Principle vs. Custom

Today on Renewing Your Mind, learning to interpret the Bible properly. You don't know whether a particular passage is custom or principle. If you treat a passage that God intended to be binding on you forever as a mere local custom and dismiss it, you are guilty of disobeying God and doing violence to His holy law.

Well, we certainly don't want to do that, so today's message from Dr. R.C. Sproul is vital. Head coverings, clothing styles, different ways of observing the sacraments—how are we to know what things in the Bible are cultural tradition or principles that are binding today? We're glad you've joined us today as we continue Dr. Sproul's series, Knowing Scripture. This week he's given us the basic guidelines for how to read the Bible properly and apply it. Today's message will teach us how to discern principle versus custom. In this, our last session together in this course on interpreting the Bible, we're going to finish by offering some concrete suggestions on how to handle this difficult problem of knowing what from the New Testament and the Old Testament applies to our lives today and what would be simply a matter of custom.

In our last lesson, we looked at the distinction between principle and custom, and I promised that this time we would try to find a way to discern the difference. Last Sunday I was in church, and as I was sitting in the congregation, I looked around and I noticed that there were two women sitting next to each other. They were sisters. I believe they were both in their eighties, and there was something very conspicuous about these two particular women. These two women and these two women alone in the entire congregation were wearing hats. They had their heads covered in the midst of corporate worship, and it looked strange. It looked a little bit out of place because women just simply don't wear hats to church anymore. And as I thought about it, I remember when I was in high school, it was unthinkable that any girl or any woman would come to church with her head uncovered.

I can remember my mother being very fussy about it, my sister, my girlfriend. If they got to a church service and said, oh, I don't have a hat, they would scramble for a handkerchief or something to cover their heads when they came into the church. At that time, we were involved in a very large Presbyterian church, mainline church, not a small denomination that still retained ancient customs. This church was a liberal church, a mainline church and so on. Still, it was expected that every one of the women wore hats to church.

Oh, where does that come from? Where does that practice come from? Most of us are aware that we have that strange teaching in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians in the 11th chapter where Paul goes through an elaborate exposition there where he commands that women cover their heads. The assumption is that in one of the translations, I believe it's the RSV, he instructs the women that they ought to have their heads covered when they're praying and when they're in church and that they ought to cover their heads with a veil. And that particular apostolic injunction was the practice of the church for nearly 2,000 years before it was set aside. Now the question is, what is principial in that passage and what is customary?

Now in order for us to learn the difference between principle and custom, what I want to do is have a little exercise among ourselves today to practice the application of the principles and to see that we can really feel how the problems are. Why don't you open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 11 and look at this whole passage because there are several sections to it in which the Apostle enjoins the woman to have her head covered. And he explains that the reason is that the covering of the head is a sign or a symbol of the woman subordinating herself to the man, which was the Jewish custom, which some believe of course to be outmoded today. So there's lots more involved in this text than simply the question of whether or not women ought to cover their heads with veils. There are several parts to it.

And as we look at that passage and ask ourselves, how are we to regard it, there are basically four different ways we can interpret and apply the principles of this text of 1 Corinthians 11. The first way is to say the whole thing is a matter of custom. From beginning to end it's pure custom.

It has no relevance whatsoever to the life of the church today. That is that these elements would all be regarded as customary, that the covering of the head with a veil is a matter of custom. It doesn't matter whether you cover your head with a veil or with a hat or with a babushka or with a handkerchief. The veil is customary. But not only is the veil customary, but the whole act of covering the head simply is a first century means or method of displaying or symbolizing a woman's subordination to her husband in church.

Now that subordination could be shown a multitude of ways. It could be shown through all kinds of different rituals. It doesn't have to be shown by covering the head. So that the very act of covering the head is merely customary. And then it takes it a step further and say you have the veil to cover the head, you cover the head to symbolize the subordination of the wife to the husband, but even that subordination of the wife to the husband is a matter of local custom, and that is not to be carried across into the 20th century life of the church. So the whole thing, veil, head covering, principle of subordination or the idea of subordination, all of those are custom and none of it has any bearing upon us. So that we conclude that since we live in a different culture from which 1 Corinthians 11 was written, it is no longer necessary for a woman to cover her head with a veil. It is no longer necessary for a woman to cover her head with anything. And it is no longer necessary for a woman to be subordinate to a man. That is what we would call view number one.

That's one possibility of applying ourselves to the church. The second option is that we regard the whole thing as principio, that everything about this text is of transcultural significance and that all Christian women everywhere at all times in all places ought always to practice the subordination of themselves to their husbands and that all women everywhere in every local situation are required to symbolize their subordination to men by the covering of their head and that the covering of the head that God prescribed that is to be applied all times in every culture is a veil. So if a woman covers her head with a babushka or with a hat, she is in violation of the principle of this passage. That's option number two. So we see the first two options, don't we? The first one is that none of it's principio, it's all custom, and so we don't have to pay attention to any of it. The second is that it's all principle, none of it's custom, and we have to implement every single detail of the passage. Those are the two extremes. Now in between those two extremes there are two other possible approaches. We can say that it's partly principle, which I'll call option A, and partly principle option B.

See, if we divide it into its parts, we can divide it more than one way. In the first option, we could say that part of the passage is principio and applies and is binding on all generations, and that part is the principle of female subordination to the men. And so someone can come to this text and say, all right, I believe that Paul is setting forth a principle here that women ought always to be willing to be subjected to their husbands and be in submission in the church, and that's the principle. How that principle is manifested can vary from culture to culture. It can be done through some other liturgical device other than the covering of the head, so that the only principle that we want to carry across is the principle of female subordination.

But we're a complete latitude as to how we show it. The second option is that we say that two parts of this are principio and one part is custom. The two parts that are principio would be this, that it is always binding on women to be submissive to their husbands and to be subordinate in the church, and it is always binding in every culture to illustrate and symbolize that willingness to submit by covering the head, so that then we have two principles, subordination and covering of the head. But what you use to cover the head is optional. It can be a veil. It can be a handkerchief. It can be a babushka. It can be a hat. It can be whatever you want it to be. But the only two things that are important are subordination and the covering of the head.

How the head's covered is immaterial. So actually, we have four different ways to approach that text. How do we know?

What is the correct one? Well, it's not easy. As I mentioned at the end of our last lecture, it seems to be pretty simple when Jesus sends out the 70 and says, don't take any bag with you, that that's obviously not to be carried over to the 20th century and forbids ministers and evangelists from taking suitcases on the trip. There was a specific reason why Jesus required that sense of urgency.

This was a very quick blitz of the surrounding areas in the midst of an urgent moment in redemptive history that is not part of the mandate of the church in all ages. Foot washing, as we mentioned, was not quite so clear. There are still many churches that practice foot washing as a sacrament, and even the Roman Catholic Church has not discontinued the practice altogether. Every year, once a year, the pope himself goes through a foot washing ceremony of people in Rome and in the church. So foot washing has been retained to a lesser and greater degree in the life of the church.

But now what I want to do is set down four basic guidelines for determining the difference between principle and custom. The first guideline is this, that we ought to examine the Bible itself and to see within Scripture if there are certain particular areas that apparently are open to the application of custom. Because we recognize that the Bible itself was not just written in the first century, but the whole process of writing the Bible stretched from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New Testament as it has from the end of the New Testament to our present day. Remember that the Bible itself was written over hundreds and hundreds of years by people in different cultures at different times and in different places. So even within Scripture, we have the problem of cultural transposition, don't we?

Now what kinds of things do we see in the Bible that are open to being treated as custom? The first thing we see is language, and that's a very important thing. We may take it for granted today because it's a custom commonplace thing for us to see translations of the Bible in English and in every other language in the world.

As I mentioned earlier in this class, that was not always the case. And from very early in church history, the restriction of translation was to Latin, to the Latin Vulgate, and it was centuries before the church made it possible to translate the Bible into the vernacular, into the local languages of the people because there was that fear that something would be lost by translation. But we notice that in the Bible itself, part of the Bible is written in Hebrew, and another part of the Bible is written in Greek. And so even the Bible sees the possibility of translating because the New Testament quotes Old Testament laws, for example, and it quotes those laws that were written in Hebrew, and it quotes them now in Greek. So it obviously is not offensive to the Holy Spirit to have the ability of transposing and translating the Word of God by way of language. It can be spoken in Hebrew. It can be spoken in Greek.

It can be spoken in English. The second example of that is styles of dress. We see that in the Old Testament, people dressed according to certain styles. In the days of the patriarch Abraham, one certain style of dress was in vogue. By the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine in the first century when the New Testament church was emerging, there was another style of dress.

There were still patterns of similarities, as there still are today with the ancient Near East, but there also were changes in clothing, and it was perfectly appropriate for New Testament Christians to dress in a different manner from Old Testament patriarchs. Godly dress habits is the principle of modesty, but I even have to say this, that modesty changes from culture to culture, and we have to understand that because clothes symbolize attitudes, they symbolize values, and all the rest. It is not provocative for a native in the interior of Africa, a native woman, to run around without a halter or for a man to run around in a loincloth. It would be utterly scandalous for a businessman to walk into his office on Wall Street on Monday morning wearing only a loincloth.

He could be arrested for indecent exposure, because in our cultural situation that would be highly provocative, highly erotic, highly immodest. And so dress codes change from culture to culture, but the principle is modesty, and we have to examine what is being communicated by a particular mode of dress. God does not set forth in the opening chapter of Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament a prescribed uniform that every believer since Abel is required to wear.

He does establish the principle of modesty. Another thing that we see that changes from culture to culture are monetary systems. The Bible talks about paying tithes and about bringing your shekels or your denaria into the storehouse and all that. Does that mean that a Christian in the 20th century America must pay the church in denaria rather than dollars?

Of course not, because monetary units are easily translated and transposed across cultural grounds. So I'm saying the basic first guideline is look to the Bible itself and see the kinds of things that the Bible recognizes as being customary so that you are aware when those questions come up in our culture today. The second guideline is to allow for Christian distinctions in the first century.

But what do we mean by that? It's perfectly appropriate, it's sound scholarship to search out the literary and the historical backgrounds of any document we're researching. And it is helpful for us to know what the local customs were, but we must never work on the assumption that everything that the Bible says merely reflects the cultural situation of the day. Studying cultural backgrounds can help us understand difficult passages. For example, when Jesus is debating with the Pharisees about divorce legislation, it helps us to understand what He's saying. If we can go back into the first century and understand that there was a fierce debate going on between two schools of thought in theology in the first century Jewish community, those who followed the liberal school of Hillel and the rabbinic interpretations there, and those who followed the conservative school of Shimei, and those who were the advocates of that school, the fierce battle between the Hillelites and the Shimeiites over divorce legislation, liberal versus conservative. And they brought their dispute to Jesus, and Jesus gives His verdict. It helps us to understand Jesus' words if we go back and examine what the controversy was that was being brought to Him. But if we just look at the Bible as expressing nothing more, nothing less than the attitudes that were prevailing in the day, then there's no reason why we should study the Christian faith at all except for historical reasons. The whole point is is that the message of Jesus and the message of Paul was radical.

It was innovative. And if we just restrict it to reflecting and echoing and mirroring what everybody else already believed in the culture, we will miss that innovative, radical, new gospel that is being preached. So we must allow for Christian distinctives to be in the text. The third principle or guideline is be aware of creation principles. As I said, if anything crosses the line from community to community, it's those rules that are set down in creation because those are given to man not as 1st century Christian or as 5th century B.C.

Jew or as 17th century Dutchman or 20th century American. But those principles are set down and given to man as man. There we have principles that go all the way back to the beginning of time so that when the Bible appeals to the beginning of time, we ought to have our antennae stick up and take notice and say, be careful. This is a warning that we ought not to be treating this loosely as a mere historical custom, but that it has historical roots that reach all the way back to creation.

Now the final principle is, in my opinion, the most important principle of all. What if after studying the Bible diligently and arduously and trying to see what kinds of things are possibly customary and what aren't, and after examining the historical background and after looking at the creation principles, you still can't be sure whether it's principle or custom, and you say, I just don't know whether this applies to the day or not. You're left with that quandary. Is there any way you can cut the Gordian knot?

Is there any way you can simplify it? Yes, there is because the Bible itself gives us a principle to how to handle that. The Bible tells us that whatever is not of faith is sin. The principle here is sort of a benefit of the doubt type principle.

You're left with a choice. You don't know whether a particular rule or a particular passage is custom or principle. Think about it. If you treat a passage that God intended to be binding on you forever and treat it as a mere local custom and dismiss it, as I said earlier, you are guilty of disobeying God and doing violence to His holy law because you have reduced a principle to a mere custom. That violates God. Or suppose it was a custom and wasn't intended for today, but you personally take it as a principle that you ought to obey, and so you obey it even though you really don't have to because it's merely a matter of custom. Now what you're guilty of, at best, is being over scrupulous, being too obedient. Now I ask you manifestly, which is worse?

What do you want to do? Do you want to run the risk of being disobedient to God or being over obedient to God? It is far better to be over obedient to God than to be under obedient to God. God is not going to punish you for being super scrupulous. He may punish you for being super loose with the principles that He has set forth before you. I call this the principle of humility.

It's summarized in this way. When in doubt, don't. Humility requires that we bow before God, and what we are saying is that if it's still in question, whether it's principle or custom, the burden of proof must always be on those who argue that it's a mere custom. And unless there is good and sound reason for treating a biblical mandate as custom, then we ought always to treat it and apply it as principle. That attitude God will honor.

Let me just finish by saying I'm glad to have spent this time with you. We've only touched the surface of biblical interpretation and the principles of it. I beseech you to continue to study more deeply on principles of interpretation so that you can grow and mature and become more and more responsible, more and more confident in your handling of the book of Scriptures, which I believe is the Word of God written from the perspective of transcendent wisdom for your edification, that you may be equipped and furnished for every good work which is pleasing to your God. Well, it is the responsibility of every believer. Indeed, it's our great privilege to learn how to study Scripture. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind as we wrap up highlights from Dr.

R.C. 's Sproul series, Knowing Scripture. So much confusion can be avoided when we learn the basic guidelines for interpreting the Bible correctly.

And Dr. Sproul helps us put those guidelines into practice in this series. In 12 messages, he covers the basic principles of hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation. So request the four-DVD set when you contact us today with a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. There are a couple of ways you can reach us.

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