We Need the Whole Counsel of God

The following is "only" the foot note for an article I read at Chalcedon. It's so easy to take something out of context from the word. Or try to apply some segment of the word while missing out on other scriptures that would alter the application or give correct understanding and that is what he addresses here. It's from a section for subscribers of the magazine ,or I would link to it. The magazine is very good. We all have seen this happen, it will be good to have this perspective in the back of your mind when it happens again. Often as I am working on my strained carrots, I look over at someones elses plate and ask "could you cut me off a little piece of that.."

Note I'm not putting it all in italics, as I wanted to stress certain portions of it.

Martin G. Selbrede

4. The disingenuous condemnation usually takes is easy to recognize: all fundamentalism is bad, and it is the reason people fly jetliners into skyscrapers, or why self-appointed vigilantes will shoot and murder a doctor who performs abortions. The answer is self-evident: all these abuses arise, not from a totalistic approach to Scripture (where the whole counsel of God is understood and applied) but from a piecemeal approach to it. We see this in humanistic attacks on the Bible: critics always quote an “offensive” verse or two in isolation and rail about what that allegedly leads to. But Christianity, as Greg Bahnsen well says, must be defended as a system, and theology, as Dr. Rushdoony makes crystal clear, is a seamless garment. The best protection against the abuses lamented by humanists is Biblical totalism. The man who is guided wholly and authoritatively by the entire Word of God is not some mindless automaton, a ticking time bomb that could go off and kill his fellow citizens without a thought, but a man constrained, a man immune from being controlled by those who manipulate fragments of Scripture to their own ends. Far from abandoning ethics and morality, the fully equipped man of God alone has an expansive, well-anchored morality that exhibits, in exhaustive detail, his loving his neighbor as himself. In short, the only solution to the caricature painted of Christian fundamentalism is Biblical totalism. Christian fundamentalism can go astray when it fails to anchor itself to the whole counsel of God, when it plays the piecemeal game the humanists indulge in. The vigilantes can be criticized for being “consistent” with a verse or two, but their actions show their gross inconsistency with the whole counsel. Critics paper over this difference because humanists know nothing other than a piecemeal approach to anything: thinking in a system is alien to their premises. In their hands, our Lord’s instruction in the Great Commission would be changed to “teaching them to observe a select handful of the things I’ve commanded you,” rather than all things I’ve commanded. Herein lies the modern error: the straw man it erects against the Bible is its own humanistic, fractured approach to the Bible.

Critics deride Rushdoony’s “jot and tittle” approach to Scripture as leading to such a piecemeal approach to God’s Word, but even that criticism misquotes Rushdoony: the mandate is to obey every jot and tittle, not pit them against each other. “[T]he spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Cor. 14:32), forbidding the isolation of any portion of the Scriptures from the testimony of the rest. Modern Christendom sets legalism in motion when it picks and chooses between jots and tittles but disdains to teach all of them, because what remains after filtering is no longer subject to scriptural checks and balances (those having been expunged). When the Sadducees attempted to refute the doctrine of the Resurrection, they cited jots and tittles concerning Levirate marriage, yet Jesus said to them, “Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures …?” (Mark 12:24). Unless one embraces the total message of the entire Bible, he “knows not the scriptures” and will blunder into a ditch as readily as the Sadducees had done.