A Confessional Calvinist Approach To Biblical Interpretation: Butchers, Biblicists, or Bereans? Part 1

The author of What Is a Reformed Baptist? gives baptism four senses — but the engine is allegory's, and his own confession already ruled on it. Tom Hicks — a confessional Reformed Baptist pastor whose very handle, @TomHicks2LCF, flies the Second London flag — recently offered on X what he weirdly called "the fourfold sense of Christian baptism." Four numbered senses, each pinned to a medieval label: immersion as a sign of union with Christ (literal); a sign of Christ's death and resurrection (allegorical); a sign of the believer's death to self and new life (tropological); a sign of the believer's passing from this world into the next (anagogical). Patrick Schreiner — author of The Four Senses of Scripture, the most prominent recent case for recovering the quadriga — welcomed it: a smile emoji and a "thank you" GIF. The gesture is light. It is also telling, and it is why this small thread from X repays a longer look. The author of the retrieval's flagship book has just cheered the fourfold method as it steps off the page. What was a claim about how biblical texts mean is now applied, with the movement's blessing, to how a sacrament means. I want to be careful not to pay this the wrong compliment. One could call the post creative and mean it warmly. It seems as if many confessional Reformed Baptists do. But the creativity is the whole problem, not a mitigating grace. A hermeneutic is a discipline: it constrains what a thing may be taken to mean and tells you when you have gone wrong. A heuristic is a generator: it prompts you to produce, and it never runs dry. The fourfold scheme, turned on baptism, constrains nothing. It generates — four slots, and an invitation to fill them. That a godly and able pastor can fill them so readily is not evidence the method works; it is evidence of what the method is. A scheme that can find its four senses in a text, in an ordinance, in a hymn, in a handshake, is not discovering four senses in any of them. It is running its apparatus, which will always yield four, because yielding four is what it was built to do. Not a bug — the feature. There is a name for the faculty at work. Pareidolia is the mind's readiness to see a face where there is only cloud; apophenia, its broader cousin, is the readiness to see connection where nothing is in fact connected. The quadriga laid over a sacrament is apophenia in its Sunday clothes — the familiar fourfold silhouette projected onto a subject that never asked for it. Baptism is not a text with a literal sense and three spiritual ones stacked above it. It is one sign, and it signifies richly: union, death and resurrection, new life, the hope of glory — all of it whole and undivided in a single thick redemptive-historical reading of the texts that give it (Rom. 6:3–5; Col. 2:12; 1 Pet. 3:21). Sorting that one meaning into four medieval bins does not enrich the meaning. It multiplies the bins. And then the thread did the argument's work for it. A reader, Mark Harrelson, noticed a gap: "5. For remission of sins. You missed that one." The fourfold scheme had left out something the Nicene Creed itself confesses of baptism — and a fifth item is an awkward thing to hand a fourfold sense. Hicks's answer has real theological content, and none of it is wrong: Christ procures remission at the cross, faith is the hand that receives it, and baptism asserts and confirms it to the believer. Hold that sacramentology; it is sound. Then watch what the method makes him do with it. Remission, he said, is "contained in the allegorical sense." The four senses did not produce remission; challenged, they absorbed it, folding a fifth doctrine into a slot already holding another. That is not a fourfold reading yielding its riches. It is an elastic container stretching to swallow whatever the objection supplies. If the allegorical sense can take on remission after the fact — remission, which has no quarrel with the "death and resurrection" already sitting in that bin — then the "senses" are not distinct compartments of meaning the sacrament yields. They are labels roomy enough to relabel. Press them and they expand; and a scheme that expands on demand has stopped dividing anything at all. Remission was never a missing fifth sense. It was already inside the one meaning of baptism, exactly where union and new life and hope already were. The category error is the surface. The deeper problem is confessional — and here the irony turns tragic. And the tragedy is only multiplied by however many Reformed Baptists it influences to downplay or contradict the this foundational confessional hermeneutic. Hicks is no bystander to the Second London; he wrote the book on it. In What Is a Reformed Baptist? he argues that Reformed Baptist identity is confessional identity — that to be a faithful Reformed Baptist is to hold the historic confessions, and the Second London above all. The man who taught a generation that being Reformed Baptist means holding this confession has now read baptism in a way the confession forecloses. He cannot wave the objection off, because it is his own standard, in his own book, that raises it. The Second London, with Westminster, declares that the true and full sense of any Scripture "is not manifold, but one." Those four words do logical work. "Not manifold" is a denial — not a ranking, not a subordination, but a denial — of multiple senses as such. It denies the genus. And the quadriga, a theory of four senses, is the most prominent species of that genus. The denial of a genus necessarily contains the denial of its species: deny that Scripture's sense is manifold, and you have denied, in the same breath, the fourfold scheme that is manifoldness's flagship. To confess 1.9 is to have already declined the quadriga — and having declined it for texts, one has declined it for whatever else the fourfold silhouette gets projected onto next. This is no novel reading of the phrase. It is the plain force of "not manifold," and it is how the confessional tradition treated the question. Tyndale, Perkins, Whitaker, Leigh, and Turretin did not say the spiritual senses must be kept subordinate to the literal. They said Scripture has one sense. The men who wrote "not manifold, but one" were denying multiplicity, not tidying it into a hierarchy. The confession does not only deny; it directs. Having called the true and full sense "not manifold, but one," the same paragraph says how the one sense is found: it "must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly" — Scripture set beside Scripture, read under the analogy of faith. That is the confessional method for establishing a doctrine's full meaning, baptism included: not four bins to be filled, but the gathering of every text that bears on the sign into one coherent teaching. Remission belongs to the doctrine of baptism not because it can be tucked into an allegorical slot, but because Scripture, searched and known — Acts 2:38 beside Romans 6, and the creed's "one baptism for the remission of sins" — teaches it as part of the one thing baptism signifies. The analogy of faith is intertextual, not fourfold. What was offered under the name of depth is a medieval grid standing in for the confession's own method — and standing in for it poorly, since the grid had no slot for remission until someone pointed out the lack. There is a stock reply that this is simply not what the Confession means. But asserting that "not manifold, but one" leaves room for other distinct senses is not an argument; it is the very thing to be shown, and it owes three unpaid debts: an alternative reading of the actual words "not manifold, but one"; historical evidence that the framers meant to leave a door open for distinct senses; and some account of the genus–species relation on which a man may deny multiple senses and keep four of them. Until those are produced, the four words stand. So — allegorist? Not by conviction. Despite recommending allegory to frame a spiritual sense for the doctrine of baptism, Hicks would reject the label, and the confession he wrote a book to commend rejects it for him. The charge was never that he holds allegory's creed. It is that he has borrowed allegory's engine and set it running against the very standard he taught the churches to keep. The soft retrieval of the quadriga keeps arriving at the same wall, and it arrives now in a new field. Whether the fourfold sense is offered for a passage or for the ordinance of baptism, the confessional verdict does not move. The waters are rich — rich with union, death, resurrection, new life, remission, and the hope of passing through the last judgment into glory. But that is the fullness of one sense, not the sum of four. There is a leaven here, and it is spreading. The manifold sense of Scripture, long resisted among Baptists, has unfortunately found a welcome among some Reformed Baptist pastors and seminary professors — and now it has jumped the tracks a second time, from the senses of a text to the senses of a doctrine. A fourfold sense of baptism today; a fourfold sense of the Supper, the church, the covenants tomorrow. Each step is greeted as recovery, as depth. But none of it is the confessional framing of the analogy of faith, and a little leaven leavens the whole lump. What spreads here is not a retrieval. It is a grid mistaken for a method, and a fad mistaken for a tradition. It may be someone's tradition. But not ours. Heuristic, not hermeneutic. Not manifold, but one. We distinguish. POST SCRIPT... Pastor Tom kindly unblocked me and replied to my X article: "Thank you for the post and the generous interaction. Allegory in the medieval usage was often severed from the meaning of the text and generated fresh meaning independent of the what the Word of God actually said. When the Reformers opposed allegory, that is what they opposed. But at other times, the Reformers employed allegory, but only when it was anchored in the one meaning of the text. Benjamin Keach was a faithful English Particular Baptist pastor who signed the Second London Confession of Faith. He wrote a massive interpretive tome titled Tropologia in which he proceeded to open the allegorical/typological, metaphorical, and tropological senses of Scripture. You can research it using AI and Google. He did not believe the one sense of Scripture is limited to the literal sense but expanded to typology and allegory and tropology. The same method of interpretation is evident from the preaching of Charles Spurgeon (often maligned by literalists). But these Reformed Baptist brethren didn't see any conflict with our venerable confession because there isn't any. It is found throughout our Reformed and Particular Baptist heritage. Tolle lege. The procedure of looking for the meaning of the text, how it points to Christ, how to apply it, and how it gives us hope for the future, arises from studying the way that Jesus and the apostles themselves studied the Bible. While I don't have space to work it out fully here, consider just one example from the author of Hebrews which is Paul, in case you were wondering. :) See Hebrews 12:5-6 and the manner in which the preacher handles the biblical interpretation of Prov 3:11-12. Context shows a fourfold sense. First, there is the plain sense. This is the truth that God trains or disciplines His sons. Second, there is the Christ-centered sense. God led Christ to the cross (Heb 12:2), and Christ learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8). He did this for us as our substitute and example. Third, there is the applied sense. God loves us, Christ teaches us how to suffer in love; therefore, in light of Christ, we can embrace suffering and persevere in love without becoming weary or fainthearted, knowing we are being made like Christ (Heb 12:11). Fourth, there is the final or heavenly sense. The goal of our training in sanctification is ultimately to see the Lord (Heb 12:14). Many other such examples of the Bible's interpretation of the Bible in this way could be shown. There is only one sense of the text. But that one sense is often though not always multilayered with many necessary implications." To which I replied: "Appreciate you for unblocking me to exchange replies. While some people decry this app, i find you get what you invest in it. Your input is greatly appreciated. I understand you may write more wherever you choose is best. My good faith yet pointed response will be a short list of where I consider you unhelpfully and sloppily blurring the lines logically, biblically, and confessionally: The first and most obvious: the 4fold sense as a tool for reading texts, versus interpreting a doctrine (e.g., baptism). A figure of speech, versus a second sense. Typology, versus invented allegory. Preaching a text, versus interpreting a text. Rejecting a method’s abuses, versus rejecting the method; illicit to overlay even the quadriga’s structure on our confession. And a big one: the implications of one meaning, versus four different senses or meanings." Please, stay tuned and be on the lookout for an episode of the Urban Puritano Podcast for a discussion of these issues.

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