Thus far:
1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
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8. I have been sharing some personal and relational pieces of my journey with holiness standards. But of course, there were verses that went along with these beliefs about how to dress and present your hair. I've already mentioned several of them.
For example, 1 Timothy 2:9-10 says, "Likewise also, I wish wives to adorn themselves in proper clothing with modesty and discretion, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garment." 1 Peter 3:3 similarly says, "Wives, don't let your outward adornment be the braiding of hairs or wearing of gold or wearing of garments."
I grew up treating these as timeless individual commands. I did not think to ask what these verses meant in the first century or even in the situations of these letters. The words applied directly to you and me -- and I read the look of our jewelry and our hairstyles into the words.
The question of the original context -- what the hairstyles were like in the first century, what jewelry was like in the first century -- I didn't even think to ask that question. It never occurred to us that the specifics of a verse might have a lot to do with that time without being for all time in its particulars. After all, why would God have put it in the Bible then?
9. In 2005, I was privileged to go with Wilbur Williams to Israel. In the group was an engaged couple. In fact, Wilbur did an unofficial wedding for them at Cana in Galilee. While we were in the Old City of Jerusalem, she wanted pizza, and he wanted a gyro. So while she went into the pizza place for a slice of cheese pizza, he went across the alley to get the gyro.
A funny thing then happened when he returned to the pizza place with his gyro, wanting to eat with her. He was immediately shooed out of the restaurant. Why? Because of Exodus 23:19: "You will not boil a baby goat in its mother's milk." What?
What does this have to do with pizza and gyros? Well, Jewish tradition associates the milk with dairy and the baby goat with meat. So the rabbinic tradition did not allow a person to eat meat and cheese in the same meal. Thus, no meat on your pizza for a Jew who follows kosher dietary rules.
The way Jews observe this commandment today has nothing to do with its original purpose. In fact, we don't really know what the purpose of this command in the Law was. Its original meaning is locked up in the ancient past, lost to history, and we simply do not have any ancient evidence to tell us what it was about. I have a hunch that it had something to do with a Canaanite religious practice. But we just don't know.
(As a side note, you hear a lot of chatter out there from people claiming to know the real meaning behind many biblical mysteries. Nine times out of ten, these ancient secrets have no historical basis. The "secret knowledge" these influencers give rarely has any basis in historical evidence. For example, there was no gate to Jerusalem called the "eye of a needle." The high priest did not wear a bell or rope when he went into the Most Holy Place so they could pull him out if there was a problem. These legends are completely made up.
(Alternatively, some people wrongly assume that all the practices in the Mishnah (AD200) or the Talmud (400s and 500s) go back to the time of Jesus. But Judaism changed dramatically after Jerusalem was destroyed in AD70 and then even more after the Bar Kochba revolt was squashed in AD135. For example, the seder meal many Christians celebrate today probably wasn't fully developed at the time of Christ. We love these traditions when we hear about them because they make us feel like we have secret knowledge and are right there with Jesus. But many of them are anachronistic.
(If you are a real truth-seeker, get used to the answer, "We just don't know.")
10. When I wrote my New Testament Survey textbook, I wrote the following bottom line: "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose." In other words, greeting the brothers with a holy kiss today (1 Thess. 5:26) doesn't "do" the same thing as greeting someone with a holy kiss in the first century in Paul's churches.
This is such an important realization. Someone might say, "Ken, you're disobeying the Bible because you don't greet people at College Wesleyan Church with a kiss." My response is that the connotations of a kiss at College Wesleyan would be dramatically different than a kiss in the church of ancient Thessalonica. Doing what they did wouldn't be doing what they did!
Even more, what kind of a kiss would you have me give? A kiss on the lips? That might be what the verse appears to say when I come to it with the "dictionary" in my head. You say kiss; I think lips. But what if their kiss was a friendly kiss on the cheek like they do in France sometimes?
We are getting to the heart of how meaning works. The pre-modern, pre-reflective thinker 1) assumes that meaning is inherent in words, things, and actions and 2) doesn't realize a different mind might see a different meaning in those entities. When we first encounter someone with a different interpretation, our natural inclination is to think they are ignorant or evil.
This is the benefit of cross-cultural experiences. Ideally, we get to know ourselves and have our unexamined assumptions unveiled to us. (Of course, many a person on a mission trip in the past has simply come away thinking that those "poor people" are stupid. This would be a failed trip that has only reinforced ignorance on the part of the goer.)
11. I would eventually come to realize that meaning is not inherent in words, objects, or actions. Paul alludes to this principle in Romans 14:14: "Nothing is impure in itself. It is impure for the person who thinks it is impure." On its face, this is a quite radical statement and there are currently debates over the exact meaning of "impure" here and what the scope of the comment was.
However, Romans 14 would play heavily into the development of my understanding in those years of late college and early seminary. It shifted my focus from actions themselves -- Sabbath observance, clothing -- to the intentions behind the actions. Indeed, the final verse of this chapter gives great insight into the very nature of sin, "Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin." In other words, sin is a matter of one's heart far more than one's action.
I heard a story once that I have been unable to verify. I originally heard it in the context of a military person in Africa during World War II. Perhaps it is instead a missionary story. Or perhaps it is a completely made-up legend. Nevertheless, I have found it a helpful thought experiment in the meaning of actions.
In the story, a famous military general was going to be passing by a crowd of Africans. However, the African women in this particular context did not normally cover their breasts. So, they were told to be sure to cover their breasts as the VIP drove by. Accordingly, as the general's jeep passed by, the women lifted their skirts to cover their breasts -- in the process revealing something else.
The reason I find this story helpful is because it demonstrates that the significance of both breasts and privates is not entirely intrinsic to them as objects themselves. To be sure, such things have global functions. When every instance of something on the planet functions a certain way, there are bound to be overlapping connotations that appear intrinsic and appear universal.
However, a child might not infer them, and an alien from Mars might not. In that sense, the meaning still is not intrinsic. The meaning only appears universal because each individual instance has that connotation -- not because the action has that universal meaning inherent in it. Meaning in such cases adds up to being universal. It is not universal because it has that meaning in itself.
When I was a teenager, it would have been difficult for me to believe that breasts are not always highly sexual because they certainly are for me. But I have been convinced that, at least in the past in Africa, a woman's breasts were not sexualized in the way they are in my culture and certainly not as sexualized as they are in many Middle Eastern countries. Both on my honeymoon in Greece and on a family vacation years ago in France, my wife and I had occasion to observe some middle-aged topless bathers. Although it was a little shocking, there was nothing particularly sexual about those instances.
What is my point? My point is that the significance of jewelry and adornment has everything to do with 1) cultural norms and 2) internal attitudes. As I said earlier, a person can be arrogant about their plainness. A person can press the limits of how showy their hair bun is and yet officially be following the rules. Or a woman might wear a fair amount of jewelry and think almost nothing about it.
What kinds of jewelry and hairstyles did 1 Peter and 1 Timothy have in mind? Here is an example of a Flavian hairstyle. The Flavians were slightly after Peter and Paul's lifetime, but it could give us a hint of what a showy hairstyle might have looked like in the late first century. Ironically, it is not entirely unreminiscent of the "Wesleyan wads" I grew up with, with a little more panache.
12. If we desire to listen to the Bible on its own terms, it tells us that it was written to Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and so forth. This is what it says. It is hard to see how -- if we really consider Scripture to be the authority -- we can get around this most basic of conclusions. 1) The Bible tells us that it was written to people who have been dead for 2000-3000 years.
Now here's the second realization, one that some may want to debate more. It will feature over and over again as we go on this journey. 2) Meaning is contextual. What words meant to the audiences of the Bible was a function of their world. We cannot fully capture the meaning in English because our English words are a function of meaning in our world -- our words presuppose certain features of our world that did not exist or were different in the ancient worlds. Our words presuppose elements of our worldview, just as their words presupposed elements of their worldview.
This is also true about actions. Doing certain things in their world had different connotations than doing those things in our world and vice versa. That means that simply doing what they did today isn't always going to be "doing what they did."
What's the conclusion? The conclusion is that reading the Bible in context is like an intercultural experience. We are "reading someone else's mail" at least in the first instance. There is a meaning gap between us and them that is in play whether we realize it or not.
I see no way around this conclusion. As so many have said, the Bible is for us but it was not written to us. To respond, "It's written equally to everyone" reflects a lack of understanding of how meaning works. Feel free to doubt me. In late college, my understanding of such things was only beginning and was very uneven. I have to think that, if you hang with me in the pages that follow, you will be more than convinced in the end.
13. For those who did not grow up in a context that was so out of the mainstream, it is possible to go a long time -- maybe even your whole life -- not recognizing or encountering the distance between ourselves today and the text. I heard a pastor not too long ago poo-pooing any sense that we should not simply read the text and do what it says.
However, his claim would not stand up to any close examination. Does his wife stay in seclusion for seven days during her periods (Lev. 15:19)? Like any paradigm, he selects certain verses that are deemed important and "deselects" others that are not considered as directly relevant. This all seems like common sense to him, but it is a function of his sub-culture. Some other group would select a different set of verses and deselect others.
All of this is done fairly unreflectively, pre-modernly. In my final year of college, I was just beginning to understand that "context is everything" when it comes to meaning. And our context today is quite different from the context of the ancient world. It just undeniably is.
In Greek in college, Dr. Dongell gave us a quote from Melanchthon in the 1500s. He was the main systematizer and interpreter of Martin Luther's theology for the Lutheran tradition. I wrote it in my first Greek New Testament. It was something like, "Theology is merely the application of the rules of grammar to the biblical text." Although Melanchthon was brilliant, he was completely wrong here. A couple years later, when I was in seminary, I wrote under that quote the much more accurate statement, "Context is everything."
2 comments:
Well done, as usual.
Is it not possible that some commandments were given to see if God's people would obey them.
For sure. I tend to think purposeless commands would be very rare, Adam and Eve level. Even then, there is the question of tests for particular periods and moments.
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