully “investigated everything from the beginning” and then “decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:3–4).

Luke uses words that are entirely appropriate to human knowing, to human certainty; he is not promising omniscient knowledge to Theophilus. Again, John tells his believing readers that he is writing his first epistle “so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13): he is not writing so that they may become omniscient with respect to their knowledge of their status.

When Paul encourages Timothy to become “a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15), he is anticipating that Timothy will become a faithful interpreter of Scripture, but not that he will become an omniscient interpreter of Scripture.

If this argument is valid, that we do not enjoy 100 percent certain knowledge about what the Scriptures are saying, for example on homosexuality, then to be consistent we must adopt the same agnostic position on everything the Bible says, including what it says about the most deeply confessional Christian truths.

For example, Christians hold that Jesus is truly to be confessed and worshiped as God. But the deity of Christ is denied by Arians old and new, including Jehovah’s Witnesses: one cannot say that there is universal agreement that this is what the Bible teaches. Must we therefore say that because we don’t know “for sure” what the Bible says about these things, therefore we should leave the matter open?

Believing in the Bible, Demas (the doubter who says we cannot know) asserts, “is an act of faith.” True enough. It appears, however, that Demas pits faith over against knowing. If I understand him correctly, his argument is as follows: You may believe that the Bible says such and such about LGBTQ+ issues, but you cannot know “for 100% sure,” and therefore you are not warranted to pronounce that LGBTQ+ behavior is disapproved by God.

This buys into not only a misguided view of knowledge but also contemporary secular definitions of “faith.”

“Faith” has one of two common meanings: either it is a synonym for “religion” (there are many “religions”; there are many “faiths”), or it refers to a personal, subjective, religious commitment without any necessary connection to truth.

One cannot help but ask how Demas knows that God is a loving God. Many so-called “new atheists” viscerally deny that God is great or good.

Why does Demas base his ethical decisions on his conviction that God is good?

To be consistent, shouldn’t he say that we cannot know “for 100% sure” that God is good?

Isn’t he making ethical decisions on the basis of what (his own logic must tell him) he cannot know?

Demas is undermining the clarity and the authority of Scripture on the ground that we cannot truly know what Scripture is saying because we don’t enjoy omniscient knowledge, and that even our view of the Bible is grounded not in knowledge but in (his understanding of) faith.

But the ploy is not only deceptive, it is idolatrous. It demands of human beings that they enjoy an attribute that belongs to God alone if they are to know (“for certain”, well enough to make ethical decisions) anything at all.

The Bible demonstrates, often implicitly but sometimes explicitly, that human beings can grow in knowledge, with appropriate certainty, responding to God’s revelation with thought and active faith and obedient submission to our Maker and Redeemer. The ideal of knowing God and making him known is traded in for dogmatic focus on what we cannot know that make us deaf to and careless about what God has disclosed of himself, of our world, of moral and ethical conduct. God has been de-godded. The name of this game is idolatry.

Second, we must at all costs avoid being manipulated by “the art of imperious ignorance”

The person of imperious ignorance not only claims that he himself does not know whether the relevant texts are from God, and/or what they mean (which is an admission of his own ignorance), but he also claims no one else may legitimately claim that they know (which is a dogmatic declaration of their ignorance). This is “imperious ignorance”, that is, an imperial declaration that they must be ignorant whether or not they admit it.

I think it is clear that in every case some can decide, with varying degrees of certainty, even if others confess that they cannot decide. But that is quite different from legislating ignorance in order to avoid conclusions one wants to avoid.

Third, we should be careful to sniff out publishing ploys that seem designed to introduce new waves of uncertainty.

For example a book titled Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church.

The advertising for the book maintains that both sides argue their case “from Scripture”—though of course, Jehovah’s Witnesses argue their case “from Scripture” too.

The point is that if there is such a thing as orthodoxy, then not all disputed things are properly disputable. Sometimes the Christian church is built up and strengthened by farsighted publishing ventures; sometimes it is being manipulated by publishers with little or no confessional loyalty or ecclesiastical discipline.

Fourth, we must become informed as to the nature of some postmodern epistemologies that, though now rarely teased out, are very widely assumed.

For example, Bernard Ramm’s Protestant Biblical Interpretation, published in 1950, there was no interaction with postmodern hermeneutics.

Twenty years later, in the third edition there was added some material to tip the hat in that direction, but most of it shared the assumptions of the first two editions. The task of biblical hermeneutics is to develop skills to enable “me,” the interpreter, to ask questions of “it,” the text. I, the knower/interpreter, direct appropriate questions to the text, and the text, as it were, answers me back with equal directness.

But the “new” hermeneutic (now quite old!), that is, postmodern hermeneutics, points out, quite tellingly, that the “I” who is asking the questions is never neutral, never reliably objective. Perhaps the “I” is a white, middle-class,

And suddenly, we have tumbled into some profound reasons, some postmodern hermeneutical reasons, for justifying the skeptical charge, “But that’s just your interpretation.”

The result is a smorgasbord of innovative interpretations that transform personal beliefs and (if enough people buy into them) cultural assumptions. As Richard Topping has pointed out, “Remember we live in a time when six of the seven deadly sins are medical conditions, and pride is a virtue.”

When enough people absorb the interpretations that postmodernism has authorized, it is easy for a traditional Christian to feel excluded. There is a well-known line from Flannery O’Connor, who said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” By contrast, if with the new hermeneutic, you decide you cannot know the truth, then in the culture steeped in the effluent of postmodernism, you will not be odd. And neither do you know the truth.

Things to remember when studying.

1. It is important to avoid a response that is needlessly polarizing, for transparently no interpreter, no “I,” no knower, is perfectly objective. The only way to achieve perfection in that department is (here we go again!) by becoming omniscient. In other words, traditional hermeneutics owes a debt of gratitude for reminding all of us how we cannot escape our subjectivity, our finiteness, our cultural blind spots.

2. Remember, not all interpretations are equally valid or invalid, as we circle in on the text again and again, we get closer and closer to faithful understanding, even if it is never the understanding available only to Omniscience.
3. 3. The appropriateness of these models of learning and knowing (we grow closer to faithful knowing with time) is confirmed by the way we learn, whether the subject is Greek or any other. Our first attempts at knowing any subject expose how large the distance is between what we think we know and what is actually there (as measured by those whose diligent study has brought them asymptotically close).

We human beings learn; we come to know by degrees; we self-correct; we compare notes with others. None of this supports the notion that by diligent hermeneutical discipline we may obtain perfect (omniscient) knowledge, but it surely excludes the conclusion that all putative knowledge is no better and no worse, neither more faithful nor less faithful, than any competing putative knowledge.

This same hermeneutic applies to culture, Is the culture of Nazism of equal value and worth to the culture of, say, Mother Teresa?

4.The models change again if we become convinced that Omniscience has kindly spoken to us in the words of human language. That does not mean that God gives us the capacity to enjoy omniscient knowledge ourselves: for that, we would have to be God.

But surely it is reasonable to assume that this omniscient God knows which words and idioms and syntax and figures of speech to use so as to best communicate with his image bearers, however lost and blind they may be.

” (Acts 17:11) is an example of growing in knowledge without ever claiming to possess omniscient knowledge. In other words, it is possible (as well as urgent) to press toward what Paul elsewhere calls “the pattern of sound teaching” (2 Tim. 1:13;  Rom. 6:17),

The special character of the word of God, in which the omniscient God stands behind it, however faulty our interpretive efforts of it, calls us to humility and godly fear whenever we engage the sacred text. God declares. This stance also grants the interpreter a certain kind of humble boldness.

In many cases the person does not like the outcome of what the scripture teaches and they try to make themselves the victim, and if you are the teacher or preacher or person that is dealing with the issue, they make you the abuser and victimizer.

So then the teacher, preacher, or person must ask them, did their anger and hurt come from what we said, or from what God says in Scripture. Was she angry with me or with God?.

To tremble before the word of God leaves me content to be odd in a culture that fails to recognize the authority of that word. But it also affords me a place to shelter.

“But that’s just your interpretation.” Well, yes, it is my interpretation. Whose else could it possibly be? Yet, in today’s climate, the question is not designed to offer a superior or better-warranted interpretation, but to relativize all interpretations.

The plea for imperious ignorance must not be allowed to stand. It is, finally, incoherent and idolatrous. A far better approach to Holy Scripture is preserved for us in Psalm 119.