Peter (John) Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled (J.I.) Packers Hermeneutics and What's Right and Wrong With the Regulative Principle
What’s right about the regulative principle is its laudable aim to please God completely in worship. If God has told us what to do and not do in worship, surely conformance to that revealed standard should prevail. Like so much admirable Reformed thinking, the Regulative Principle of Worship strains itself in pursuit of meticulous compliance with every discernible jot and tittle it finds in Holy Scripture. This exhaustive compliance reflex of the Reformed mind continues to identify and illuminate much otherwise neglected Biblical truth. The global church owes much to the Reformed teachers for the pearls of wisdom mined from Holy Scripture across the centuries.
What's wrong with the regulative principle is its temptation to say too much. Christian leaders of every age face a two-fold burden when faced with the duty of biblical interpretation; the quest not to go beyond what is written, but also not to fall short of what the Bible makes clear.
I suspect that Reformed thinkers are prone to violate the first stricture and indeed, go beyond Scripture with neck veins protruding. Why do they do it? They often approach the Bible like a puzzle to be put together so that now all things become clear. Could it be that some neo-Puritan believers find themselves increasingly more enamored with John Owen than with John the Apostle because, after all, the wise Puritan divnes decipher, divy up, and display everything in order, nicht wahr?”
When this preference for the pantheon of approved Reformed expositors and theologians takes hold, it seems that a certain unwitting, catholicizing quasi two-source theory of revelation operates; only the authoritative “tradition” is thoroughly reformed. I call this “Peter (John) Piper picked a peck of pickled (J.I.) Packers hermeneutics.
Happily, in the case of both Packer and Piper, such restriction to some reformed ghetto of eisegetical theologizing has not taken hold. Packer continues to study and learn from many non-Reformed sources and Piper’s Future Grace involved a clear departure from received Reformed wisdom regarding incentives to moral striving and holy living. And the departure was driven by exegetical labor and honesty. And here lies the antidote to Reformed tendencies toward catholicizing eisegesis; an ongoing rigorous, historico-gramatical, contextual approach to the Bible. Where such scrutiny confirms the hallowed Reformed inheritance—so be it. Where it does not—let the chips fall where they may.
***
Technorati Tags:
What's wrong with the regulative principle is its temptation to say too much. Christian leaders of every age face a two-fold burden when faced with the duty of biblical interpretation; the quest not to go beyond what is written, but also not to fall short of what the Bible makes clear.
I suspect that Reformed thinkers are prone to violate the first stricture and indeed, go beyond Scripture with neck veins protruding. Why do they do it? They often approach the Bible like a puzzle to be put together so that now all things become clear. Could it be that some neo-Puritan believers find themselves increasingly more enamored with John Owen than with John the Apostle because, after all, the wise Puritan divnes decipher, divy up, and display everything in order, nicht wahr?”
When this preference for the pantheon of approved Reformed expositors and theologians takes hold, it seems that a certain unwitting, catholicizing quasi two-source theory of revelation operates; only the authoritative “tradition” is thoroughly reformed. I call this “Peter (John) Piper picked a peck of pickled (J.I.) Packers hermeneutics.
Happily, in the case of both Packer and Piper, such restriction to some reformed ghetto of eisegetical theologizing has not taken hold. Packer continues to study and learn from many non-Reformed sources and Piper’s Future Grace involved a clear departure from received Reformed wisdom regarding incentives to moral striving and holy living. And the departure was driven by exegetical labor and honesty. And here lies the antidote to Reformed tendencies toward catholicizing eisegesis; an ongoing rigorous, historico-gramatical, contextual approach to the Bible. Where such scrutiny confirms the hallowed Reformed inheritance—so be it. Where it does not—let the chips fall where they may.
***
Technorati Tags:
john piper, j.i. packer, regulative principle, reformed, theology, bible, church, religion
posted by Mark DeVine at 5:44 PM
9 comments
