Hermeneutics 5

5. Caution in the Direct Application of the Original Meaning
Most of our discussion so far has centered on the original meaning of the Bible. We have suggested that the pursuit of the original meaning is legitimate because 1) it is after all the first meaning God inspired, and 2) it provides depth and perspective in relation to any other meaning we might see in the words. But at the same time, a number of important considerations make it clear that we should not base our beliefs and practices today solely on the original meaning of a biblical passage.

First of all, we should admit up front that in a vast number of cases, we simply do not have enough information to conclude for certain even what the original meaning of a passage was in the first place. Consider 2 Thessalonians 2:5, where Paul reminds the Thessalonians of a discussion he had with them while he was still at Thessalonica: "Do you not remember that I used to say these things when I was still with you?" We would love to be privy to this information. But unfortunately, none of us are, for it was not written to us. We are not the "you" of this passage. 2 Thessalonians 2 remains an extremely difficult passage to interpret because we have insufficient data to determine its meaning with certainty. Basing the Bible's authority strictly on the original meaning is problematic in part because we do not know for certain what that meaning was.

Even more problematic than the information that we know we lack, is the information we do not know we lack. In other words, new discoveries have repeatedly cast new light on old questions in ways that revolutionize the way we look at certain biblical texts. For example, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 continues to transform our understanding of various parts of the Bible even today.

Further, with so many thousands of biblical scholars pouring over the text, the background literature, and the history of the Bible's interpretation, we constantly hear new perspectives on old questions. Occasionally, the waves of these discussions bring in new revolutions of insight--or at least trendy changes in interpretation. It is often difficult to know what trends will stand the test of time and which will pass quickly after they hit the shore. Thus while the original meaning is in theory a fairly stable meaning, we cannot always identify it with certainty. Surely we need some additional checks and balances in place as we try to appropriate it.

But secondly, even if we could know the original meaning with absolute certainty, a number of reasons exist for us not to assume that the original meaning will apply straightforwardly to today. Whether in terms of belief or practice, a direct application of the words to today can be inappropriate, even dangerous for several reasons.

1. The first is that simply doing what the ancient audiences of the Bible's words did, would not be "doing what they did" if its significance, connotations, and implications would be different today.

No one should assume that we are trying to "get out" of obeying the Bible with this observation. Indeed, in many respects working out the heart of biblical teaching today often requires us to be more exacting than the Bible itself was originally. Jesus' interpretations of the Old Testament in Matthew 5 often "fulfilled" the Old Testament by exacting a more thorough standard than the Old Testament itself. Yet it is equally clear that there are prohibitions and commands the Bible makes that would not make any sense in our context.

I mentioned some easy examples of this fact earlier. Take Paul's admonition to "greet the brothers with a holy kiss" in 1 Thessalonians 5:26 or his urging of the women at Corinth to have a sign of authority on their head when they prophesy "because of the angels" (1 Cor. 11:10). Greeting my fellow brothers at my home church just wouldn't do what it did two thousand years ago--the connotations are now vastly different in twenty-first century America.

And scholars do not even agree what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 11:10. I personally think Paul meant a woman should cover her head (not her face) with a veil when entering the spiritual presence of putatively male beings like angels and God. The authority comes from the fact that she is honoring her "head," her husband, as she is entering the presence of other "men." If I am correct, then you can see how foreign the logic of this passage is to anything we can easily relate to today--even among those who wear prayer bonnets or hair buns in lieu of this passage.

In other instances, we will have to "fulfill" the heart of Scripture by a greater strictness than the Bible requires. Thus the Old Testament freely allows polygamy (e.g., Deut. 21:15-17). Indeed, no passage ever complains about David or Solomon's many wives (except that they are foreign). And it seems very unlikely that Ruth was Boaz's first wife. A wealthy, older man like him at that point in Israel's history probably had more than one wife long before Ruth came into the picture.

The New Testament does seem to assume that a person will have only one wife (e.g., 1 Cor. 7:2), but no passage in the New Testament explicitly prohibits polygamy for an ordinary person. 1 Timothy and Titus come the closest when they insist an overseer or deacon must be the husband of one wife (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:2, 12; Tit. 1:6). Indeed, these two books may mean something even stricter than monogamy--they may mean one wife during the course of a whole lifetime. But if we base our practices on the Bible alone, we have no clear prohibition of polygamy anywhere in the entire Bible.

However, in Western culture, polygamy seems to us incompatible with the very essence of Christianity. Some of the reasons for this sentiment actually come from cultural misunderstandings of the biblical text, like the presumption that a person can only become "one flesh" with one person. Presumably Jacob became one flesh with both his wives and his two concubines as well. And Paul speaks of becoming one flesh with a prostitute with no sense that one has thereby entered a marital or monogamous relationship with her (1 Cor. 6:16).

No, the reason we should consider polygamy inappropriate for a Christian is because in our world it would inevitably bring an inequality between husband and wife that is ultimately unchristian. When the Sadducees tried to foil Jesus' understanding of resurrection, they presented him with a scenario in which a woman had become one flesh with seven brothers one after the other without having children (e.g., Mark 12:18-27). Whose wife would she then be in the kingdom? Jesus' answer was that there would not be marriage in the kingdom, and women will not be given to men then (Mark 12:25). The subordination of wives to husbands will not exist in heaven, and all individuals of both genders will stand on an equal footing.

It is possible that at various times and places on earth God has allowed Christians to be polygamous, but clearly such a practice is less "heavenly" than monogamy. In the same way, God has allowed Christians at times to consider wives subordinate to their husbands, but this set up is similarly less "heavenly" than marriages where both are on equal footing. Like God allowed for divorce in the old covenant, perhaps God has "winked" at less than the ideal at various times and places. But Westerners have no excuse to formulate the relationship between men and women on earth in these passing earthly terms--often based on certain conceptions of the body. And we should urge Christians from polygamous cultures to move in a monogamous direction. When it comes to issues like these, surely God expects a higher standard today in the relationship between husbands and wives than He has sometimes allowed at other times and places.

2. The second reason why we should be careful about applying the original meaning of the Bible directly to today is that God largely revealed the truths of the Bible within the paradigms and worldviews of the original audiences. The point was not the ancient paradigm, but what God was affirming by way of it.

We see that when Paul says he was taken up into the "third sky" in 2 Corinthians 12:2, the image is just like the Testament of Levi, where you go up through successive layers of heaven (or sky) until you get to where God is. When Paul says that every knee will one day bow before Christ, he formulates every knee in terms of how he pictured the world: "of those in the skies and on the earth and under the earth" (Phil. 2:10). When Genesis pictures the creation of the stars, it sees them in the sky (Gen. 1:14), which it also sees as an expanse between the waters of the earth and certain primordial waters above the sky (Gen. 1:6).

When Colossians discusses the respectable relationships of the household (Col. 3:18-4:1), it does so in the same terms that Aristotle did in his Politics. Paul and Timothy discuss relationships of husband and wife, fathers and children, masters and slaves--the three domains that Aristotle lays out as the relationships of the household. When Paul speaks of the husband as the head of the wife and calls for her submission to the husband, he says exactly what Aristotle laid out as the appropriate relationships of the home.

My point here is not to discount these passages, which I affirm as inspired, but to clarify exactly what the point of these passages was and what it was not. Paul's point in Philippians was not the structure of the cosmos, but the ultimate submission of the world to Christ. And Genesis 1 no doubt showed who God was in contrast to the gods of the other creation stories--more than giving us a slide show of the creation process. And the point of the household codes of Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter may have been much more about "having such good conduct among the Gentiles that although they might speak badly of you as if you were doing evil, when they see your good deeds they will glorify God on the day of His visitation" (1 Pet. 2:12). Ironically, to fulfill the purpose of this verse we would need to allow our wives to have equal value and freedom today--the opposite course of action from what fulfilled it then!

Because the inspired message of the Bible's books came in the clothing of ancient paradigms and worldviews, much discernment is necessary when appropriating the biblical text. Thus the Bible was not meant to tell us about how the brain works. Indeed, various parts of the Bible conceptualize the human make-up differently (e.g., Genesis differs from Hebrews). The process of appropriating the original meaning of the Bible will require us to discern what the inspired point of each passage was and what the ancient clothing was in which it was dressed.

3. The third reason we should be careful about applying the Bible's words directly to today is because in some cases the New Testament had not yet reached a "final answer" on certain beliefs and practices.

We have already mentioned the matter of polygamy. We might add to that list slavery. For example, it is not at all clear that Paul is asking Philemon to give Onesimus his emancipation from slavery in Philemon. The text never says anything like this. Indeed, Colossians--probably sent to the same destination at the same time--instructs slaves to obey their earthly masters and says not a word to masters about setting their slaves free (Col. 3:22-4:1).

The New Testament does not spell out the specifics of the Trinity or exactly what the divinity of Christ is. God worked out these understandings in the church in the centuries that followed. Indeed, on several issues the books of the New Testament have not yet reached a "final answer." Take the issue of earthly sacrifice. According to Acts 21, Paul goes to the temple to offer animal sacrifices to release certain individuals from a vow (21:26). But Hebrews tells of the end of all animal sacrifice in the light of Christ's once and for all atonement (Heb. 10:14). While God has made it immensely clear to us Christians that an earthly temple would be irrelevant, it is not clear that all the New Testament authors had fully come to understand this fact yet. In this case we now know that Hebrews gives the final answer, but other books in the New Testament may not be quite as far along in unpacking this implication of Christ's death.

4. A fourth consideration is that since each book has its own individual meaning, these books do not tell us how to connect their teaching to each other. The activity of creating a "biblical theology"--determining the general thrust of the Bible on a particular topic or issue--is a matter of us looking in from the outside. It is an extra-biblical task. It is the same with the task of applying the words to today. Since the books were written to them, the Bible itself does not tell us how these words might relate to us. Determining this relation is also an extra-biblical task.

Thus, whether we like it or not, we are the determinative moment in the synthesis and application of biblical teaching to today. The Bible itself, Scripture alone, cannot tell us these things. They are activities--synthesizing teaching and connecting worlds--that we do from the outside looking in at the texts.

Before we apply a verse like 1 Timothy 2:12 to today--"I do not allow a woman to teach or take authority over a man"--we have to connect it with other biblical teaching relating to women teaching men. Thus we will also need to consider the implications of Acts 18:26: "When Priscilla and Aquila heard him [Apollos], they invited him to their home and [they] explained to him the way of God..." We will need to consider the prophetic role Acts 2:17-18 and 1 Corinthians 11:5 describe for women. To be careful, we should not apply any one of these individual passages directly to today until we have considered all the others.

And as we have already mentioned, once we have constructed a biblical theology on this topic, we will need to consider the relationship between the biblical world and our world. We must find points of continuity and discontinuity between the two worlds and identify the flow of revelation in the church since. Only then can we be certain that we are playing out the teaching of the original meaning with God's blessing today.

5. A fifth and final reason for caution relates to any expectation we might have that the original meaning of the Bible will give us all the answers we need for our questions today. Unfortunately, the New Testament simply does not directly address many of the issues that are most pressing for our time. Although the concept of an abortion existed at the time of the New Testament, the New Testament does not address the subject. Any verses we might produce on the topic are only indirectly relevant at best. And where will we find verses on stem cell research or on removing feeding tubes from bodies that are brain dead?

Indeed, we will not find passages that directly address so many of the issues on which we most want a word from God today. The verses brought to bear on these subjects are often those most read out of context. This is not a point of despair. It is a point for the church to pray and take the responsibility that it has always had, but has often not wanted to take. It has sometimes been easier to pretend like there is an easy answer in a verse taken out of context than to do the hard work of "working out your [plural] salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12). God did not stop speaking when he inspired the books of the Bible. It is the church's job to listen to what He is saying.