R.C. Sproul

But that the basic message, that message that is necessary for a person to understand and grasp is plain for any person to see it.

And when Luther talked about giving the Bible to the laity, the church said, if you do that, that'll open up a floodgate of iniquity.

because people will start creating all kinds of horrible distortions, which is exactly what happened.

But Luther said, if that is the case, and if a floodgate of iniquity is opened by opening the pages of the Bible to people, so be it.

But the message that is clear is so important.

It contains the message of our salvation.

It is so important and so clear that we'll take the risks of all of the distortions and all of the heresies that go with that to make sure that the central message of Scripture is heard.

And as a result of this affirmation of sola scriptura, the Bible was put into the church

And the reading of the Scriptures and preaching from the Scriptures became central to the liturgy and to the worship of historic Protestantism.

The problem comes when we deduce certain things from the Bible, from one passage of Scripture,

that then brings us into direct conflict with something that the Scripture teaches elsewhere very clearly and very plainly.

That's what we're trying to avoid, being careful with how we deal with implications.

What I want to do in this session is to spell out a few more practical principles that we need to master if we're going to be able to understand the scriptures in a coherent way.

You'll recall that in the last session, I mentioned the importance of how we relate the historical narrative on the one hand with the didactic literature on the other, the gospel and the epistle and so on.

And I mentioned at that time that we have to be careful about drawing inferences from historical narratives that would be in conflict to the clear teaching that we find in other parts of the Bible.

Now, that really leads us to the next principle.

And that is the principle that deals with the relationship between the explicit and the implicit.

Now, it's an abstract principle, but it's a principle we need to get a hold of, and that is very simply, the rule is this, that the implicit is to be interpreted in light of the explicit, not the other way around.

We are not to interpret the explicit in light of the implicit.

Another way of saying it is that the obscure...