The Bible Tells Me So
On Knowing & Obeying the Biblical Pattern for Life & Godliness
by David Mills
If you know your Bible, you will begin to see the pattern in the biblical cloth. You will know that any particular error doesn’t fit the pattern, is a blotch on the tartan or a tear in the tweed. You will know it doesn’t feel biblical, even if you can’t refute it. If you read a story set in a place where you’ve lived, you know with some certainty whether the author really knew the place. He might have made some error in description. Or he might have gotten all the details right and still not described the place itself, so that though you can’t point to any particular error, you can still say “No, that isn’t my home.” So with the Bible. If you live in it, wander down its streets, play in its parks, you will easily detect the frauds and imitations.
Detecting Frauds
If you want to know a true Rembrandt from a forgery, you study true Rembrandts.* You learn to distinguish an authentic painting from a very good fraud by studying with excruciating care paintings known to be authentic. (Their authenticity, by the way, you have to take on reliable authority, as most of us must take the authenticity of the biblical books on reliable authority, in which we’re as justified as the student who accepts the consensus of Rembrandt scholars.)
You use a magnifying glass to study Rembrandt’s brushwork, and you stare at his paintings for hours to learn how he composed his pictures and how he used color, and so on. You’ll never know Rembrandt if you don’t spend a lot of time with Rembrandt. But if you won’t learn his methods with scientific reliability, you won’t ever be able to say with mathematical certainty that this or that painting is authentic. But you will have trained your eye to recognize Rembrandt. If you think this an unreliable way of judging things, just remember that prudent people spend millions and millions of dollars on paintings on just such recommendations.
Knowing the biblical pattern helps us discern its teaching on controverted questions. If someone says that self-fulfillment is more important than continued faithfulness to his wife or that St. Paul condemns only promiscuous homosexuality but would have approved “loving, committed, monogamous relationships,” and he produces a wealth of scholarship to support his claim, you will be able to say that it simply doesn’t fit the pattern. If you know the pattern, you will be able to say that every time the Bible mentions homosexuality, it condemns it, and that nowhere does the Bible commend or approve such acts, as you would expect if they were sometimes permissible, because otherwise God had failed to tell us something important. You could add that the biblical ideal is either chastity or faithfulness between husband and wife, and that this is understood to be the source of joy and happiness and contentment, and that unfaithfulness is understood to be a source of sorrow and pain and tragedy.
Further, if you know the pattern, you will know how intimately God has tied together the body and behavior. It will be clear that the fact that men and women have complimentary sexual organs, and that the combination of those organs produces fruit, means that they are meant for each other and that to use them in any other way is a perversion. You will know that becoming “one flesh” through sexual intercourse is not a metaphor for “growing closer” but a natural and supernatural reality.
And you will sense the many more profound and subtle meanings, even if only the wisest men and women are able to make them explicit. Since the deepest truths are the truths most easily denied by the liberals’ simple and rational (or rationalist) criticisms, it is thus important that you actually sense them yourself rather than take them on someone else’s authority, if you don’t want to wander into deeper darkness. It is easy to believe things seen in the distance are actually mirages or illusions when they are only far away, and can be reached if you keep walking.
The Biblical Pattern
Thus, there are sometimes no conclusive answers to questions about biblical teaching—answers, that is, that will win arguments and convince skeptics—but there is a conclusive pattern, which convinces despite our inevitable ignorance on one point or another. This pattern of answers will convince and sustain you despite your ignorance, much as a net with a hole or two will still catch enough fish to feed your family.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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