Mondays would normally be my day to put a plug through some general notes about my life. This would be a continuation of a post about a month ago about my first year at Asbury. Before that post should be some earlier material on my moving beyond the King James Version.
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What is inerrancy?
6. In college, I took a May term with Dr. Elliott on the Synoptic Gospels. Amusingly, I woke up to drive back to Central and sat down groggily in the morning for a bowl of cereal. As only I could do, as I bent forward to sit down, I poked my eye on a candle still wrapped in plastic.
I would have to wear an eye patch throughout the class. Rather than drive myself, my mother had to drive back with me to Central. It's hard to imagine her driving back to Lakeland by herself, but she must have. She would have been 60, just a smidge older than I am now.
I remember in that class Dr. Elliott posing the question of Matthew's interpretation of Hosea 11:1. I always thought he was a little mischievious, one of those types that feels no need to tell you what he is thinking. We looked first at Matthew 2:14-15, where Joseph takes Mary and the baby Jesus down to Egypt to escape Herod the Great. Matthew says that this fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my Son."
In those days, I had a lovely Thompson Chain Reference Bible, a gift from my parents at some point in high school. It had a chart I loved in the back that showed all the places where the Old Testament was fulfilled in the life of Jesus. You've probably heard the argument -- it's mathematically impossible that all these prophecies could be fulfilled in the life of one person by chance.
But I had never actually gone to look up those Old Testament passages. I assumed that, if I did, I would find fairly straightforward predictions. For example, in this case, I expected to find Hosea to say something like, "When the Messiah comes, he will go down to Egypt for a time. And then out of Egypt will I call my Son."
But when Dr. Elliott took us to Hosea 11:1, that's not what we found. Hosea 11:1 is not a prediction at all. It's God talking about even further in the past, back in the time of the exodus, at least five hundred years before Hosea. To my eyes, it didn't look like a prophecy at all.
To make matters worse, the "son" is Israel -- not the Messiah. And Hosea goes on to say that the more God called after his son, the more he went after other gods. That certainly wasn't about Jesus!
At the time of Dr. Elliott's class, I just smiled. I was secretly rather naively cocky at the time. I don't think I acted that way much in front of others. I just was quietly overconfident that there was no puzzle I couldn't figure out.
So when Dr. Elliott read Hosea, I smiled, confident that I could figure out what was really going on.
7. When it came time for the final paper for that class, I decided to take on the accounts of Peter's denials in the four Gospels. On the one hand, I didn't like Harold Lindsell's proposal in The Battle for the Bible. His suggestion was that Peter might have denied Jesus six times -- three before a first cock crowing and three before a second.
This seemed ridiculous to me. I wanted an answer that seemed likely, not contrived. I grew up expecting the evidence to demand a verdict, not expecting to have to come up with far fetched possibilities.
As I would later put it, his reconstruction was more different from all the Gospels than they were different from each other. To me, that would later suggest to me that his idea of how the Gospels must fit together was more important to him than the texts themselves. So it seems to me many harmonization efforts turn out to be.
So I confidently started my paper (at the last minute), believing somehow that I was smarter than all the countless eyes on the texts for the last 2000 years. Quite amazing, my naivete.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke were fairly easy to fit together. At 4am, I got to John. I couldn't figure it out. I came up with something. But I wasn't satisfied. I figured I'd return to it later, some other time. After I got some sleep.
I was at a different place two years later. My confidence in the approach of my background had changed. I had learned a great deal about how to read the Bible in context. I had taken inductive Bible study. Its goal was to let the text tell me what it said and not to shove my own theology or ideology down its throat. That would be my undoing -- listening to the text.
8. Back to Matthew and Hosea. At the end of my first year of seminary -- given the criteria people like Lindsell had bequeathed me -- Matthew seemed to be in error. The choice they had given me was "Either Hosea had the meaning Matthew interprets or the Bible is in error."
But the original meaning of Hosea was clear. It wasn't a prediction about Jesus, at least not if taken literally.
This set me into a crisis. Was this a test? Did God want me to believe something that looks like a lie? Did God want me to turn off my brain and believe on blind faith in something that sure didn't look to be true? Is that the way God works? Is he, as it were, a trickster?
If I might give you a spoiler alert, I would later conclude that Matthew was simply interpreting the text using Jewish interpretive methods of the day. That is, he largely wasn't interpreting Hosea in context -- and that's ok. [1]
In fact, in the end it wasn't too unlike the way my family and I interpreted the Bible growing up. We didn't really understand what it meant to read the Bible in context. We read its words in the light of our questions and our concerns, hoping that the Spirit was guiding our thoughts. We hoped we would hear a word from the Lord, that the Lord would "quicken" the text. We wanted the Spirit to zap us.
In a not-too-dissimilar way, we believe that Matthew, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, read Hosea in a "spiritual" way, hearing a meaning that went far beyond anything Hosea imagined.
The problem was not with the Bible. The Bible was not "in error." Rather, that chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference was misleading. It was Lindsell who was in error for what he insisted the Bible must do.
He was a modernist. This is a rather fascinating thing. The critical scholarship of the late 1800s and early 1900s said, "Matthew doesn't understand Hosea. He's wrong (and not too bright)." Fundamentalists disagreed but accepted the modernist criterion for error. They responded, "Matthew did too understand. He's right and inspired."
But the correct answer was that Matthew was reading Hosea in a more-than-literal way. It didn't matter that he wasn't reading Hosea exactly in context. That's not a sign of error or a lack of intelligence. It's just a different hermeneutic, an ancient Jewish one.
To be continued
[1] I say largely because Matthew arguably does find an implicit parallel between Jesus coming out of Egypt and Moses leading Israel out of Egypt. He does not completely ignore context.
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