Mike Hess: 3 common theological trends undermining Biblical sufficiency:

#4 - Viewing everything other than the main point of the passage as “white noise.” (HT: Tyler Robbins) :)

[T Howard]

#4 - Viewing everything other than the main point of the passage as “white noise.” (HT: Tyler Robbins)

Care to elaborate?

Lee, great question. What is being addressed is that you may have a passage with a clear main point—say Leviticus 18’s prohibitions of many sexual deviations—and you ignore the very interesting pattern that for all of the heterosexual deviations, the phrase used isn’t “have sex”, but rather “uncover nakedness.”

Not you personally, mind you, but imagine you did. Now, is there anything interesting to learn about Hebrew culture from how that phrase is used? Does it perhaps illustrate something about how we should, or should not, approach the topic of nakedness, even apart from fornication?

You don’t have to agree with my position—hence I won’t even name it—but if we limit ourselves to the “main points”, we are going to miss a huge portion of what Scripture tells us. We miss the forest for the trees.

Another example; the main point of Genesis 1 is God’s creation. However, a secondary question is whether the inconsistent usage of singular and plural noun and verb forms give us some indication about the nature of God.

A huge portion of the significance here is that if we simply use the “main points”, there are a number of points of theology, like the Trinity, that become incredibly hard to demonstrate.