We don’t do Bible studies. I know, it sounds shocking, and frankly it’s taken me some time to get up the courage to write this. You’re probably wondering how I could say such a thing, and I understand this, because for many years I thought exactly the same thing.
After all we have all of these different ministries offering what they call “Bible studies:” Voice of Prophecy, It Is Written, Amazing Facts, and others, offering “Bible studies.” Of course, these studies do reference Bible texts, but they don’t really study the Bible itself as a whole, or any of the 66 individual books.
When you look at these various “Bible study courses,” they often have different titles, but the same topics appear in each set of studies. For example: The Sabbath, the State of the Dead, The Mark of the Beast, The US in Bible Prophecy, The Three Angels’ Messages—you can see the trend. These are no doubt important topics, and important doctrines, but they are studies of biblical topics, not of the Bible.
Who decided that these in fact are biblical topics? As just one example, the phrase “The US in Bible Prophecy” never occurs in the Bible itself. It represents a conclusion, an interpretation of several symbols in a single chapter of Revelation. I’m not denying the validity of that interpretation, merely pointing out that some interpreters use the phrase because they agree with reasoning.
They then assembled various texts and lines of reasoning to bolster that understanding. That’s what topical/doctrinal studies do: they begin with a topic and collect evidence to explain its significance. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the process entails many pitfalls, confirmation bias being the most serious.
The simple human tendency to believe things that fit into what we already believe, or what we desire to be true, we call “confirmation bias.” So we tend to interpret Bible texts, for example, in ways which match what we already know or would like to be true. We tend to seize on those interpretations, and then seek evidence to back them up, and ignore or simply fail to recognize contrary evidence and alternative meanings. Being blinded by confirmation bias is not inevitable, but it always lurks in the background, threatening to lead us down the comfortable path, whether true or not.
Of course, these doctrinal studies do cite Bible texts, so why do I say it isn’t a Bible study?
Imagine, for a moment, that instead of a text, the Bible is a giant tapestry. Woven into its fabric are scenes from the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Patriarchs—and visual representations of all the people and events in all of the sixty-six books. A beautiful, majestic, monumental work of art.
To appreciate and understand each individual scene and how it intertwines with all the others surely would take many, many hours—perhaps a lifetime. Indeed, we have every reason to believe understanding all of it may well occupy eternity.
Now, imagine that someone comes along and begins to cut a snippet here, and another there, until he has an entire chain of these, which he then proceeds to weave together in a continuous band, intending to highlight a single important theme.
That new composition might be beautiful, might appear to be consistent and well matched, something like a beautiful quilt. But that quilt would be a product of the mind of the quilt-maker, not the Master weaver who composed the whole tapestry. Each part of the quilt came from the original tapestry, but it does not, cannot, and is not intended to represent the entire tapestry.
A topical/doctrinal study is a textual quilt. It may be beautiful, it may accurately represent an important theme—or it may not—but it differs from a study of the entire tapestry, or even one of the scenes depicted.
For now, understanding the difference between the tapestry and the quilt, and thus the difference between a Bible study and a study that cites biblical texts is enough. Next we examine what a Bible study consists of.
