MBD-04 The Normative Perspective: Parts and Aspects of Scripture

A friend of mine recently bought a bicycle for his son. The bicycle required some assembly — things like attaching the wheels and pedals. But there weren’t any instructions for assembling the bicycle. Now, my friend knew what a bicycle should look like and how it should work, so he was still able to put it together. But imagine what would have happened if he had never seen a bicycle before. In that case, he might not have been able to assemble it properly.

In some ways, the Bible is like a box of bicycle parts without instructions. Just as it is relatively easy to put together things that are familiar, it is also relatively easy to discover some basic things about the Bible’s meaning and proper use. On the other hand, just as it is difficult to put together complicated devices without instructions, it is hard to apply the Bible to complicated ethical questions when we do not understand Scripture’s finer workings.

This is the fourth lesson in our series, Making Biblical Decisions, and we’ve entitled it “The Normative Perspective: Parts and Aspects of Scripture.” As we’ve stated throughout these lessons, ethical judgment always involves:

This definition has led us to speak of three essential considerations in making biblical decisions: the proper standard of God’s word, which we’ve associated with the normative perspective on ethics; the proper goal, which accords with the situational perspective; and the proper motive, which corresponds to the existential perspective.

In this lesson, we’ll look again at the normative perspective, exploring the process by which we discern ethical standards in the Bible. We’ll focus our attention on the different ways the various parts and aspects of Scripture communicate God’s norms to us.

As we discuss the parts and aspects of Scripture, we’ll consider first the variety of materials we find in Scripture. Second, we’ll look more closely at the books and passages that comprise God’s law in Scripture. And third, we’ll address the unity of Scripture that draws all of the parts and aspects of the Bible together. Let’s begin with the variety we find in Scripture.