About Jesus Steve Sweetman
No Presuppositions
So what’s a "presupposition" anyway? This word comes from the word "presuppose". "Presuppose" is made up of "pre", meaning before, and "suppose", meaning, to consider or think about. So to presuppose, or pre-consider something is to consider something in advance.
There is a place for "presupposing" or "pre-considering" things in our lives. If you’re going into a debate or into any kind of negotiations with others, you want to consider all of the possible outcomes in advance. You want to consider all sides of the issues involved.
Yet on the other hand pre-considering in some respects is not good. If you’re in a healthy argument, or if you’re trying hard to understand what someone else is saying, you don't want to presuppose or pre-consider anything. You want to listen intently and understand exactly what the other person is saying. You don’t want any of your pre-thought ideas inserted into the other person’s ideas.
In this kind of situation, if you presuppose, you’re bringing your preconceived ideas into the discussion, and in fact, you could be putting words in the other person’s mouth, so to speak. When you bring your pre-thought ideas to the discussion table and try to understand what the other person is saying in light of your ideas, you’re mixing your ideas with his ideas and coming up with an understanding that is not his. The understanding is part yours and part his. Thus the attempt to understand him accurately is clouded with your thinking and fails. We do this kind of thing a lot in our daily communication with others. That’s one reason why we have so many misunderstandings between each other.
Once you have fully and completely understood the other person’s thinking accurately, then you present him with your ideas, and he in turn listens intently to you without interjecting any of his presuppositions.
We often bring our presupposed, pre-considered, pre-thought ideas to the table of Bible study. In light of these pre-thought conclusions, we then try to interpret what the Bible is saying. In reality, we’re putting words into the Bible’s mouth. We are not letting the Bible speak for itself. We are mixing our ideas with the Bible’s ideas and coming up with a mixture. This mixture gives us unbiblical conclusions. We in turn miss the real point to what the Scriptures say, and worse still, we often teach this wrong conclusion to others. Maybe that’s why James says that there shouldn’t be too many teachers in the church. Teachers will be judged for what they teach. (James 3:1)
By bringing our presuppositions into our Bible study we’ve come up with all sorts of wrong interpretations. We should simply let the Bible speak for itself as much as possible. If the Bible says, "don’t steal", that means "don’t steal". It doesn’t mean don’t steal on certain occasions or in certain circumstances. There’s no need to put any words in the Bible’s mouth by interpreting "don’t steel". You don’t interpret "don’t steal". You simply believe it and repeat it.