How to Study Your Bible: Part 2 Session with Nathan Pearl from the Big Texas Shindig

Transcription

[intro music]

Nathan Pearl:  Understanding that we need context, the thing that I want to illustrate is that there are two different approaches to Bible study. Dad talked about, earlier, the slip that there is in Christianity today away from the Word of God. Here's the problem with that: There are two different types of science that people talk about today. One is what they call soft science. Your soft science is sciences like social science, psychology, anthropology. It's the study of there's three doors, one is open and two are closed, which one will you go in? That's an anthropological study.

Soft science is based on observation and conjecture and remains open‑ended, subject to interpretation, not having a basis in fixed law. In other words, a soft science is your opinion, or it's somebody else's opinion. It is to say that Freud says, or that this great professor or psychologist says . . . The problem with soft science is that it's always open‑ended.

If someone has a psychological problem, and you say, "If you will take this aspirin, and go this way, and then go that way, then do this, or if you do that, then you'll be fixed," it doesn't work, because there's not a particular thing that you can do that will fix, because it's not an exact science. One person's fix might be different from someone else's fix. If I say that this kid has ADHD and someone else says, "No, he just likes to run around," we could argue about it all day long, because there's no way to prove whether he has ADHD or whether he is just undisciplined. That's why so many people would get diagnosed with something like that, because it's not a hard science; it's not something that's quantifiable.

The other thing is a hard science. A hard science is chemistry, physics, biology. Hard sciences rely on quantifiable data, data that you can sum up, add, subtract, fix. They are subject to fixed walls and they do not allow subjective interpretation.

In other words, what's in this bottle is water. It's H2O. It doesn't matter what my opinion is on it. It's still there. I could write a paper on it. It's still the same thing. It doesn't require any particular scholarship to determine that this is water. I have no purpose for talking about the qualities of this particular water. It's just water. It's water in a bottle. It's always going to be water in a bottle.

Soft science, you can't do that. People have begun to approach the Bible as a soft science. It's subjective. It's your opinion. How do you feel about it? What do you think about it? How does it affect you? What is your doctrine? What is your favorite Bible to use? The issue is that it's being approached as a soft science, instead of being approached as a hard science.

The way that we're going to approach studying your Bible—it makes Bible study exciting—is that it's a hard science, that the Bible is quantifiable, exact, and perfect; that I can determine whether there's an s on the end of the word or not, and that completely changes the doctrine. That completely changes what's there.

All I need to do is, I don't need to determine whether it's right or not, and I don't need to determine how I feel about it. I don't really care what anybody else says about it. I don't care what some other professor or what some other scholar says about it. The only thing that matters is what's there.

Do you follow that? Do you understand the strangeness of that? I have friends that like the Bible study that's the other way; they study it as a soft science. What I do seems over simple to them. Because I can take a passage and say, this is what it means, emphatically, this is what it means. Well, how do you know? The Bible says so. It makes Bible study exciting.

[outro music]