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Taking the Bible Literally

 by Joe Haynes

Reformation Day, October 31, 2024

The classic Protestant interpretation of Bible prophecy, sometimes called the "continualist view"; sometimes the "historicist," or the "historical view," (not to be confused with the so-called "historical premillennial" view popularized by George Ladd!) was widely held among Protestant preachers and theologians for 600 years, from Wycliffe through the early 20th Century.  This historicist view was born out of twin convictions common to the Reformers: 

1. Every word of the Bible is inspired by God and therefore utterly trustworthy. 

2. The way to understand what the Bible says is to determine what the writer of each passage meant. 

In other words, readers don't have the right to impose any other meaning on Scripture than what the authors, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, meant to say. Martin Luther called this method of reading the Bible, "the grammatical-historical method," and John MacArthur is rather famous for defending this method still today. One of the core convictions shared by men like Luther and MacArthur is that we approach the Bible literally. MacArthur put it like this in one of his sermons:

If it says horse, it means horse. If it says he went somewhere, he went somewhere. If it says house, it means house. If it says man, it means man. And not everything is to be extrapolated off into some mystical spiritualization, allegorization, or whatever. It is literal. We understand Scripture, then, in the literal sense of language. Now, there are figures of speech - there is simile, metaphor, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, whatever else - ellipses. All of the figures of speech will be there... There may even be sarcasm. There may even be exaggeration, as a device. There may be symbolism, such as the symbolism in the prophetic literature, which is obviously symbolic, clearly symbolic. But it is in the normal language of speech. We use symbols in our language. We say, “That man is as straight as a pine tree,” or “that man is as strong as an ox.” Well, we’re using a symbol to make a literal point or statement.

Now obviously Luther and MacArthur arrive at very different conclusions about the meaning of Bible prophecy--Luther was a historicist (although unfortunately amillennial) and MacArthur is a "leaky dispensationalist," as he calls himself (but fortunately, solidly premillennial).  But their commitment to interpreting the Bible literally led both of those men to very similar doctrinal convictions more often than not. The thing is, for very many of the great Protestant preachers between Luther's time and the early 20th Century, that way of reading the Bible literally led them to conclusions about the meaning of Bible prophecy that would surprise a lot of Protestants today.  What I aim to do on this website is to introduce you to these surprising conclusions about the meaning of Bible prophecy--conclusions held in common by many of the great preachers and teachers you probably already hold in high regard for their faithfulness to the Word of God and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.