This is a challenging question but good in that it touches on a few ancillary topics and gives us opportunity to address them.  We would like to start our answer with a word of caution. Whenever we are trying to determine what is true, there is a pitfall that is easy for all of us to fall into.  The pitfall is affixing weight to a belief that someone espouses because they we hold them in high regard or disregarding a belief espoused by someone because they we don’t hold them in high regard.  It is human nature to do this, but it can lead us to some poor conclusions.  The Word of God should be the final authority in our belief system.  While we can certainly look to fellow believers for help, we have to make sure that we start with Scripture as our primary source.

So, our answer begins with Scripture – specifically how we handle Scripture.  In short, we are literalist. We believe in using the plain reading of Bible. We recognize figures of speech when they are present in a passage.  Synecdoche, anthropomorphism, and other poetic forms happen throughout scripture.  They are seen as ways to convey the information without turning the bible into an exhaustive text. (That’s a play on words. The text would be exhaustive, having all explanatory thoughts listed literally in every passage, and you would be exhausted reading it.) Another key to Biblical interpretation is the context of the time and people who the passage is about. In a land that does not have sheep, discussing a lamb has little meaning to them. Allegory does exist in Scripture.  We are not actual “branches” (Jn 15).  The goal is to understand context and see allegories and figures of speech when it is not possible to view the scripture in a literal sense. This keeps us from pressing our own thoughts into doctrine.

Sola Scriptura was a defining doctrine of the Reformation.  Even Luther said, “Every word should be allowed to stand in its natural meaning and that should not be abandoned unless faith forces us to it.”  The idea that other people would dictate doctrine on to Christians was beginning to falter.  William Tyndale add,

“…that the Scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense.  And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, where unto if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way. And if thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but go out of the way.  Neverthelater, the Scripture useth proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which the proverb, similitude, riddles, or allegory signifieth, is over the literal sense, which thou must seek out diligently…”

The church leadership was no longer going to be equal with scripture in defining doctrine.  It has taken time for this view of scripture to mature, and it continues to mature.

It is with this, the literalist lens, that we come to our final answer.  It starts and ends with looking at the Bible as a whole narrative that describes God’s relationship to humans. Throughout the relationship, God would make commitments to people. There were times that God decided to promise or make an ‘everlasting covenant’ (Gen 17:7, Gen 17:19; 2 Sam 7:11-16; 1 Chron 16:17-18). These covenants included land and an everlasting throne that the “King of Glory” (Ps 24) would sit upon. The Literalist view provides continuity for these promises that God made. Even though we have a new covenant with God, Paul says that it does not void the promises that God made to Israel (Rom 11:1). The Futurist view says that Christ will rule on a physical throne as a descendent of David, in an actual land that was promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and not the spiritual Kingdom of Hearts alone and we believe this view is most consistent with a literal interpretation of Scripture.

 If you’re interested, below are six guides to literal interpretation that Bernard Ramm has given that we have found helpful when studying scripture.

(a)    That the literal meaning of sentences is the normal approach in all languages.

(b)    That all secondary meaning of documents, parables, types, allegories, and symbols, depend for their very existence on the previous literal meaning of the terms.

(c)     That the greater part of the Bible makes adequate sense when interpreted literally.

(d)    That the literalistic approach does not blindly rule out figures of speech, symbols, allegories, and types: but if the nature of the sentence so demands, it readily yields to the second sense.

(e)    That this method is the only sane and safe check on the imaginations of man.

(f)      That this method is the only one consonant with the nature of inspiration.  The plenary inspiration of the Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit guided men into truth and away from error. In this process the Spirit of God used language, and the units of language (as meaning, not as sound) are words and thoughts.  The thought is the thread that strings the words together.  Therefore, our very exegesis must commence with a study of words and grammar, the two fundamentals of all meaningful speech.