Good and Necessary Consequences

Logic and the Interpretation of Scripture

Scripture is Rational

The Westminster Confession of Faith states that

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.¹

If we want to know what God has revealed to us in Scripture, then, we must look not only at the explicit propositions of Scripture, but also implied propositions which may be validly deduced from Scripture’s explicit propositions. God is rational; his thoughts are not disjointed and self-contradictory. When reading the Scripture to understand doctrine, it is important to keep this in mind, lest we fall victim to the false teaching of others, or formulate our own false teaching.

Given the size of Scripture, the number of subjects it addresses, and the number of people who claim their teaching is Scriptural this can feel like an impossible task. However, as the Westminster Confession goes on to explain —

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.²

God has not left us without a means of adjudicating beliefs about what the Bible teaches, whether they are our own or those of others. And this is the significance of understanding the basics of logic becomes abundantly clear.

Non-Contradiction

In the first place, we have to remember that because Scripture is rational, it does not at any point contradict itself. This means that Scripture does not and cannot affirm and deny, at the same time and in the same sense, that some proposition p is the case. That may sound a little abstract, so let’s make it a little more concrete by looking at Scripture. For example, consider the apostle Paul’s assertion in Rom 3:20. He writes —

…by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight…

If no flesh (i.e. fallen son of Adam) will be justified in God’s sight by the deeds of the law (i.e. by obedience to the law of God), then we can confidently state that anyone who teaches that any fallen son of Adam will be justified in God’s sight by the deeds of the law is wrong. God does not contradict himself.

Identity

Secondly, we have to remember that each proposition has an identity. What I mean by that is that we can identify them as belonging to a larger set of propositions about some subject (e.g. “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line” is a geometrical proposition). The question we face when looking at these propositions is that of their identity. What kind of proposition is in Rom 3:20? What kind of proposition is in James 2:24? There will be some who attempt to argue from other passages of Scripture that men will be justified before God by the deeds of the law, but they do so by incorrectly identifying these two propositions as members of the same set. For the sake of simplicity in this article, we can say that Paul’s proposition is soteriological (concerned with how one is made right with God), whereas James’ proposition is ethical (concerned with the validity of one’s profession of having been made right with God, which is supported or undermined by one’s ethical or unethical conduct).

For example, a passage used by Romanists and Eastern Orthodoxists to justify their belief that some flesh will be justified in God’s sight by the deeds of the law is James 2:24, which states —

…a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.

What the person citing this passage may not realize is that if Paul and James are referring to the same kind of justification (i.e. in the sight of God/before God), then it follows from this that the Scriptures are self-contradictory and, therefore, not the Word of God.

How, then, do we solve this problem of superficially contradictory assertions? We begin by rereading the assertions in their contexts. In the case of Paul vs. James, the context of each will tell us if they are talking about the same kind of justification; and what we see is that they are not. Whereas Paul explicitly states that no flesh will be justified in the sight of God by the deeds of the law, James indicates that one is known to be righteous by the deeds of the law done in the sight of men.

Let’s look at the passage —

What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?

Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.³

In whose sight do deeds of the law justify a man? In the sight of other men, not God. Abraham was justified by faith alone before God, but by the deeds of the law in the sight of other men. The Scripture which declared Abraham to be righteous via faith alone was fulfilled by his demonstration of that faith through actions we can observe. Clearly, then, Paul and James are speaking about two different kinds of justification — (1.)before the sight of God by faith alone, and (2.)before the sight of men by deeds of the law — and their propositions, therefore, do not belong to the same set of propositions.

Excluded Middle

Lastly, then, we need to remember that a Scriptural proposition either is or is not dealing with the doctrine it is being used to support. In our case above, either James’ proposition is dealing with the doctrine of justification before the sight of God, or it is not. There is no middle position. This same principle/law of logic holds for every assertion made by a teacher; the propositions they derive from Scripture either support their teaching or they do not. There is no middle position.

Conclusion

What is wonderful about the Scriptures is that their meaning is not something only some superior class of Christians can divine. Rather, as the Westminster theologians state —

…those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.⁴

When we encounter the claim that the Scripture’s imply some doctrine x, the first thing we need to do is ask whether or not that doctrine contradicts a clear teaching found in Scripture on the same matter. In the example given above, the question we needed to ask was: Does the claim that man is justified in the sight of God by faith and the deeds of the law contradict the Bible’s teaching on justification? We answered this by looking at the Scriptural propositions in their contexts (Rom 3:20 & James 2:24), identifying the kinds of propositions they are (viz. soteriological and ethical), and recognizing that because they are essentially distinct from one another these two propositions are not touching upon the same subject and are not, therefore, capable of synthesis.

We saw that because God is not irrational we have to conclude that the teaching of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox churches about justification is irrational and false. Though they may claim that their view is inferred from the explicit teaching of Paul and James on the matter of justification, subjecting their view to logical scrutiny shows us that it isn’t. Their inferred doctrine, to put it another way, was not deduced by good and necessary consequence, but was arrived at via fallacious reasoning.

Knowing this can help us apply the laws of logic to our discernment of the teaching of others who wish to pass their strange doctrines off as the implied teaching of Scripture. We don’t have to accept their claims. Indeed, we have the privilege and duty of testing those claims by searching the Scriptures in a logically rigorous way.

1. Ch. 1, Art. 6.

2. Ch. 1, Art. 7.

3. James 2:14-24. (emphasis added)

4. ibid.