This is just a heads-up. I have been trying to get to this for a while, but it is a tough subject and I’ve needed to cull a few resources.
This week I am going to make two or three posts on the proper application of the Scriptures. The first will deal with the dreaded subject of the relationship of ‘meaning and application’ and the second will deal with the application of Law and Gospel. From there, it may or may not take a third to tie up loose ends. That is all.
John Frame has convincingly made the case that doctrine and application (or the meaning of a text and its application) cannot be neatly separated (See his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God). The great preacher Jonathan Edwards understood this. And so it was said of him (by ‘Rabbi’ John Duncan):
[He is a preacher] whose doctrine is all application, and his application is all doctrine.
We do well to follow the model that Edwards (and many of the Puritans) set, not only in preaching, but in all our study, meditation, and conversation.
