Does 2 Timothy 3:16-17 Really Teach That Today God Speaks Only through the Bible?

One area of disagreement among Christians concerns whether God still gives extra-biblical revelations to his children (i.e., revelations that are outside what he has revealed in the Bible). Some claim that he no longer does so and that in our day he speaks only through Scripture. Others say that God continues to give revelations and that the Bible itself confirms that he does this.

I am firmly convinced that God does continue to give extra-biblical revelations to believers today. The Bible was never designed to give us every piece of useful information for us to live our lives, and sometimes we can’t find out this information ourselves. God has every sovereign right to impart any piece of useful information he wants to any person he wants, at any time he wants, in any way he wants. And I am convinced that he still does this in a variety of ways including through means like the gift of prophecy and dreams.

The focus of this article

This is a big subject that has many different aspects to it and that touches on a large number of biblical passages. In this article I am not intending to discuss this issue at length, as I have discussed it in more detail elsewhere (see the end of the article for the relevant link).

Here I want to focus on a biblical passage, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, that is often used as a proof text that God no longer gives extra-biblical revelations today. I am convinced that this passage doesn’t teach this at all, and I want to explain why.

The text and the argument used

It is actually worth setting out the whole of 2 Tim 3:14-17, as it helps to show the context a bit better. This passage reads as follows:

‘14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed. You know those who taught you, 15 and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.’ (CSB)

Those who claim that 2 Tim 3:16-17 proves that God no longer gives extra-biblical revelations argue along the following lines:

In verses 16 and 17 Paul tells Timothy that Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for various things so that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work. Scripture is the only means Paul refers to for making Christians complete and equipped for every good work. This implies that Scripture alone is sufficient to do this, which in turn implies that extra-biblical revelations are unnecessary. It makes no sense to think that God does something unnecessary, so we can be confident that God no longer gives extra-biblical revelations today.

Although at first sight this argument might seem to be a good one, actually it is badly mistaken, as I will aim to show in what follows.

Looking at this text in its original context

When we are looking at any biblical text, it is important to do so in two stages. First we need to ask what it meant to the original author and readers. Only when we have reached a conclusion to that question should we turn to think about how the text applies to us today. It can hardly be overstated how important this approach is.

In the case of 2 Tim 3:16-17, this means that we first need to ask what Paul and Timothy understood these verses to mean. So let’s do this. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows I will just refer to what Paul meant, but we can assume that Timothy would have had the same understanding as Paul.

What did Paul mean by ‘all Scripture’?

The first question we need to ask is what Paul has in mind when he uses the words ‘all Scripture’ at the beginning of v. 16.

To begin with, we should be clear that the ‘all Scripture’ Paul refers to must already exist in his day. He implies that prayerful study of ‘all Scripture’ is what will enable Timothy to be complete as a Christian man and equipped for every good work. And he wouldn’t say this about something that only partially existed in his day.

This means that Paul can’t have been referring to the whole Bible as we have it today, with its complete Old and New Testaments (OT and NT), for the simple reason that much of our NT had not yet been written when Paul wrote 2 Timothy.

There are very good reasons for believing that Paul died sometime in the 60s of the first century, and there is extremely broad agreement about this among historians of Christian origins, including conservative scholars. So if we take a conservative approach to 2 Timothy, as I am doing here, as a letter written by Paul very soon before his death, that means that 2 Timothy was written in the 60s of the first century.

However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that much of the NT was not written until after this time. It is probable that the Gospel of John, letters of John and Revelation were not written till very near the end of the first century. Even revisionist dates don’t put the time of writing of these documents any earlier than the 70s. Similarly, it is highly probable, for example, that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were not written until after Paul died.

So when Paul says ‘all Scripture’ in v. 16, he can’t mean the whole Bible as we have it today.

What does he mean, then? There are two possible answers to this question. Either he means what we would refer to as the whole OT and nothing more than that, or he means the whole OT plus parts of our NT. Most scholars, including conservatives, think that he means the former, i.e., that ‘all Scripture’ refers simply to the OT. But for the sake of thoroughness, I want to consider each of these options in turn.

If ‘all Scripture’ means simply the whole Old Testament

Let’s think about things, then, assuming first that ‘all Scripture’ is a reference to the whole OT and nothing more than that.

If we do this, there is something crucially important to understand about what Paul says in 2 Tim 3:16-17, which is that he is certainly using a hyperbole.

Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration that is used for effect and involves no attempt to deceive. It is a figure of speech that is very common in the Bible, as it is in modern Western culture.

For example, if I pick up a really heavy bag and say, ‘That weighs a ton!’ I have used a hyperbole. The bag doesn’t literally weigh a ton, but I exaggerate its weight to help me express my experience of finding it heavy to lift.

If by ‘all Scripture’ Paul is referring simply to our OT and nothing more than that, when he says that all Scripture can enable Timothy to become complete and equipped for every good work, he must be using a hyperbole. The reason for this is simple. It is impossible that Paul, a Christian apostle, writing to Timothy, a Christian young man, would tell him that if he wants to become a complete Christian man of God equipped for every good work, all he needs is the OT.

In other words, it is impossible that Paul would have thought that all the new teaching that came in the earthly ministry of Jesus and all the new teaching that came through the apostles was superfluous for making Timothy a complete Christian man of God equipped for every good work.

If ‘all Scripture’ means only the OT, then in 2 Tim 3:16-17 Paul speaks as if the OT is sufficient to make Timothy complete, but he can’t possibly have intended his words to be taken literally. Instead, he is using a hyperbole. And this hyperbole is totally appropriate. Paul’s point is that the OT is an extremely important part of what is needed to make Timothy complete as a Christian man of God. So he exaggerates the effectiveness of the OT in hyperbolic language to stress this.

If we remove the hyperbole from Paul’s words and paraphrase what he says as a literal statement, what he means is this:

‘Timothy, if you want to become a complete man of God who is equipped for every good work, one of the things you need to do is spend lots of time prayerfully studying the OT.’

If ‘all Scripture’ means the whole Old Testament plus parts of the New Testament

We have just considered how to interpret Paul’s words if ‘all Scripture’ in 2 Tim 3:16 is referring only to the whole OT. But there is a second, though less likely, possibility, which is that in this verse when Paul says ‘all Scripture’, he is referring to the whole OT plus the parts of the NT that existed in his lifetime that he was aware of.

This is a complex issue, and I don’t want to get into a long discussion here of whether Paul might have meant this second option, because, for our purposes in this article, there is no need.

Importantly, even if Paul was using the phrase ‘all Scripture’ to include parts of the NT, it is still the case that much of the NT had not yet been written before Paul died. And this means that the point I made about hyperbole in the previous section also stands here.

It is unthinkable that the parts of the NT that didn’t yet exist in Paul’s day, such as the Gospel of John, letters of John and Revelation, are superfluous in making Christians complete and equipped for every good work. Today, would any serious Bible-believing Christian say that a Christian could become complete and equipped for every good work simply by reading the OT and parts of the NT? Of course not!

So the same was surely true of Timothy (and other Christians) in the first century when Paul wrote 2 Timothy. Timothy couldn’t possibly have become a complete Christian man of God equipped for every good work just by reading the OT and the parts of the NT that existed at that time. God would have to have provided extra insight through apostolic teaching and/or by his Spirit in other ways. And we would expect Paul as an inspired writer of Scripture to have understood this.

The upshot is that even if Paul was using ‘all Scripture’ in 2 Tim 3:16 to refer to the whole OT plus parts of the NT, he would still have been using a hyperbole. He would be speaking as if prayerful study of the OT plus parts of the NT were sufficient to make Timothy a complete man of God equipped for every good work, but he can’t have intended his words to be taken literally.

Summing up what Paul meant by ‘all Scripture’

We have been looking at 2 Tim 3:16-17 in its original context, asking what Paul would have meant by what he says in these verses. And we have seen that there are two alternative options for what he might have meant by ‘all Scripture’.

Probably he uses ‘all Scripture’ to refer to what we would call the whole OT. But it is not impossible that he may have been referring to the whole OT plus the parts of the NT that existed in his day that he was aware of. 

Regardless of which of these options is correct, however, we can be confident that Paul was using a hyperbole when he wrote these verses. Paul speaks as if prayerful study of ‘all Scripture’ is sufficient to make Timothy a complete man of God equipped for every good work. But Paul cannot possibly have thought that this was literally  the case, because large parts of the NT had not yet been written before he died. So we can conclude that he was speaking hyperbolically.

Applying this passage to today

Now that we have reached a conclusion about what Paul meant when he wrote 2 Tim 3:16-17, we can turn to think about what these words mean for us today. Does this passage really teach that God no longer gives extra-biblical revelations?

Absolutely not! This passage implies nothing whatsoever about whether he does or doesn’t do this. Instead it is a hyperbolic statement by the apostle Paul saying how important the OT (or possibly the OT plus parts of the NT) is.

Those who use these verses as a proof text that God no longer gives extra-biblical revelations tend to make two big mistakes when they approach this passage. First, they usually start by thinking immediately about what Christians today mean by ‘all Scripture’ in v. 16, instead of asking what Paul meant by this phrase. And secondly, they usually just assume that in this passage Paul is making a literal statement of fact, whereas he is actually using a hyperbole.

So in reality this passage implies nothing about extra-biblical revelations. Properly understood, it is no proof at all that God has ceased giving these.

 

See also:

Every Christian Should Desire the Gift of Prophecy

God Wants to Use Christians in Miracle Work Today

Charismatic Churches and Their Attitude to Hardship

Charismatic Churches and Their Attitude to the Mind