Confessions #4: Paul made Sabbath-keeping optional.

Number 4 in my new series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse. 
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies.
x. Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
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1. I grew up with a lot of Sabbath rules. I wasn't rebellious, although it did make Sundays pretty boring for me. We went to church at least twice. As an attention-deficit boy, that was a little torturous, if I am honest.

We didn't "buy or sell" on Sundays, which meant we didn't go out to eat or to the store. Part of why we didn't go to restaurants on Sunday is so that someone else didn't have to work. My dad occaionally got the opportunity to work overtime on weekends. He'd do the Saturdays but not the Sundays as a matter of conviction.

We didn't watch TV on Sundays. My dad felt like he would end up watching football all day if that door was open. So we set the day aside for worship. When Star Wars and E.T. premiered on TV on Sunday nights, I missed them. (I had already missed them at the movies because we didn't go to movies either.)

Sunday was serious, solemn. It was a holy day, set aside, sanctified. That means we didn't throw a football or baseball. I was kicked off a playground at a holiness camp ground once because Sunday was too serious for play.

This was all very normal for me. It was one of many practices that set my family apart from other people. We knew we were a "peculiar people," as Deuteronomy 7:6 in the King James Version says.

There's nothing wrong with any of the practices I mentioned above. As I studied the Bible more and more, though, I realized that these things were really a matter of personal conviction. A deep reading of Scripture won't see them as practices that God requires of his people.

2. Two things began to change my mind on these practices. One is an increasing ability to read the Bible in context, and the second was an openness to listen to the Bible over my tradition.

For example, the most glaring insight is that Sunday isn't the Sabbath. Saturday is and was. There's not a verse in the entire Bible that refers to Sunday as a Sabbath. [1] Sunday is the "Lord's Day," not the Sabbath. In the Bible as in Judaism still today, the Sabbath referred to the period from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.

There are groups like Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists that have recognized this fact and they do keep Saturday as the Sabbath even today.

Of course, many Christians recognize this fact and will immediately respond, "The specific day is not what's important. What's important is that you set aside a day as your Sabbath." For example, many pastors set aside Monday or another day as their day of rest.

Many other Christians have blurred the Sabbath into a day of worship. So what becomes important is going to church to worship on Sunday. If you do that, they believe, then you have kept the Sabbath.

These are all very interesting (and practical) traditions. There's just one thing about them They're not in the Bible. They are like the traditions of the elders of the Pharisees in Mark 7:1. They are oral traditions that Christians have come up with to explain how they keep the law in concrete situations.

And that's ok. It is fantastic to set aside a day of rest. It is very healthy! It is spectacular to set aside a day of worship! The Lord deserves our worship every moment of every day, and setting aside a day to gather together to worship him is VERY biblical (cf. Heb. 10:25; Rev. 1:10).

3. Here's the thing though. The farther I went into my study of the Bible, the more I let each passage say what it wanted to say. I didn't let myself continue to say, "OK, this verse sounds like it says x, but I can't let it say that because of passage y." I tried to stop "cooking the books," so to speak.

So, consider Colossians 2:16: "Do not let anyone judge you because of food or because of drink or in respect to a feast or a new moon or a Sabbath." What is this verse saying?

If I let the verse speak, it seems to say that the non-Jewish Colossians (Gentile Christians, in other words) should not feel pressure from anyone in the city to observe the Jewish food laws, festival days, or Sabbaths. That is to say, Colossians does not consider Sabbath-observance binding on Gentile believers!

If you were in doubt, let's go to Romans 14, a chapter that was very important to me on my spiritual pilgrimage. It says, "There is the one who considers one day above another and another who considers every day [the same]. Let each person be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who observes the day observes it for the Lord" (Rom. 14:5-6).

Verses like these are sometimes difficult for us, not because they are hard to understand, but because they wreak havoc with what we think we know. Paul here indicates that keeping the Jewish Sabbath was a matter of personal conviction, not a universal requirement. Some Christians would believe God requires it of them. Others would not.

Why is this so striking? It is striking for several reasons. For example, this is one of the Ten Commandments. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exod. 20:8). And Paul says you don't have to keep it. I think he especially had Gentile Christians in mind. 

Let that sink it. Not only does he not consider it an absolute. He does not even consider it a universal requirement. By definition, he puts it in the category of the relative, a "relativist" categorization. There's no way around it. That's what he says.

I was talking to a family member about this once and the response was, "But Exodus 20:11 bases the Sabbath law in creation" (cf. Gen. 2:2-3). 

"I know," I responded. "But it doesn't seem to matter to Paul."

4. Let me give it to you straight. Despite our traditions, despite what makes sense to us, despite the fact that it is one of Ten Commandments, rooted in the creation story, despite all these things... the New Testament does not consider the Sabbath to be binding on Christians.

That was a huge admission for me as a Bible know-it-all. When you listen to the biblical text, it often doesn't want to be read the way my tradition wants it to be read. Then I have to decide whether my idea of the Bible is more important to me than the real Bible itself.

[1] I did hear an ingenious argument that the Greek of verses like Matthew 28:1 changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. A wooden reading of the Greek is "Now after the sabbaths, at the dawning of the first of sabbaths." Some have argued that this verse changed the old Sabbath to Sunday as the first of the new Sabbaths. Brilliant!

But of course it is this sort of game-playing with truth that caused me to have a bit of a faith crisis. The expression "first of sabbaths" was an idiom for "first day of the week." It existed before Easter, and it existed after Easter. This interpretation is just a very sophisticated version of ripping a phrase out of its historical context. The meaning of these phrases was "Now after the Sabbath, at the dawning of the first day of the week," which is how pretty much every version translates it.

What is evangelicalism? Part I

1. The thing about words is -- they change their meaning over time. 

Take the word woke. For most of my life, it simply meant that someone was awake. Not sleeping, in other words. Then, about fifteen years ago, it began to be used in certain circles to refer to someone who had become aware of their own privilege in society and the challenges of others who are largely unseen to them.

Now, it has become a strongly negative term without much content, largely a nickname to mock liberal or progressive individuals. If it has any content at all, it mocks those with social concerns in relation to people of color or women.

Same word. Changing meanings and connotations.

This is how words work. The same word can mean significantly different things over time. A word can flip from being positive to negative or negative to positive. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson came out with a song called "Bad" in which the word bad came to mean really, really cool. In the early 2000s, a "googol" (1 with 100 zeros) became Google, and "to google" something became a verb.

2. The same is true of the word evangelical. It has not always meant exactly the same thing. 

In German, evangelisch simply means Protestant. Preachers of the 1700s like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards used the word to describe an approach to salvation that, like Martin Luther, emphasized salvation by grace through faith. That was "evangelical" faith and "evangelical" religion.

So we largely call these individuals "evangelical" in hindsight. In their own time, the word described a kind of Christianity more than it named a distinct group.

As the 1800s progress, two streams of "evangelical" Christians begin to emerge. On the one hand, you have those like Charles Finney who continue to emphasize the "conversion" sense of the word that Wesley and Whitefield did. These are the revivalists of the 1800s. [1]

The other stream is foreshadowed by William Wilberforce, who begins to use the word evangelical to contrast the "alive" part of Anglicanism from the "nominal" part that, from his perspective, is Christian in name only. The evangelical part of Anglicanism is still orthodox. It still believes in sin and salvation. It sees faith as personal. The other is respectable and formal, perhaps a little too influenced by the Enlightenment. [2]

By the end of the 1800s, you have two distinct centers of gravity in what we would call evangelical Christianity in America. The one is the revivalist wing that, like D. L. Moody, emphasized conversion and the experience of salvation. They are evangelically "orthodox," but that is not their focus. 

The other includes academics like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, whose center of gravity is the more doctrinal aspects of faith. They are Calvinists who focus evangelical faith on a particular understanding of sin and salvation. For them, an evangelical especially has the right beliefs about the Bible and salvation.

3. In the mid-1900s, the word evangelical would emerge now as a clear sociological movement after World War II. Now, it is very intentionally defined by a group calling themselves "neo-evangelicals." And both streams loosely rejoin in this new coalition.

On the one hand, you have Billy Graham...

[1] For an excellent survey of this stream, see Donald W. Dayton, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage: A Tradition and Trajectory of Integrating Piety and Justice (Baker Academic, 2014).  

[2] David W. Bebbington, as we will see, commits the root fallacy by mixing these two distinct streams together.

Notes Along the Way TF5 -- Teaching at Asbury College

continued from last week
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1. Back in the day, Mike Harstad was a legend at Asbury College. (I don't know the details of his departure so I'll leave it at that.) He was known for teaching Greek the old school way -- by which I mean the way my mother learned it at Frankfort Bible College in the early 1940s. You learned Attic Greek first. Then you downshifted into Koine Greek, the "merchant Greek" of the New Testament.

Brian Small learned Greek from him that way and, as I recall, first introduced me to Smyth's classical Greek grammar. In my seminary years, Greek resources featured high on my list of birthday and Christmas requests. My parents obliged and I filled in some details. I believe Joseph Beth was helpful.

Dr. Harstad thought that Philo was the author of Hebrews, or at least could have been.

Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, Liddle Scott, Moulton and Geden, Blass-Debrunner. My parents gave me Kittle's 10 volume Theological Dictionary one Christmas. Of course, it turned out to be riddled with language fallacies, not to mention the fact that it was put together by Nazi Bible scholars. Oh well.

In the 1992-1993 academic year, Harstad was on a sabbatical. The whole year. And, since I was now finishing up my MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky (UK), I seemed like a good pick to do some of the fill in while he was gone. 

So I taught second year Latin at Asbury College that year, one class each semester. He used Robert Ball's Reading Classical Latin text, which used simple texts from Julius Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, and the like. It was nice. If only I could have started out with those beginning texts instead of being thrown into poetry again at UK.

I can't say that I remember any students except for Jerald Walz, who has occasionally stayed in touch.

2. We used to joke that a great gulf separated Asbury College from the Seminary, as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Seminary men were known to go over to hang out at the Grill in hopes of finding girls who might date them. It was a little embarrassing, and I joined the ranks of the embarrassing for a short time.

Some of my college friends were RD's at Kresge. We would go over to visit them. That's when I first met Cindy Gunsalus and then Vicki Gibson, who was a close friend in those years. My roomate at the time was Brian Matherlee, now well known Wesleyan pastor in North Carolina. He introduced me to the Braves and the Tarheels. 

He was much more of an extrovert than me and quite cool for a seminary guy. A brief story will capture our respective personalities. Two of the most popular female seminary students came to our apartment to visit him. I was there -- or at least I thought I was. As he showed them around the apartment, he pointed to my room and mentioned that it was Ken's room. Mind you, I was standing right there behind them.

"Who?" they asked.

"Ken," he said. And then as the look of perplexity continued on their faces, he added, "He's standing right behind you."

Ah, such is life.

3. I was a Greek and Hebrew Teaching Fellow at Asbury Seminary from the fall of 1990 to the spring of 1992, going to UK part time. Then from 1992-1993, I went full time to UK and finished my degree.

This involved of course going headlong into Latin. I've mentioned that I took 2.5 years of it in high school. Then I spent the summer of 1991 going through Wheelock.

The first class I finally took was, by some freak act, another poetry class: Juvenal, Martial, and Statius. It wasn't too bad. Juvenal was a satirist. So we read the famous quote that all the people want are bread and circuses. Martial, as I recall, was ronchy. So for a brief moment I knew some Latin bad words and sex terms. I had Dr. Jane Phillips for that class. She was quite reasonable. I had her for Cicero as well.

She was Roman Catholic, and I think may have been a nun at one time. Not entirely sure. I remember her being perplexed that I didn't know the term "fracture" for when the priest breaks the wafer when consecrating the elements. She was trying to prompt my memory for the fourth principal part of frango -- "fractus."

I had two semesters of Latin Composition with her my final year. I can't say that I learned as much as I would have liked, but that has always been my story.

4. I took Virgil's Aeneid with Lewis Swift. He was Dean of Undergraduate Studies and for some reason I was surprised that he actually would teach a class. He passed away a few years ago. I remember a brief exchange we had at a social for the master's students in classics. It was at Robert Rabel's house, as I remember. I dutifully abstained from the wine that was on offer. He had a very nice wine stock, as I recall.

Somehow, we had a brief chat about the imprecatory psalms. Dr. Swift said something like, "I was never quite able to figure out what to do with the imprecatory psalms. You know, praying down God's wrath on your enemies." He had actually studied for ministry as a Roman Catholic at one point, I believe.

I responded that I had always taken them somewhat metaphorically. Praying for God to end evil and various vices rather than people. He seemed intrigued.

He was a great teacher of the Aeneid and, although I continued my multi-hour pre-class Arby's ritual, I regularly found myself trying to guess when I would be asked to read to make sure I had something to say once we got there. A trick I tried with varying success was to volunteer early and then have pockets of text translated so I could volunteer throughout the class and just maybe give the appearance of having it all done. 

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I missed the Battleship.

5. There were classes I wanted to take but it just didn't work out. I missed Plato. That hurt. I went the first day but conceded I just didn't have the time. I did catch Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with Robert Rabel (Books I and X, I believe). I missed Homer, which sucked. I mentioned that I had a year of Sanskrit with Greg Stump.

I had to pass a reading French competency. This was while I was still a teaching fellow. The problem is that the class I signed up for was at 8am. And at that time I certainly was not a morning person. That didn't happen until I was married. I couldn't get myself up. And it's not like there was an attendance requirement. Everything stood or fell on whether you passed the competency exam at the end.

I went the first day. I went a random day in the middle. I went to the class before the exam, I believe. And I studied reading French on my own.

I got an A in the class.

Confessions x: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.

Just for Easter, number x in my series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies
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Confession #n: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
1. I grew up with two beliefs that I never really tried to fit together. The first was that, when you die, you go to heaven or hell. The second was that the dead would rise from their graves when Jesus came back to earth.

Later on, I tried to make them fit. When you die, you are in some sort of intermediate state. Perhaps your soul is in "Abraham's Bosom" (Luke 16) or Paradise (Luke 23:43). On the other hand, you may find yourself in torment (Luke 16 again).

Then when Christ returns, your soul is reunited with your body, like Iron Man calling his suit from afar. The soul of the Christian is reunited with an upgraded body. And, on the Day of Judgment, the damned are also reunited with their bodies before going to eternal torment.

2. There are many Christians who, perhaps without even realizing it, simply do away with the resurrection part. A few years ago, when an ossuary with the name James on it was discovered, there was speculation about what would happen if the bones of Jesus were found. A colleague of mine -- teaching at a Christian college, no less -- didn't think it would make any difference if they found the bones of Jesus. Apparently, he thought the afterlife was purely spiritual. Our physical bodies didn't matter, as far as he was concerned.

Some of us were stunned. Admittedly, the person didn't teach in the religion department. They taught in a completely different field and really didn't know any better. They didn't realize that resurrection in the Bible is an embodied resurrection. Jesus' tomb is empty -- and that matters.

When I was growing up, I didn't realize how important our bodies are in the Bible for eternity. But 1 Corinthians 15 makes it very clear. When Paul talks about resurrection, he isn’t imagining a disembodied existence. He can’t even conceive of an afterlife without a body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:35). For Paul, salvation isn’t escape from the body. It’s the transformation of it. 

For Paul, the alternative to resurrection isn’t “your soul goes to heaven.” It's no future at all.

3. Come to find out, our popular notions of the immortality of the soul are more Greek than biblical. It's not that we can't make them fit. There are several hints of something similar. "Into your hands, I put forth my spirit" (Luke 23:46). There are martyred "souls" under the altar in Revelation 6:9.

But Jesus' resurrection is a bodily resurrection. Luke and John make a big deal of this fact. In Luke, the risen Jesus asks for fish to show he is not a ghost (Luke 24:39-43). In John, he offers the marks in his hands, feet, and side for Thomas to touch to know it is him (John 20:27).

And I've already mentioned the apostle Paul, who apparently can't understand what the Corinthians are thinking about resurrection. He doesn't understand how they can believe Jesus is alive and yet not believe in resurrection. As a former Pharisee, resurrection for him obviously means that our corpses rise from the dead. [1] "Someone will say, 'How will the corpses be raised?' and 'With what sort of body are they coming?' (15:35). 

He just assumes everyone knows that resurrection involves our bodies. It doesn't even occur to him there might be another view like, "You die your soul is freed." In this part of his ministry, he even talks about the time between death and resurrection as "sleep" (1 Thess. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:51).

Resurrection of the dead is the rising of dead corpses. The Greek story said, "Your soul escapes your body." The biblical story says, "God raises your body."

4. But the biggest shift came when I realized that this embodied eternity in the New Testament is almost certainly on earth. The kingdom of God in the Bible is God's kingdom come to earth.

This seemed heretical to me as a young man studying for ministry. And I know I wasn't the only one. I know a church leader who was shocked to hear a professor at my seminary point out that this is exactly what Revelation 21 describes. Somehow, while we took all the rest of Revelation literally -- the parts that probably weren't meant to be taken literally -- we took this part figuratively. We took the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem as a poetic expression of the future rather than something that might literally happen.

Yet, when I became a professor, my theology colleagues would assure me that historic Christianity has always believed that eternity is on a new earth, the redeemed earth of Romans 8:18-23. That was news to me. "Orthodoxy" in my low church background meant an eternity in heaven.

But it's all there in the New Testament. I just mentioned Romans 8 and Revelation 21. But Jesus too talks of people coming from north, south, east, and west to feast with him in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). I had just always ignored the clear implication that this was on earth somehow. But it's strange verses like that one that lead to paradigm shifts.

I still believe we are conscious between death and resurrection, somewhere, in some form. The details are above my pay grade. I believe in spending eternity with Jesus.

But I now believe it will be in a glorified body. And I believe the kingdom of God will be right here, on a new earth. Christianity isn’t about leaving earth for heaven. It’s about heaven coming to earth.

[1] N.T. Wright emphasized this fact in his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

Confessions 3 -- Then I read the verses before the prophecies

Number 3 in my new series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.
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Confession #3: Then I read the verses before the prophecies 
1. My parents gave me a Thompson Chain Reference King James Bible when I graduated from high school. Aside from the Bible itself, my favorite page was a chart in the back that told the key Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in Jesus.

You have probably heard the argument: "It's impossible that all these predictions could be fulfilled in the same person by coincidence." It's an argument used to defend the inspiration of Scripture, the existence of God, and the divine identity of Jesus. Now I believe all those things. But I also feel like I was set up for a bit of an unnecessary crisis because of those arguments. 

It's not the Bible's fault. It's a casualty of that "first naivete" I mentioned in the last chapter.

2. The first hint of this came in a college class. The professor showed us Matthew 2:15: Jesus went down to Egypt as a child "that it might be fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet, 'Out of Egypt I called my Son.'" 

Now, I had that chart in the back of my Bible. But I had never actually gone back to those passages to read the verses that came before and after them. I had just assumed they were straightforward predictions. I expected that, if I went back to Hosea 11:1, I would find something like, "When the Messiah comes, he will go down to Egypt, and then he will return so I can say that out of Egypt I called my son." Or something like that.

Then the professor had us go back to Hosea 11. It wasn't what I expected. It wasn't a prediction at all. And it certainly wasn't about the Messiah. Here's what the verse and the one after it say: "When Israel was a boy, I loved him, and from Egypt I called my son. The more they called to them, the more they went from their face. They sacrificed to Ba'als, and to idols they offered incense."

That was a surprise. The verse is about the Exodus -- in the past -- not about the Messiah in the future. And Jesus certainly didn't sacrifice to Ba'al or offer incense to idols. Clearly, the verse in context was not about Jesus at all.

This was a puzzle! I smiled at the time -- being the Bible know-it-all I was. I'll figure this out.

Except I didn't -- at least not in terms that fit the chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference Bible.

3. After my first year of seminary, this seeming discrepancy began to wear on me. In fact, as I was learning to read verses in the light of what came before and after them, I was finding more and more of a difference between how the New Testament used these verses and what they seemed to mean in their original books. It seemed like Matthew was reading Hosea incorrectly, and I didn't believe the Bible could have errors.

Spoiler alert: I don't think Matthew was in error. I think my expectations were in error. I expected these to be prediction-fulfillments. And it turned out they were instances of the New Testament authors reading the Old Testament in a "spiritual" or more-than-literal way. In other words, they were reading verses or segments of verses somewhat like I grew up reading memory verses. 

Let me explain. In the last chapter, I mentioned that, once words are uttered, they become distanced from the meanings their authors intended. [1] We can see meanings in emails, text messages, conversations that weren't what the writer or speaker intended. Relationships regularly get into conflict over these sorts of misinterpretations.

Growing up, my family expected the Holy Spirit to speak to us in the words of the Bible. Many American Christians read the Bible this way, expecting to hear a word from the Lord -- to get zapped by the Spirit while reading. We didn't think about the fact that we weren't reading the Bible in context for what it actually had meant. This unreflective reading is what we might call a "first naivete."

Ancient Jewish interpretation of the Bible often read its words in a similar way. Something about the biblical text triggered a truth in the reader's mind. In some ancient examples, they read the words of the prophets in relation to their current situation, much like Bible prophecy teachers still do today. [2]

Some Bible scholars of the early 1900s called this seeing a "fuller sense" in the text (sensus plenior in Latin). Even though Hosea 11:1 wasn't a prediction about Jesus, there is a parallel between Jesus and Moses in Matthew. Moses led Israel out of bondage in Egypt. Jesus leads us out of the bondage of our sin. You can see where, while Hosea 11:1 wasn't originally about the Messiah, there is a rough parallel.

4. Over time, I began to "change my mind" on how to see the way the New Testament read the Old Testament. The New Testament was not in error. It just used a different hermeneutic than the way I was learning to read the Bible in school. A hermeneutic is a way of interpreting something. 

In college and seminary, I was learning "inductive Bible study" or how to listen to the biblical text to let it tell me what it meant. That's also called exegesis, where you draw meaning out of the text. The biblical authors and I, growing up, often read the Bible "eisegetically." We read meanings into the text based on our traditions and theology. [3]

If your theology is good, it's not too bad to read the Bible this way. For one, the vast majority of Christians do and always have. We read the words using the Christian "dictionary" in our heads (as well as the dictionaries of the churches we go to). It's just not how to read the Bible if you want to know what it actually meant originally. 

As a side note, I had a Bible colleague who would tell students, "Matthew was inspired. He was allowed to read the Old Testament this way. You aren't." But, I think he has actually softened a little on this point over the years.

5. I end this chapter with a potentially shocking example. Isaiah 7:14. You probably know the verse because Matthew 1:23 reads it in relation to the virgin birth: "A virgin will become pregnant and will bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel, which being interpreted is 'God is with us.'"

Again, I expected to go back to Isaiah 7:14 and find a prediction that the Messiah will be born of a virgin. As a memory verse, it can be read that way: "Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young maiden has become pregnant, and she gave birth to a son. And she called his name Immanuel."

Hebrew tenses are not entirely about time, so the timing could be translated differently. However, the most natural way to take the verse is in relation to something that has already happened. Some modern translations have "virgin." Others have "young woman" (e.g., the RSV). At the time, I assumed these were the evil translations.

But who is this sign to? Eventually, I looked at the verses that came before and after 7:14. To be honest, there were names and places I didn't really know anything about. Who was Ahaz? Who was Rezin? Who was "Pekah the son of Remaliah"? Where was Syria? What was Ephraim?

Because I didn't know who and what these things were, it was easy to hear "blah blah blah" virgin birth "blah blah blah." And this was especially true in the King James Version, which printed each verse separately anyway.

6. So what is the context? 

This is the late 700s BC. The big threat to this region is Assyria, which will end up destroying the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. Isaiah is a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah.

The word from the Lord comes to the king of Judah, Ahaz, through the prophet Isaiah. Two kings from the north -- who will soon be obliterated -- are trying to force Ahaz to fight with them. From a human perspective, it makes some sense.

But Isaiah's word from God is not to do it. Ahaz doesn't want to listen. He makes up an excuse, something like, "I don't want to bother God."

But Isaiah insists. The Lord is going to give you a sign whether you want one or not. A young woman has become pregnant and given birth to a son. Verse 16 -- "before the boy knows how to refuse evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by the two kings."

Suffice it to say, I found this train of thought confusing when I was reading the verse in relation to the virgin birth. For one thing, Jesus' birth was 700 some years later. If this verse was a sign to King Ahaz, it wasn't a very good one. What good is a sign to you if it only happens 700 years after you're dead?

But, thought I, how could there have been another virgin birth in Isaiah's day?

Let me share the rest of the story. Virgins get pregnant all the time if they get pregnant the first time they have sex. Also, it isn't entirely clear that the Hebrew word 'almah here only refers to a virgin, although it's possible. So, it was possible that the verse referred to a perfectly natural birth originally.

Second, there are a couple young male children mentioned in these chapters of Isaiah. Isaiah has a son, for example, Maher-shalal-hash-baz (Isa. 8:3-4). Isaiah 8:4 sounds very much like the prophecy in Isaiah 7:16.

7. Get to the point, Ken. The point is that, in context, this was a prediction to King Ahaz. It was a prediction about a child who was born during his reign. That child was a sign to him. Before that child was old enough to tell the difference between good and evil, Ahaz's problem was taken care of.

This does not mean Matthew was in error, as I would have once thought. It means that Matthew was reading the verse in a fuller sense. He was reading the words in relation to Jesus in a "spiritual" way. And that's ok.

After being jolted out of my first naivete into reading these verses more in context, I eventually reached a "second naivete." I can accept that Matthew was inspired to read Isaiah the way he was. AND, I can accept that Isaiah was inspired to give the prophecy to Ahaz too with the verse's original meaning.

After all, it actually happened in the late 700s BC.

[1] The philosopher Paul Ricoeur called this dynamic, the "autonomous text" in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.

[2] For example, the Habakkuk commentary (1QpHab) among the Dead Sea Scrolls reads the words of Habakkuk in relation to the rise of Roman rule and influence in the region.

[3] Although they would likely deny it, there's a school of hermeneutics called "theological interpretation" that arguably does this. It tries to have its cake and eat it too, claiming to read the Bible in context while instead reading it in the light of its theology. Both readings are valid, but they are different interpretations.

Confessions 2 -- Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.

Number 2 in my new series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
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Confession #2: Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.
1. I grew up with memory verses. Love them. Was taught them in Sunday School. Still quote them regularly.

I realized something as I started taking Bible classes in college. I didn't pay much attention to the verses that came before and after them. Sometimes I still caught the right general sense. Other times, I realized I didn't have a clue what those verses actually meant in context.

Again, by "in context" I mean hearing what the words actually meant. I'll get there eventually, but words are always locked in a context when someone reads them. It's true when someone utters words--the words are a function of what words mean in their context. 

And it's true when I hear or read words. When I read them, I'm the one that assigns the meaning to the words, inevitably. Once an author utters words, he or she loses control over what someone hears in them... unless they're still around to correct the misinterpreter.

I grew up on the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. I have a family member who tried the New King James (NKJV) for a short while. But he ended up going back to the KJV because he didn't like the paragraphs of the NKJV. In other words, he preferred to read each verse individually.

2. But, of course, the words before and after a verse help you know what the verse was actually saying. So, you're less likely to know what the verse means if you don't read what comes before and after it. We saw this in the first article. Jeremiah 29:11 was not a verse about me or you. It was a verse to a specific group of people in Babylon in the early 500s BC.

Read the verse right before it: "When seventy years are completed in Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill for you my good word to return you to this place" (Jer. 29:10). 

Why do we think 29:11 is about us? Only because we've been taught to memorize the verse that way. The Bible as a whole does indicate God has good plans for those who love him (Rom. 8:28), but that doesn't mean your life won't be rough now. It's not a promise that you won't be murdered or martyred. And it's certainly not a promise for serial killers or dictators.

What I changed my mind on was about just ripping verses out of context. It's not that God doesn't still "zap me" from time to time. But now I know I'm not hearing the words for what they actually meant. What they really meant is locked up in the context when they were first written.

3. While we're talking about Romans 8:28, it's another one that people tend to rip out of its context. "We know that, to those who love God, all things are working together for good to those who are called according to [his] purpose." There's a tendency to translate this into the slogan, "Everything happens for a reason."

But what do the verses before and after it say?

From Romans 8:18 on, Paul is talking about the glory that we all can look forward to when Christ returns. Not only will our bodies be transformed but the creation itself. Currently, the creation is in bondage to the power of Sin, so that our flesh prevents us from doing the good even when we want to (that is, unless we have the Spirit to help us).

So, we are awaiting the redemption of our bodies (8:23). We are awaiting either the resurrection if we die or our transformation if we are still alive when Christ returns. 1 Corinthians 15 gives us a good deal more detail about these events to come.

Meanwhile, the Spirit helps us as we wait (8:26). This is the context of Romans 8:28. It's all going to work out for good. It is not a statement focused on individuals, although of course as Western individualists we are bound to read it that way. And it seems to point to the end when all the things Paul has been talking about take place.

What were these things again? They were our resurrection and the transformation of our bodies.

In other words, the verse is not saying that your infected toe will work out for the better. It's not saying that everything happens for a reason. It's not saying God will not let you suffer. It's saying that no matter what "groanings" we may undergo now, we will eventually find ourselves transformed in the kingdom of God.

4. I started out not being programmed to read verses in context. I had a family member who had a verse jump out at her that made her think God wanted us to move to Florida. Maybe he did! But I guarantee you that is not what Judges 1:15 meant originally.

I would later read a philosopher who called this a "first naivete." I didn't know what I didn't know.

So, I learned to read the verses before and after. I began to hear verses differently. I could see that some of my readings of Scripture had been wrong--at least as far as context is concerned. I changed my mind on their meanings.

But you know, that same philosopher talked about a second naivete. That's when you know it isn't what the verse meant but you can see a truth in the first way you read it.

My grandfather used to preach a sermon from the KJV of Isaiah 35:8 from the line, "though fools shall not err therein." His sermon preached that you didn't have to be smart to be holy.

He was right of course. It's just not what that verse meant. A fool in Hebrew is not a person who isn't smart. It's a wicked person. And to err in older English is to wander. The verse is saying that wicked people won't accidentally find their way onto the holy highway.

I suspect the Spirit speaks this way all the time. He spoke originally with what the words actually meant in context. And yes, because we are all fools in the modern sense, he meets us in the words still today, however we are able to understand them. 

Notes Along the Way -- TF4 -- Ichthusman

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. Previous post here.
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1. My second year as Teaching Fellow involved two new preps -- Hebrew and Intermediate Greek. At first, I was a little annoyed at Bill Patrick for finageling a second two year term as Teaching Fellow. That meant he would teach the summer Greek intensive, which was money I wanted. But it seems like perhaps I was allowed to teach Hebrew then, which was perfectly delightful for me. Not all TFs got to teach Hebrew.

Lawson Stone had sung the praises of LaSor (although apparently not enough to use it). I loved it. It was my first experiment with teaching biblical languages inductively. It wouldn't be the last.

Teaching a biblical language inductively can require some pastoral skills. With LaSor especially, students had a good deal of miscellaneous information rattling around in their heads before they could see the big picture. And that is highly uncomfortable -- especially the more "J" you are.

Then, all of a sudden, everything comes together. And in a shorter time period than it would have taken otherwise.

But I loved it. It was great for me, having first learned Hebrew from Seow's textbook, to solidify my understanding with LaSor. Maybe a smidge selfish. But to this day, my sense of Hebrew phonetics is far better than it would be otherwise.

I had some really good students. I like to boast that I was Brian Russell's Hebrew teacher. Of course, I couldn't answer half his questions. So let's just say he taught himself.

Jeff Finger stands out to me as a student, not so much because of his Hebrew prowess, although I'm sure he got an A. Rather, he was a quite unique fellow. I remember one class where he was laying on top of his desk on his back holding LaSor up in the air. This is a desk chair I'm talking about.

2. He seemed like just the right person to play "Lust Boy" for Ichthus that summer of 1991. Denise Greenhalgh, as I recall, had asked me to be Ichthusman for the Christian rock festival. Bob Lyon had started the festival way back in the 70s, as I recall, as a Christian alternative to Woodstock. (I would later propose to Angie during the festival in 1998. This was before they moved it to the place where it died.)

As a small taste of what I had become, I made the suggestion in all seriousness of parachuting into the festival. After checking, the response was that the insurance company would drop us like a hot potato if we tried such a stunt.

So I invented the costume myself. Yellow cleaning gloves. Someone sowed a yellow fish (ichthus) on a black turtleneck I got at a Goodwill type store. Black pants. Purple cape. Some (cheap) cool 90s sunglasses. I had some used clothes that we cut up and vecroed so that I could rip them off to the tune of "This looks like a job for Ichthusmannnnnn!" The costume was underneath.

So that summer we vanquished Lust Boy. I think Scott Brown might have been "Sin Man" the next summer.

3. I also taught Intermediate Greek using Brooks and Winbery as a grammar and Metzger's Lexical Aids. Students were supposed to go through Galatians and both do sentence diagrams and give a semantic analysis for each word. 

No doubt, I was not the best teacher for this. That was I believe when I met Jim McNeely. I seem to recall that Bryan Blankenship was in that class as well, but I could be wrong. As usual, I learned a great deal while teaching.

The year after I was teaching fellow, I would take two semesters at UK in Sanskrit. It was a linguistics sequence. I wish I could say I gave it the time it deserved. I mention it because Sanskrit has an 8 case noun system, and Brooks and Winbery analyzed the five Greek cases using that Indo-European model. [1]

The Nominative, Accusative, and Vocative have always stood alone. But the genitive was originally a genitive and ablative. And the dative was originally dative, locative, and instrumental cases. Indeed, this is a curious thing to me. While we are used to thinking of things getting more developed over time, the Indo-European languages have actually become much simpler over time. Modern Greek is simpler than ancient Greek, and ancient Greek was simpler than its Indo-European ancestor.

I have always felt like I was just a step behind. If I knew everything that I have studied, I would be quite a knowledgable fellow.

4. McNeely likes to remind me that I was fined for trespassing on railroad property with a girl I was dating from Asbury College at the time. But I'll let that story pass.

[1] I suppose this is a good place to mention that I sat in on Dr. Stone's Akkadian class too my first year as Teaching Fellow. I didn't find the time to learn it as well as I wished. It was quite a fun deviation, since it used cuneiform for its syllables. He needed my warm body for the class to go, as I recall.

Jesus Wars 2 -- The War of Two Natures

Our small group continues to read Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins. See my post on the introduction and first chapter here.
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1. After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham.

I have argued for #1 for the last 25 years. If we don't have some faith that God was directing the final outcomes, Christian orthodoxy falls apart. We like to think that the Bible is obvious on all these things, but history tells a different story.

Every party in the debates over the Trinity and the nature of Christ was arguing from Scripture. Arius argued from Scripture. Athanasius argued from Scripture. Paul of Samosata argued from Scripture. Cyril argued from Scripture. Apollinarius argued from Scripture. Nestorius argued from Scripture. 

The politics -- indeed the violence -- that forged what we now believe as Christians is depressing. I think I had some sense of holy men gathering to discern what God wanted the church to affirm. Not so. In fact, the winners were more often the least holy and the most politically crafty. It reminds me of something Victor Frankl said about the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The more virtuous you were, the less likely you were to survive. "The best of us did not return." [1]

The century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ. I have always felt like the final conclusion made perfect sense -- one person, two natures, fully God, fully human. Yet the players in this debate seem far from holy intellectuals. They seem more like the Gangs of New York.

2. Jenkins reviews the lead up. 

The earliest centuries saw options -- arguing from the books we now call the New Testament, no less -- that were early considered wrong. These were not evil people with twisted mustaches. They were the losers, and history is told by the winners. Again, by faith, we believe that God picked the winners whether they were good people or not.

Some early losers:

• The Ebionites -- Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah but not that he was divine. It is debated whether they represent a form of Jewish Christianity going back to the earliest church.
• Adoptionists -- This one lasted a while. They believed that Jesus became the Son of God at some point (for example, at his baptism). Mark does not give any explicit teaching on Jesus before his baptism.
• Perhaps Matthew and Luke could be used to argue that he was Son of God through the virgin birth, but they say nothing explicit about what he might have been before that. Some early Christians might not have believed in Jesus' pre-existence.
• Some Gnostics had a form of adoptionism. Cerinthus (time of John) thought Jesus was possessed by a divine force at his baptism.
• Paul of Samosata (bishop of Antioch in the 260s) believed the human Jesus was born of Mary and then that the Logos descended on him at his baptism.
• Some might have believed Jesus became Son of God at his resurrection.
• By contrast, Docetists (around at the time of 1 John) believed that Jesus only seemed to be human.
• Sabellius (around 220) believed that God was only one person who kept changing hats. The Father became Jesus became the Spirit. One person.

3. Then we have the 300s. Constantine makes Christianity legal, which means the door is now open for Christians to develop power and use it to stomp on others. I will say, reading this book has made me much more open to those who think Constantine inadvertantly opened the door to the wholesale corruption of Christianity. We seem to do better when people -- by which I mean non-Christians -- are trying to kill us.

Some losers:

• Arius -- "There was a point when the Son did not exist." Arius believed Jesus was pre-existent and that he was like God. It's hard for us to fathom how popular this version of faith was in the 300s -- more popular than the orthodox. And Arius may very well have been more godly than Athanasius. Christianity among the Germanic tribes in the 400s was more Arian than orthodox.
• Apollinarius -- To be frank, most popular Christians today might just as well be Apollinarians or Eutychians. They more or less saw Jesus as having one nature -- a divine one. Apollinarius thought Jesus had a human body and divine soul. Eutychus thought that Jesus' humanity was like a drop in the ocean compared to his divinity.
• If the Council of Ephesus in 449 had stood (the Robber Council), we would all believe that Jesus did not have a human nature -- or at least not enough of one to count.

4. In 380, the emperor Theodosius II picks a winner for Christianity in the Empire. He picks Nicene Christianity. Thus, we are all Nicenes.

The two centers of the conflict for the next 70 years or so are Antioch and Alexandria. Antioch is always defending the humanity of Jesus. Alexandria is always pushing a single nature that is divine. Antioch is the place of biblical scholarship. Alexandria is the place with a history of Platonism.

Alexandria seems to wield the power of sabotage and the power of the mob. Frankly, I kept thinking of MAGA Christians as I read about them. 

Constantinople had become the center of Roman power, so it was a key power with regard to its bishop. These bishops often were chosen from Antioch. Then Alexandria would use its power to trash them. Most of the time, they did this by finding something about the Antiochenes or patriarch of Constantinople that they could call heretical and stir up a mob over. Again, MAGA Christians.

Meanwhile, Rome was trying to consolidate its power but was really like an old man whose hearing aid isn't working. They don't speak Greek so they don't really know entirely what's going on. They're invited to the council but can't really hear very well.

All sorts of forgeries are being created in this era. And of course, on a popular level, people believe whatever they want to believe, which is what their tribe believes.

"People knew the slogans, but did they really understand them? Actually an excellent case can be made that such distinctions were beyond the reach not just of ordinary believers but of many church leaders" (62).

"Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father or of like being, homoousios or homoisousios? Was he from two natures or in two?" (63).

5. Nestorius was another target of the Alexandrians. It's not at all clear that he was the heretic he is made out to be.

Christians "did not fully understand the theology they believed" (67). But they knew the groups they were against. "Once something was an ism," it was a target. Once a stereotype was established, it could be used to destroy someone. All you had to do is attach the label to them.

Sound familiar? This is quintissential MAGA Christianity. "Socialist" "Leftist liberal" "woke." No need to have any.thought whatsoever. Once the label is attached, they're toast.

"Whatever he actually preached, Nestorius became the central figure of Nestorianism" (67). "Theological debate became a game of guilt by association."

"Understanding a war of isms helps us trace the course of theological development thorugh these centuries... In each case, advocates were reacting as much to the stereotype of the enemy movement prevailing at the time rather than to any rational analysis of its teachings" (67-68).

[1] Man's Search for Meaning.

Confessions 1 -- I am not the "you" of the Bible.

New Tuesday series... Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind. Way #1
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Confession #1: I am not the "you" of the Bible
I'm not sure I ever gave it much thought, but for the first 18 years or so of my life, I assumed that when the Bible said "you," it was talking to me.

Take Jeremiah 29:11 -- "I know the plans I have for you." Wow, I thought. God is talking about me!

"Be strong and courageous. I am with you wherever you go" (Josh. 1:9). Wow, I thought! God is with me wherever I go.

I went through a time of struggle when I was ten. My mother gave me these verses to hold on to, promises to remember while I was at school. She wanted me to remember God was with me while I was at school.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do believe God is with me and you wherever we go. I do believe God is love and has good plans for those who trust in him. What I didn't realize until much later, though, is that those verses weren't actually written to me at all. I am not the "you" of those verses.

When I realized what was going on here, it completely changed how I read the Bible. And once you see it too, you'll start to notice it everywhere.

2. I always say that the Bible is for us but it was not written to us. Once you see it, you see it. "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. 6:4). I'm not Israel. The Israel of Deuteronomy lived about 3000 years ago. The Israel Isaiah addressed lived 2700 years ago.

Paul says he's writing to Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and other churches in his day. Am I a Roman? A Corinthian? A Thessalonian?

Nope. None of those letters were written to me.

Why did I think those books were written to me? Why did I think that the Y-O-Us of Scripture are for me? That's not actually what the Bible says.

So, does that mean the Bible has nothing to say to me?

3. Of course it does. That's how the idea of a "Scripture" works. The idea of a Scripture is that it speaks beyond its own time to the people of the religion whose Scripture it is.

But, mind you, Paul didn't know his letters were going to end up in a Bible. "Scripture" for him was what we call the Old Testament. He was just writing letters. Important letters, to be sure. Letters that he believed carried authority for the churches to which he was writing. 

But did he think he was writing part of a future Bible? Almost certainly not.

4. Yes, I was once an unreflective reader of the Bible. Still am, of course, to some extent. We can never become fully self-aware.

But I narcissistically read the Bible as if it was just about me, which meant that I was mostly misreading it. And I didn't even know it. A little self-centered, really. To ignore the message it actually had. To ignore the people it was actually written to.

It's like picking up a love letter to someone else and applying it to yourself. "Wow, whoever's writing this really loves me." That's how we often read the Bible. Kind of funny, really, how clueless we can be when reading the Bible.

"I know the plans I have for you"? God said this through Jeremiah to the Israelites who had been captured and taken to Babylon. It wasn't written about anyone alive today. God was telling them to buy property but that in 70 years he would bring them back. They're all dead now, of course.

"The Lord is with you wherever you go"? God said this to Joshua before he started a military campaign. It's over. You can go visit the ruins of Jericho if you want today. The verse wasn't a promise to anyone alive now, let alone to anyone today who is about to start a military campaign. To read it that way is to rip it out of its context.

I know, it's hard for a lot of people to see it. "No, no, no! It's for me." Yes, I was a narcissist once too.

But it wasn't written to you. Those words weren't originally to you. Just read what the words actually say. 

5. We're talking about learning to read the Bible "in context." That is, reading the words for what they actually meant. Realizing that the love letter was first to someone else before we immediately clutch it longingly to our chests with stars in our eyes. 

Yes, I believe by faith God preserved the Bible for us as Scripture, even though the Bible mostly doesn't say that. It's an idea I learned in church, a tradition about the Bible that the Bible mostly doesn't say. It's a true tradition, but it mostly goes beyond what the Bible itself says.

Bottom line. If I really love this text -- if I really respect the Bible -- shouldn't I first stop and listen to what it actually says? That is, before I rip the words out of context and smack them on myself? 

Before I ask what it means for me, shouldn't I first ask what it meant to them?

Notes Along the Way -- TF3 -- Postmodernism

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury and student in classics at the University of Kentucky. Last post here.
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1. In the years when I was a Teaching Fellow, I was learning more and more about literary criticism and, of course, postmodernism was in the mix. My original source of exposure here was Dr. Bauer at Asbury.

Dr. Bauer was a leader in narrative criticism, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which I've mentioned before. As it was practiced in the United States, narrative criticism examined the stories of the Bible as stories. His Dokter Vater Jack Kingsbury and others like Mark Allen Powell bracketed the historical questions. You didn't ask whether or not these events happened. You assumed each Gospel was a self-contained story world. It was a very convenient hermeneutic for evangelicals to work on their PhDs because they didn't have to address those critical issues.

Alan Culpepper has a complex but helpful diagram in his book, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel which captures the main dynamics. And of course, Mark Allen Powell wrote a helpful little book called What Is Narrative Criticism? The three main elements of a story are the events, characters, and settings. There is the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader. There is narrative time and story time. I would use some of these categories in my PhD dissertation, as I've said.

When I got to Durham, I felt like they weren't quite as sophisticated at these hermeneutical approaches as Bauer and others were. They were still quite historically oriented, and those who were dabbling with narrative criticism had not fully disconnected their study of narratives from the study of history. 

Of course, as Joe Dongell once mentioned to me, the very use of language assumes a historical baseline. I would understand this better my first year at Durham when I was exposed to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the idea of narrative criticism was to examine the text in isolation from historical questions and historical background.

2. As I've said before, in those days I felt like I was slowly moving through the historical progression of biblical criticisms. In the early 90s, I would catch up. Textual criticism asked whether the King James tradition was more or less original. Historical criticism searched for the history. Source criticism looked for written sources. Form criticism looked at oral traditions. Redaction criticism asked how the authors edited their sources. Composition criticism asked how the writings were composed. Narrative criticism analyzed the stories as stories.

Now, in the early 90s, I had caught up with reader-response criticism, the next step after narrative criticism. The first two thirds of the twentieth century had focused on the world behind the text, the historical. The 80s had tried to focus on the world within the text. Now, with the 90s, there was a turn to the reader, the world in front of the text.

Reader-response criticism had at least three varieties. First, there were those who viewed it with a historical lens -- what was the impact of the text on the original audience. David Smith, doing his dissertation at Durham in the late 90s, hypothesized how the passion narrative of Mark was written in a way to have an impact on the original audience. If the author ended the book at Mark 16:8, what kind of an effect would this have on the audience?

A second variety relates to the impact of the biblical texts on various groups of modern readers. How do women experience the letters of Paul (feminist readings)? How might an African-American woman experience the text (womanist readings). There were black readings and Latinx readings. There is ideological criticism, such as liberation theology readings.

I would read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels my first semester of my doctoral program. I found it very helpful to sort out these different approaches hermeneutically. I think I mentioned before the SBL presentation I managed to hear from him in 1991. You can find it in the helpful hermeneutical volume, Mark and Method.

Perhaps the most extreme form of reader-response criticism is the one that basically says you can read any meanng you want into the text (see Stanley Fish). As I began to embark on my doctoral studies, I would become acquainted with Paul Ricoeur and the notion of the autonomous text and the polyvalance of texts. Although I don't think the number is infinite, the same text can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Once a text is uttered, Ricoeur observed, it becomes autonomous. The author can no longer control what it comes to mean.

If you've had me for certain classes or read much of my hermeutical stuff, you will begin to hear where my understanding began to sharpen. There are virtually as many potential meanings to a text as there are readers. The text is often a mirror in which we see ourselves. 

3. In those days, I was gaining a good perspective on the way I grew up reading the Bible. We wanted God to "quicken" the text and speak directly to us. God might tell you to move to Florida or go to a specific mission field when a few words in a verse jumped out at you. I grew up with almost no sense of how to read the Bible in context. The meaning of the Bible was to some extent untethered from its historical moorings. We read the text in reader-response mode, shaped by the tradition we came from. 

In terms of ideological criticism, we made "holiness readings" of the text.

Those of a more charismatic nature regularly read the text this way. I've come to believe that if God didn't speak to people in this way, we would all be lost. Although pastors and people in the pew think they know what the Bible means, the fail rate is actually quite immense in terms of the details. I suspect that Sunday morning sermons across the globe are filled with some spectacularly creative interpretive moments.

Perhaps most scholars who come out of these backgrounds, like Gordon Fee, end up rejecting these sorts of reader-response readings. "The text can't come to mean something that it never meant," he wrote. He's right of course in terms of the original meaning, but can't God speak to people through the text however he wants to?

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern interpretation. I can overlay the people I was reading in the early 90s with it. Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative was quite challenging but the first few pages gave me a powerful sense of what I later called "unreflective" readings of texts. Two decades later, when our IWU Religion Monday reading group read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, an even deeper sense of the shift from pre- to modern was to be found.

Putting it all together, we start off as unreflective, "pre-modern" readers. We don't see ourselves as readers of the text. The meaning of the text seems obvious to us without us realizing that we are bringing our own "dictionaries" to it. 

Pre-modern or precritical interpreters don't read the text in context, but they don't know they aren't. They have a "what you see is what you get" approach. They think they are seeing meaning in the world that they are actually reading into it. Paul Ricoeur called these kinds of readings a "first naivete."

I recently encountered some Bible readers of this sort in discussions of biblical prophecy. It's quite clear that they have no idea how to read verses in context. They see the meanings someone has told them. 

When I taught inductive Bible study, it was very hard to get students to read certain Old Testament texts in context. It was quite discouraging actually. You might give them a text that the New Testament reads in relation to Jesus. But they couldn't detach themselves from that meaning to hear the verses in the flow of whatever Old Testament book it was in.

Meanwhile, my holiness forebears and modern charismatics are very open to these on-the-spot "zappings" of the Spirit too.

All of these readings are exercises in reader response, and there are potentially as many meanings as there are interpreters.

4. This, of course, is why the notion of sola scriptura itself was pre-modern because it assumed the meaning of the text is intrinsic and self-evident in the text. The Reformers were more or less premodern and non-contextual. They increasingly knew literary context. Melancthon understood literary context, but he didn't understand the depth of historical context. Wesley largely did not know how to read the Bible in context. And so when he said he was a man of one book, the book he had in mind was the Bible filtered through his reader-responses.

Now to be sure, his reader-response interpretations had a massive archaeology. As an Anglican, he had massive amounts of church tradition rattling around in that head of his. Somewhere in the back of his head were vast numbers of historical texts and of course the biblical text. He knew those texts as Tradition had brought them to him.

And here, let me tip my hat to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer suggested that we do not actually read the text as it was originally, but we read it as it comes to us through layers and layers of tradition. I would say this is absolutely true for the pre-modern, unreflective reader. They have no idea of the glasses they are wearing when they read the text. So it was with Wesley.

5. Postmodernism is then a step beyond reader-response criticism. Jacques Derrida did not believe the text had any stable meaning. Of course, this seems to deconstruct in that he wrote books. [1] In my opinion, he deliberately wrote ambiguously to try to make his point. But the fact that we all know his point suggests that words can indeed have meaning.

Postmodernism is thus a warning sign rather than a philosophy in itself. It tells us that our confidence in the meaning of our words is almost certainly overconfidence. Some like Stephen Fowl have pointed out that the meaning of many texts, including biblical texts, is frequently underdetermined. That is to say, we may lack sufficient evidence to know for certain what their original meaning actually was.

But in my mind, he has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. He effectively says, because we cannot know for certain the meaning of certain texts, why don't we just assume that they're orthodox. This is a certain brand of what has been called "theological interpretation." 

In the end, interpretation is a never ending struggle. But at any point in time, it does seem likely that we can identify a host of things that the text didn't likely mean -- including a lot of the meanings that people from various church traditions give it today.

6. The hermenutical struggles of those years left me concluding that there is more than one legitimate path to biblical interpretation. First, there is the original meaning, about which we can have varying degrees of certainty. If you want to be an expert on this original meaning, you must know biblical languages. You must know biblical history. You should know the history of interpretation. 

This is something beyond the level of most pastors. They're simply not trained on this level. And many don't have the aptitude.

Then, there is the reader-response understanding of broad orthodoxy. It does not tell you how to interpret every verse, but it gives boundaries to your appropriation of Scripture. The more we dig into the history of orthodoxy, the more nervous we might get about this reading. We almost have to have some sense that God was behind the scenes, directing this process. Even within the Bible itself, an honest contextual understanding inevitably has to believe that God directed the flow of revelation within the pages of Scripture.

I wrote up how this might work in a book I first published in 2006. I had first submitted the text to Westminster John Knox in a competition. Then, I gave it to Abingdon for year, at the end of which they published a curiously similar book with someone else. 

7. In addition to the orginal meaning, there are the many different reader responses to the biblical texts. There are denominational readings. There are our "tribal" readings of various kinds. Finally, there are individual readings when God speaks directly to you.

These years were the crucible in which I was catching up with the postmodern discussions of that moment. I was learning to distinguish between what I thought was valuable and what I thought wasn't. It would eventually allow me to have a second naivete (another Ricoeur phrase). My childhood church involved readings of a first naivete. 

With a second naivete, we can read the texts in the same way we did in our first naivete. The difference is that, now, we are consciously reading the texts out of context. First, we read it out of context without knowing it. But now, we can read it that way quite conscious of what we are doing.

[1] Deconstruction is the term used to refer to his philosophy. It's the idea that meaning unravels in the very act of trying to construct it. He did not claim to try to construct a philosophy--his was an anti-philosophy. But, ironically, his own attempt to deconstruct meaning was a veiled attempt to construct it.

Notes Along the Way -- TF 2 -- The First Iraq War

Continuing from last post
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1. On January 17, 1991, the US launched an attack against Iraq from Kuwait, the beginnings of the first Iraq War. I was standing in the University of Kentucky student center when it launched, suddenly realizing that, at 25, I was still an age that had once been drafted.

I remember some trepidation about a war with Iraq. I don't know how widespread my feelings were, but I felt like we had been under a hangover from the Vietnam War up to that point. Could we win a war? It sure hadn't seemed that we had won Vietnam. It had seemed that, in the end, we had cut our losses and hightailed it out of there. 

In that sense, the first Iraq War restored our confidence. At least it restored my confidence. We got our mojo back. 

Bush senior wisely didn't go into Baghdad, unlike his son. In hindsight, that seemed prescient, although he was sharply criticized for it. The next time, when Dick Cheney had the chance, he and the neo-cons talked Bush junior into it, resulting in the second longest American conflict. P. S. He started the longest one so far too, in Afghanistan.

2. I was at the University of Kentucky (UK) because I was starting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature, that is, classical Greek and Latin. I was following in the footsteps of Joe Dongell, who had done the same thing when he was a Greek Teaching Fellow. They foolishly gave me the same scholarship they had given him, not knowing how much smarter he is than me.

It was my second semester teaching beginning Greek, and the courses I was teaching that spring were the same ones I taught in the fall. In short, I was already getting bored.

I only took one class, Greek Poetry. It certainly wasn't the ideal class to begin with. Poetry in any language tends to break the most rules and be the least explicit. It doesn't use the full grammar of prose.

And it was painful. This was a master's degree. We had a lot of lines to do for each class. I was just solidifying my Koine Greek. I had no idea that ινα could be used with the indicative. I had no idea that ου could be used with a participle. There was no Google yet, and there certainly wasn't any AI yet.

I would teach Greek in the morning at Asbury, then drive 30 minutes to Lexington to an Arby's not far from the UK campus. I would spend the next two or three hours trying to create an interlinear from a blown up version of whatever text from Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides. I had an English translation to try to retrofit the Greek text if I was totally lost.

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

I almost never had the translations entirely done, which was embarrassing. I would try to predict where we would be in the text by the time they got to me and, if I hadn't gotten that far, I scrambled to have something to say.

3. However, Dr. Hubert Martin was the best professor to have for such an incompetent fool as me. Soft spoken, infinitely merciful. He must surely have known how much I was struggling.

The other students had done classics in their undergraduate work. I had not looked at Latin since high school. I had taken 2.5 years of it with Mrs. Mrozek -- and high school Latin is a lot different from master's degree Latin. In the summer of 1991, I crammed Wheelock's 40 chapters down my throat. Thankfully, I had started Latin when my brain was like a sponge, so it came pretty easily.

One of the students had done his undergraduate work at Berea College. I don't remember his name but, man, he was sharp. There was another woman fresh out of undergraduate classics too. I felt SO stupid around them.

4. I believe we read Oedipus at Colonus for this stint. I had known the Oedipus trilogy since high school. But it has been interesting to think about it from a theological angle. The ancient world was fatalistic, as the story of the Three Fates shows. But they didn't see "free will" and fate as contradictory. Rather, as we humans went about making free choices, we ultimately end up where it was said we would end up. (reminds me a little of Molinism)

You probably know the story. Oedipus' father gets a prophecy that his son will kill him. He has Oedipus exposed -- put outside for animals and the elements to kill him. But, of course, a shepherd rescues him. He ends up raised thinking his father is the king of Corinth.

He then gets the same prophecy. He doesn't want to kill his father, so he heads north. And who should he meet on the way but, unbeknownst to him, his father. In the first recorded incident of road rage, he kills him. He goes north to Thebes where he brings about the Sphinx's end and, as a reward, gets to marry the queen of the city -- who interestingly is his mother.

Everyone in this story thinks they are acting freely. Yet when the story is done, they have all fulfilled their fates.

I've wondered if something along these lines is a better explanation of the tensions in the New Testament rather than Augustine or Wesley's more philosophical approaches. In any case, it speaks to the cultural framework in which Paul and others lived.

I would end up taking Greek Poetry again in year 3 because there wasn't another option. It was at least a little better the second time -- with different readings of course. I always felt like, when I got to the end of these degrees, I was about where I would liked to have been when I started.

We read Prometheus Bound. I wasn't very acquainted with the story before. Prometheus is punished for helping humanity by giving them fire. It's a reminder that the biblical creation story is unusual when God actually likes us. We are much more of a thorn in the side of other creation stories.

Martin had us read J.B. by Archibald MacLeish alongside PB. It is a play on Job. It has Job say that famous line, "If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God." I would wrestle quite a bit with the problem of evil over the next couple years. It wasn't Dr. Martin's fault.

5. The second Greek class I took was Thucydides (with Robert Rabel). That was an eye-opener with regard to the standards of ancient history writing. He apologizes for not being more entertaining. Many historians of the day were more prone to make things up for the delight of their readers, apparently.

But the most striking passage is where he indicates he made up some of the speeches in his history. If he didn't have access to witnesses or wasn't present himself, he invented what he thought they probably said. This potentially has implications for the speeches of Acts and the Gospels. Thucydides was not being pernicious at all. He was genuinely trying to present the flavor of the events. 

To me, it showed that the parameters of ancient history writing were just different than they are for us.

I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin in the program too. Plutarch was a moralist. He is potential background for what biography was like at the time of Christ. My main take away was that he was far more interested in what lessons or morals we might take from the figures he told about than portraying them with great historical accuracy.

What was important was that the story about the person present a truth rather than you track down and be absolutely sure it happened.

I always laugh when I think that, while Herodotus is often called the "father of history," Plutarch called him the "father of lies." This was actually because Plutarch could not be objective about history. The Greeks always had to be superior to any other people. Meanwhile, part of what earned Herodotus that title was the fact that he could critique his own people. 

In the end, Plutarch was a tribal thinker and nowhere close to an objective one.

Fatalism, Herodotus, and Thucydides would show up in my philosophy classes at IWU, because the first two are mentioned in Sophie's World.`

To be continued...

6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom. (philosophy)

Last night the next group of philosophers in training started social and political philosophy. We primarily went through Niebuhr's five ways Christians have engaged culture. But since I am going beyond my classes in this blog series, I thought I would start with some fundamentals.
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1. One of the basic principles of theology--the study of God--is that any earthly, visible church is not the same as the invisible, spiritual church. Your local church may be great. The denomination to which you belong may be great. But it is not the same as the one, true, invisible church. This is one of the most basic things you learn in Christian theology.

Protestants especially believe this. But it is true even for Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church openly admits that not all of its popes have been godly. The church has had periods of great corruption. No earthly church is ever the same as the true church. 

Even when you dig into the earliest councils of the church, you will find huge instances of all-too-human politics and ungodliness. The church erased a council in 449 that would have likely changed what we believe about Christ for all time. At that council, a bishop was beaten to death and those present were forced to sign a blank document that was filled in later. 

Afterwards, the emperor's horse tripped and killed him. Because that emperor died, there came a different emperor who backed a different position--the one we believe today about Christ being one person with two natures. They had another council two years later (Chalcedon) and erased the first one. Chalcedon established what almost all Christians believe today about Christ being fully human and fully divine.

The one, true church is invisible. No earthly, visible church is equivalent to it.

2. If this is true of the church, it is absolutely true of any earthly, visible state or country. Think about it, is the state more likely to be holy than the church? It's really an absurd thought. If the visible church is never the same as the true church then the state absolutely is never the same as the kingdom of God.

It's important to point out that this is a major blind spot for some Christians at times. We have recognized the dangers of civil religion for as long as people have confused patriotism for worship. Various forms of religious nationalism can't tell the difference between fervor for a particular vision of a country and the worship of God. 

And those infected can't see it. In fact, they are more zealous for the state than they ever were for God. At its worse, they are ready to kill those who do not bend to their vision of the state. They become hard hearted, and anyone whose loyalty to their vision is in question becomes the worst of evil.

In our times, Nazi Germany is of course the classic example, where loyalty to Hitler's Germany became indistinguishable from state Christianity. When German Christians in the 1930s tried to merge Christianity with nationalism, the true church responded with something called the Barmen Declaration. 

This statement pointed out that "Jesus Christ [that is, not Hitler or Germany] is the one Word of God whom we must hear and obey in life and in death." When the state insisted that it was God's kingdom on earth, they rejected "the false doctrine that the church could recognize other powers as God’s revelation."

Whenever our love of nation takes on a fervor that should only be reserved for God, we have begun to lose sight of the real God and our vision for the state has become an idol. The state has become a god for us.

The kingdom of this world is never the same as the kingdom of our God.

3. There may be times when an earthly state aligns more or less with the kingdom than at other times, but we should always be clear. No earthly kingdom is ever identical to the kingdom of God.

It is essential that we never confuse or blur the two.

A theocracy is allegedly a state ruled by God. But apart from the days of Moses, there has never been one and will never be one till Christ actually returns. The book of the Judges, when Israel was allegedly a theocracy, was one of the most godless periods of Israel's history, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In so-called theocracies, there is always a group of priests or a Pope or an Ayatollah interpreting what God says. Theocracies are thus really monarchies (rule by one) or something called an oligarchy (rule by a few) in disguise. 

Sure, someone might say they are only letting the Bible rule--but it is always their interpretation of the Bible. In Calvin's Geneva, the rule of the Bible was the rule of John Calvin's interpretation of the Bible. And in Puritan England and Puritan New England when they were in charge, it was their interpretation of the Bible that ruled. If you were a Mary Dyer or Roger Williams, you were either ousted or put to death.

No earthly state--even if it claims to be a theocracy--can be equivalent to the kingdom of God because humans are involved. A human has to tell the people what God says. A human has to implement what they think God says. A human has to interpret the Bible. 

And people are sinful. "There is none righteous, no not one" (Rom. 3:10). The Founding Fathers of the United States thoroughly took that into account. They put extensive "checks and balances" into the Constitution so that the evil, sinful nature of one person or group was counteracted by other individuals and groups in the government.

This is part of why Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament strongly distinguished between the church and the state. Jesus told his questioners to "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). And Paul told the Philippians--living in a Roman colony--that they were citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). 

The implication was that their political identity did not lie with Rome but with God in heaven. Hebrews and 1 Peter imply the same when they call citizens exiles and aliens (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 1:17).

The Founding Fathers were thus wise to dictate that "Congress shall establish no religion." Thomas Jefferson called this a "wall of separation" between the state and religion. It was all too clear to the Founding Fathers that, if there were a state religion, it would end up oppressing the people like the Puritans had in New England or like the kings, queens, and Puritans of England had in the 1500s and 1600s.

3. Lord Acton put the principle wisely: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [1] For this reason, it is best for the church to always be distinct from the state and for there to be more than one church at that. There is surely a correlation between the amount of power someone has and the danger of corruption and corrupt impact. 

It is not an absolute correlation, but it is a general one.

And since wealth brings power, the same correlation is in play there. The more wealthy a person is, the more powerful a person is. And the more powerful a person is, the greater the potential for corruption and corrupt impact. 1 Timothy 6:10 was not lying when it said that "the love of money is a root of all evils."

At times, Western culture has at least given some appearances of resisting these trends. But the more you dig into history, the more you realize that corruption has never been far away from any period of rulers. We celebrate the apparent exceptions. Yet even here the public doesn't always know what has happened behind the scenes.

These are not absolutes. They are tendencies and warnings with serious implications about how society would ideally be structured. The main take aways are 1) keep power from being concentrated in the hands of the few and 2) keep religion separate from the state with the state as a neutral zone. 

Of course, at any given time, most of us don't have a choice about these things. We are born in a particular place and time, and the state is a given.

[1] In an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated? 

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom (this post)
6.2 How to Structure Government 
6.3 Kingdom Values for Society
6.4 Christ and Culture
6.5 The Social Contract (equal rights and utilitarianism)
6.6 Adam Smith vs Karl Marx

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism  

1 -- Unlikely Friends (a seminary novel)

Thinking about a strange novel idea. Went to Fazolis. Here's what came out...
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We met in the summer, three unlikely friends brought together by a common enemy—Greek.

Julie was a Methodist, sort of. Two weeks before starting seminary she wasn’t even a believer. She had gone a few times to a United Methodist church when she was a kid. But it all seemed so boring to her, even useless.

She had gone into social work because she wanted to help people. About three years in, she was pretty discouraged. She wanted to help people so badly. But it was such an uphill battle.

The last straw was when one of her clients took her own life. She had worked so hard with her—well beyond the norm. But you can’t watch everyone 24/7. A person’s going to do what a person’s going to do.

It was then she saw a billboard. Sometimes you wonder if those signs do any good. I think, as often as not, they tick people off. But that day Julie heard a message: "Have you tried God?"

She went to that Methodist church for the first time in twenty years. She wasn’t even able to talk to the pastor, but an older lady in the back struck up a random conversation with her.

“You seem like you’re looking for something,” she said.

“God, I guess,” Julie said with a chuckle.

“Well, you’d think you’d come to the right place.”

Before she knew what was happening, Julie was having a home cooked meal with an 87 year old widow. She shared her story. The woman listened.

“I think God might be calling you into ministry,” the older woman finally said.

“What?” Julie blurted out. She later expressed to me repeatedly her shock at such a question.

Our friend Bobby not only thought such things were ridiculous but exclaimed at one point, “Were you even baptized at the time?” he asked.

“No,” she said with a grin. “I’m still not.”

Being friends with Julie would be hard for Bobby even beyond the challenges of seminary itself.

By the end of that lunch, Julie took comfort in the thought of starting seminary to find out what God had to say—if he even existed.

The timing was right. Intensive Greek was just about to begin in July. Bobby and I were headed in the same direction, although by different paths.

Bobby was a Southern Baptist. He hated the thought of going to a “liberal Methodist seminary,” but he had a good job working third shift at a mail facility and he didn't want to move. He thought he could work all night, take classes in the morning, and sleep a little in the afternoon and early evening. 

He had looked at other choices, including online. None of them clicked with him. He felt like his foundation was strong enough to survive liberal Methodist professors. Maybe he could even convert a few.

Ultimately, he wanted to preach, but he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Baptist churches don’t always have a good structure for a person to get a church. He had tried to connect with various small churches in rural North Carolina, but he hadn’t been successful. He thought maybe if he had a degree in Bible it might help.

To be frank, his presence at Coke Seminary was an oddity. I’m sure he wouldn’t have come if some bizarre donor hadn’t set up a special scholarship just for Baptists. They hardly ever had anyone to give it to. 

One day, he finally walked into the admissions office and jokingly asked, "You don't happen to have any scholarships for Baptists."

The lady looked at him funny and said, "Funny you should ask..."

Me? I was a charismatic. Assemblies of God. It was a strange place for me too because I had a sneaking suspicion that nobody there exercised any spiritual gifts. (I was wrong, by the way.)

I was between things. My girlfriend had dumped me for a random woman we met at Myrtle Beach—that was tough. I decided I should get my life in order. One thing led to another and, before you know it, I found myself learning the Greek alphabet in a two-month summer intensive.

It wasn't how I had seen my summer going.