It is possible to misuse the Bible in two opposite ways: subtraction and addition, as Revelation 22:18-19 indicates. In general, it is the theological liberals who err by subtracting from the Word while it is the fundamentalists who add teachings to it. But that generality is not always true, as the following example shows.
One group of conservative Christians have been labeled hyper-dispensationalists. They have a quite detailed scheme dividing up the teachings in the Bible according to the time periods or dispensations in which the teachings apply.
We had a young teacher in our Sunday school class at one church I attended who made the statement that since Christians are already forgiven of their sins, they have is no need to ask God for forgiveness of sins they subsequently commit.
Several people in our class brought up the passages that tell believers to confess their sins to God. The teacher's reply was that confessing our sins is totally different from asking for forgiveness. In other words, if we were to kill someone we could basically say to God, "OK, I did it. So what?"
At that point, rather than argue with him, I brought up the Lord's Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” His reply was that Christians are not supposed to recite the Lord's Prayer since that teaching only applied to the 3-year period when Jesus was alive on earth.
The notes to the Scofield Bible, and to a lesser extent the Ryrie Bible, similarly assign each of Jesus' parables, for example, to the particular dispensation in which they apply, past, present or future, and state that it is a mistake to apply them to any other time period. This is an effective way to rob most of Jesus' teachings of their power to affect us today.
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