Analogy of faith
“If prophecy, according to the proportion of faith.”
Definition
The analogy of faith, also called the analogy of Scripture, is the principle that Scripture interprets Scripture: because the Bible is the work of one divine mind, no passage can rightly be read in a sense that contradicts what the Bible teaches elsewhere on the same subject, and an obscure or disputed passage is to be read in light of passages that speak on it more clearly.1
Confessional Definition
The confession does not use the phrase “analogy of faith,” but states the same principle: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture it self: and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold but one) it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly.”2 This paragraph is verbatim-identical to Westminster Confession 1.9, one of the many places where the 1689 LBCF follows Westminster’s chapter on Scripture almost word for word.
A 2024 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dissertation names the connection: “As Scripture is the inspired Word of God and, thus, inerrant, infallible, and authoritative, one must conclude that Scripture is its own best interpreter, a principle known as the analogia fidei,” citing this same paragraph.3 The confession grounds the rule in Scripture’s own claim to a single, unified, and non-contradictory sense (2 Pet. 1:20-21; Acts 15:15-16).2
Biblical Basis
Scripture is “the work of one mind, and that mind divine,” so “Scripture cannot contradict Scripture”: “God cannot teach in one place anything which is inconsistent with what He teaches in another. Hence Scripture must explain Scripture. If a passage admits of different interpretations, that only can be the true one which agrees with what the Bible teaches elsewhere on the same subject.”1
Charles Hodge works a live example of the rule from a Trinitarian question. Scripture teaches that the Son is “the same in substance and equal in power and glory with the Father” (John 10:30; Phil. 2:6); when the Son says, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), that statement “must be understood in a manner consistent with this equality,” referring either to the Son’s mode of subsistence or to his office, not to any inferiority of nature, “as a king’s son may say, ‘My father is greater than I,’ although personally his father’s equal.”1 Hodge adds that this rule of interpretation “is sometimes called the analogy of Scripture, and sometimes the analogy of faith,” with “no material difference in the meaning of the two expressions.”1
Opposing Views
Roman Catholic theology also commends comparing Scripture with Scripture and “the greatest deference to the faith of the Church,” but goes further and holds that Christ “appointed” officers in the church “to whose interpretation of the Scriptures the people are bound to submit as of final authority.”4 Hodge states the Reformed alternative: “The Bible is a plain book. It is intelligible by the people. And they have the right, and are bound to read and interpret it for themselves; so that their faith may rest on the testimony of the Scriptures, and not on that of the Church.”4
Related Doctrines
References
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Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 187-188. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 9. ↩ ↩2
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Alex Charles Tibbott, “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 5. ↩