I’ve always felt that only Scripture should be used to interpret Scripture. Isn’t it dangerous to allow extra-biblical knowledge to influence our interpretations?
It certainly can be dangerous. We’ve all seen sad cases of fundamental Christian doctrines being flippantly discarded because of a misguided attempt to incorporate extra-biblical knowledge. But it can also be dangerous to completely close ourselves off to the testimony of nature and read the Scriptures in a vacuum. For example, Isaiah 55:12 says that “…and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” If we are not informed by our extra-biblical experience with actual trees, how else would we know that this verse is a literary device and not divinely inspired botany? And since Isaiah also must have known that trees do not have literal hands based on his experience with nature, it seems reasonable to assume that he intended this verse as a literary device rather than a statement of scientific fact. But these things are not always so easy to determine. A more challenging example would be Psalm 104:5 which tells us that God “set the earth on its foundations; [so that] it can never be
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