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SOUND DOCTRINE IS FOR READING AND TEACHING THE BIBLE

“You gotta go to this concert tonight. The greatest saxophonist in the world is playing!” So said my saxophone teacher about an upcoming Michael Brecker concert at Cal State Hayward.

I was in sixth grade and had just begun playing the saxophone the year before. I was quickly developing a love for jazz music through listening to some of my dad’s old tapes and CDs of greats like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Dexter Gordon, but I had never been to a live jazz concert. This would be my first.

“Greatest” is often a disputable title, but Brecker certainly was the premier jazz saxophone virtuoso of his generation. (In 2007, at only fifty-seven years old, Brecker died of leukemia.) That night, rotating between fronting a big band, leading a smaller combo, and playing solo, Michael Brecker transported me into another realm.

While Brecker played, his vintage Selmer Mark VI saxophone seemed less an inanimate hunk of metal than a wizard’s wand, able to conjure up any sound he wanted. He could summon a flood of notes out of thin air and cast them perfectly into place faster than any listener could follow. Hearing him improvise was like watching a Rembrandt painting materialize out of thin air: all that perfectly shaded light and dark, all those delicate, invisible brushstrokes, made up as he went, with not a note out of place. But his playing wasn’t mere pyrotechnics—it pulsed with focused, fluid emotion as he ranged freely between laughs and cries, laments and lullabies.

It seemed impossible to do what he did with a saxophone, and all the more so because he was making it up as he went. The only word for it was “magic.” Indeed, all good improvisation has something magical about it. It’s seemingly effortless yet dizzyingly complex. It’s spontaneous to its core, yet every note sounds inevitable.

No merely technical description can capture the magic of a live performance by Michael Brecker or any other jazz master, but that doesn’t mean there is no technical work going on behind the curtain. On the contrary, Michael Brecker, like virtually every other jazz great, was a relentless practicer. He relished his breaks from the road so that he could spend upwards of eight hours a day working on his technique and vocabulary. In order to be a great jazz improviser, you have to attain a kind of effortless mastery over a wide range of terrain: your instrument’s sound and technical demands, the complex logic of jazz harmony, hundreds of tunes and chord progressions, a number of styles and their hybrid offspring, the riffs, clichés, inflections, intonations, and more, which constitute jazz’s vocabulary—and the list goes on.

There’s more to the magic than the machinery behind the curtain, but without it, there’s no magic.

THE “MAGIC” OF A MATURE CHRISTIAN AND THE MACHINERY BEHIND THE CURTAIN

There’s also something seemingly magic about the life of a mature Christian. While far from perfect, the life of a mature Christian commands respect and attention, even while similarly defying technical explanation. A mature Christian can bear afflictions with joy, can turn a person from sin with a few well-placed words, can create harmony where conflict abounds.

And, as with a great jazz improviser, there’s a lot going on behind the curtain. Among other things, a mature Christian works on mastering—or better, being mastered by—the Bible. He knows how to put it together. He knows how to summarize it and put it in his own words. He knows, in other words, sound doctrine. Remember how we defined sound doctrine in the last chapter? It’s a summary of the Bible’s teaching that is both faithful to the Bible and useful for life. A godly person will know how to do this. Even if he wouldn’t dream of teaching a class full of systematic theology students, a godly person knows what God says about himself and about us in the Bible.

This should come as no surprise, since Scripture itself teaches that it is able to equip us for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16–17). And it teaches that spiritual transformation comes through the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:1–2), which happens as we soak ourselves in Scripture.

So every Christian has a vested interest in learning to read and teach the Bible wisely. We do this through personal study, but also, perhaps more foundationally, through the church’s public proclamation and teaching. This chapter is about how sound doctrine helps us to read and teach the Bible wisely, both personally and in the corporate life of the church.

SOUND DOCTRINE: THE PINS AND BUMPERS OF BIBLE READING

Ultimately, the goal of reading and teaching Scripture is to love God and our neighbor better. And the way to love God more is to know God more. It’s true that a person can learn theological facts about God without loving him. At the same time, you cannot love God without knowing him. And to know God, you have to know things about him. If you love your wife, you’ll want to know about what she’s like, what she loves and hates, her past, her plans for the future, and much more.1 In the same way, we who profess to love God should learn all we can about him.

That’s why sound doctrine is an important goal of Bible reading. Sound doctrine summarizes and synthesizes the Bible’s teaching into a coherent whole. It tells us what God is like, what he loves and hates, what he’s done in the past, and what his plans are for the future. Letting your knowledge of God be determined by one or two isolated passages would be like letting one or two isolated conversations determine your knowledge of your spouse.

Sound doctrine is also an important guardrail for Bible reading. It keeps us from wrongly inferring things about God from Scripture that are untrue. In order to interpret Scripture rightly, we need to bring to the table what we already know about God from Scripture—that is, sound doctrine.

To borrow an image from bowling, sound doctrine is both the pins our Bible reading aims at and the bumpers that keep us from rolling into the gutters of error. Sound doctrine helps to send our Scripture reading in the right direction, and it helps keep us rolling in that direction. Sound doctrine is for reading and teaching the Bible.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A STORY THAT PREACHES A MESSAGE

In order to unpack in more detail how sound doctrine impacts reading and teaching the Bible, let’s first consider what the Bible is.

Is the Bible a magic book you open at random for in-the-moment spiritual guidance? (Anyone for a game of Bible roulette?) Is it an archive of Hallmark cards that gives you an inspirational thought for every season of life? A set of prescriptions for moral self-improvement? An anthology of inspiring myths?

(1) The Bible is revelation. God reveals himself to us in his Word. Every single word of Scripture is breathed out by him (2 Tim. 3:16). The authors of Scripture were from different cultures and had different personalities, and they wrote in different genres at different times, but they were all carried along by the Holy Spirit so that they “spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21). They all wrote the very words of God.

(2) The Bible is a story that preaches a message. From beginning to end, the Bible tells a single story of salvation. From creation, through our fall into sin, to Jesus’s saving work on the cross and the eventual restoration of God’s rule over all creation, the Bible tells a single epic narrative that spans Genesis to Revelation. It tells the story of how God is working out salvation for his people through his Son Jesus.

Yet this isn’t just a story—it’s a story that really happened. And it’s the story in which we live. We Christians can and must plot our lives on the timeline of the Bible’s story: we live after Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, and after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, but before Jesus’s final return. The Bible’s story explains where we’ve come from, where we are, who we are, and where we’re going.

Notice how sound doctrine arises from this story and is an integral part of it.

• From creation we learn that God is powerful, and holy, and wise, and good (Psalm 104).
• From the fall we learn that God is perfectly just and his anger burns against sin, yet he is also merciful and patient with sinners, which all of us are (Genesis 3).
• In the life of Jesus we see God’s holy and merciful character perfectly displayed (John 1:18; 14:9).
• In the death of Jesus we see God’s justice and love working together to accomplish salvation (Rom. 3:21–26; 5:6–11).
• In Jesus’s resurrection we see the victory over death that God promises to all his people (2 Cor. 4:14).
• In Jesus’s promise to return and restore God’s rule over all of creation we see God’s faithfulness, his lavish generosity toward his people, and more (Rev. 22:12).

In other words, the Bible is a story that preaches a message. To borrow Michael Horton’s phrase, it’s a drama that gives rise to dogma. It’s a narrative that’s full of teaching. Sound doctrine arises from the Bible’s grand story of salvation.2

(3) The Bible is an instrument in God’s hand to carry out his redeeming work. When we read Scripture, we are confronted by the voice of the living God (Heb. 4:12–13). And God’s Word is invincibly powerful—it never fails to accomplish his purposes (Isa....