FGI occassionally recieves messages from confused or concerned individuals who have heard the various Bible teachers at FGI teaching concepts with different nuance, expressions, or phrasing from one another. This article is designed to explain how we handle our multifaceted team, their agreements, and their varied views.
We focus on what we agree on. This starts with our Doctrinal Statement (which is required for working with FGI), but our unity goes much deeper than just that.
We are on the same page about what we are trying to do:
We know we won't always see eye-to-eye on every detail.
We affirm that we might use different interpretive summaries and selective representation to share the gospel, and that's okay. (For more on acceptable range of interpretation, interpretive summaries and selective representation, see below)
Signed in a spirit of unity and shared purpose: The FGI Team.
Picture a line representing all interpretations of a biblical topic. We often plant a single dot on that line—our "position"—and cling to it as the only safe ground. Seeing someone on a different dot feels like a threat to the truth itself. But this rigid, single-point mindset comes at a heavy cost.
We need to shift gears. Instead of demanding that everyone stand on our exact "dot" of opinion, we should look for an Acceptable Range of Interpretation (ARI).
When we use the "Acceptable Range" idea, we stop asking, "Does this person agree with me?" and start asking, "Is their view a possible interpretation of the Bible’s message?" If the answer is yes, we can still be friends, share a meal, and go to church together—even if we have different opinions about it later.
The Bible itself deals with this problem. The early Christians fought about stuff just like we do. Here are four times they had to learn to live with differences.
Instead of comparing their position to yours, take this approach:
The "Acceptable Range" isn't about being wishy-washy. It's about growing up. It allows you to look at someone and say, "I have a different default position, but I affirm that your position has respectable support too."
In a world where everyone is screaming at each other, the Church should be the one place where we can disagree without dividing.
When we do evangelism, teach, or preach, we never recite the entire Bible in a single sitting. Instead, we rely on two necessary tools: Selective Representation and Interpretive Summary.
These tools are not only useful; they are essential. However, a specific danger arises when we fail to distinguish between the tools we use and the raw material of Scripture itself.
To understand how we communicate the Gospel, we must define the methods we are using:
It is important to affirm that both of these practices are completely fine. In fact, they are unavoidable. It is what preaching is; it is how we teach; it is how we evangelize. We cannot communicate effectively without them.
We find biblical precedent for these methods. Jesus utilized them when He read a portion of Isaiah in the synagogue and provided the immediate commentary that it was fulfilled in their hearing (Luke 4:16–21). Philip utilized it with the Ethiopian eunuch, beginning with a specific passage the man was reading to preach the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:30–35). Similarly, Paul engaged in this practice in Thessalonica, where he reasoned from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead (Acts 17:2–3).
While these methods are necessary, they involve human agency. Our summaries and our selections are creative choices we have made. The danger arises when we forget that our interpretive summary is not the message itself, but rather a digest of the message.
The saving message is the Scripture. What we say about the Scripture is an interpretive summary.
We risk elevating our interpretation to the level of inspiration. We must maintain the humility to admit which parts of our presentation are our own phrasing and which parts are the actual Scripture.
In modern evangelism, we use many phrases that serve as interpretive summaries. These are shorthand statements based on a selective representation of verses that the teacher believes represent the whole truth.
Examples include:
Each of these is a theological summary. While they may be derived from Scripture, they are often distinct from the verbatim text.
The most practical application of this concept lies in how we view rejection.
Because our presentation relies on our own creative choices (summary and selection), a listener might reject our specific wording without actually rejecting the Scripture.
If a skeptic pushes back against an interpretive summary, they may simply be disagreeing with your method of summary or your specific selection of verses. They are disagreeing with the thing you chose, not necessarily the saving message of the Bible.
When the Apostles speak of "defending the doctrine," they are not referring to your selection and interpretive summary. They are instructing us to defend the actual deposit of truth that is the Scripture. The Bible is the doctrine.
Any extrapolations we build on top of the Bible may or may not be correct, but they remain extrapolations. It is dangerous to take a Bible verse that commands us to defend the doctrine and apply it to our own creative choices. We must not claim divine authority for our summaries. To do so is to demand that others defend our words with the same vigor they would defend God's Word.
As evangelists and teachers, we must be intellectually honest and clear. We must distinguish between the perfect Word of God and our imperfect, though well-intentioned, summaries of it. By doing so, we ensure that when people engage with the Gospel, they are grappling with the text itself, rather than just our creative representation of it.
